“How did it go?” Faust asked, as he finished levitating pills out of his cauldron, and carefully placed them in a small cold sand bath.

Sylver sat down on his own shadow, and with a gesture of his hand, coated Faust and himself in a paper-thin layer of magic.

It wasn’t strong enough to prevent eavesdropping, but it was weak enough to break at the barest wisp of mana or Ki. If someone tried to listen in, Sylver would know.

Sylver wasn’t sure where to start, or even what to say.

He’d told Bruno about the book, and the names it had screamed at him, but he hadn’t told anyone else. Even Lola didn’t know, only Bruno, and Ria knew about it. He trusted the dark elves wouldn’t say a word about it to anyone, but now he had to figure out if telling Faust about it would be a good idea.

Sylver was worried he hadn’t been careful enough in the past. He’d told Faust about the dragon, the shield girl with the birthmark, not to mention all the other shit he’d spoken out loud about while under assumed privacy.

Sylver’s soul sense provided him with the ability to sense when someone was paying attention to him, when someone was watching him, listening to him. But now that he’d seen someone as proficient and powerful as Tarragon worry about being overheard while covered in a soundproof barrier, Sylver struggled to place his trust into his skills.

Sylver didn’t have what he needed to boost his abilities to their maximum, to feel even the world’s most covert assassin’s presence, what he had right now amounted to an extremely powerful intuition, nothing more.

Even with the shades literally checking every inch of the sect’s land inside the barrier, something inside Sylver just didn’t sit right.

Sylver stood up from his seat and spoke to a very worried-looking Faust.

“I’m leaving two daggers for you. Throw this one outside if something goes wrong inside the sect, and I’ll come running as fast as I can,” Sylver said, as he placed the dagger in question onto one of the nearby tables.

“You can feel it too? Good, I was starting to worry I was losing my mind,” Faust said, with a very quick tap on his ear.

“And this dagger is if someone comes looking for me,” Sylver said, as he laid down the dagger with a cloth wrapped around the handle.

He and Faust shared a knowing glance, that was as subtle as a wink, but if someone omniscient really was watching them, all the coded language in the world wouldn’t help.

As Sylver started channeling his fog up towards the first floor, he remembered something.

“Do you still need Mora, or are you strong enough to handle everything yourself?” Sylver asked, and Faust’s half-grin disappeared.

“Regretfully, I still need her… If you don’t mind me asking, where are you going?” Faust asked as Sylver moved the fog towards the back of the house.

“At the moment I’m waiting for you know who to come see me. So, I decided I might as well use this time to go back to the swamp and see if I can lure out that dog and rat,” Sylver explained, as he considered if there was any point waking Mora up to tell her he was leaving.

She already knew what he was going to say, just as Sylver knew she was very comfortable right now and didn’t want to be disturbed.

“The ones you said are one of the only few things you should be afraid of?” Faust asked without so much as a hint of mockery in his voice.

“That was before. Now that I understand how they work, there’s nothing to be afraid of… Well… They are about the only thing that can seriously mess me up… And they have almost twice as many levels as I do… I’m not heading straight for them mind you, I’ll take a detour and pick up a couple of levels,” Sylver explained.

Faust’s eyes opened a little wider as he remembered something.

“You’re planning to scout out the river while you’re there,” Faust said.

“That too… Honestly, I don’t think sitting and waiting by the river is going to get me anywhere. At least that’s what my gut is telling me. But since I’m heading in that direction anyway, I might as well see if there’s a good spot to set up a trap, or ambush, or something,” Sylver explained, as Faust simply shrugged his shoulders.

“If you want, I can lend you a couple of people to keep watch for you. I have 3 that practice the [Southern Moon] constellation, they’re nearly impossible to detect during the night. And I can have people patrol the river during the daytime, they’re strong enough that they should be able to deal with anyone that attacks them,” Faust offered, as Sylver remembered why he came here in the first place.

“There’s a man named Tarragon living at the Blue Rat sect. He’s an elf, he’s the leader of a group of elves that came here to help with something. I’d suggest you get a loan from him, but you seem to be doing well enough as you are now,” Sylver said as Faust gestured at his bubbling cauldron.

“I get ingredients, I get jade from selling the pills and potions, the students get experience from hunting monsters, and are working towards paying off their debt with their own hard work. If possible, I would like to ally myself with a couple of sects. I know you said things get messy when alliances are formed, but-”

“Oh, I don’t care, form whatever alliance you want. That was when I thought I might need to win someone’s trust and didn’t want to accidentally become allies with their sworn enemy. You’re basically on your own, do as you see fit. Just keep a safe spot for me to sleep when I need it, and make sure none of your pupils die,” Sylver explained, as Faust smiled at him and nodded with each point.

“How’s the wife search going?” Sylver asked, just so he could end the conversation on a positive note.

“I haven’t started. I’m still on the building power stage. I haven’t left the sect grounds even once since I stepped foot inside. So, unless the woman of my dreams just happens to magically fall from the sky, I’m just going to continue focusing on building myself and everyone else up as much as I can,” Faust explained.

For about 30 seconds he and Sylver stood in complete silence and stared at each other, as they both waited to hear the sound of a woman screaming from falling from a great height.

“Does this usually work?” Ria asked, and Sylver saw an ever so faint flash of a smile appear on Faust’s face before he realized Ria was the source of the feminine voice.

“Ed met his wife by falling through her ceiling. She and her family lived in the middle of nowhere, it was literally the only ceiling for hundreds of miles in any direction, and Ed just happened to get attacked while he was flying above it. She nursed him back to health, and by the time I found the idiot, he had already proposed to her,” Sylver offered, as Faust sighed.

“Anyway, I’m here if you need me,” Faust concluded.

He was genuinely upset that a woman hadn’t fallen from the sky during their pause, and if Sylver was feeling his soul right, was a bit angry at Ria for getting his hopes up for that half-second.

“The elves I mentioned earlier... I don’t know if you knew this, but they love older men. Especially ones that are centuries older than them. I don’t know how you would go about proving it, but I thought you should know,” Sylver offered and could see it in Faust’s eyes, he already had several ideas to take advantage of this information.

With as close to a smile as Sylver could get from the very recently suicidal reincarnator, Sylver left the room.

***

After essentially informing Mora that he was still alive, undead, and asking her to continue standing guard, Sylver left Faust’s sect and went towards the swamp. The swamp that was coincidentally close to the river the girl that Sylver needed to find to free Edmund, was going to travel through.

Probably.

The river the girl was probably going to travel through.

The smart thing to do would be to use the card the dragon had given Sylver, to ask whether the girl was still on her way, or if she was already inside the barrier.

The problem with that was that Sylver was scared of the dragon, and even if its life depended on him, dragons weren’t necessary creatures Sylver would describe as “rational.”

For starters, Sylver didn’t know what the 3 headed dragon’s opinion was regarding the undead. If Sylver had to make an educated guess, the dragon tolerated his undead presence, and if the circumstances were even slightly different, would have incinerated him just for getting within incinerating distance.

The other issue was that Sylver didn’t know how difficult it was for the dragon to communicate with him. What if there was a limit, and Sylver wasted it by asking to speak to the dragon now?

And more than anything else, Sylver wasn’t sure what the fuck the dragon had said before it teleported him back to where he was. The only words Sylver could understand were “TIRED, DANGER, TIRED, HOME, NEGATIVE, MOUNTAIN, and AGREE.”

Sylver knew NEGATIVE MOUNTAIN was its name, Gorynych, but that was the only thing he knew for certain…

Come to think of what home could it possibly have after spending so long trapped inside that mountain? How does it know it has a home to return to?

The only explanation is that it’s actively communicating with someone currently living in its home. But then, why wouldn’t that creature come here to free the dragon?

Is it too weak? Is it unable to for some other reason?

Is there a second fucking country using a goddammed ancient dragon as a power source?

Sylver struggled to imagine how the Ibis would react to learning that there was a whole country built around sucking the life out of a trapped ancient dragon. They probably wouldn’t even bother trying to negotiate and would just send Sylver to “deal with it.”

Kind of how Sylver was dealing with it now…

The idea that Sylver was carrying out something akin to his old duty, even in his current form, made him grin his wrapped-up face.

As Sylver arrived at the edge of the swamp, he summoned Cory into his hand and dropped the water commanding shade into the muddy ground below. The rodent-shaped shade quickly started working on gathering as much water and mass he could, while Sylver sent his shades out in all directions, to find something to kill.

[??? (???) Defeated!]

[??? (???) Defeated!]

[??? (???) Defeated!]

…

That was fast.

By the 9th message, Sylver accepted his fate and did his best to move the notifications out of his face as fast as possible. Off in the distance, the shades were massacring some sort of slime-covered pig creature that was being aided by so many similar-looking pig creatures, that Spring didn’t even try counting.

They had white whiskers in place of tusks, that they used as a combination of whips, and piercing weapons, and were killing 5 shades for every 1 pig the shades managed to kill, purely due to their speed.

After the number of shades had been whittled down by a quarter, Sylver got up from the tree branch he had been sitting on and used [Fog Form] to float over to the battlefield.

They had formed a defensive ring, by running in a loose circle around nothing in particular. Every time a shade attempted to materialize near the circle, one of the pigs used its whiskers to stab the shade, and the pigs behind and in front of it, defended it as it prepared to attack again.

Sylver materialized right in the middle of the pig circle and disappeared into the hole he had made in the mud as he fell towards the ground.

He didn’t even have to create his own, Sylver simply manipulated the plant life already present in the murky water above him.

[??? (???) Defeated!]

[??? (???) Defeated!]

The first two died due to the thorn-covered vines stabbing it in the belly button, and as the squealing pig continued running, it was like the vine had simply caught a zipper and pulled it open.

More messages of defeat flew by Sylver’s eyes, as he pulled the trampled over corpses towards the hole the still alive pigs were running around, and with a single wave of his hand, sprinkled as much [Clever Clematis] seeds as he could make.

The pig corpses sort of fused together, as the plants growing out of their eye sockets made their way upwards and wrapped around the body of the pig directly above it.

Down in his hole, Sylver suddenly found himself sitting on a warm bundle of corpses that had been replaced by a little over 40 blooming [Clever Clematis] flowers. Sylver felt his mana channels falter under the quantity of mana flowing through them, but Sylver ignored his body’s protest and continued killing the pigs above with one hand, while simultaneously repairing his shades with the other.

[Swamp Lord] has reached level 32!

+5AP

[??? (???) Defeated!]

As Spring informed him of the pig reinforcements arriving, Sylver grabbed hold of the corpse he was sitting on and proceeded to rot it from the inside out. It puffed up and the skin bled from being stretched to such a degree.

Just as the corpse was about to burst, Sylver threw it out of his hole, high into the air, and used a small amount of explosive to send that sweet-smelling carrion flying as far away as possible.

Sylver planned to remain where he was and to tunnel his way towards the heart of the swamp. And while he did that, the shades above would kill anything that was attracted to the bait.

[??? (???) Defeated!]

[Swamp Lord] has reached level 33!

+5AP

[??? (???) Defeated!]

It did feel a little like cheating.

This deep underground, Sylver was in as much danger as a fisherman on a sturdy boat.

It wasn’t his fault the vast majority of the monsters here relied on poisons and toxins that were completely useless against the undead, and minions of the undead. As some sort of reptile appeared out of seemingly nowhere and swallowed a distracted archer shade whole, Sylver decided to put his excess mana to use and started fiddling around with his mushroom strains.

[??? (???) Defeated!]

[Due to defeating an enemy 50 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

[Swamp Lord] has reached level 34!

+5AP

[??? (???) Defeated!]