In a location close to the Beast Woods.

Three figures dressed in white were floating in the air. They were observing the ruins of a large settlement.

“Was this the village that the boys were supposedly from?” one of the figures asked.

“It’s possible,” another replied.

“I had no idea people actually lived here,” a third one said.

These were naturally the mage kings sent by the Myriad Sword Palace to investigate the Beast Wood incident further. They had finally arrived here after a month.

The three figures moved closer to the settlement to investigate. They spotted the remains of various buildings, numerous tools which were clearly made and used by humans, and more. It was unmistakable that this was the remains of a human village.

The three moved away and continued exploring the area and spotted the ruins of several more villages. They discovered one such ruin next to a large cliff. But instead of the ruin, the trio were interested in the cliff.

“What happened here?” one of them wondered out loud.

A part of the cliff had collapsed, and a large section of the ground was charred black, and there were numerous craters everywhere. They could also detect trace amounts of violent mana fluctuations.

“It seems like a battle was fought here, definitely involving some powerful cultivators. Mage kings at least,” one of them replied.

“Could it have been the dark mage king we heard about?” the first one asked curiously.

“It’s possible, but there seems to have been someone else just as strong, if not even stronger!” the other replied slowly as he observed the surroundings.

“Look there!” the third one exclaimed.

In the distance, they could see the corpses of several individuals.

Within a second, the group vanished and reappeared next to the corpses. There were three corpses which were almost completely eaten, leaving behind only the bones, rags, and a few pieces of meat. They could sense that the corpses belonged to powerful cultivators, and one of the three was much stronger than the other two. Combined with the remains of the clothing worn by the corpses, the group were clear on one thing.

“Dark mages!”

“I don’t believe it, the boys were right. The demon tides really were caused by dark mages!”

“Indeed. Moreover, someone even more powerful had appeared and killed off the dark mages afterwards.”

“Who could it be? What did they want?”

The group became silent as they contemplated.

“In any case, this is important news. Let’s return and give our reports to the sect elders. There’s nothing else left to investigate here.”

“Agreed.”

The three mages came to an agreement and rose into the air once more, before dashing off into the distance.

It would take another few months for the three mage kings to return to the Myriad Sword Palace.

…

Duskville, town lord’s manor.

Cedric Ironheart was sitting behind his desk in his office. Standing in front was Darren Gold. After taking care of the driver and escorting him, the cargo, and the corpses safely to Duskville, he rushed here immediately and requested an urgent meeting with Cedric.

“What’s wrong Darren?” Cedric asked concerned. Darren was a busy man with many responsibilities. It was very unusual for him to request to see Cedric so urgently. Something must have definitely happened.

“You’ll get a full report about this soon from one of your subordinates, so I’ll just give you the quick version,” saying so, Darren explained his encounter. Starting from when he sensed a dark mage and rushed over, only to see the Ironheart family’s carriages attacked, the guards killed, and the dark mage nowhere to be seen. Then he explained the story he heard from the driver.

“The Hidden Venom Cult again!?” Cedric slammed his hands onto his desk and stood up. Why would they attack his family’s cargo? He couldn’t recall the cargo containing anything particularly valuable, so why?

“I found this in the scene,” Darren added, taking out the envelope. “You have to read this.”

Cedric grabbed the envelope and took the letter out before reading it intently.

“The Ironheart family’s cargo will leave Basindale through the highway at sunrise.”

Cedric read the letter several times to make sure he wasn’t misunderstanding the contents.

‘They are… specifically targeting my family?’ That didn’t make any sense! He and his family had no enmity with the Hidden Venom Cult. Why would they want to target him?

Unless…

‘Someone… is trying to attack my family? Using the Hidden Venom Cult?’ Cedric lowered the letter and stared unblinkingly at Darren. However, his mind was flooded with thoughts.

This information changed everything. If someone was intentionally using the Hidden Venom Cult to attack and sabotage his family, then there were very few people who would have the motive to do this. And among all of them, there was one, glaring suspect.

The Blackthorne family.

Their families had been rivals for a long time. If anyone wanted the Ironheart family to go down so badly, it was the Blackthorne family.

Cedric recollected the destruction of the wheatfield. No doubt, whoever was responsible for that incident must have known that the only way for Cedric to salvage the situation was to ask Basindale and, therefore, the Blackthorne family for help.

Why didn’t he see this sooner!

The Blackthorne family had the biggest reason to attack him, and they had the most to gain from his losses, especially with the destruction of the wheatfield.

It must have been them all along!

Cedric was furious!

Seeing his expression, Darren spoke again. “I know what you’re thinking, but there’s another possibility too.”

“What’s that?” Cedric asked, trying to control his anger and think rationally.

“Don’t you think it was too easy?” asked Darren.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, leaving such evidence behind, for the Hidden Venom Cult, it seems very… clumsy.”

Cedric frowned. For an organisation as large as and with as many resources as the Hidden Venom Cult, leaving behind clear, incriminating evidence was too rookie of a mistake to make. Almost as if they wanted someone to find it.

“Maybe that’s because they didn’t expect you to show up so suddenly. So, when they panicked and left in a hurry, they left this behind?” Cedric suggested.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Unbeknownst to Henry, Darren randomly showing up ended up giving more credibility to the evidence he had planted. His luck really worked in strange ways!

“That’s what I thought as well,” said Darren. “However, it’s still good to be suspicious.”

Indeed. It could very well be the case that a third party was acting from the shadows, trying to frame the Hidden Venom Cult and the Blackthorne family to use them as a scapegoat.

“Thank you for bringing this to my attention Darren,” Cedric spoke sincerely. “I will make sure this matter is thoroughly investigated and keep you updated.”

“Sure, no problem,” Darren replied, before turning around and leaving.

…

Drake’s party who had completed their mission, were heading back to Basindale in their carriage.

To express his gratitude to the party, the man had agreed to triple their reward for the mission. Drake expressed that rather than a higher reward, he would like to select some herbs from that cave and the man happily agreed. Drake managed to gain some rare herbs and also took several vials of the mana water.

While Drake was selecting herbs, Sylvia and Helen slowly awoke and were surprised to see the cave too. Blaze caught them up with everything while Drake finished taking what he needed, and the group were now returning together.

Everybody was quiet, and a gloomy atmosphere filled the carriage, in complete contrast to the cheerful mood with which they had first arrived.

“Thank you for saving me,” Helen was the first to speak, slightly bowing to everyone.

“You don’t need to thank us,” Blaze replied.

“Yes, we would all have done the same for each other,” Drake added.

“That’s why we’re a party right?” Sylvia smiled.

Helen just clenched her fist in response.

She was supposed to be Drake’s bodyguard and protect him, yet she was by far the weakest in the group. She had been basically useless in the fight against the arachne, and when the dark mages appeared, not only had Sylvia been forced to continuously keep an eye on her, but the dark mages had taken advantage of her weakness to hurt the entire group, take what they wanted, and escape.

She felt like such a failure, as a bodyguard, and as a member of their party.

‘If only I wasn’t so weak…’ she thought.

Sylvia placed an arm around Helen and rubbed her shoulder.

“It’s okay…” she said softly, as if she could understand what was going through her mind.

But it didn’t help her. Helen was extremely frustrated with herself. She felt like a burden to the entire group and thought she didn’t deserve their kindness and support, that she didn’t deserve to be one of them.

Drake felt sorry for her. Helen was actually the only normal person in their group. Whilst Blaze and Sylvia were from the powerful dragon and faerie races, Drake himself was a transmigrator and had his own advantages. They were actually the abnormal ones so it wasn’t a surprise that she couldn’t match them. Yet being in their party, Helen must be feeling like she was the one who wasn’t good enough.

The carriage became silent again for a while. Everyone watched the vast, grassy plains pass by in the bumpy ride, as a gentle breeze occasionally wafted through the carriage.

Drake became frustrated and decided to try to change the mood.

“Anyway, Sylvia, what was that move you used? It was so powerful!”

Sylvia was brought back from her thoughts and turned to Drake.

“You might have heard that faeries were the first race to be created and that we are similar to nature spirits except we are self-aware and have a physical body?” she asked.

Drake nodded.

“Well, maybe because of that, we can summon, in a sense, a spirit version of ourselves - a spirit avatar,” she explained. “Not only does the avatar multiply the power of any attack we use many times, but it also allows us to use mana freely, similar to how spirits would. However, it consumes a huge amount of mana, and takes a large toll on our bodies. So I can’t use it easily.” Sylvia looked at Blaze and added, “It’s an ability unique to our race due to our nature, similar to dragon form for dragons.”

Drake, along with everyone else, looked at Blaze. Drake realised that he still hadn’t seen Blaze use that ability. Blaze had previously told them that he could use it partially, but they hadn’t seen him use it yet.

‘Would it be just as powerful? If not even more?’ Drake wondered.

Blaze gave an awkward chuckle.

“Your avatar is incredibly powerful, I’m not sure if my dragon form can measure up,” he said, laughing wryly, before turning around and looking into the distance.

Once again, Drake felt depressed for not having reincarnated as a dragon or faerie, or literally any other race apart from human.

‘Why do they all get to be stronger than us?’ he thought to himself.

By the time the carriage returned to Basindale, it was already evening. The exhausted party shared an early dinner, before retiring to their rooms.

Unexpectedly, the drop from the flower of life left an incredibly large amount of residual mana inside Helen. She would be able to use this to cultivate much more rapidly in the near future.

For the next three months, things returned to normal.

The party would go on missions every other day, and Drake focused on his alchemy and rune engraving in his free time. They didn’t receive any more surprises after that incident.

After one week, Drake managed to perfect his first rune - the lightning bat’s lightning bolt rune.

He immediately wanted to create a rank two glove artifact by combining his fireball and lightning bolt rune, however, it wasn’t easy and there were several problems he had to overcome.

The first was that Drake had only been practising engraving the runes on their own, so when combined with other runes, the mana pathways he had to create, and the runes themselves, had to again be altered slightly. Whilst this would be a major problem for others, it was not a big deal for Drake, who managed to figure out the necessary changes relatively quickly.

The next problem was the material. Since rank two artifacts contained more mana pathways and more mana would flow through them, ordinary materials wouldn’t be able to handle it and explode. They needed to be made with higher quality materials, typically demon materials, or other special materials like mythril or everlast leather which Elwin’s sword and Blaze’s armour were made from.

Luckily, Drake had saved up a large number of demon corpses. He used servant class demon skins to get a bunch of leather gloves made by a tannery, so this issue was also quickly resolved.

The final and main problem was his mana.

Even though engraving required less mana than summoning the artifact with the runes directly, he still needed enough mana to engrave the runes and create the mana pathways, which would cost almost the same amount of mana as would be required to summon the rank two artifact itself, but a little less since the body was already made.

With their mana capacity, creating a rank two artifact would already be the limit for a true mage. For Drake who had most of his mana core destroyed, he had to continuously consume mana recovery pills during the process in order to not run out of mana, something which would quickly become dangerous if overdone.

Although it was difficult, Drake knew that it would be worth it. A rank two artifact not only allowed him to cast more spells increasing his versatility in battle, but since they could accommodate a greater number of mana pathways without becoming unstable, more complex runes could be engraved into them, and the runes could be activated with a larger amount of mana, allowing the spells to become more powerful. In fact, they couldn’t even be considered the same spells anymore, but something new.

Hence, Drake knew that his strength would increase a lot once he crafted the rank two artifacts.

It took some time, but Drake finally managed to create a rank two glove artifact containing both the fireball and lightning bolt rune. However, Drake altered the rune so that he could now summon a much larger number of fireballs quickly. Additionally, although he kept the size of the fireballs the same, he increased their temperature to be much hotter. Its power would be completely different to before, and hence, Drake decided to give it a new name – solar barrage.

Similarly, he modified the ordinary lightning bolt rune so that the lightning could branch itself into many smaller lightning streaks, making it look like lightning chains. He decided to call it chain lightning.

Furthermore, Drake took the pseudo-commander class arachne’s sharp and durable shell and had a sword forged from it. Drake then modified the fireball and lightning bolt runes, and engraved it onto the sword, so that instead of shooting out fireballs and lightning bolts, it would simply create fire and lightning which would wrap around the sword.

He similarly had a new amulet made from monster materials and engraved the healing and light orb runes into it, making it a rank two artifact as well.

Over the next two and a half months, Drake managed to perfect the rank two water goldfish’s water bullet and water pillar runes as well and made another rank two glove artifact with those runes. He also made some progress with the healing butterfly’s poison curing and advanced healing runes, but he wasn’t able to perfect them yet.

Of course, Drake had also been practising alchemy during this time. He managed to become a rank one alchemist and started refining rank two pills. However, they were much more difficult than he had imagined.

Learning and using the techniques from the ‘Advanced Alchemical Techniques’ book had made refining rank one pills much easier for Drake and allowed him to progress quickly. However, rank two pills were not so easy. Even though he had practised and mastered the various techniques a lot, the pill recipes were much more complicated, requiring more steps and using materials that required more delicate handling, and even the slightest of mistakes would cause the refinement to fail.

Drake managed to reach around a 50% success rate for rank two mana recovery pills, 30% for stamina recovery pills, and only 10% for some healing pills.

No matter how difficult it was, Drake was determined to continue.

The third month passed.

Drake’s birthday arrived, making him twelve years old.

Additionally, with help from the residual mana from the drop of the flower of life, and the zenith and other pills Drake refined, Helen managed to reach the steel body.

Blaze and the others decided to celebrate both events by having a night of full drinking and dining in the hunters guild.

Later, news about the discovery of the inheritance grounds was also revealed to the public, causing the whole town to become excited. Everyone was busy preparing for the grand opening, which was declared to be one month from now on the blood moon night.

They were also informed of the collaboration between four different forces, and how only those below the grand mage realm could enter, causing many cultivators to become quickly disappointed.

Still, the town became filled with an air of excitement and anticipation. It wasn’t just Basindale, but even the neighbouring Duskville as well.

Seeing everyone work and prepare crazily, Drake felt that he wasn’t doing enough.

I need rank three artifacts, he thought to himself.