Chapter 725: Information Exchange (1/2)

The group of cultivators was too far away for their bounties to show up, but Zac saw the leader’s bounty as he got closer; 250-500. That was essentially the average of those who managed to reach the Hollowtongue Mountains from what Zac had seen, making the members of the group footsoldiers.

The man hesitated a bit when he saw Zac’s own value, but he still approached a bit further before he stopped.

“You’re looking for that crazy Draugr?” Zac asked skeptically. “Sounds like a good way to get yourselves killed.”

“We dare not target him ourselves. Many have already fallen, we know that. We are simply looking for him on the orders of Auride Serveris of the Radiant Temple,” the leader explained.

“Oh?” Zac exclaimed curiously, and he suddenly remembered one of the fights in the past week.

It was one of the two groups he had fled from. He had suddenly stumbled upon a group of over twenty cultivators, four of whom wore robes that seemed to be related to the Radiant Temple. One of the warriors had emitted a very intense aura, and a massive two-handed sword circled his head.

The small army hadn’t actually made a move on him, but Zac didn’t dare take any chances because of the number of people and the strength of their leaders. He had chucked one of his pre-made talisman balls to set a whole valley on fire while he fled with [Abyssal Phase]. Now it looked like that man was looking for revenge.

“He is currently at the 1,533rd spot on the trial, a future powerhouse of the Temple. He is paying handsomely for both clues and tracking marks,” the leader continued when Zac didn’t immediately speak up.

That rank might not sound too impressive compared to the rankers, but Zac knew it represented real strength. It was noticeably higher than his own, and Zac had definitely sensed a powerful weapon-related Dao emanating from that leader's body, which made sense considering the massive sword.

“I got two of those crystals and some second-hand information,” Zac slowly nodded. “What is the young Lord willing to pay for that? I am only interested in treasures and Twilight Fruits.”

“10 Twilight Fruits per crystal,” the man said.

“Even if the signal has gone out?” Zac asked with a raised brow.

“We don’t know what the young master is planning,” the cultivator shrugged. “We can pay five for second-hand information if it's useful.”

“I got close to the signal three days ago, to see if an opportunity would present itself,” Zac sighed. “But a massive explosion suddenly erupted. Judging by the energy signatures he should be an Array Master who had set up a trap. The force was much too strong for it to be an attack. Just half a minute after the explosion, the man was over ten thousand meters away. I guess he has high-quality escape talismans to move that quick in the mountains. If you want to trap him, you need to do something to block those kinds of arrays.”

The man’s face got a bit weird when Zac described the event where his leader got blasted to kingdom come, but he slowly nodded and took out a normal jute sack and filled it with twenty-five Twilight Fruits. Zac in turn threw over two of the crystals he had snatched the past days, somewhat regretting he couldn’t divulge he actually had 16 of them.

The two groups left in their own direction soon after, with Zac heading toward the outer reaches of the mountains. The 25 Twilight Fruits was a nice enough bonus, though just a fraction of the almost 600 he had robbed over the past days. What was more important was the information he got from the trade; the Radiant Temple-leader had some method to track him.

Zac scanned his body over and over with [Spiritual Anchor] over the next ten minutes, but there was really nothing left behind. His second-best guess was that the sword cultivator had some method to reverse-engineer the Revenge Array so that one of these tracking crystals could instead track the other crystals. If that was the case, his location would be lit up considering how many he carried.

It didn’t hurt to be careful, so Zac took a circuitous route the next few hours and dumped one crystal after another into various powerful currents, allowing them to be dragged back into the depths of the mountain range. With that dealt with, he had washed his hands off the whole situation. Something was brewing in the Hollowtongue Mountains, and he wanted no part of it.

He kept going through the winding paths for another two days, at which point he finally reached the exit. The towering peaks were eventually replaced with jagged boulders, who in turn were replaced by a mostly flat seabed covered with corals and seagrass.

Zac didn’t encounter anything of interest over the next week except the occasional plant he found with the help of [Forester's Constitution]. It was obvious he was moving through the same paths as others had traveled before him on the way to the inner layer of the Trial. Any of the real treasures in this area, if there ever were any, had long been harvested by those who had rushed here.

Eventually, the topography started to change a bit as Zac found the ocean depths slowly decrease until it was just a few hundred meters. At the same time, the ambient energy was steadily increasing as Zac spotted a vast forest in the distance. The trees weren’t of as grotesque proportions as the cork trees over at Cork Island, but they more than made up for it in number.

The forest line stretched across the horizon, blocking his whole field of vision as they reached from the ocean floor all the way to above the surface. Zac didn't immediately enter, but he rather took out his missives, trying to figure out which forest he was dealing with. There were over a dozen sprawling forests in the Twilight Ocean, and a few would be dangerous to enter even for him.

Some were the homes to massive schools of fish or other beasts, and the hordes were so numerous that even he would find himself harried to death if he wasn't careful. There was not much to go by though, and Zac found himself at an impasse where he wasn't sure whether he was better of passing straight through to save time, or to spend a week or two going around.

Suddenly, a lone figure emerged from the forest line in the distance, swimming straight toward him. It was clearly a cultivator rather than a local beast, and Zac looked over with a small frown that only relaxed when she stopped over a thousand meters away from him. The woman sent out a crystal, and it sped through the waters toward him. Zac looked at it suspiciously, considering whether he should destroy it or not, but he soon realized what it was and accepted it.

“Are you interested in a trade?” the unknown cultivator asked through the communication crystal.

“A trade for what?” Zac asked curiously.

“Judging from your trajectory, I think you took the Life Pulse on the way here, and we could both benefit from updating our mappers as well,” she said. “I have also traded and killed until my [Ocean Chart] has reached 2.33% completion. I have traveled in the outskirts of this forest for a while as well, and I have valuable information.”

Zac gave it some thought, and he agreed. There was a small risk of giving up good information and getting false information in turn, but the mappers were smart enough to differentiate with first-hand accounts and bought information.

“I can do that. My map is 2.46%,” Zac answered as he engraved a copy on one of his spare mappers.

Of course, this copy was slightly altered to not make his path in the Hollowtongue Mountains completely clear. It also didn’t display the location of the valley with the Life-Death Pearls, or the disjointed external data containing the Volcano and its surrounding features.

The stranger did the same, and Zac smiled with satisfaction when he saw how his mapper almost doubled. This cultivator had followed another current here and traveled roughly two weeks through the edge of the forest before she reached this place. Part of it covered the Life Pulse though, and Zac guessed she had traded with someone taking a similar route as himself.

He quickly scanned the contents, and he slightly sighed after seeing none of the spots that held the Remnants were marked down. He had handed over the task of finding the spots to Catheya, but it would obviously be even better if he managed to find them himself.