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Abel was now at full rank twenty wizard. Honestly, things went smoother than he expected. That being said, he still couldn’t find a way to detect the power of rule that should be emerging. He could feel the loss of the five hundred perfect gemstones, however. He did it with his oak tree. Their collected effort made it possible for so much progress to be made in so short of a time. Not even a large wizard organization was capable of this. No, especially not when all that resources were put into the training of one individual in just a twenty-minute meditation training.
After taking out twenty bottles of the soul potion from Valaya’s ring, he poured most of them onto the oak tree’s trunk. The tree quickly absorbed the purple liquid and quickly recovered because of it. When it was in a much better condition, he took out some more perfect gemstones from Valaya’s ring and placed them underneath the roots. This way, the recovery would happen much more efficiently. He could feel it. In just a few months, the oak tree would be as good as it was never injured before.
Everything about this made him feel a lot more relieved. He was lucky that he had a lot of various potions on him. The “soul potions” that targeted the souls of their consumers, especially, were the ones that could affect one’s soul directly by aiding in life force generation.
Anyways, he went forth and slapped on the bark of the oak tree. He expressed his gratitude, and when he received a response, he used the “instantaneous movement” to move back to the Rogue’s Encampment.
Anyways, he was now rank twenty, with just enough ability to protect himself. He placed his hand on his chest, and his advanced wizard presence quickly diminished and transformed into the essence of an advanced rank eighteen druid. The promotion happened quicker than he would’ve expected. He’d prefer the process to be subtler than that because he’d hoped that he wouldn’t show too much of his true strength in front of other people.
After getting Doff back into his portal beast ring, he entered the dark world back to the Rogue’s Encampment. As he arrived, he opened the portal beast ring again and had the Beamon giant beast jumping right out of it. He then took a good long time searching his Valaya’s ring. He took out the “ability potion” he got from Geleb Firefinger, which, from his estimations, should include at least four types of hell strengthening abilities. To be more specific, it should contain “specialized bow strengthening,” fire strengthening,” specialized speed up,” and “mana burning.” For his first time using this ability, Doff would only get one out of four of these abilities at random.
If Abel could choose, the ability he wanted on Doff the most would be the “specialized speed up.” It would help with Doff’s overall fighting capability. As for Doff, it wasn’t concerned with any of that. It did feel the power emitted from the ability potion, though, on an instinctual level. As far as it was concerned, drinking the thing would make it a lot stronger than it was.
Anyways, it drank the ability potion, so the purple light washed all over its gigantic body, transforming its whole bodily structure. When this light slowly faded away, Abel immediately connected Doff’s soul with his soul chain. He wanted to check what sort of ability it just received.
“Mana burning!” Abel spoke to himself in a half-disappointed, half-pleased manner.
The “mana burning” was quite a versatile hell enhancing ability on its own. Once the target was hit, the target would lose about four times the mana than the minimum amount of attack the attacker was dealing with. At most, it could force the target to lose about four times the amount of damage the attacker’s maximum aggressive spell was dealing. Not only that, but it could also provide a +100 attack frequency and +75% mana resistance to the one casting it.
It wasn’t just Doff that possessed this ability, by the way. Johnson also could do the same terrifying thing. Just one hit was enough to drain out all the mana out of whatever it was hitting. More terrifyingly, there was the 75% mana resistance, and that’s basically another layer of defense on top of its already super-versatile layer of defense. Still, Abel wasn’t concerned with having more defense. He just wanted Doff to get a buff in speed so it could increase its overall aggressive capability. It was a shame that all he had at the moment was the “ability potion” that he could use for “specialized speed-up,” and not the ones with spiritual qi enhancement on them.
After picking through a few bottles of the “ability potion,” he finally focused on the one he got from Wren. From this particular bottle, he could see that the available options include “mana burning,” teleportation,” freezing enhancement,” skin hardening.” Since Doff’s already got the “mana burning” by this point, it’d be a one out of three chance to get each of these abilities if it was to drink his option. since Abel’s main concern was with speed enhancement, the one he was hoping for would be the “teleportation” ability.
From there, he opened the lid of the ability potion, passed it over to Doff, and had it swallow all the liquid that was inside. Purple light started rising from its body, and sparks of light wrapped all over it. After a few minutes, its body disappeared from the original position and reappeared at a spot that was several tens of meters out.
From Abel’s perspective, seeing this happening was very interesting. The teleportation ability was supposed to trigger only when there was a loss of life force, but that was when the hell creature’s intelligence was below the level in which it could choose whether to use this ability or not. For Doff in its current state, since it had the soul potion enhancing its spiritual strength, it was now fully capable of applying the “teleportation” ability so that it could experiment using it in all sorts of ways.
Abel was very pleased to see that, of course. Doff was technically a melee-type wizard now that it had a very strong defensive capability and the ability to annihilate anyone in range. Unlike Johnson, by the way, Doff was capable of strengthening itself. Its ability was increasing simultaneously as when its spiritual beast level was increasing. That being said, it was a lot harder to improve Johnson’s ranking. To get Johnson to be in the next rank, Abel would actually have to find the best materials to replace a lot of its parts. There were pros and cons to that, but all in all, it was generally a lot easier to increasing Doff’s ability than Johnson.
Since Doff was the only available one now, Abel would have to rely on it a lot for safety purposes. To get it to do its job better, he would have to find it a new weapon, and that was not an easy job if he was trying to venture around an ancient ruin to look for something that a ten-meter tall creature was capable of utilizing. It wasn’t like forging the weapon was a potion because, given Doff’s current strength, anything that’s made of ordinary material would just be destroyed in a few moments. It’s just a lot easier for it to rely on its two hands and claws if it was to engage in close-range combat.
“I’ll be leaving it all to you then, Doff,” Abel spoke loudly as though he just discovered a new toy.
With quick teleportation to Abel’s front, Doff slammed on its chest to show that it was ready to fulfill its first task. Abel was ready to leave the job to it, so he decided to leave the dark world early for the first time in a while. That would prevent him from having the chance to perform a meditation by three times, but it was just not possible for him to rely on meditation as a way to increase his performance. His priority now, as it seemed, was to do everything that he could to improve the skills that he had now. He has had several exponential increases in ability lately. If he didn’t set his foundations right, that would hinder him from making more steady progress in his future pursuit. Of course, if he was going to reach his limit at rank eighteen, he would just have to accept that as the fact.
After having a nap, Abel woke up in the morning and went to the dining room. When he was there, he could see that the Butler had already been waiting for him. a plate of fresh fruit and a portion of deer milk was something he hadn’t seen in a while. He wasn’t all that hungry. He did spend the entire night fighting inside the dark world, but it’s only been a while since he’s drunk a few of the “ration potion.” That being said, since fruits were really more of a side than a main for him, he took no hesitation sweeping through everything in front of him.
After seeing that Abel just finished the meal, “Master, there seems to be a lot of law enforcers patrolling near the royal palace lately. It appears that they’re sending men even to this street we’re living at.”
Abel didn’t seem particularly bothered, “Well, I don’t think that’s a big issue as long as they don’t bother us.”
The empire seemed to have started moving already. He didn’t think that it was the right move for them to increase the number of law-enforcers, though. No, he thought that doing this was just going to make people hide more. There’s something he was wrong about regarding that, though. After hearing the message he relayed, the empire’s intelligence force could use however ways they wanted to search everywhere inside the royal palace. That was what they did, of course, but they ended not having found anything out of the usual. This was true even when the royal palace used their special admission to do scanning all over the city. Even after all the work that they’ve done, they didn’t manage to find any race other than the elves.
Bay Law City was not a very inclusive place. Races other than elves and half-elves weren’t usually allowed here. Even law-defying wizards that came from the Wizard Union had to prepare a lot of paperwork if they were to be there. As painstaking as this was, it also contributed to making Bay Law City be the safest city across the entire central continent. As things would have it, however, the situation at hand was more complicated than it ought to be. Before, the major indicator of an intrusion was if any non-elves entered the city, but now that the chance of that happening was eliminated, the intelligence system just lost directions in how they should try to detect intruders. Because of that, they had no other choice than to increase the number of base-level patrollers around.
The Butler seemed to understand that Abel was trying to lay low, “Yes, Master.”
Abel walked out of his room and went inside the garden. Just when he was ready to take a chariot to head over to the Potionmaster Guild, Druid Poly and Gunter went over to the garden and were ready to escort him.
Druid Poly looked at Abel in a strange manner, “You seem a little odd today, Master Bennett.”
Abel smiled in response to the very blunt statement, “It, well, probably has to do with the new potion I was testing. I’m not sure what the side effects are, but I presume that they have affected me in some ways.”
That was not the real explanation, of course. Abel just reached rank twenty. Even if he had the transformation necklace to help him bypass detection, it was still kind of hard for him, on a psychological level, to make quick adjustments to the drastic change that was happening to him. There was no way Poly could see that, of course. She simply shook her head, and even if she could see that Abel was still a rank eighteen druid, she was starting to think that it was just not that easy to beat Abel if they were fighting against each other. She did buy into Abel’s explanation, in any case. “Master Bennett” was quite famous for being the craftsperson of many effective potions. She was the one that experienced it herself. Her training progress became much faster recently after she had been drinking the golden quality potion. She was just going to give up on becoming a big druid a while back ago, but after having what she considered the “privilege” to follow Abel, she was starting to have hopes of becoming better again.
Right now, Loka was riding the carriage to fly across the sky. Abel opened the window to check below him, and from his perspective, it was very easy to see that there were law-enforcers in red walking all around the royal palace. There were the regular law-enforcers, who were the elven warriors who usually dressed in red leather armor. There were also the investigation officers, who were the red-robe officers with years of experience in tracking people down and breaking cases. Together, they were the ones who’ve been keeping the whole royal palace safe.
For the druid law-enforcers, they were a special case. They would only come out if there were particular cases in need of special attention, especially if there was a discovery of “extraordinary powers that could be further cultivated upon practice.” Yes, that was a bit of a tricky definition, but forget about that. Right now, all Abel was looking at the ordinary law-enforcers. He wasn’t just going to trust what’s on the surface, however. If he had to guess, there were more intelligent officers that were hiding in plain sight.
“What could they be waiting against?” Abel spoke to himself and smiled, realizing that it was of no use asking this sort of question. He was no expert himself, and there was just no use asking these sorts of things when even the elves didn’t know what to do.
When the vehicle arrived at the potion master guild, Abel could see that Master Miur was waiting for him.
Abel went down and smiled with a bow, “I thought it’s work day for you, Master Muir.”
Master Muir was a busy man on most days. It was the same for all potion masters. They needed to study, and brewing potions was, by no means, a job that would take little time to finish. The fact that Master Muir was standing here would mean that he’d have to drop a lot of his workload, and that’s very surprising to see for Abel.
Master Muir greeted him with a bow, “I come here with good news! What else? Master Bennett, your residence is available now. I’m here so I can be the first one to let you know.”
Abel was more to like a celebrity lately. This was especially true after so many blue-quality master-level potions. Even the other three masters in the same rank were looking for ways to be on good terms with him. They were trying hard to make sure that they could learn something out of him, and even if they weren’t looking to learn something new, they all knew how convenient it would be to get Abel to help build potions for them. This way, a good relationship with Abel was very important.
“Done! Finally!” Abel said pleasantly. The flying carriage was convenient and all, but it’s still far. If he were to move to the new castle and vineyard, it would be a lot more convenient for him to wait for the new residence the potion master build was preparing for him.
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