33 Natural Selection (1/2)

For the next two days, Nero brought himself back up to peak condition and toured around the place.

After the fun days, the weekend came around once more. It was Saturday.

Nero hadn't neglected training and getting used to Adept Mana at all, but he had cut down on physical activity that required space, like running and practising using the blade.

Speaking of the scythe, Nero had, after countless revamps, chosen to call it the 'Ripper'. Its capabilities were mainly to slice & dice hence the name.

Scoping around, he'd truly understood why mages here had such an arrogant nature.

They earned a fortune.

-

Their role in society was to hunt monsters, get their carcasses and, if possible, Essence Cores.

Beast essence cores have incredibly high demand, and not enough supply to account for, thus explaining the giant gap in prices between cores bought here and the cores acquired in Pinnacle.

Pinnacle had, to remove the risk of being exploited, made exclusive contracts and bought all the beast cores collected by its Kingdom's Hunters.

If they hadn't done so, other Nations would have brought the Hunters in with better, more enticing offers, which would result in the loss of military strength for the whole country.

A Beast Core's functionality lies in the type of chemical energy it contains. To keep them from dissipating, they had to be contained in insulated containers which had a temperature less than 5 degrees Celcius, or they would dissipate from their solid form into intangible thin air.

The Core was like pretty much a battery, shaped like a crystal and its two edges were the nodes.

To bring forth the energy, one simply needed some conductive wires, but not the ordinary kind.

The mana-conductive kind.

Crystalline, a material used in Nero's Ripper, was one such conductive metal. It could be used as the wiring in a simple circuit, achieving technological advancements that Earth only produced in the Modern Era while only having evolved for less than even a tenth of the time.

There was no known concept of electrons to the people; people still had the belief that every element was a creation of mana, and even more simplification to the earth, fire, water and air that those on Earth believed.

Due to the highly modernised growth of Haron, the need for beast essence cores has skyrocketed, making Hunter's job the most lucrative.

-

Sometime during the afternoon, from a high enough altitude, one could see a little splodge of blur in the sky, far enough for none to notice.

No more than an hour later, the splodge had transformed into a visible circular disc, more than noticeable to the masses. Only a few minutes later, the large circular disc had turned into an oval-shaped blip, familiar to most of the citizens underneath.

It had arrived, the Gas Giant of the Nobles had begun its descent.

”OH? The great Nobles are her again!”

”I wonder which line of aristocrats will have a disciple chosen this time!”

”Look, children, one day, you could be lucky enough to get chosen by the great Lords as well!”