Peppers’ Legendary Scan Spell went through, permeating the sky with her magic and provided the System with a detailed breakdown of the place. The castle was nonetheless the most populated area with a mix of Valgs and Cultivators in it.
Other than that, the System was able to identify various pockets of activity within the city’s underground. It predicted that those were the Animal People which they were hoping to rescue. Thus, the System had already started searching for viable coordinates to teleport the insertion teams.
And because of this particular operation, the System had also diverted processing power away of its other menial processes to analyse the possible routes the monsters could take so it could allocate the soldiers needed for each insertion team.
Peppers’ Scan Spell was without a doubt worthy of being called Legendary Grade. Should she ever be deployed into a war zone, it was clearly similar to a cheat spell for revealing the fog of war on the battlefield. There was nothing that could be hidden from her scan but only an entity like the System was able to analyse the copious amount of data.
Such a high levelled spell would have already taken a toll on her body given the scale of the scan, but Ayse had already begun activating her machine. Her experimental vest had successfully counteracted the after effects Peppers was experiencing.
What Peppers previously lack was the sufficient mechanisms to handle the overloading of Mana as it gushed into her. Peppers’ body was acting like a gate against an immeasurable amount of Mana flowing into her from the Universal Pool of Mana. If she was using only a spell or two, the body did not need to tap much from the pool, and it absorbs the Mana like a sponge.
But the problem comes when she used a large amount of Mana. When her spell completely drains the body’s Mana circuits, Peppers would require immediate replenishment to keep herself sane. That was where the body would openly entirely, and the overflowing rush of Mana from the universe pool would gush in to fill this empty container. (Mages in Jin’s world works differently, but the discrepancies were insignificant. They had a Mana Core that tapped into the pool, unlike the Dantian Core which generates chi from within.)
That was also where the pain and hurt come in for Peppers since the body could not close the tap to the Universal Pool due to her pact with the System. Her wish for unlimited Mana had inadvertently caused her body to be overflowing with it, damaging her circuits and thus the after effects such as vomiting and lost consciousness.
In previous fights, all Peppers did was to leave the tap open and let the Mana flow for the battle while Milk tried to repair the strains. But with Ayse’s new vest, things changed drastically.
Her machines acted like an extended container for Peppers, allowing overflowing Mana to flow out of her body instead of being restrained solely within her body. The experimental vest assisted diverted the excess Mana via multi layered tubes and later into the machines for processing. Ayse was also not dumb to let such precious Mana dissipate into the atmosphere.
The machines condensed the Mana and inserted them into diamond crystals since they were the best containers of Mana. With those charged crystals, Jin could sell them for extra cash since such prisms held a lot of value in his world.
Apparently, it was rumoured in Jin’s world that such crystals had the ability to aid a mage into the next magic grade quickly due to the high condensed level of Mana within and there was little to no consequences using it compared to other methods.
High level mages tried to produce such crystals, and sadly few succeeded. Thus, the demand for such a limited quantity of these high quality crystals skyrocketed through the roof. Many mages who were able to obtain them were usually among the wealthy of the wealthy. These mages also preferred to use these crystals to push their grades up since the modern world had more or less reduced the places with natural occurring Mana near to zero due to globalisation.
In the next few minutes, Peppers was surprised that pain was lesser than anticipated, and when she turned to glance at Ayse, the Orc Research already had a smug look on her face.
“See? What did I tell you? Told you things will work out if you follow my advice. Oh, and you should feel even lesser pain for the next legendary spell casting since the machines were previously warming up.”
“Does that mean I can –”
“No! No spamming of spells! My machines are still delicate! Just out of the prototype phase! Don’t you dare break it now!” Ayse interrupted Peppers’ line of thought.
“Awww, no fun.” Peppers frown for a moment before genuinely smiling back at Ayse. For the first time, the Mage Bellator did not have to worry about the backlash of her overflowing Mana. “At least, I can tell Big Sis Milk that you are better than her! Hehehe!”
“Please, No! Don’t! The last time you complimented me, I found her drunk and had the urge of punching my other devices and messed up all the research paper! Just keep this to yourself.” Ayse shook her head when she recalled Milk coming in complaining that she was not good enough for Peppers anymore.
Clearly, Ayse did all this was to comply with Jin’s orders as well as satisfying her ability to solve ‘impossible’ problems.
Soon after, they saw a bright green flare flying upwards in the distance, and they guessed Jin ordered Hamatarou to officially start the operation. Similar to Peppers’ Scan Magic, the beacon of light lit up the sky and split out like a huge firework. But the scattering of the firework was non random as those projectiles flew with purpose into the various parts of the ruined kingdom.
At the very same time, a series of monster cries were heard in the background. The flare had not only signalled the mass migration but also awakened the monsters in the vicinity as well.
“That is why I did not want to send the flares up!” Hamatarou said to himself as he could hear anguished cries of the Giant Monsters.
This was mainly due to the fact that the flare was induced with a Call of the Wild spell, inciting the Animal People’s will to move for the mass migration. Hamatarou knew that those Animal People would be too comfortable living in their shitty hole for the rest of their lives because that was how they were trained to be.
Stay somewhere safe, hunt when needed and try to survive the harsh environment.
Those who wished to seek further out of the ruined kingdom were at best a handful. But because they now were partially animals, the Animal People could not ignore the call by a Druid. However, that also meant that the spell incited and disrupted the basic habits of Giant Monsters, causing them to seek the Druid’s call.
So right now, all Hamatarou could hope was that the rescue operation by Jin would be successful.
