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Ch225-What Goes Around

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After Sylver had returned from his Fobur Plateforged rescue attempt, 11 days had passed.

As of last night, there were 7 mountains left. 7 chain links that were breaking down one by one.

Sylver was sitting in a somewhat odd location, but this way Bruce didn’t have to wait too long before he could rift through the giant Ki bubble Sylver, and his garden of fungus occupied.

Getting a mushroom to react to Ki wasn’t very hard.

At least not for a man of Sylver’s skill.

If you can call semi randomly mashing together various strains of fungus, until something that changed color in the presence of Ki appeared, “skill.”

Sylver had initially tried using local plants, but it turns out that even the ones “infused with Ki,” couldn’t sense Ki.

Sylver ended up learning a fair bit of cultivation alchemy and discovered that they basically used the dried-up roots, eyeballs, and what have you, the same way mages used spell components.

The various ingredients functioned like catalysts. Which meant that, even though they conducted Ki like nobody’s business, they couldn’t “sense” it. They produced a negligible amount of heat, and in some cases produced a faint light, but none of the plants Sylver had access to could be used to sense Ki in the manner Sylver needed.

On top of that, what minimal reaction there was, was far too slow to be used as a counter to cultivators rifting through Ki bubbles.

Sylver needed this thing to react faster than he could. He needed this fungus to handle the rifting cultivator even if Sylver wasn’t aware he was being attacked.

Sylver felt that ever so familiar wisp of softness brush against his face, as Bruce yet again appeared behind him. The furry-looking mushroom growing in the palm of Sylver’s hand wiggled around and changed color, about 2 seconds after Bruce would have sliced Sylver’s throat open.

Bruce sat down, which was the silent signal that the bubble of Ki that Sylver was occupying was getting too “hot.” Bruce was a very quiet boy, and he did as Sylver asked without questioning him.

Mora was inside the house, sleeping inside a cocoon/hammock, Ria and Spring were playing poker inside Sylver’s workshop, and Sylver was sitting on top of a tree in the garden, with about 40 mushrooms covering his head, back, and the top part of his arms.

As the mushroom in Sylver’s palm turned into liquid, the one on his wrist slid into his palm and puffed up as it absorbed the failed attempts’ liquid remains.

He’d been in situations like this often enough to know that there wasn’t any real rush. Owl wouldn’t attack Sylver right away, he would wait for Hound to lick his wounds, and only then would he attack.

If he attacked at all.

Still, Sylver gradually put everyone on high alert, magically fortified the sect as much as he could, and then prepared an ambush.

Then an hour passed.

Then another.

Then day turned into night.

And then night turned into day.

And while Sylver was content to hide motionless underground, the living members of Faust’s sect needed to eat, sleep and rest. In the end, Sylver allowed everyone to go back to what they were doing, and the cultivators were split into two teams that stayed on guard in 12-hour shifts.

Frankly speaking, Sylver wasn’t in any particular danger, with Mora acting as backup, he was confident in his ability to, if not win, at the very least escape.

And even if they caught him, so what?

Faust was halfway to Tuli by now, and since teleportation magic didn’t work on Anastasia, the chances of her getting here fast enough for the emperor to impregnate her before all the mountain tops finished falling was just short of 0.

By all accounts, Sylver was done.

The closest thing he had to a real problem was all the people in Sylver’s sect that could be taken hostage.

The people that had been Faust’s responsibility. Except Sylver had been the one who ordered Faust to leave. So, because of that, Sylver was responsible for them.

And even though Sylver only knew a handful of their names, he wasn’t about to allow anyone under his protection to die.

Aside from pride, there was the matter of Edmund.

Sylver didn’t have a single doubt Edmund would understand that he did the best he could, but Ed would have that stupid fucking look of judgment on his face. He wasn’t even aware he was doing it, which made it infinitely worse than if he simply openly judged Sylver for his failure.

It wasn’t as if Sylver was going to murder all of them preemptively, to make his life easier, but it was like walking around with a massive hole in his armor. Sylver wasn’t accustomed to having such an obvious weak spot, the whole point of Lola turning Arda into an impenetrable fortress was so that anyone that couldn’t defend themselves, could be sent there to be defended.

The only real solution Sylver could think of was to hand the second group over to some other sect, so they would stop being Sylver’s responsibility. But it turned out that the second group was a package deal if Sylver wanted to maintain ownership of his sect’s “headquarters.”   

Faust’s sect had 2 groups in it, the first was the “main” group, the cultivators that had been brought over from the sect Sylver had defeated and handed over to Faust.

The second group were the various craftsmen and farmers that “belonged” to Faust, but at the same time, could very easily get up and move to a different sect.

The guards, Faust’s sect had 22, were in the second group, they were powerful, and a couple were even above level 300, but their allegiance wasn’t the same as Michael’s, or Bruce’s.

The guards would defend everyone inside the sect, but their combat ability decreased to nothing once they left the area that belonged to Faust. Even if Faust was defeated and a different sect took over, the guards would stay the same. They came with the land, to put it simply.

The cultivators, on the other hand, the children Faust had uncrippled and then trained, were directly loyal to Faust. Normally the two different groups would have a lot of intersection, the wives and children of the cultivators would live amongst the second group, but since Faust essentially just replaced the previous sect’s head, the people in the second group didn’t care too much if Faust was replaced by someone else.

Anyone with any real ties to the previous sect’s cultivators had left at the same time the defeated cultivators did.

Still, even with that in mind, if someone in the second group died, it would be a mark against Sylver, regardless of how little he cared about them.

On top of that-

“I. Found. Them,” a voice squawked right into Sylver’s ear.

He was very gentle as he picked up the small bird and moved it up to his face.

“Are you sure?” Sylver asked as Bruce stood up from where he had been sitting. Sylver gestured for the boy to leave, and a moment later he was gone.

“I. Am. Sure,” there was a long pause. “You. Will. Not. Like. It,” the sparrow with a glowing eye explained.

“Let me guess… Witch hunters? Priests?” Sylver asked as the bird ruffled its feathers.

Chrys had gotten a lot better at guiding the birds she was controlling, as opposed to simply puppeteering them.

“Monks,” the Chrys bird said.

“Ah… That would have been my fifth guess…” Sylver mumbled as he stood up, and in a single shake of his arms, dislodged the various mushrooms growing on him.

Sylver extended his shadow into a perch for the sparrow to sit on, as he nudged Spring to finish losing to Ria, and considered whether or not to take Mora with him.

Sylver hadn’t simply sat on his ass for those 11 days.

Well, that was mostly what he had done, but he did it while Chrys was searching for Owl and the others. Sylver didn’t quite understand how exactly Chrys was searching for them, but both she and Zelvash assured him that she wasn’t in any danger.

Information gathering wasn’t Sylver’s forte, and while he would have preferred that Chrys continued to practice her magic in the safety of his house, he didn’t have any viable alternatives.

It was either let her find them for him or ask the dragon for help.

Or the witches, and their spirit.

Sylver didn’t want to bother the dragon more than absolutely necessary, and he didn’t trust any kind of spirit, let alone the type to work with witches.

Sylver couldn’t say if the reason he wanted to find Owl and the others was because of his bruised pride, his paranoia, or because he wanted to know what could possibly be so important that they didn’t bother finishing him off.

Granted, there was a chance they weren’t aware he had survived, less than a handful of people had seen him since he returned to his sect, but Owl didn’t seem like the type to need word of mouth to find this sort of thing out.

More than anything else, Sylver had a bad feeling about leaving that particular group to their own devices. And the thought that they might interfere with Edmund’s rescue sent a chill down his spine.

Sylver informed Michael that he was leaving, and told him to do as they had discussed if Sylver didn’t send word by sundown.