Sam arranged a special meeting for the players.
"So what do you guys want? Why is this meeting? Did you all get into any trouble by any chance? You seemed so stressed."
"You are the reason for that stress, do you know that?"
"Noah asked from the side."
Sam was surprised.
"I don"t think I did anything to p.i.s.s you off, did I?"
"Dude, you set your team off on all the organizations that are within the range and because of that, we had to work faster and quicker taking larger risks. What is your hurry? If we had lagged behind most of the organizations would have been taken care of by you. Even now you at least got double the average of what we got. You are making us work harder."
Akhil said in a whiny tone.
"Don"t blame for that alright. I am playing within the rules. If you had wanted to do it fast, you should have worked harder and got an organization of your own. After all, having a bunch of capable subordinates is a good thing."
"Of course, it is a good thing. And that is what p.i.s.sing us off more. We were all born into organizations, but we are the ones that are running solo now. You on the other hand didn"t have an organization from the start and were born in a lost village somewhere, but you have the organization that is far more capable than what we destroyed in the past few months.
If we had known things would be like this, I would have made some preparations at least. Anyway, just cut us some slack, man."
"Can you guys cut the c.r.a.p and just some to the point directly?" Sam said with a chuckle.
"We need you to stay on a break."
"What? That is not going to happen. Give you guys a headstart? Over my dead body. I am not that stupid."
"Not a headstart dude. Just give us time to catch up. You are already at the peak stage of Initiation and G.o.d knows when you would break through to Pre-transcendence. Because of your hurry, we are not getting any time to cultivate and train peacefully. No matter how much we tried we are barely in the middle stage and Arkiv and Noah are the only ones who made it to the late stage.
We are being held back a lot." Akhil went on without giving anyone any chance to speak.
Sam sighed and Akhil continued.
"The thing is, we don"t exactly know what your plan is, but you are in obvious haste for growth. If you get a great headstart like this then the rest, we would slack back and we all know that in the final stages, no matter how powerful we are, those organizations are hard to deal with and there are few of them.
You wouldn"t be able to do it alone and had to wait for us to catch up.
So, why do it then, rather than do it now? Now it is easier to wait for catch up as the gap is small. If you keep on going like this the gap would only widen.
And also don"t drive us to the dust, man. It might sound unfair but we are all in the same boat, let us just have each other"s back. Wait for a few months. We will convert all the heirlooms and focus on cultivation. We all had our own encounters around and we are sure we can catch up. As soon as we reach the peak stage, even if you break through to the Pre-transcendence by then, we wouldn"t ask you to stop until the second phase ends."
Sam thought for the moment and said.
"So, what is in it for me?"
"Two-phase two heirlooms from each of us. Deal?"
"Deal. But I wouldn"t wait for all of you to break through. Six months."
"Make it eight."
"Sure then. Deal. Is that all?"
"There is something else."
"What is it?"
"It has been a while, let"s go to Mackey"s restaurant, please. I desperately want to eat something good."
Sam just chuckled and took them away.
After the meal at Mackey"s, all the players left on their own way. Eight months is not much of a time to break through and they don"t have enough resources like Sam.
They could only take the time and the opportunity they have at hand.
While they are gone, Sam also focused on his cultivation himself while he let the rest of the team on their own training or whatever that is they wanted to do. But as much as they could enjoy themselves, they also need to bring information on the next and the last three people that Sam is about to recruit.
After picking the person of their choice, the team dispersed and left.
Sam focused on training and research once again. He didn"t compete with anyone for a while and he didn"t set any goals for himself. Even though he didn"t plan for this break to happen, he decided to take this chance to calm himself down.
The things that happened with Gran and Tamas, he didn"t want to repeat it again. Not the losses, if a person doesn"t lose now and then, they will never learn some things. The reactions are what shouldn"t be repeated again.
He shouldn"t react like that in any other situation.
For that to happen, Sam just did everything on a whim in a peaceful manner. He didn"t care about the numbers for a long while. Since he had no goals, there was no need to worry about achieving something.
For the first time in a while, he just enjoyed and took in all the things that he built after coming to this world. He traveled through the trains he built. He visited some old friends. And this went on for over six months straight.
Last two months, he focused on the breakthrough.
The breakthrough to the Astral Plane Pre-transcendence was smooth and there are no weird changes. The bloodline activation didn"t happen and there was no metamorphosis. Except for the change in power and small change in his body.
But this one small change that made him ecstatic in these six months and that is his trick to hide the wings he had on the back.
After he broke through to the Pre-transcendence, as he circulated his energy according to the cultivation method something changed in his brain. It is as if the cultivation technique imprinted something into his memory directly.
Memory is the method to hide the wings. Since he was not born with them and they are at most the result of a mutation that was caused by his unique cultivation technique. And after he broke through he came to know that the mutation of wings was incomplete and it completed itself after the breakthrough.
Now, he can bring the wings whenever he wants them and hide them whenever he doesn"t. And the access point is through the wind elemental fusion.
When he goes through the complete fusion, he can call the wings and they would appear on his body in the form of solid condensed wind just like the rest of the body.
And if he changed into a normal body at that time and deactivated the fusion without folding the wings back, then the wings would take their normal form with feathers, but it takes a lot of spiritual energy and a bit of expendable life force to do that.
Once again when he needs to hide them, all he has to do is go through the wind elemental fusion and just fold the wings directly and come back to his normal body.
Even though he was happy, Sam had more questions than answers at the moment when this happened.
Because, even though the cultivation technique was a prerecorded thing, the types of beasts he would take in for the contract was not.
Except for Yanwu and the Void hopper, no other beast was pre-decided and every single one of them was his choice and a result of exploration with not too many pre-existing factors involved.
But the change in the cultivation technique and the memory imprint along with the incomplete and later complete mutation of wings, he didn"t believe that it is also pre-recorded. After all, he could have made contract with any other beast and it is impossible that different reactions were programmed within the cultivation technique based on different bloodlines.
After all, there are too many bloodlines and beasts and even bestiary is not a record that could give data on all of them.
Even though he had questions, he has no one else to ask and certainly no one else to answer.
He could only keep them in and wait until he met someone that could answer all these questions.
After the breakthrough, Sam finally shifted his focus back to something related to these families and organizations.
The heirlooms.
He had a few dozen heirlooms at hand now and he needs to exchange them for some value.
He went through a bunch of these heirlooms to see if they would be useful to anyone in his subordinates and in fact he asked some of the team captains within the team that followed Arkiv and Argan to select one for themselves, but they rejected and preferred something Sam made. So, he could only exchange everything for resources and there is one particular resource that came into the menu that attracted him more than anything else and this resource is exclusive to him which made it ten times better.