Red didn't hesitate to stop her suppression of Wyrmie's mass of uneven teeth, letting it tear out of her chest and latch itself onto her opponent.

That seemed to have succeeded in distracting him for a brief instant.

"Hey…I was about to get married you know." Black complained.

"He wouldn't mind waiting for us to recover."

"Miss, have you calmed down?" The man disrupted Black and Red's internal conversation. Her accelerated thought process slowed down.

"You're not about to kill her?" Black took control of their vocals.

"She has no hostile intentions, just trying to get me away from you. And you miss, I believe you got a little too serious and wasn't in your right mind. Perhaps a berserk skill of sorts."

"Well that is embarrassing." So she said, but she was endlessly distracted by the fact that Wrymie jumped back and dived into her body.

That shouldn't have happened, it should have been more than happy to find another creature to consume and recover. Black investigated but found the mass of uneven teeth shivering within her heart. It was weak…it was feeling unending fear that infected her since she could sense emotions. This was the first time she felt anything other than voracious hunger from the organically dead Tapewyrm.

'Just what scared it away and back to me?' Red was beginning to feel the battle rush come back, they could've continued the battle if it wasn't for Athena…

"Not quite, There aren't many other Grandmasters with abilities of your calibre. I'd say I got lucky today. Again. I wonder what you were just trying to do?"

"Self-destruct all the blood in my body, leaving my mask and heart."

"In attempt to stop me from attacking your friend over there?"

"Yeah?" She replied without much thought.

"Is she worth that much?"

"Worth? That takes too much thinking. Just act."

"You are quite like someone I know."

"It's not nice to compare but…I can say the same to you. You're a Grandmaster too? Are you Elcrian?"

"Yes and no respectively, are you from here?"

"Born here." Red didn't think much but Black was curious why Red was able to talk properly for so long. There was truly some calming mental influence at work and her Intution was not even fighting back against it.

"Fascinating, to think I've never heard of someone like you. I question whether the world is too vast or too small sometimes."

"You feel oddly familiar," Scarlet spoke her mind as usual.

"You too." The man agreed.

"…" She looked at his deep eyes through her mask.

"…" He was able to guess where her eyes were relatively well as he stared at her mask.

"Is someone messing with your mind right now?" Her Intuition and curiosity in this random stranger who had good capabilities questioned.

"How about you?" He replied with another question.

"…I don't feel anything of the sort."

"Me neither. I would know if something is affecting me." The man confidently added.

"Me too." Scarlet was a daughter of a Clan of mind mages, even if something could affect her mind there was little chance it was subtle enough to escape her detection.

"I know, we are not influenced by anything now. There is something weird in the surroundings. The entire world is being influenced, not us."

Red's dainty lips opened…but her Intuition didn't let her argue with the ridiculous words. 'He is not wrong.' The passive divination in her genes told her so.

"I look away for one moment. One! What were the odds? Haaa, how come I haven't met the fated one for me."

Red and her opponent snapped out with their swords and magic but in a blink, she realized Black was in charge of her body.

Athena was by her side and Piglet oinked while trotting forward.

Right, they were in this place because Piglet brought them here to share her stash.

"Red…is something out of place?"

"eh? I don't know. Intuition's not saying anything, so I guess not?"

"I'm right." She told herself.

Tiny hops returned to her feet as they trotted towards the Piglet's food stash. It just had to be a food stash.

❅❅❅

"Huh…" Ebony touched his chest.

Looking forward, his Turtle Fort was fine, there was no change.

Going into his mindspace, he double-checked all the Numbers, Dusk and even checked with Aegis to see if he had received anything new from the hibernating Domain Core.

Lunar Bioclock rushed to work, double checking his memories.

"I have no gaps in my memory. The time matches with all my memories. But something I don't recall has happened." Ebony was certain.

There was no other reason he could think of that would result in his maximum Will capacity to increase by 2 points out of nowhere.

'Either something happened with the Numbers, and their Will were interfered with by a Domain mage or anyone with greater Will that could affect mine or something happened to me.' Ebony couldn't confirm, his Wolf Explorer ride carried on their journey running across the ocean.

'Maybe...no, I couldn't possibly have gained 2 whole points in capacity just because I'm exploring the ocean which is an almost completely fresh experience. Scattering storm clouds with a swing of Icicle…that shouldn't have given me so much growth in Will either.' Ebony simulated the reason why his Will got a noticeable growth in an instant.

It was like he was walking when a noticeable muscle grew by a per cent suddenly occurred in his body. That doesn't happen naturally.

Perhaps if he was disconnected from his Clones and Dusk for a long time, it would occur after reconnecting and receiving their Will back. But he had no recent memories of that.

In any case, it felt like a good sign to have come out to travel the seas.

Stepping off from his Wolf Explorer in the middle of nowhere, he stood on the surface of the ocean.

'Water disrupts my mana perception under me more than earth. That should be because earth has more air gaps for my mana to seep through.' Ebony was mostly blind to the environment under the water. Gravity mana perception didn't exactly help against a body of water, a body of mass.

Vibrational mana…was wonky with a body of water.

Even tossing some Will Relay Buffers down didn't help much with underwater perception.

'I really need traditional sight for the Numbers. The batch of runic eyeballs I bought to reverse engineer and use temporarily…that's a pity." Ebony ordered plenty of useful items.

He learned how to use money, so he obviously placed it into action.

But sadly, space was generally dangerous. The transport carrying his package lost contact with Hex. The latest information Hex had was that the ship was destroyed with no survivors. So, Ebony's deposit was lost for good, the seller and buyer both carried half the lost this way since they lost their products too. Rules and contracts were different everywhere, but this deposit system was most widely used.

Ebony knew how an eyeball worked, The only problem was that he wasn't simply looking for a working eyeball, but one that could give a mass of ice element sight. Not a biological creature with nerves…or a brain.

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The light captured and reflected had to connect to Will and break down into useful, readable information somehow or the other.

This was beyond even Sister Jing's current abilities for she wasn't a Will or a Domain mage. She could probably use runes to imitate a Domain, like Mark but she was nowhere to be found and was uncontactable along with Hector and Mark.

Now that he was in the figurative middle of nowhere, he sat down and began the next thing on his pre-evolution bucket list.

Freezing the ocean seemed like a fun pastime.

It turns out that deep sea fishes were not happy about their homes being crowded.

Nature seemed to have gotten angry at him for his large-scale environmental reconstruction.

It also turns out that the ocean was truly humongous.

He had to humble himself by calling his mana pool a pool as it was no ocean compared to the real thing.

The Troll Shaman's work of covering such a humongous area with earth enough to withstand war of its scale seemed more impressive now.

A couple of Pigeon Scouts had already found Tova and mapped the distance. Ebony spent two months and he hadn't frozen half the way from Elva to Tova.

When he meant frozen, he meant through to the ocean floor. His previous 'middle of nowhere' was closer to Elva than Tova.

The Numbers had to inform him that his work was causing huge unrest in the Tides, the border cities that almost thought the Trolls were up to something again.

The ocean under Ebony was leaking life force that was spreading all over the skies. Since he was casting a seal, he hadn't killed a single creature. To maintain marine life after all.

All the sealed and accelerated healing of millions of creatures caused the ambient air to rise in life force over the past two months. Enough for physical changes to appear on the mainland in Elva.

Just because he didn't kill creatures now didn't mean his actions wouldn't kill so he stopped his experiments and had the Numbers clean up after himself. Using Will Relay Buffers to observe the entire continent

Using Will Relay Buffers to observe the entire continent the mana used to freeze the ocean over the past two months was slowly sent through to allow large numbers of Pigeon Scouts to fly across and do their best to record the environmental damage Ebony had done and possibly rectify them.

It was useful data in case he ever needed to freeze an ocean.

Ebony was now intrigued by the fact that the creatures deep underwater, further away from the mainland were so deep, they couldn't come up to the surface no matter how much they hated his work of damaging their home or overcrowding it.

Besides depth, the leaking overflowing essence of deep sea creatures also affected the water pressure in the deep dark world of the ocean depths. This also proved a significant obstacle when it came to freezing the water the deeper he went.

He could overpower the influence of foreign mana and essence with relative ease, even Emperor ranked purity essence was not an issue with the sheer quantity and density of his mana. But an entire ocean's worth of water and strong creatures proved a problem even for him.

'Hmm, more money in my account than I remember. Sophia made some profits already, work hasn't started on Velnis so it should be the farms in Tidal.' The paltry sum didn't escape his notice.

Because of his demands, work hasn't truly started so the little profit must have been from existing crop harvest. It felt like he earned his first passive dividend after investing and it felt good despite the value being less than a hundred thousand Sulpto.

Velnis was the name of the Worldcore he now owned, the Emperors who sold it were the ones who named it. A discoverer's privilege.

In Ebony's ocean freezing attempt, he found 4 dungeons underwater. Very little compared to the area that he scoured but that was the usual case for underwater dungeons.

Either the Dungeons had nobody to consume or they had too much and killed off every monster in their surrounding to make it a barren area, dying soon enough without things to feed on.

Hence, underwater Dungeons had far bigger reach with their ability to take in ambient mana and they don't impose on each other. Dungeon Breaks underwater didn't do much harm either and they rarely ever happened since there was simply no beneficial effect for the dungeons themselves even if they exploded out with thousands of creatures.

Ebony took his robe off and cast scale armour before he dived into the water towards the portal that gave off the most mana. Eight turtle shell shields circled him.

Instead of Flicker, he trained his swimming skill.

With his physical stats it didn't take long before he reached a depth where his body wasn't sinking any more, allowing him to swim normally even with his body density with compressed mana.

Taking the opportunity, he trained his swimming skill effectively instead of rushing towards his target dungeon.

The defrosting of the ocean was taking a lot of time since the mana had to slowly be transferred through the limited amount of Buffers he had in the ocean. It wasn't like anything here was able to fight him after they were just unsealed so the ocean was a safe pool at the moment.

A delayed message came over to inform him that the first home he had in Tidal had received the shipment of crystals and Dusk had already started experimenting with using them as the main material for his new line of Will Relay Buffers.

Over the next week, the preliminary scan told him Elva's environment was more stable than he'd imagined. With mages and monster habitats fighting against rapid changes such as a decrease in temperature or the sea levels changing or periodic tidal waves targeting the cliffs of the Tide Cities.

Since he only froze a portion of the ocean, it was not unlike a harsher winter coming early and he had to do little reparations if any at all.

The Generic Skill leveled and refined quickly even without pressure from a chasing monster or danger of any kind.

Ebony's practice with the deployed shields was not going anywhere since moving them around wasn't tough in any way. They didn't take much mental effort even with the streams of gravity helping the dense conjuration move around faster.

He made a new 'setting' for his shields, two for extremely closed ranged movement, six for near-ranged motions. After solidifying this experience and confirming that it took little effort, he disseminated this experience into his recharge of Will to the Numbers from now on. Over time, they would be able to use it better and soon as well as he could.

For himself, the ease of doing so made him create twelve more shields for mid-range deployment.

The Xengs had been overwhelming him with spell count during the festival, so it was about time he took magic defence more seriously instead of the constant focus on close combat.

For spells projectiles that opponents actively control, he loved to smash them with his turtle shell, instantly orb the spells up if possible and blast furnace the internal with his flames to freeze, destroy or seal the spell and it worked great against pretty much every element except air and other similar gas type elements.

While he was at it, he made a few models of different aquatic creatures and also a copy of his turtle fort and trained his Will to understand how these creatures swam, bending his mind to take their form for himself.

With species of fish, sea serpents, turtles, jellyfish and crustaceans he left a Will Relay Buffer and Flickered towards his target dungeon. After testing and tugging on the Will after he entered, he found his Will connection spotty but not cut completely as callstones do. His Will was being muffled by the dungeon.

Hex had a far superior connection even with his small portable module form.

"No water?" Ebony landed upright, with gravity pulling him down and a few dead monster corpses at his feet. They should've drowned not long after entering.

He didn't understand why there were rotting corpses, the dungeon should have consumed foreign essence by now otherwise there was no point killing outsiders.

'Does this dungeon not have any spawns as cleaners?' The first thing he had to do after entering besides taking care of immediate threats was to determine what type of dungeon this was.

The ground was a grey concrete-like rock, extremely smooth. Other than a dozen or so rotting corpses near the portal entrance, there was nothing else. The air was not breathable so he returned to using his stock of air in his lungs.

Lighting a stick nearby, he found that fires couldn't combust.

His cold flames were conjured without issue.

No monster spawn was climbing out of the floor or rushing at him from a spawn node.

No maze in sight.

No magical puzzle was sensed.

It was an odd dungeon but all dungeons were unique so he couldn't exactly say it was unnatural either.

At least, until he started exploring. The Dungeon was just a cylindrical room a couple of kilometres wide. He wasn't able to find any hidden entrances or stairs. There was no sky, just the same grey rock above. But the place did mess with both traditional sight and his mana perception as it looked like there was a sky when he stood on the ground.

'There's absolutely nothing. Is the dungeon starved and can't produce any spawns or materials? A dying dungeon perhaps.' Ebony might have been the cause of this, having frozen this part of the ocean for over a month and preventing the dungeon from eating but mana wouldn't lie, the dungeon had been in this condition for a much longer. Mana Discern was capable of sensing these information.

Being as deep as they were, there weren't many creatures outside this area either.

After triple-checking, he left the dungeon…only to smash his face into a bubble of mana when he tried to leave the entrance portal.

"Now that I think about it, every dungeon has at least two portals within it, this entrance and an exit that leads to the other side of the same portal outside but this is the only one. So you've trapped me in is that it?" Ebony tried going from the other side of the red-coloured portal but the same bubble stopped him.

"I suggest you don't waste your limited energy and let me out before I do it by force." He didn't feel stupid for talking, not since he knew a Dungeon that could talk.

Ebony pulled his cube's gravity mana and cast a compressed vortex in an orbed frost plum he conjured. He saturated this small dungeon with his liquid mana to probe for a reaction but there was none even after a minute.

Keeping his mana to protect his own body, the frozen sea outside supplied him with mana as they returned to him and defrosted the sea. All of it went into his plum. Looks like entry was possible but exit wasn't.

Long-duration spells, he always forgets how powerful they are due to the lack of chances to use them. He considered making a couple more spells to make use of his abundant many, especially for Dusk who had even less of a concern for mana and needed to be more powerful than Ebony himself to protect his home and provide a safer space than just being himself.

As a test, he tossed one of his bombs to the other side of the small dungeon wall after the gravity vortex was 20% saturated. The current limit of his spell was the amount of gravity mana. If Xin wasn't taken into account, the structure of his ice plum could easily handle…ice and his brand of mana within it.

The ambient amounts of gravity mana in this dungeon weren't abundant so his cube was the only reliable source.

Seeing a crack a few hundred metres wide but sensing his mana go tens of kilometres deep, he recalculated.

Dungeons were less indestructible than he was led to believe. That or this particular one was truly on the verge of death for a long time, thousands of years of inactivity at the very least. Mana Discern gauged the age of the ambient mana here to be at least two thousand years old without being broken down, or regenerated.

Despite that, it was also more resilient than he expected. This might just be a material it made, not its actual 'walls'

So there was no need for tests anymore, the next plums would have to be fully saturated.

He was deaf to the cacophony of explosions that followed.

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