After tracking down the footsteps of the small demons for a few hours towards their spawning place and then suddenly losing the trail, I saw Lingfeng halt his footsteps, then pull out a weird item out of his own spatial ring.
"Ok, so, what the hell is that thing?" I asked Lingfeng as he was fiddling with a strange amulet that looked like a round blue ball socketed within a bunch of decorative silver Eastern dragons coiling around each other.
"This is a magic compass. The hue on the blue-ball shows how high the Qi density is in the environment. It also points towards the place with the highest Qi concentration in about one mile radius. It's not very accurate and there are spells which do a better job if you really want to track a magic source, but it's rather useful for its basic function, which is monitoring the environmental Qi concentration, so any decent adventurer carries one with them. See the rather distinct black spot on the ball? That's the “arrow” of the compass, and things are not looking good at all."
"Why, what's wrong?"
"Here, have a look by yourself." Said the Windmage as he settled the amulet on the ground in front of me. Sure enough after staring at the black point for a couple of minutes, I realised what Lingfeng was trying to show me.
"It's moving, isn't it? The point with the highest concentration? It's not static, but rather it keeps going from left to right, as if patrolling a certain area or going in circles"
"And if it's moving…"
"...then it means that it has some form of personal locomotion, or somebody is carrying it around. Which means that we are either facing some really powerful artefact that acts as a magic source, one that is currently being wielded by the cultists, or there is a Boss out there with a high enough magic signature to even make the compass crazy."
"Good...I knew you were a smart girl. Yes, indeed, to get to the source of the Hellbound, we will have to track them back towards the strongest magic source in the area, which is currently this seemingly-mobile object. If it is indeed an Ancient which has, for whatever reason, left its own territory, we would stand no chance against it.
We will have to be much more careful about how we proceed during our journey from now on. While you kids might be able to handle a few Hellbound on your own, you most definitely will not be able to face this Boss-Thing at your current levels and gear. Just because we got lucky the last time with the Dwemmer Golem and we found its weakness, it does not mean that the scenario will repeat itself. Running headlong like idiots into the path of an Ancient would be a really stupid move on our behalf.
We should probably first get to our intended destination, and then seek reinforcements. The village we are looking for is straight in the direction that the compass is pointing towards, so we don't need to take any detours. The Buddhist Temple over there has a Weirdwood Tree, so we would be able to contact the outside world from that spot, including the other members of my party. I had wanted for this village and Buddhist Temple to become a Safe-Haven for you children, at least for a little while, but it seems that indeed the Earthmother will not leave us alone for any large amount of time, just like you said.
I only hope that the village is still standing, and that it has not been overrun by cultists or something like that. It would be rather strange if the cultists have somehow managed to take over the Buddhist Temple, since that place was a veritable fortress the last time I visited, and it could have sheltered all of the villagers quite easily."
"Ok, lead the way! We should make haste and reach our destination as soon as possible then."
We kept running towards our destination for a half an hour more before we ran into another pack of Hellbound. This time, they were idling in front of something that looked like a mine-shaft, which led straight into the earth for some unknown reason.
"Gurl...mah treajer senses are tingling!" Carmine suddenly informed me. "Gibssn' can feel it as well! About two levels beneath the Earth, at about 200 meters in from us. Lotsa magic oitems piled up togetha'!"
"The little pests must have been gathering them. The Hellbound are known hoarders of any items that are magical in nature, since they literally subsist on the surface-world by eating magic." Lingfeng explained.
"Ok, we should prepare and take them out by surprise then, but before we go and attack them, there is something that I need to clarify with you, Mr. Loremaster.
I have been looking at our combat logs from when we encountered the last pack of Hellbound, and the experience gains that we have obtained from that encounter seem a little bit on the short side, at least for an encounter where we have put our lives on the line. Are we receiving an experience penalty because we are in the same party with you high level folk?
"Well, yes, of course you do, but worrying about your experience gains should be the least of your concerns at the moment."
"And that is where we'll disagree, Old Man! The faster we Level Up, the less of a burden we will be on you. You most certainly cannot protect all of us forever. Children shouldn’t perpetually be sheltered, but rather be taught how to protect themselves instead."
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
"I guess you do sort of have a point there, but if you ever need a hand, just yell and we will come rushing to your aid."
"Fair enough, I guess." I acknowledged the Windmage's support while immediately kicking all of the high level people and the little robot out of my party, leaving only us five “low-level” children in the group.
I was surprised to see that the System still considered Will-E to be a level 55 automaton, even though he was just a baby.
After that, our “children's party” proceeded to sneak through the tall grass by belly-crawling until we were right next to the oblivious little demons, which were now dozing off by the cave entrance.
Once we felt that we were close enough to attack safely, we pounced on the little creatures, as myself and Fungus instantly shot the larger ones through their heads with our bows, and then Jin, Liliam and Xibei charged in melee range as they stunned and immobilised the lesser demons so we could experiment on them.
The little creatures did not need functional legs or arms to still be considered “alive”, so we had broken all of their bones and laid them in a row like pigs awaiting for the slaughter.
For the sake of “sound mathematics”, I decided to experiment with how much experience we would be getting for each Hellbound when the party was made out of four, three and even two members, so we had taken turns killing the helpless creatures while the party had a different composition each and every time.
After that, I even remade the entire party, except that I invited Carmine into the group instead of Jin, since she was the lowest level out of the older guys, but even her presence had ruined the experience gains for the rest of us.
Since the Hellbound were basically magical constructs spawned in the same way, they all gave the exact same amount of experience when slain, with the only difference being the party composition when it came to the net gains and losses.
The optimal composition for a party at the moment seemed to be just us five kids in our own separate team, as we would gain about 10% more experience for each kill, if we were grouped together in this fashion. Any more or less seemed to induce penalties to the experience gains, so it seems that five members was the “ideal” party size, as far as the System was concerned. The extra experience bonus was obviously there to encourage the Adventurers of this world to group together, which somewhat made a lot of sense from a Game-Designer's perspective, like the Mother System seemed to be.
After we had cleared the entrance of the cavern-mine-shaft and had killed all of the small demons guarding it, I asked Carmine to loan me her mining helmet which had a built-in light source that could be powered by spirit stones. Jin had simply lit up a small glowing flame above his head so we could head into the darkness of the cave, and the other members had lit up a bunch of torches.
It became suddenly obvious to all of us that we would need to learn some sort of passive environmental lighting skill, if we were to keep on crawling through some darkened places like these in the nearby future. That Magelight that Lingfeng usually used now seemed pretty handy, so I was hoping that he would be able to teach the spell to us after we were done clearing this place.
As we delved deeper into the cave system, I could begin to smell the vomit-inducing stench of rotting flesh, signalling that something had died recently in this place, and it had not been one of the demonkind, since they simply would simply dissolve into ashes before they could begin to rot whenever they died.
Once we were about halfway deep into the cave, we found out what the source of the smell had been, as a bunch of people that looked like travellers had been stacked together in a corpse-pile and were now oozing decaying matter as they continuously attracted swarms of hungry flies to feast upon them.
Jin immediately set fire to the entire pile on my advice, as I did not want any zombie-like surprises to pop out from behind us if we simply allowed the pile go. Fortunately, none of the corpses had seen themselves fit to reanimate, and they had simply turned into cinders under Jin fiery assault. The smell on the other hand, had been absolutely horrifying, as the “flavour” of burnt humanoid flesh has a certain “sweet” tang to it as the fats burn away, inducing a strong gag reflex in anyone encountering the smell.
On the other hand, lighting a strong fire in the middle of the darkened cave had summoned the rest of the demon swarm, as we could now spot their glowing fiery eyes coming towards us in droves from the darkness below.
*Waka-Bishu!* *Na-te-di-tu!* The demons all screamed together before charging us with maddened fury.
Fortunately for us, there was a large enough distance between our group and the swarming demons, so we began to pelter them with ranged projectiles, as myself and Fungus were shooting our bows, Xibei was using his wand and Jin was simply going into flamethrower mode once again to kill any of the incoming pests. Even if any of them made it close enough to our group, Liliam would simply smack them into oblivion with her damaged Zither before any of them could land a blow on us.
After killing about thirty of them in a row, the rest of the demons had smartened up and they had stopped charging, with many already retreating to the lower levels in an attempt to flee our wrath.
Unfortunately for them, they had run down a dead end, so after spending a half an hour more hunting them down individually, we had cleared the entire cavern system of the infestation, for a total of 113 demons.
As our victory spoils, at the lowest level of the cave we had found what used to be a large caravan chest which was now filled with a wide assortment of magical trinkets that the small demons had retrieved from all over the countryside, so I stored the entire chest within my spatial ring and then we proceeded back towards the surface, so we could have Lingfeng identify our newly-acquired loot.
Still, those last screams of the demons had unnerved something in the back of my mind, which was telling me that we were now falling into one of the Mother System's copyright-infringing scenarios once again.
Also, my Spiritual Roots were starting to itch, as their growth had started to dangerously reach the membrane of my Lower Dantian because of all of the new experience-influx, so I knew that I would have to do something about them soon, otherwise Yi Gore's predictions might actually become true, and I would get impaled by my own Spiritual-Roots as they outgrew their allocated space.