"Continent? Well, I only ever lived in a single city after moving there from my village, so I can only tell you so much from my personal experience… But that place is huge."Seeing that I was interested in the mundane affairs of the continent, this Eve-like girl moved a few steps away from the wall that she was pressing herself against only to push a specific brick on it.
Swos.h.!.+
Rather than the wall caving in as if in some secret movie about spies, it looked more like as if all the other bricks that made up this part of the wall turned into mist, before vanis.h.i.+ng altogether!
Behind what was most likely an illusion, I saw a small room, filled nearly to the brim with all sorts of old books and scripts. Just a single scan with an energy vision revealed that most of them shone with way brighter light than any of the books that I noticed on the shelves before!
"Well, there is no point standing in the middle of the hall. This place is my study, come in."
With all the tension that forced Celleria"s body to be as stiff as a dried out stick disappearing, it was given that she was still quite scared of me, but at least she managed to accept the situation she was in.
In the end, just this off chance that she was somehow related to my fiancee made her one of the most important people for me to keep safe in this whole place. Yet, it wasn"t something that I could just tell her!
"Okay then, I get that the continent is vast, especially when compared to this archipelago, with how to spread out its islands are. But I need more details. What are the customs of that place? What are the names of the nations? Cities? How does society work out there?"
Grabbing a stack of the papers from what used to be a couch and now was serving a role of storage for all the manuals that Celleria hid away from the open shelves of the hall. Fiddling with the papers for a moment, I made sure their content got recorded in my library tool before putting them away and sitting down on the spot that I just cleared out.
"Well, if it is about the city I lived in, it was called Skyheaven. As the capital of the Sky province in the Heaven Empire… I think you can see how it goes. For the other provinces, there were mountain province, sea province and abyss province, each with its own capital and culture. Truth be told, there are still some movements that aim to separate the empire and turn the provinces into states on their own."
Hearing this explanation, I was starting to get the idea of how the entire empire was most likely formed. Just like the local sects, when the so-called barbaric tribes descended on the ancestors of the Vivaci nation, they most likely were just a bunch of different groups that banded together to get the fertile hinterlands of the continent for themselves.
The emergence of an influential figure that managed to unite them was most likely the sole reason behind the existence of a singular, political ent.i.ty that governed most of the continent known to Celleria. As soon as such an expert would die, the fragile balance between various powers was bound to come to an end!
That"s why when I heard that said empire still existed despite the s.h.i.+ft of the power and the third wave of refugees happening many years ago, I couldn"t help but wonder whether the timeline I knew so far was wrong, or if there were any other forces at play that influenced the situation.
"You said you lived in the capital of the sky province… But since the empire is a single country that consists of different provinces, then there surely is a place that governs it all?"
While it was already lovely to learn a thing about its political divide, the information that Celeria gave me were still far from being enough for me to move around that part of the world freely!
Because that was the reason why I wanted to go to the continent in the first place. Outside of all the possible buried records and manuals in the ruins of the cities of the first and second civilisation, just the fact that most of the overseers for this very heavenly city were stronger than even the sect leaders implied that the average power level on the continent was far higher than what I could find in this strange archipelago!
"Yeah, right in the middle of the empire, where the greatest forces of aura converge, there is a Higheaven city. While it"s called a city, in reality, it is just the highest organisation in the entire empire. While reaching the top of the local organisation is an achievement by itself, in reality, most of the people who strive to grow stronger locally, only do so to be qualified into entering the Higheaven city in the first place."
The more I heard from her, the more sense it made. Initially, I thought that this continental empire would have a structure based on the similar political ent.i.ties that one could see on earth. Contrary to my expectations, though, from Celleria words, I could tell that just like everywhere else, it was all aimed at distributing the cultivation resources!
As someone who dabbled with stuff like medicinal herbs, pills and other elements of supporting one"s cultivation efforts only on the surface, I couldn"t quite understand why everyone was so keen on doing everything they could to obtain more and more of spirit stones or enhancing pills. If they put all that effort they did to get those resources into polis.h.i.+ng their craft or even fighting skills; they would be far better off in the long term!
While saying those words while banking on Bonger"s help in almost everything that I did could appear as if I was some hacker flaunting how can I no-scope everyone with obvious aimbot, on the other hand, it only proved that I was right.
Yes, I walked an easier path without all the efforts otherwise required to reach the levels of expertise in the skills I possessed, but that didn"t change the fact that having them in my a.r.s.enal made me far more potent than people on par with my raw strength level!
Even though it was only a guess, I think I was around establis.h.i.+ng dominion level at this moment, maybe just a tad stronger than it, yet I could easily make short work on even the collapsing spirit experts!
While I wouldn"t be as dumb as risking going against sage level cultivators who overcame the huge bottleneck separating those two grand realms, I"m quite sure that while I would have to pay a hefty price for it, overcoming even such strong opponent was well within my means!
"Okay, then. What would you consider the crucial information for someone who wants to enter the continent then? Where should I go first? What job would allow me to remain low-key while empowering me to travel through the lands?"