Hao Xuan took a puff of the cigarette loosely hanging between his fingers and leaned back against a tree trunk. He was about three meters above ground sitting on a thick tree branch.
Below him was a small bonfire still burning lightly and a few tents around it.
There was a clear sky tonight and the weather was relatively cold in this place but to Hao Xuan, it made no difference. His internal body temperate was so high that if he let out a deep breath, the temperature of his immediate surroundings would rise by a few degrees.
Hours had turned into days and days into weeks. It had been exactly two weeks now since Hao Xuan first entered the Temple's consulate for training.
The area they were in now was a new biome located about 80,000 kilometers away from the outer city. This was a relatively small group of mountains under the control of the Wu Clan, covering about 8,000 kilometers square. It was used to raise Demonic and Ether beasts that had many different applications.
Moving here was, of course, Hao Xuan's idea. He wanted to go to a place where there was some threat to their lives while following Guo Yang's strict regiment.
But even here Ryfon would visit him almost every day. Hao Xuan still wasn't able to sleep, only managing to take a nap for an hour since coming here so he had a lot of time to spare.
After interacting with this group of strange cultivators for a fortnight, Hao Xuan got pretty close to them. And how could he not? They had been fighting together for survival since coming here.
Guo Yang didn't stay in this place though. He was a real neat freak and unless completely necessary, he would never put himself in a situation where he was surrounded by dirt and grass 24/7.
Hao Xuan was sitting with his eyes closed, going over all the information he had just gotten due to Wu Jin.
One of the things he had asked of him was to get everything he could about the Wu clan. From their cultivation methods to the clan secrets, their history, etc, and Wu Jin delivered for the most part.
In Hao Xuan's left hand was a rectangular object with golden sigils and mini formations hovering around it non-stop. It looked extremely sturdy and seemed to be cut from a single piece of rock of some kind.
This little thing could be used to directly enter the Wu Clan's virtual archives and snoop around. Of course, it had its limits. Hao Xuan could only review the information that was available to someone of the same access level as Wu Jin, which was the third-highest in the clan. Above him was the access level for Clan elders and then the patriarch.
For the last couple of days, he had been slowly going over everything in the clan's archives and recording it in Baracus's memory storage.
There was a lot of information there which helped Hao Xuan come up with another identity and an explanation for his actions.
In the cultivation world, several different methods allowed people to summon beings from other planes of existence or make contracts and tame the ones from here. What Hao Xuan wanted to do, according to Baracus's suggestion, was pretend to be one of these individuals.
After all, he couldn't let people know about the Soul Severing Heavenly Constitution.
After going over all the options, he had finalized it down to the last three.
1). Summoners. One could not "learn" to be a summoner and had to be born with this innate talent. Summoners were able to reach out beyond the veil and call the 'things' that lived in the in-between to our world. They didn't require the summon's consent so whatever they called out was usually pretty pissed off.
Summoners were relatively rare and not much was known about them other than mere rumors and hearsay. There was a small clan of summoners somewhere in the Beast World but nobody knew their exact location.
The Archives stated that a Wu Clan elder had come across a summoner on his travels just a few decades ago. They got into an argument and ended up fighting one another. There weren't a lot of details mentioned there but he said one thing that stuck with Hao Xuan.
"Kill the summoner as soon as the battle starts. The longer the fight goes on, the worse situation you will be in. But if possible, stay away from them at all costs. It is not worth it to fight these lunatics."
"Lunatics huh…" Hao Xuan smiled as he remembered his words. He could only imagine what the elder had gone through to say something like that.
2). Beast Masters. In contrast to the Summoners, Beast Master's were the most common ones. As the name suggested, they were able to tame beasts to use their abilities and even merge with them to an extent.
On the beast world, Beast Masters were the strongest overall force there was. They controlled the 'Primis' continent, the biggest and the most powerful continent in the beast world. Tertium was the continent Hao Xuan was and it ranked 3rd in overall power.
Most of the people here were from other worlds so you would see the most variety only here.
The cultivation system of Beast Masters was vastly different from Hao Xuan's, although it still had its similarities.
Beast Masters would tame a different beast in every realm and with its help increase their own cultivation. Each of these beasts lived inside their meridians, able to answer its masters call instantly.
The relationship between them was mutually beneficial in most cases as with everything else, but there were different types of Beast Masters with their own distinct methods.
3). Contractors. Occurrence wise, Contractors fell somewhere in between the Summoners and Beast Masters. Nobody knew how many of them there were because they mostly kept to themselves. They usually stayed away from other cultivators so there wasn't a lot of information about them in the archives.
*Beep*
"As I said, there is no better option than Contractors. Progenitor met with two of them in his lifetime and collected some data, so I believe they would be the best choice."
Baracus's emotionless voice rang in Hao Xuan's mind.
