Age of Adepts

Tangling vines and low bushes were everywhere in the forest. Fruits that were half green and half red swung on the branches above. The wind carried with it the sweet smell of grass and the moisture of the air.

It was almost a quarter of a mile away. Looking back, Greem could only see tall trees that covered the sunshine. It wouldn’t be easy for someone far away to notice anything that happened here.

Greem took an earth summoning core from his storage belt and threw it to the ground. Black shiny dirt began to rise as the earth Elementium gathered around the core. In 5 seconds, the dirt had shaped itself into a humanoid clay golem.

Countless broken branches, decaying leaves, and insects were wriggling about the body of the golem as Greem hadn’t filter the dirt used to form the golem.

Greem frowned.

Even though this was a beginner-level golem and wasn’t as powerful as something like the Demon Alligator Hunter, but it shouldn’t be this weak.

A beginner clay golem such as this one should be 2 meters tall and weigh six to seven hundred pounds according to his tests in the World of Adepts. But here, the clay golem was at most 1.5 meters tall, and it had lost 1/3 of its weight.

It seems that the golem’s strength had been reduced due to a lack of magic Elementium even though the golem summoning was not affected by plane laws. The tiny flaw wasn’t enough to get Greem down. Just for this plane war, he had prepared over 300 golem summoning cores of all types, all hidden in his storage belt.

These were the fruits of his labor of the past six months. Greem firmly believed that if you cannot crush the enemy with raw strength, then flood them with terrifying numbers!

Greem shut his eyes to get a sense of the mental drain of summoning the clay golem. With his current Spirit, he could sustain over 100 clay golems on the battlefield simultaneously. Next, Greem repeatedly tested the other golems, including the Water Elemental, the Stone Serpent, the Wind Critter, the Lightning Giant, the Flamehound and the Fire Lord....

Greem took his time and effort to sense the mental drain of each and every one of them, etching it to his brain.

The sudden increase in Spirit since his advancement to adept made his idea of a golem army much more realistic. With Greem’s current Spirit, he could approximately support 100 beginner golems (clay golems, flamehounds, wind critters) or 25 advanced golems (water elementals, demon alligator hunters, stone serpents) or 10 pseudo-adept golems (lightning giants, water sprites, magma hounds) or 5 adept golems (Fire Lords)

Greem had only one Fire Lord and very few higher level golems. The only strategy left for Greem was golem swarming!

Just as Greem finished evaluating the golems, the chip suddenly let out a sharp siren.

"Beep, discovered odd biological existence transmitting mental flux......”

Greem turned around, his eyes bright as stars. Instantly, his vision pierced through hundreds of meters and locked onto an odd flying bug resting within a bush.

This was a bug with a dark black shell the size of a finger. It was resting on a thick branch, using the leaves to hide its body. If it wasn’t for the chip, Greem wouldn’t have been able to pick up on such a hidden "infiltrator" with his Spirit badly suppressed.

Jerk. It was Acteon’s spy.

Greem frowned. Red shone in his eyes, and the bush where the bug was hidden instantly caught fire, ignited by the concentrated fire Elementium.

The insect realised it had been exposed and started to flap its metallic wings to leave. Sadly, Greem had locked on to it with his second "Ignite." The different plane laws of another world had affected Greem’s first spell, forcing him to cast another.

The sudden flame enveloped the bug. It began to scream like a human as it wriggled its fat body. It seems that Acteon had attached a strand of his Spirit on the spy bug, and was hurt by Greem’s spell.

500 meters away from Greem, in an empty field within the forest, the black-robed Acteon let out a groan from under his hood.

Acteon, much like Mary, had a special physique. He didn’t rely too much on Elementium, and so the effect of the changed laws was not evident on him either. This was what made him think of taking the chance to kill Greem.

The reason he didn’t choose Mary instead was because vampires were annoying and resilient creatures that were hard to kill. Greem, on the other hand, was merely an Elementium mage. Once his powers had been suppressed, killing him would be a breeze.

But the images sent by the bug sent chills down Acteon’s spine. That damn Greem had so many golems! It irritated and terrified Acteon to no ends.

The volatile emotions were what caused a spike in his mental flux and allowed the chip to detect the existence of the bug. Acteon’s mental world stung as the bug was consumed by the fire.

Hmph! I’ll let you live for a little longer!

Acteon cursed and quickly disappeared from where he was.

He looked calm on the surface, but in truth, nervousness filled his heart.

That Greem’s power didn’t seem to have weakened. In fact, he seems to be way more terrifying now. If his army of golems surrounded him, along with the wraith-like Mary.....Acteon was confident in his power after he became an adept, but still, he had no chance against the both of them.

So he ran as fast as he could after cursing.

After all, he was scared that Greem would have a change of heart and come after him.

............

Mary sped through the forest.

The vampiric bat she had turned herself into moved freely in the forest. At times, she flew up towards the skies and looking down on the valley. At times, she dove into the forest thick with trees and weaved between the branches, vines, and leaves.

Everywhere she went, countless critters were scared into hiding, where they looked upon this giant bat with frightened eyes.

Mary would occasionally break into the homes of powerful magic beasts, where they would attack her. Sadly, their immobile bodies could only eat the dust before Mary’s lightning speed.

Winged dragons, gryphons, rocs, four-arm apes, razor boars, sabertooth elephants, man-eating demons......

Mary couldn’t help but be impressed by the plentiful biological resources of this plane. It was way beyond her imaginations. The density of the creatures was even more impressive.

Of course, in comparison, the power of the creatures here was much weaker than those of the World of Adepts. It was rare to see any magical creatures in the forest!

The lack of magical creatures might be a fortune for the average human. This way human settlements would be much safer and suffer much fewer sacrifices. But this was terrible news for those with supernatural powers. This gave them far fewer opportunities to train themselves and learn from the wild.

The reason the adepts were so powerful was precisely because the World of Adepts was home to many equally powerful magical beings! To protect the peace of the human world, to allow the continued existence of humans, the adepts had to be more powerful, smarter and stronger than those beings.

Thus the power of adepts was the natural result of millenniums of bloody battles against magical beings, not because of the rise of one or two talented adepts.

If this plane lacked powerful magical creatures or beings, it was natural that the natives here could not give rise to an extremely powerful individual. This was the plane development theory every adept firmly believed in!

Why did the World of Adepts exile all adepts beyond the Fourth Grade? Precisely to maintain the balance of power between the adepts and the magical beings, to ensure a cruel and unforgiving world for their descendants, to grind and create more powerful adepts.

This was a theory Greem came to after collating the state of development of multiple areas, so Mary naturally knew about it as well. But she had never given a damn about any such theories. The only thing she cared about was whether there were delicious blood treats here!

The giant rampant bat finally caught the attention of the ruler of this forest. A rare three-headed chimera took to the skies, rushing towards where Mary was.

The chimera was a powerful magical creature with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a snake. Normal chimeras had only one head that was capable of spewing flames that could resiliently stick to its victim. And once a chimera has three heads, it would simultaneously wield the powers of flame, poison, and wind.

In the World of Adepts, such a creature might barely make it as a middle-tier magical being, but here, it was considered an extremely powerful beast.

Mary was excited that she had found a magical creature that attracted her attention. Instantly, she began baiting the three-headed chimera into a chase in the woods. Her body was much slimmer and much more capable of speeding through the thick canopies of all the ancient trees. The large chimera with a wingspan of 12 meters, on the other hand, was having trouble.

Amidst the sounds of snapping branches, the chimera charged through the forest like a bulldozer.

The strong but immobile chimera was at a huge disadvantage against the bat in such narrow quarters. Thus the angered chimera took to the skies after a fruitless chase. With all its power and all three of its elemental attacks, it bombarded the area where the giant bat was.