One rather interesting thing the group found out a month after killing Frellsae, and watching his corpse be carried away alongside some other demonified elves, was that the pillar actually only told the dragon of several key points from what it heard.

Where the base was, who headed it, what they’d been doing, and such things…

But not where they stored their loot from these ventures. Quite surprisingly, the pillar intentionally held back such information and claimed that it was ‘rightfully theirs for unveiling this danger’. And while somewhat true, it impressed Icy to know the pillar’s spirit possessed real intelligence, and was not completely bound by a list of rules.

As for the treasure vault of this demon elf organisation, it was actually stored within three banks from cities in the surroundings. All of these were personal dimensional storage safes with ridiculous security, but one easy way to access them is simply having the key for them.

Frellsae, as the one with a dragon to loot these pillars, routinely assessed two of such safes to store and withdraw resources. In other words, they had a key to take two loaded bank safes, and all the party had to do was reach that place.

Obviously, the banks in question knew the appearance of those demon elves now, but not exactly which safes they owned. No way the leaders suddenly lowered their intelligence to the point of entering a major city though. Sages and Great Sages still scoured the continent for that Blossoming wizard, and could not afford to stop until his divine relic was destroyed. Let alone how hard the Bearers for that peach tree worked…

While never mentioned, that racial god did not go by a name. Although it did receive the moniker of ‘Salvation’ in the far past, which led to the more modern term ‘God of Salvation’.

…

Right before their exit, one day alone was spent choosing a destination.

Capital city, hunting ground, prosperous city, OR those banks filled with goodies to take… Given no one else reached it first.

The group immediately split, choosing between prosperous city and banks on the first day, but eventually, they found a fair settlement.

Just loot the bank safes, then go to a prosperous city. Honestly, you’d think they were playing some ridiculous chess variant by how long that thought process took to come up with. Of course, the only fool was themselves for not realising they could do multiple things at once.

Two years stuck in a single place has that effect.

Icy and the group gladly took the teleportation offered by Fragheim’s lord and found their whole group about 1940 kilometres north, slightly to the east too, with the city of Solletaria nearby. The lord opted to send them here in case the group needed local information about the surroundings before starting a long journey.

The fact that he thought of this so quickly came as a surprise, as it didn’t seem like his advisors even had time to make this point.

Well, no way a Fortress city would be headed by an unintelligible elf. Experience in combat and exploration is a must for such roles. Maybe a city built for pleasure held a more hedonistic leader instead… Or an economic powerhouse.

The group did not set foot in Solletaria, their preparations for this trip more than sufficient.

So, that made their first target a city by the name of Saevana. Still, with that city being some thousands of kilometres away, after accounting for this teleportation, they had a long journey ahead of them. Albeit, only a couple months long, something they’d all done before.

With a full team of Gold ranks, albeit a degree of power slightly above that, very few things on normal dirt paths posed a threat to their group.

The biggest? Probably a large merchant caravan they came across which somehow hired a pair of Mithril ranks as lead guards.

On sight alone, a few of them felt a slight desire to start a battle against the two, wanting to test their power, but then held off as they knew the gap between the two ranks remained.

Three years of training is an immense amount of time, but it’s not enough for Gold ranks to already evolve. The fastest cases are around four years, and these looked at noble houses with great lineage as well as resources to support recovery and growth… But those cases didn’t have dragons and a constant source of opponents to push their bodies against.

Funnily enough, near-death battles are actually the most efficient way for warriors to train. The incredible damage they incur, resulted in greater body transformation, therefore speeding training up immensely.

The time frames hadn’t been given in clear detail as well, but to make some things clearer:

From the day after the whole mess, they entered contact with that skilled alchemist and drank the dragon heart potion in just a few months. Then a year passed as Mala created a new spell for bodily transformation, unique to the five adults who took the thing. Lastly, Icy spent a month creating three arrays for the group to use.

Therefore, they had roughly 9 more months before finishing the transformation of their hearts, however, in that time, they also had to perform other sorts of training and also relaxed.

The current lowest was, surprisingly, Mala! She focused far more time on learning and refining her magic, not to mention casting spells a literal crap ton just to force more elemental conversion within her body. Then there was the time needed to fill literally every book inside her library to its brim. To then spend time on converting her heart… She only reached 55% before they left.

And at the top was Jaren, who not only trained regularly with skills and a technique for reaching Mithril rank… But spent 8 hours a day sitting on that array to transform his heart.

In just 6 months he finished the first transformation.

From that, Mala found the spell wouldn’t work for the second transformation and added it to a list of already large things to train and research.

As for the effect of that transformation… Well, it’s fair to say that beside gaining some ‘amazing’ physical transformations, what stood out was the abundant mana within him and massively improved control. Not to mention his passive absorption speed rose drastically, now hitting about 2% MP per minute, something normally only seen by wizards or magical races.

The rest all remained at various points between Mala and Jaren. Darak was second closest at 90% conversion, for reference.

Icy, as well, recently hit 60% of his way to the second transformation. This second transformation slowed immensely as the crystals produced were several times denser, and smaller. So many more spell casts were required to completely transform the heart this time.

As a side note, his Mind palace also reached Intermediate tier, granting a new title as expected.

[Obtained title ‘Intermediate Mind Palace’. Title requisite - Obtain Intermediate Mind palace

Intermediate Mind Palace: The ‘shape’ of your consciousness within your mental space is no longer set and may be controlled freely with no limitations. You must be capable of imagining any new form clearly]

Whilst not an overwhelmingly amazing effect, it actually possessed immense use. Besides allowing anyone with an Intermediate Mind palace to try out various forms to see what they’d like to shapeshift into, something quite commonly used by humanoid races funnily enough, it saw a major use in precise decorating for the Mind palace.

Not to mention the fact that he could shrink down and not deal with minor issues like doorways or corridors.

On that note, he really needed some shrinking magic soon. For the past year, he collected about 20 gallons of fluid from various mana gatherer trees, as well as about one gallon from node trees, all in preparation for his next growth phase. Yet it still had yet to arrive after these two years.

Anyway, it wouldn’t be long until the next phase started and Icy grew a few metres longer. The consumption of souls made up for his lack of mana at the moment, but ideally, he wanted to cast the shrinking spell without utilising that non-renewable resource.

He’d already burnt about 500 souls over the past two years to strengthen his soul. As a qualitative upgrade through the usual routes had been closed off, he relied on this bastardised plan of absorbing soul fumes to directly increase his soul’s power. Not to mention, his third soul armament did nothing to improve his combat power!

That tool could wait for a better explanation later though, when it was more relevant.

Things almost seemed completely peaceful, in fact, as no one caused trouble for them and no beasts travelled these main paths. Raccelline spent most of her time on Icy’s back, kept entertained with conversations or lectures from the adults. Of course, they kept the information agreeable with the help of jokes or by using stories of the past as examples.

Unfortunately, just a week into the journey, they met a roadblock. A group of four gold tier beasts… Which they soon realised were actually chimaeras. With intelligence of their own, as well as some obvious tactics with the bulkiest two standing in front as vanguards, this might have been a particularly troublesome fight two years ago. Very much like how they struggled against the demon elf…

But after all the work they’d completed till now?

Jaren released ten arrows in the blink of an eye, blinding both of the front two chimaeras. Seven eyes on one, with three on the other, yet all ten arrows, shot near-instantly, hit their mark.

He’d be ashamed if his major focus these past two years failed now of all times.

While the two up front wildly screamed and roared, somehow actually doing both at once with just one mouth each, Rebecca already snuck up on the back two and stabbed a blade covered in poison into both. This being the very poison Icy’s tongue created, finally seeing use against the four monsters.

And honestly, from there, it wasn’t even a fight. Jaren pushed himself to his limits to fire off ten arrows so quickly though, normally he only managed six or seven at once.

Describing chimaera is a rather troublesome thing, as even simply identifying their body parts takes quite a bit of time. Only the brain and hearts of a chimaera are important when considering their nature. Intelligent ones like these were known to use elves as the cores… Or sometimes even demonified elves.

From there, the rest of the body is an accumulation of flesh and blood from… Well, wherever the creator damn well pleased.

Body of an elephant with limbs from a tiger, eyes from three different species, and then a prehensile tail for good measure?

Sure, that’s actually rather tame as far as these things went. A more ‘socially adjusted’ chimaera maker would’ve done something like that. These monsters were skinned, causing every movement to result in pain, on top of their traits sometimes just being loads of shit piled together.

An ant’s head connected to a wolf’s body, with four different limbs as well as the bones and organs from a beast capable of slight shapeshifting. Then throw in a tail which fired corrosive sludge and even innate abilities grafted onto the resultant monsters. Every single chimaera created involved such descriptions, and so, it was thankful that the group killed all four in less than 15 seconds.

But that was beside the point…

This meant more chimaeras in the future. After all, all of these monsters acted as their creators’ eyes and ears. And that degenerate bastard hated everyone who harmed his pets, as known by the 54 Gold rank warriors and 13 Sapling wizards killed after they dealt with gold tier chimaeras. Similar in power to the four who turned up this far south.

What a damn pain… Is what the group might have said in the past.

But today? Well, it just meant a chance to kill a mithril tier. An intelligent one like they’d considered for months now.