Over the course of a day, Sam plotted out a small expedition that he would lead, towards a newly discovered dungeon. The city had scouted out nearby dungeons, and had sent fighters to conquer them. Because dungeons did not scale in level, they were easy enough to fight through once you were high enough level. The planet had thousands of dungeons, but most of them were like the first dungeon that Sam had set foot in, scaled for level 20s at the most. However, there were higher rank dungeons.
The one that Sam was interested in was a peak F Rank dungeon in the Himalayas that had been so far unconquered. Scouts had been sent to explore, but the dungeon was filled with monsters that had levels upwards of 125, which would spell doom for all but the strongest of fighters. Some of the captains had given him strange looks upon his sudden expression of this desire, but they still went along with it nonetheless. Some of the more hotblooded of his followers were also feeling the strain of being cooped up. To his surprise, Talnor had wanted to come along as well. The man was over level 110, and an elite in his own right, meaning that this dungeon would be perfect for him.
Eventually, Sam had gathered up his A team for the mission. Eduardo, Lao, Talnor and Jeffrey stood in front of the city hall, kitted out in their armor and weapons. Sam faced them, clad in his own suit of armor, with his hammer held loosely in his grasp.
“Are you all ready?” He asked as Jeffrey tightened the last few straps holding his guns to his back.
“Yes,” Lao responded. “We would have been ready earlier if not for this laggard.” He shot a glare over towards Jeffrey, but Sam could tell that it was just a joke among friends.
Lao had come out of his mystic shell a lot recently, now that he had left his life of meditation and asceticism. He was more outgoing, and he no longer found the need to project a sense of worldly wisdom everywhere that he went. Now that he was no longer what anyone could reasonably call an old man, he seemed to have regained some of the youthful vigor of the others.
“Great,” Sam replied, ignoring the dig at Jeffrey.
He pulled out his portable ship, and set it down. The craft expanded out in the blink of an eye, settling down on the plaza before the city hall. A few passersby spared a glance, but far stranger things had been seen in the city. The others trooped on into the ship before Sam. He gave the city one last glance before he entered, confident that it could defend itself. With the massive amount of money that they were bringing in, far more than could reasonably be expected, they were gaming the System to some extent. They were not supposed to be this strong so early in the initialization, relative to their size. It had only been a few months so far. Because of the way that power scaling worked, a faction of a higher rank would always be stronger than a lower one, even if it had far fewer people. When Sam reached E Rank, the Arbiters of Justice would rise to take this universe by storm.
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With one final glance at the seemingly endlessly upgraded mana cannon that took pride of place among the defenses, he stepped aboard. The interior of the ship was as he remembered it, a sparsely outfitted troop carrier. It had a circular row of seats surrounding the central pillar, and a retractable floor. In the front, a vaguely humanoid monster floated in a tub of liquid, the ship controller. As Sam entered, it seemed to come online.
“Pilot, greetings. Where do you wish to go today?” It asked.
“Plot a course to the Peak F Rank dungeon in the Himalayas. It should be easy enough to find with the amount of energy that it gives out.”
The ship controller went silent for a few seconds, and then nodded. It had found its target. Sam sat down as the ship took off, remembering the amount of shaking that happened as it got up to speed.
As the ship flew off towards the horizon, Sam started to meditate, wanting to make the most out of the time that he could. However, he was not prepared for what happened next. A vortex of power touched down around him as he began to draw upon his Dao, causing the others to rise from their own meditation, shocked. Sam opened his eyes to see a tornado of energy surrounding him, tinted with the colors of his Dao. It seemed that cultivating a Dao Seed was different from anything he had previously discovered.
“So that’s what it looks like,” Jeffrey said. “I remember hearing of the power of E Rank cultivation, hell, I even felt the edges of it during my time as a noble. However, this is even more inspiring than I thought.”
“I wasn’t expecting this,” Sam replied. “If I had known the effects in advance, I wouldn’t have done it here. Sorry.” It seemed that his cultivation had reached such a level of power that it interfered with the cultivation of his allies by stirring up the ambient Dao.
The only person approaching this level was Lao, and even he was only at the third level of his Dao Fragment. Lao was one of the top one hundred people in the universe in terms of Dao formation, and even he paled in comparison to Sam’s might.
For the rest of the trip, Sam stuck to mental contemplation of his Dao, not bothering to use its energy at all. Instead, he thought about what the concept of his Dao actually meant to him. A lot of conceptual Daos were tailored to the minds of those wielding them, rather than to some universal ideal. Vengeance could mean a lot of things, some of them good and some of them bad. Sam knew that his understanding leaned towards a more virtuous light, but it was still a Dao that had a lot of potential to go wrong. Even with his massive bonuses to contemplation, it would take him a very long time to make his way through this rank.
There were likely more steps of Dao mastery during the Seed stage than before, and each would be a lot harder. Everyone else on this ship were months away from even forming the most basic of Seeds, probably years with those who had less talent in that area.