Helena looked at the massive wolf at her feet. She had killed it without breaking a sweat, but it had been powerful enough to do serious damage if she hadn’t been there. She looked around, but nothing seemed to point out the presence of a second wolf.

For the last minute, she had been looking at the corpse with a frown. She wasn’t as good as Jacob in reading power levels, but this monster was at least somewhere in the middle of the Mantis realm. Even with her limited knowledge about Demonic Beasts, Helena gave a firm order to the group.

“Fall back to St. Peter. Something is going on.”

Everyone looked at each other, then at the huge Demonic Bloody Wolf that would have mangled any one of them like a rag doll, and they decided the girl was making an awful lot of sense.

Alert as a mother hen with her chicks, Helena watched over the group from St. Peter make their way back. Andrew had gotten close to her, acutely aware of his ineptitude to face a fight with such strong monsters. Helena had previously mentioned that he should drip his hands in blood to remove some of his fears, but the current situation did nothing but amplify said fears.

“Helena, where does that monster come from?” Andrew asked while looking all around with rapid movements of his eyes and neck.

“No idea,” she said sharply.

“Man, I wish Jacob was here. He always knows everything,” Andrew said innocently, not knowing how much that would irritate Helena.

The golden child of St. Peter scowled.

“Yeah, thank God for Jacob, savior of humanity,” Helena said with dripping sarcasm.

“Oh yeah, absolutely,” Andrew, as immune to sarcasm as you could have a man be, nodded in agreement.

All of them, except for Helena, was jumpy and waiting for another huge monster to come out of the woods in the next seconds. Among them, only one person was in the Mantis realm.

This is a problem, Jacob.

They had the Contribution System, but it would take time before it started making people strong enough. If Helena hadn’t been with them to kill the wolf, they would have all died.

You idiot, if you don’t spread the stronger Cultivation Techniques as fast as you can, people will start dying because of it. Is that what you want?

Helena wouldn’t have liked Jacob’s answer to that question.

…

“So, we can’t have teams go out without at least one person to the Intermediate Stage of the Mantis realm. Ideally, there should be at least three people at the Intermediate Stage of the Mantis realm, but we don’t have that many cultivators,” Jacob told Luis Albert.

“Well, Jacob, if there is a possible horde coming our way, don’t you fear that people will get very angry with us? We explained that the Cultivation Techniques are extremely dangerous if they fall into the wrong hands, but now someone could die because we didn’t distribute them,” the principal noted.

“On the flip side, though, unless people plan on starting a revolt, they will run through the Contribution System, trying to ‘farm’ it as much as possible, as some kid put it.”

Luis Albert tapped with his fingers on the desk, pensive.

Jacob had just thrown the most perverse incentive to those people. Nothing motivated humans more than risking their life or getting caged. And if they didn’t have power, not only they would not be able to protect themselves, but they would also be locked up in St. Peter; after seeing the effects of a global lockdown on people, Luis Albert knew that the restrictive boundaries might be an even stronger motivator than dying. In fact, dying was abstract, and in the future, confinement was very much in the present, and one felt it immediately on their own skin.

“How do you plan on handling the situation when we are going to be swamped with people? Food is going to run out very fast, isn’t it? Thanks to your Formation, Jacob, water is ok, but we don’t have enough food to survive without organizing hunting parties. We can’t just cultivate and wait, especially if the potential ‘guardians’ would all go on an extermination mission.”

“We’ll tackle the problems before it arises. And about food, I have more than one hundred wolves at the Mantis realm. Once cooked in the right way, their meat is not just nutritious, but it will help with cultivating.”

Jacob made a face while thinking of something grim.

“What I’m going to say it’s terrible, principal, but we need to be practical. The fact that most of the people up North probably died plays to our advantage; I’ll need a day or two to transplant the Alchemical Garden here, but once I do, we might be able to produce Alchemic Tagliatelle en masse. I could grow enough Spiritual Herbs to feed everyone Alchemic pasta every single day of the week. And that, paired with the meat we already have, and my future breeding farm of Demonic Boars will be more than enough.”

Luis Albert looked at Jacob and suggested a census. They needed to know exactly how many people were going to be fed, how many Demonic Boars, Spiritual Herbs, possible servings of Alchemic Tagliatelle could be produced on a daily basis, and so on. While Jacob lighted a cigarette and prepared a little speech, Luis Albert started typing away numbers and graphs in a spreadsheet.

“By the way, I’ll start working on the statue tonight,” Jacob mentioned casually.

Luis Albert didn’t look up from the computer but still nodded and sniffed a bit with his nose.