Chapter 820: In the Middle of the Ocean (Three in One)
Translator: Exodus Tales Editor: Exodus Tales
Since there a landmark to follow in the middle of the ocean, it was easy to get lost. Because of this, Abel opened the digitalization ability of his world stone fragment as soon as he left the Dividing Earth Basin. He created a visual map inside of his brain and followed it pretty much ever since he was above water.
Every time White Cloud traveled for a while, Abel’s brain would automatically update the map. He couldn’t get lost, so that he couldn’t take any breaks this whole trip. Actually, he didn’t even know how long he would spend before he actually found the island. Obviously, he was tired, but at least the druid spirit was there to help him expend a lot of the mental power needed for this kind of work. This way, he could still read books and occasionally glance at the spiritual beasts that would come out of the water.
The first day went quite peacefully. Just as Abel expected, White Cloud’s invisibility mode made it very difficult to find the creatures that lurked in the ocean. For the whole day, there hadn’t been any that responded to White Cloud. Of course, it wasn’t just the ocean that Abel had to pay attention to. There were also birds and flying spiritual beasts that he had to be aware of, but none of them really made a response when they went by.
Or so Abel thought.
“Gaw!!”
A terrifying shriek surprised Abel when he was busy reading his book. The sound must’ve come from at least ten miles away because that’s how far the scream of a high-level spiritual beast was. This voice conveyed a strong sense of violence, but the battle command spirit didn’t send any warning in response. This meant that the source of the voice was actually far more than ten miles away.
“A terrifying beast, I see,” Abel said, then took out a scope to check on the source of the voice.
From what he could see, there was a flying spiritual beast that was fighting against a marine spiritual beast. The marine spiritual beast was the owner of the scream just then. It was a white long snake that should be about twenty meters tall. It had a strange white horn on its head and white scales all over its body. The scales reflected light under the sunlight.
Meanwhile, a giant, bald vulture used its claws to s.n.a.t.c.h the white long snake. He could see them both quite clearly, but he actually had no idea what they were. It wasn’t all that strange, actually. There was just too little that the humans knew about the ocean.
The white long snake spat out a white ice crystal ball towards the giant vulture. The giant vulture didn’t dodge. Instead, it just s.n.a.t.c.hed the ice crystal ball with its claws. The ball popped, and ice frost splattered all over the giant vulture’s body. It didn’t do anything to the giant vulture, however. All it really did in response was to shake the frost.
Still, shaking the frost off meant that the giant vulture had to stop its attacks. This proved to be a chance for the white long snake. Its body leaped from the water, and its ma.s.sive tail slammed towards the foe that was flying on its head. This move was too fast for the giant vulture to respond to, but it wasn’t like the fight would end any time soon. When the tail came towards it, it unleashed a sharp shriek as ice frost spat out from its mouth.
Frost spread around the snake tails before it made contact with the giant vulture, and soon, it went all over its entire body and slowed it down. The snake’s tail was slightly slowed down because of it, and even though it was just for a bit, it gave the giant vulture enough time to dodge. As a result, only a few feathers were sacrificed for a hit that would’ve decided this fight’s outcome.
While watching from a distance, Abel’s already made some estimations. First, most of the spiritual beasts that lived in this area should be ice element spiritual beasts. There was nothing but seawater here. That wasn’t to say that fire-types wouldn’t come here, but they didn’t have a good chance of surviving here.
Abel said in an amused tone, “Get close, White Cloud.”
A fight between two high-level spiritual beasts. This wasn’t something that could be seen very often on the Holy Continent. Usually, if they weren’t crossing each other’s territory, it wouldn’t be even possible for the two to have any interaction.
To let Flying Flame and White Snow gain some experience, Abel decided to let them out of his portal beast ring. Flying Flame was still very young, so it needed more experience before he challenged another difficult opponent. It was the same for White Snow. Since it was born on the Holy Continent, there probably hadn’t been many chances for it to match against spiritual beasts that were at the same level as it.
Speaking of which, the two spiritual beasts that were fighting were direct predator and prey. The giant vulture was supposed to be a natural predator of the white long snake, but this time, the giant vulture managed to find someone quite different. This particular long white snake was an alpha of its kind. It managed to promote itself to be the same level as its predator, which was why this fight was able to take place in the first place.
After a struggling, the giant vulture’s claws finally managed to leave some scratch on the white long snake. There was a trade-off for it, however. The white long snake whipped its tail, but luckily, all that happened was that it slightly interfered during the vulture’s flight.
That’s not what the giant vulture thought, however. It felt offended to have this much difficulty in a regular hunt. Now that the white long snake was bleeding, not only was it mad, it also felt a lot more tempted to speed up its attacks. As it sped up its attacks’ tempo, its claws and beaks continued to stab at the white long snake. The white long snake could dodge and block the attacks but never tried to escape. If it tried to turn its back against the vulture, it would expose itself for an instant lethal strike. With that in mind, all it did was repel the giant vulture’s attack with tails and ice crystal b.a.l.l.s.
Since the snake’s body was injured, it grew slower when it tried to twirl its entire body. This gave the vulture seize the chance to level up its aggression. As it had done to its previous victims, it used its claws to cling onto the white snake’s body. After that, it pierced through its scales and held tightly onto its fibers and flesh. As it flapped hard with its wings, the long white snake’s body completely left the ocean.
Out of instinct, the white long snake tried to curl up the giant vulture’s entire body with its own body, but when it tried to do so, the giant vulture pecked at it, and the snake stopped. The pain was too great for it to try to move at all, so the body became flaccid instead of curling up. Next, the giant vulture continued to peck at the long white snake’s flesh, which was enough to leave a blood-gorging wound that was about seven inches long.
As it came to its final moment, the white long snake curled its body and tried to leave the firm grasp of the giant vulture’s claws. It couldn’t. The claws managed to reach its heart. A lot of blood was splattered. Some of it was splattered on the giant vulture’s eyes, and that made it even angrier. It tried to shake the blood off, and while it was doing so, the white long snake used the last of its strength to bite the giant vulture’s neck.
A dying snake was still a pretty strong snake. The bite managed to pierce the vulture’s neck, which was the least protected area on the giant vulture. A huge amount of venom was injected into the giant vulture’s body. Soon, the two beasts fell into the sea from the sky.
Abel couldn’t believe that the fight would turn out like this. In fact, out of fear that the surviving would try to come after him, he decided not to unleash his power of the Will.
Able commanded his summon creatures, “Flying Flame and White Snow, help me fetch their corpses.”
After leaving White Cloud’s back, Flying Flame and White Snow charged towards were the corpses. Flying Flame was responsible for the white long snake, while White Cloud was in charge of the giant vulture. When they were back, Abel was finally able to get a look at the first high-level spiritual beast he’s discovered in the wild.
Not only were their crystal cores a favorite of the wizards, but their spirits were also an extremely valuable material for creating a wizard’s staff. Not only that, but all their feathers, skin, teeth, and bones could be very useful in creating all sorts of gears and weapons. Even their meat could be used as a very healthy food source. This was why so many adventurers would gather to hunt spiritual beasts in some of the weirdest places that existed on the earth.
Since the two creatures were just dead, Abel decided to collect their souls first. After that, he took out a knife and dissected their brains. He picked out two dark-golden crystal cores from their golden brains, which were about the size of two human fists with his hands. This when White Snow started screaming in a very desperate way. It was trying to him that these crystals would work best if used on ice elemental spiritual beasts.
Of course, Abel wasn’t going to be stingy for something like this. If he wanted more crystal cores, he had plenty from the ones he could harvest from the blue howling rabbits. These two, as far as he could see, should go to the one that wanted them the most, so he threw them right into White Snow’s mouth and let it swallow them in.
After swallowing the crystal cores, a layer of ice crystals began to cover around White Snow. Abel couldn’t help but shake his head at the sight of this. He could’ve retrieved White Snow back into his portal beast ring, but White Snow was too eager to take the freshly harvested core. Well, not that it could have helped. There was enough s.p.a.ce on White Cloud’s back. He decided to keep it and Flying Flame on with him.
For Flying Flame, it just looked at its surroundings like a newborn baby. It was still a child, after all. Still, if Abel had to say, he would prefer it to take a nap if it wasn’t really doing anything. Dragons are usually trained by sleeping, and the longer they spent sleeping, the more energy they gathered for their future growth. Since there wasn’t a lot of mana-rich environments on the Holy Continent, Flying Flame spent most of its time resting on top of the red gemstones that Abel prepared. Of course, if Abel wasn’t so resourceful, there was always the option of sleeping inside a volcano or a cave with lava.
When the looting was done, White Cloud began to teleport towards its destination. The more that it was used as a method to travel, the more it began to like moving in such an unorthodox way. In fact, it was starting to not mind as much about not flying like other ordinary birds or flying spiritual beasts.
Abel suddenly said loudly, “Stop, White Cloud!”
White Cloud suddenly deactivated the teleportation and pecked its master.
“Up! Go as high as you can!”
Despite being quite confused by this order, White Cloud went straight to the top of the sky. It wasn’t sure what was going on, but even Flying Flame could tell. A promotion qi was rising out of White Snow, and if they didn’t have the same master, it would’ve gone on to hunt it down.
On a side note, when the promotion qi came out of a spiritual beast, it would attract other spiritual beasts to come prey on it. Like humans, spiritual beasts would become completely defenseless during this time. Not just that, though. If other spiritual beasts managed to eat a spiritual beast crystal core that contained the promotion qi, their chance of promotion would also rise.
So Abel told White Cloud to fly high was simple. He didn’t want a giant spiritual beast-attracting magnet to start drawing attention to all the spiritual beasts that were nearby. This was a blunder on White Snow’s part. It trusted its master too much, so it swallowed down the two crystal cores before it prepared itself a safe place to promote itself.
After taking out several hundred blue crystal cores around White Snow, Abel was finally at ease to let the promotion process begin.
“What? d.a.m.n! Flying Flame, prepare for battle!”
As the battle command spirit warned that three dangerous targets were on their way, Abel couldn’t help but curse at how fast things were happening. Flying Flame seemed to have a different reaction. It was getting quite bored about this journey, but when it heard the word “battle,” it unleashed a dragon’s roar to greet its enemies.
When the three approaching spiritual beasts heard the dragon’s roar, they suddenly turned in the opposite direction and ran away. Abel couldn’t believe it. They should be all at around the same level, but dragons were still the strongest beings in this world as things would have it. The hierarchy was too significant that the three high-level spiritual beasts had to run right away.
Well, not that it was what Flying Flame wanted to see. Without a fight to enjoy, it crawled back towards White Cloud’s back and began to rest.
The battle command spirit sent out another warning, “Sir Elder, two dangerous targets are approaching.”
Instead of paying any attention this time, Abel waited and let the two high-level spiritual beasts approach White Cloud. When they were about two miles away, Flying Flame unleashed another dragon’s roar towards them. This time, it roared in a much less enthusiastic manner. It didn’t even stand up as it was doing this.
Other than that, there really weren’t many spiritual beasts that came to attack White Cloud and White Snow. The marine spiritual beasts were too far down below, whereas the flying spiritual beasts would leave when they heard Flying Flame’s dragon roar.
When Abel thought that this was the end of it, he heard another warning siren from the battle command spirit. Soon, he could see a giant back that was leaping out of the ocean. It was a ma.s.sive whale coming out of the water. It had a pure white body, and while Abel didn’t know what the name of this species was called. He could tell that it was a spiritual beast far stronger than the white long snake that he just saw.
An apex level spiritual beast. It was almost impossible to find one any more on the Holy Continent because there had to be a very rich biosystem for it to exist. Apex level spiritual beasts only fed on other spiritual beasts, and there weren’t all that many of them on the Holy Continent, to begin with.
Instead of remaining in its resting position, Flying Flame leaped up from White Cloud’s body and screamed at the white whale below. It tried to scare it away, but it only continued to come closer to White Cloud. As it came out of the water, Abel was finally starting to get a full view of its body. Not only was its body’s length at a terrifying 200 meters, but its curves and skin also made it look both elegant and somewhat threatening.
Once the white whale appeared from the sea, its body only continued to reach out from the water. Abel thought it was just really big, but no, this whale could fly. When its eyes locked onto Flying Flame, it quickly s.h.i.+fted its attention to somewhere higher. It sensed something very attractive. It did pause a bit to make its decision, but very quickly, it opened its ma.s.sive mouth and let out a deafening scream towards the sky.
Abel was very up high in alt.i.tude, but this scream was so loud that it felt that it could make the heaven and earth split. The surrounding air was crushed by the sheer voice of this beast. If Abel’s physical durability didn’t reach the level of a head knight command, he would’ve been shredded by the shock wave alone.
While still managing to be in the same shape, he took out the “contract of the ancient” s.h.i.+eld and put it in front of White Snow. Then, he let out a scream.
“Tough defense!”
He learned a technique when he first became a knight, but now that he was a head knight commander, the golden combat qi wall that he produced managed to leave a striking presence in front of the summon creature in front of him. Also, his “shattered ice armor” was in place to make barricades in case of any spell attacks. He managed to protect White Snow relatively well from the white whale’s scream because of his combined defense.
Abel screamed towards Flying Flame, “Kill it! Don’t it affect White Snow’s promotion!”
Flying Flame unleashed a colorless fireball that flew straight towards the white whale as though expressing its anger from being ignored. As the king of the ocean, the white whale managed to avoid this attack. After flipping its ma.s.sive body in the air, it spat out a deep blue water ball about ten meters in diameter. This extinguished the flame that was flying towards it. The water element it unleashed was powerful. Despite having reduced in volume after extinguis.h.i.+ng the fireball, there was still a bit of it that flew straight towards Flying Flame. Flying Flame managed to dodge it in time, but it was still quite unhappy to lose in a match of elemental strength.
As though shocked by the fact that its attack was dodged, the white whale grew more serious than before. Its gigantic tail slapped the water that was below, and despite being quite a distance from the water, a ma.s.sive amount of seawater started bursting explosives. Instead of dropping back into the ocean, the seawater continued to float around the white whale’s surrounding them when they were splattered into the air.
No, the white whale didn’t stop there. After slapping its tail, a super-large water wall was created next to it. Abel couldn’t help but frown at that. This was not a very fair way to defend against Flying Flame’s fire element attacks. Seeing that there wasn’t much of a choice, he tapped on his chest and created a ma.s.sive black hole next to him. Soon, the ten-meter-tall Johnson appeared as it stood on White Cloud’s back.
Abel ordered Johnson, “Protect White Snow, Johnson!”
Despite not making a direct response, Johnson immediately followed its master’s order by transforming itself into a fort that surrounded White Snow. It wasn’t the best at attacking, but in terms of its defensive capability, Abel pretty much had nothing to worry about once White Snow was covered by it. As for the reason for calling it out, he hated to admit it, but he really made an underestimation when he prepared to battle against the spiritual beasts that were in the ocean. The marine spiritual beasts weren’t just scarier because they were larger in number. They were scarier because they were actually stronger.
After connecting his power of the Will to the soul chain, Abel disappeared from White Cloud’s back and reappeared on Flying Flame’s back. Then, he produced a lightning spell rune on his right hand. Under the current situation, whether it was ice or fire element, he knew that he couldn’t deal a lot of damage to the white whale hidden in the giant water ball. This meant that only the lightning element was enough to create an opening.
After leaving a white streak of light in the air, the “lightning” spell landed right onto the fireball that the white whale spat out. After that, it pa.s.sed towards the water ball and became a lightning arc that was spreading across the entire water ball. From what he could sense with his power of the Will, Abel could tell that the lightning effect was immediately stopped as soon as it made contact.
To put it simply, the lightning effect was weakened by more than 40% as soon as it made contact with the giant water ball. Abel experienced the same thing when he faced powerful advanced wizards and orc priests, but this was the first time that he’s faced an opponent who could neutralize the effect of his attacks by this much. Perhaps he would understand once he became a rank sixteen wizard.
He’s heard of it from Wizard Morton before. Once someone became an advanced wizard, the difference between levels would become very crucial. Even if the wizard were just a level below, he would still face a great sense of heaviness from the wizard that was above. This was not something that could be overcome with just one or two magic staff. This was why there was such a distinct sense of hierarchy for wizards all over the Holy Continent. Rank sixteen was supposed to represent the elites of each Wizard Union branch. Rank seventeen were supposed to rule the Wizard Union as a whole. Rank eighteen were the ones that decided every major move the wizards had to make.
From what Abel remembered in his previous battles against advanced wizards, none of his spells managed to gain him any advantage. Most of his kill counts came from his summon creatures or other methods. He had to be sly because he didn’t get any leverage when engaging in direct battle. It was the same thing with this white whale. Once the lightning spell stopped, the rest of its lightning effect was vastly reduced before it even hit the target. Also, the white whale’s body was about two hundred meters in total length. The most that this lightning attack really did was to make it just a bit uncomfortable.