"We would like to meet that person."
"He must be within the vicinity of this realm. But it would be hard to contact him. He is good at hiding."
"What is he hiding from?"
"The curse brought upon him because of his skill. People often covet the result and try to make it theirs and in the process, they ignore the value of the person who made it, his efforts, intelligence, skills, and even the fact that his very existence is the cause of that result, they so dearly covet that much.
And any person who can get results that are extremely coveted by someone is considered cursed. And among all the cursed people I know, the weight of his curse is the greatest."
"Where did you get this curse theory?"
"He told that to me. Anyway, I would be roaming around a bit to get some inspiration for the research. I might not be able to spend as much time here. I hope it is not a problem."
"Not really. We are going on defensive currently and just keep in touch with the outside world a bit and you would know if you are necessary here."
"That would be great. Thank you."
With that, Sam came out of the city and went into the forest before disappearing.
He went to the camp where Akhil and Donner are staying.
"So, what is the current status?" Akhil asked.
"I got the Beast whistle. If my guess is right, they will be constructing the formation and it might start immediately. They don"t have time to waste. With all the chaos we caused, they are completely believing that some other organization is definitely eyeing them. They need the best defense they could possibly afford at the moment."
"That is great. So, what do we do now?"
"Tell the players to gather up here. We would be waiting it out and dealing with some guys who come and go often. From now on, don"t leave their bodies after killing them. Clean up the whole place after the battle and try to make it look like what it was before the battle. It is important.
We need to create some sense of terror and add some mystery flare to get the job done properly."
"Your wish. We will be going now."
With that, they left, while Sam started making preparations.
In this time he spent in the Fiend tribe, he understood one particular thing, there are not many factors that he could take advantage of when dealing with the Fiend tribe.
They are not thirsty or greedy for anything in particular, except for the bloodshed. But even that urge is completely under their control. Except for the really immature ones, not many people could be influenced easily to let that urge go wild.
He wanted to use, alcohol, food, s.e.x, or any other kind of addiction that could make them go wild and weak, but there are no holes in that direction.
If he had access to the liquid energy cells, he would have had destroyed half of the tribe by now. But now there are very few choices he could make and one of the most feasible ones is a contagious curse.
One of the high-level curses even in the Myriad Curse guide and he needs to use a lot of energy to activate it and even then, there is no guarantee, it would work properly in a single attempt, so he needs to test them out before all the players a.s.semble here.
If things work out, with the contagious curse and the efforts from other players, the tribe would be down in a few days.
So, he let his beasts out after a long time as he used them to guard him while he practiced.
Forest Bear and Dia first created a leveled area that could be used as his experimental setup. He could use the simulation on the second floor so that the time difference would be able to help him get to have more time to practice.
But he just decided to do it outside so that he can see the effects on the surrounding environment. The curse has too much dark elemental energy and no matter how much he could replicate the environment, it doesn"t beat the real thing.
So, he started painting the inscriptions on the ground creating a large array that almost took two and a half hours for him to create and after it was done, he stood in the center and activated the array.
The dark elemental energy started gathering in his hand slowly forming a glob black sphere.
The inscription ink slowly disappeared.
At this moment, he activated energy vision to see what is happening in the surroundings and he could see the inscription array absorbing the surrounding energy and converting it to the dark elemental energy which has an extremely sinister feel to it.
It took five minutes for the whole array to disappear and the black sphere in his hands glowed with black light.
He tried to suppress it, but he is already short on energy due to the array and he knew he cannot keep it for a long time.
So, he aimed at the tree nearby and threw the ball onto it.
The tree was. .h.i.t by this dark energy ball and it slowly started aging, first, the tree started growing branches and the leaves became dense, later the leaves withered one by one and fell down before the tree itself withered away.
As it was dying, Sam signaled the forest bear who injected the wood elemental energy to the nearest tree to make its branch grow towards the dying tree and make contact with it.
When the first tree completely died, the second tree touched it. All of a sudden, the second tree started going through the same aging process.
The forest bear repeated the process with a few more trees and as this constant contact was maintained, the chain reaction didn"t stop.
Dozens of trees died in a few minutes and after some time, Sam cut off the chain reaction.
The last dead tree emitted a lot of energy which it shouldn"t have. The energy is far more than the energy present in the initial curse Sam created.
The change in the quant.i.ty of energy is because of the curse"s absorption ability. When it was attached to the target, it absorbs all the energy from that target and makes it its own.
After the target died if there is no direct physical contact with another living body, it will slowly dissipate the energy until it was finally gone and merged with the atmosphere.
But if there is physical contact by a single ent.i.ty or multiple ent.i.ties, things would be different.
The energy would be sent to the new ent.i.ties that are in contact. If it is only one, it would absorb all the energy and if there are multiple ent.i.ties, the energy would be distributed equally amongst them.
The curse will continue to propagate as it absorbs more and more energy.
Currently, the curse Sam used is actually a short version of it. For it to be used on a cultivator of his level, the curse needs a lot more energy and it would take a lot of time for it to completely absorb the energy from the target.
There is a possibility that if the target is powerful enough, he might be able to suppress the energy and forcefully expel it from his body even at the expense of their injury.
After going through some data on results, he once again went on with the practice after recovering the energy with the wine.
The next day, the players started coming one by one and they saw Sam practicing the same curse again and again.
As he drew the arrays one after another, he got more and more familiar with them and he managed to do it faster every time.
By the time all the players are there, Sam is confident that he could create a full-scale contagious curse that could make a person of his cultivation level, the original cultivation level with Middle-stage transcendence of Astral Plane die and even if he managed to save himself, he would have to go through a lot of effort and would be as weak as a chicken.
After he was done with the process, Sam looked at the players and said.
"I hope you guys all have enough tricks up your sleeves. I already got the Beast Whistle and kind of used Noah and k.u.mar"s points. So, the remaining four of you are the main players here and need to step up.
You guys should be able to bring that Tribe Chief and the Grand elders down.
I am telling you, if things go south, I will break the whole pact and just use my toys to take him down and I wouldn"t have to share anything with you guys. We already wasted too much time here."