Chapter 60 - Goodies

Mi Quo tracked through the wasteland, barren and devoid of all life. In fact, he felt he would be that way, too, if he carried on much longer. All that existed were withered, blackened stumps of trees and husks of what once were Wendigos. So he stumbled on, mile after mile feeling the sickness overcome him—dark energy sickness.

Even though he stopped every hour or so to cycle his energy and also expend as much as he could from his body, it was not enough. The density of dark mana was incredible, and he had seen no sign of the elusive Lich. So he lay down on the ground and prepared for the worst.

In Weihou, it was all hustle and bustle; it seemed like they had been away for a lifetime. The people seemed unconcerned about Bai Bo-Xue, hideous appearance and just went about their days.

The first two physicians they went to just turned them away, and they eventually all found themselves having to travel into the heart of town. Where they found the central apothecary and were at last allowed admittance, that is after someone was sent to chastise the guards at the town gates for letting them in at all; at least they were taking it seriously at least.

And Adam was at last allowed to roam freely after they were all checked over for any sign of poisoning. They were all cleared and left the supposedly dying Bai Bo-Xue there to check out the town.

Thawain was tasked with selling some herbs and ores. He also took the children to the market for them to check out new clothes and peruse the blacksmiths for weapons.

Adam now needed to meet up with Bai Bo-Xue’s brother so that he could get access to the town’s archives, as there was a lot of bureaucracy around who could and could not gain access. Bai Zhoo was all proprietary and met Adam for tea at a local establishment.

Adam itched to get at the archives. He wanted information to help him puzzle out the shrine and anything at all that might be useful. There could be more magic there for Libby to learn.

Bai Zhoo beckoned him over to a table out of earshot of anyone else. He used his identity on him and found that he was indeed only level 13. Pah, what nonsense. He had grandsons with higher levels; it was a thin disguise.

“Master Adam, it is so good to meet you finally. My brother has told me of your exploits.” Said Bai Zhoo, not wanting to allude to the void wars in public.

“Nice to meet you too.” Said Adam, slipping Bai Zhoo the note his brother had given him.

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Bai Zhoo did not miss a beat after reading for a few seconds.

“It is stuffy in here; let us go and fulfill our first obligation,” he said, placing down some coins and leading them out. They headed off to the central archives at the magistrate’s office.

It was lucky they had Bai Zhoo with them; Adam hated red tape; he would have been tempted to break in. But with Bai Zhoo, they just waltzed through, everyone moving out of the way or bowing politely.

They got to the first section of the archives, but this was more than enough. With their current SP pool, it was nothing for Echo to create a mana field a few hundred meters in diameter.

Scanning the area, Libby started to make a detailed itinerary of the archives, searching for valuable areas. While Adam just had a nose trying to find historical documents about the shrines in the local area. There did not seem to be much more detail than what Libby had surmised from the shrine itself, a dead end.

Libby had more success. She found many, many scrolls. But they took a lot of work to scan accurately. So they would have to put Adam’s original thoughts into plan later and break in. The sheer volume of information had tantalized Libby, but all the interesting stuff was, of course, locked away behind closed doors.

So she just mapped out the approximate locations of the other rooms for later use. She detected a few wards. She probably could have worked out how to bypass them, but instead, they just stayed there until someone accessed one of the inner rooms. When they did, she secretly observed what they did to the wards to open them. This done, they exited the archives.

Next, Adam gave his thanks to Bai Zhoo, who stuck admirably to his part, going off to check on his brother. On the other hand, he went off to the market, where Libby scanned all the stalls and shops they visited for herbs and anything and everything. She cataloged things.

Any useful herbal remedies were scanned to find out their constituents. Then, having done so, she checked her records to see which herbs grew near Binyon and which she would need to buy—ideally, purchasing seeds so that they could grow their own. Fortunately, it was precisely the right time of year for most of the seeds to be found in the market.

She was also very interested in looking at any magical artifacts they could try to reverse engineer. Unfortunately, they were all very expensive at the moment, but she still wanted to see what she could glean and earmark those she would like to purchase at a later date.

They caught up with Thawain and the kids and a clearly very patient smithy. They had been staring bug-eyed at numerous enchanted weapons. Libby was bug-eyed too.

There were weapons enchanted with basic spells to keep down maintenance by keeping them sharp or breaking resistance. Others had standard elemental enchants for fire, wind, ice, earth, or other magics. But there were surprisingly a lot more with more complex enchant combinations. From what they had found out, this was due to the high demand for quality products and the large purses of faction members who visited the region.

Libby spent some time scanning these, but it took a lot of work. The data required could not be obtained accurately.

She needed to be able to analyze beyond the top layer of energies involved in the symbols used to enchant the weapons. As she really needed to get closer to the objects so that she could scan them more accurately, she asked Adam if he could persuade the owners of the smithy.

They agreed when Adam put up ten beast cores as collateral in case of any damages to the highly expensive weapons.