Mila
Mila took a second to think before deciding the Violet Mountain Sect was going to be her target. “Is anyone able to watch us right now?”
“No. There’s a privacy formation that’s active and, though Bothil is spying on me for the Hewin Kingdom, he knows not to take things too far.”
“Got it.” Mila had already guessed Epecteos’s butler was an open spy of some kind, given she’d been able to see he had a master with her Noble’s Senses skill yet it wasn’t Epecteos, so it wasn’t much of a surprise to have it confirmed. “Then please tell me as much as you know about the Violet Mountain Sect.”
As Epecteos began to explain, another of Mila’s minds started asking questions of Nana Xara. “Is there anything I should know about sect infiltration?”
“Oh, so much.” Nana Xara sounded like her normal cheerful self. “First, it’s generally a bad idea. All sects use powerful contracts to restrict their members, either through treasures or, better, through the powerful skill of one of the sect’s elders.”
From Epecteos’s descriptions, one of the elders of the Violet Mountain Sect was responsible for the contracts of all sect members, a non-combatant non-crafter C rank who was getting old, likely having less than 3,000 years left to live. He didn’t personally activate all the contracts, however, his skill instead triggered through an artifact by those of lower rank.
“Entering a sect is also essentially the same as entering into a master servant relationship with the sect’s leader, giving high level members of the sect access to your status page.” Nana Xara continued. “So long as the contract skill isn’t triggered personally by a C rank, however, it should be possible, given your Laws and skills, to disguise your information. Trickster’s Guise is a versatile skill and, with it triple boosted, you should be able to hide your classes and race even from some B ranks.”
According to Epecteos, the Violet Mountain Sect’s Chief Elder was a powerful warrior, very much focused on qi and magic more than psyforce. If he deliberately looked at her soul with his powerful perception, he’d be able to see she had two classes and, if he focused, he’d be able to tell she was a monster. But the Chief Elder was generally not at all involved in the day to day running of the sect and almost certainly wouldn’t pay attention to a cultivator before they at least reached the middle of E rank.
“For disguising yourself as a talented youngster, there is then also the problem of master apprentice relationships. Most sects would very much prefer you to have a master from within the sect, so your growth will boost the strength of the sect in more ways than just your own strength. As a result, you’ll generally get less resources if you have an outside master unless that master is someone the sect wants to curry favor with.”
As Mila already had a master in Nana Xara, she couldn’t take another master until she became a god, or at least an A rank more powerful than Nana Xara in her prime, but her bond with Nana Xara was not something even the B rank Chief Elder of the Violet Mountain Sect would be able to spot, so Mila could instead use her bond with Aalam and make it look like it was a bond with Epecteos as her master instead. So long as Epecteos spent most of his time hiding on Earth, it wouldn’t create too many complications. And it was a lot better than not having an excuse for why she couldn’t take on a master from the sect.
“Lastly, the level of benefits given to different categories of sect disciples varies wildly, so you’ll have to craft your identity very carefully before joining to get them to value you enough to do something like give you a cultivation technique for your outside master.”
This was the key in any infiltration, and something Mila had already been considering.
Her biggest issue, however, was actually food. She’d already solved the issue of Aalam being able to eat while she was gone, buying two cheap artifacts from the Trial Tower’s list of rewards, one of which would allow Diana or Isaiah to capture the souls of the monsters they killed and another to charge those souls with lust so Aalam could eat them. But she had to eat as well, and normal cultivators didn’t consume souls of any kind, let alone lust filled ones, while it wasn’t like she could hide when she did so. This then limited her choices of fake races, bloodlines, and racial abilities.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Done with figuring out the more mechanical issues with infiltrating the Violet Mountain Sect, Mila had the mind which had been talking to Nana Xara instead keep focusing on mastering the skills Aalam needed for his insane fusion, while her mind listening to Epecteos continued to do so, allowing her to get a better and better understanding of the state of the Carium Galaxy Cluster and its leading force.
The Violet Mountain sect was very old, the current Chief Elder actually its third, and it had been a B rank sect for all but the very beginning of its lifetime.
Before the Violet Mountain Sect’s rise, two B rank forces had divided the Carium Galaxy Cluster, fighting over the cluster’s major wonder, a special minor dimension with Law strength equivalent to a B rank world known as the Violet Mountain Blessed Land due to the huge violet mountain which took up 30% of its area.
One of those two B rank forces was populated mainly by humans, while the other was populated mainly by jinn, one of the more common cultivator races in the universe which humans from Earth would likely confuse for demons. Epecteos for example was of an Uncommon grade variant of the race specializing in the Spirit stat.
These two races were the main ones in the Carium Galaxy Cluster, with about 48% of the cluster’s cultivators being human and 49% jinn, but this wasn’t reflected in the upper echelons of the Violet Mountain Sect, and this had historical reasons.
The founder of the Violet Mountain Sect had been the grandson of the Chief Elder of the jinn force, his mother a human prostitute, but, due to his mixed race and his mother’s profession, he’d been ostracized in his force despite being the most talented cultivator it had ever produced. Through various trials and opportunities, he’d then made it to B rank, but, according to legend, his grandfather had attacked him out of fear as soon as he returned.
The chief elder of the jinn force died in the attempt, the founder becoming the leader of his force and initiating a quick cleansing. Then the chief elder of the human force married his only daughter to the founder and the two forces effectively combined, the jinn force subjugated under the founder’s might and the human force having willingly surrendered.
This resulted in unequal treatment, humans and those of mixed blood having a much better time than full jinn, and, as a result, after over seven million years, there were no full jinn among the C ranks of the Violet Mountain Sect while powerful full jinn like Epecteos weren’t treated all that well.
The entire galaxy cluster as a whole had very few psychics, Epecteos very much an outlier, and the Violet Mountain Sect’s main heritage paths were seven different varieties of warrior, a very specialized blacksmith, and a few different varieties of earth, metal, and water mages, all of which could make full use of the resources naturally produced in the Violet Mountain Blessed Land. This meant there were quite a few roles the Violet Mountain Sect didn’t have enough talents to fill, such as a replacement for the non-combat elder responsible for the sect’s contracts, and Mila thought that would be a good opening.
“Finally,” Epecteos continued, “the Violet Mountain Sect will be holding its bi-annual recruitment event in 143 days. It sounds like you want to join the sect, and, if that is the case, this would be the time to do it.”
So, she had five months to set up an identity. It wasn’t much time, but with Epecteos’s help it wouldn’t be impossible to create something completely solid even under close scrutiny.
“Okay. Here is what I need.” Mila started to think out loud. “First, I need a list of everyone you’ve slept with over the last few thousand years. Then I need a list of destroyed communities in your Territory during the same time period as well as anyone who has gone missing on one of the two F rank monster worlds you control in the last five years and is presumed dead. That you looked up this information also can’t be known by anyone.”
“Alright.” Epecteos smiled, seeming to not mind taking directions from an F rank. “I already have all that information and I can get a copy to you within three days without anyone being able to find anything suspicious.
“Would you mind explaining the reason for your rushed timeline?”
Mila gave a brief introduction, explaining how she was a succubus who’d faked her identity as a native on a world and then gone to the Trial Tower with Aalam as her familiar, briefly mentioning how many trial points they’d gotten. Then she explained how a demigod had taken the Twelve Element Primal Code they’d earned because she’d developed a crush on Aalam and how that made all the higher resources they had access to effectively useless.
As expected, throughout the entire explanation Epecteos’s expression and aura showed more and more shock. “How did you know how to do all that?”
“Oh.” Mila smiled brightly, knowing she was dropping the final nail to get him fully invested in helping her. “My master is a mostly dead A rank who can secretly talk to me at all times, the Yin Yang Sage. She says hi by the way.”
Epecteos’s eyes grew even wider and Mila could almost hear his heart start to race.