Badge in Azure

There were times where there was no need to kill enemies with special weapons. Truman was simply looking for trash in the dimension stone. After Saleen gained possession of the Starline Ring, he no longer found himself out of storage space.

The dimension stone was used considerably less as a result. There were items that had not been cleared out when taking apart temples en masse.

Among the items, there were stone statues without any attributes. While the statues were not actually worthless, given how nobles would buy them with a considerable amount of gold, the so-called art pieces were little more than garbage to mages.

Truman was looking for garbage to throw. He had no way of actually carrying rocks weighing thousands, or even tens of thousands of pounds, but he could wrap it in wind element, enabling him to take aim.

Due to the growing noise of the church on the ground getting trashed, the shouts of the holy masters were muffled. The believers were unable to suppress their fear and scattered.

The holy masters were exasperated. They had objectives to achieve with building a church in a place like that. The believers were little more than smokescreens, and it hardly mattered if they ran. They could just get more from the empire.

However, with the church trashed and rocks and statues falling from the sky, four holy masters had already died. They were all low level holy masters and utterly incapable of defending against things dropping on them from the sky.

The church was huge. Despite having thrown many rocks at it, Truman was unable to destroy the place entirely. He only ended up destroying half of the walls and a clock tower.

There had been guardian knights and a red-robed bishop stationed there, but heretics appeared, and the red-robed bishop led the knights corps on an expedition to crush them.

With the surrounding armed forces mobilized, the church emptied and the low level holy masters were unable to do anything about attacks coming from the sky.

More than 20 holy masters stood on an open field and chanted prayers. Truman, who was high up in the sky, had no idea what the holy masters were up to. He resorted to simply taking out a magic fire shell and throwing it at them.

Saleen carried a hefty amount of magic fire shells with him, and Truman threw hundreds at them. The shells formed a ring and exploded one after another, giving birth to raging fires.

The holy masters continued chanting prayers in the raging fires. It was unfortunate for them that the magic fire shells were very lethal, and the splash damage was capable of burning their targets to the bone.

High temperatures, toxins, and a rapidly depleting air supply quickly stole the holy masters’ ability to continue chanting, burning them where they stood.

The church was not built in the city, but in the remote wilderness. The fires could be worse and would not end up harming innocents.

Truman looked for targets in the church after he was done with the holy masters, but he was unable to find any worthy of attack. The Magical Element Tower stayed in the sky and the rest of Saleen’s entourage focused their attention on observing the lightning’s secrets.

Ball lightning phased into the tower every now and then. Saleen found that the lightning did not necessarily need to attack living beings. They could simply remain hovering aimlessly until dissipating.

Saleen had released over 10,000 puppets by then, watching them being reduced to dust by the lightning in a myriad of ways.

Saleen did not dare cast Puppet Constellation. The equipment might have been strong, but there was no way it could resist the power of lightning in nature. The Magical Element Tower took a hit from the branch-like lightning bolts.

Saleen was perceptive enough to sense that the power absorbed from that hit was dispersed to every single inch of the elementite. Some of the energy from the lightning was sent into the dimension stones, and the mechanical core of the Sky City also absorbed some energy.

Seeing that the mechanical core was capable of absorbing energy, Saleen looked over the large scale magic power furnace again, finding that the furnace was incapable of absorbing the scattered energy. If he had been able to send the ball lightning into it, things might have turned out very differently.

It was unfortunate that other than that one time when Saleen succeeded in attracting a ball lightning using a tornado, he never succeeded in doing so again.

Saleen was hardly discouraged. His luck had been good enough to get him one accidental success, enabling him to continue attempting to manipulate the ball lightning, feeling every attempt being very near succeeding.

It was not peculiar for mages to repeat their experiments over 10,000 times. A mage like Saleen who possessed such powerful mental powers was capable of running 10 to 100 experiments in one go. It would not cost him a lot to repeat experiments over 10,000 times either.

The trait became increasingly apparent as a mage rose in level. Low level mages were only capable of performing one or two experiments in one go, and their lives were short, which was why it seemed so unusually difficult to advance.

Mages relied on hard work before reaching level seven, but relied on talent beyond level seven.

Despite not being able to comprehend how the lightning formed and not developing a way of manipulating ball lightning, the lightning patterns on Saleen’s Water Shield looked increasingly clear and simplified, erasing parts that proved unnecessary.

The number of lightning runes on his eyes grew to a staggering 360,000. The standard size of the lightning runes was the size of an element particle.

Saleen knew that if he were able to thoroughly decipher the lightning runes as they were supposed to be, the runes could be made over 1,000 times smaller than they were at the moment. If that proved to be the case, he would end up learning 360 million lightning runes.

Magic with over 360,000 runes was practically unheard of. Most magic had between 360 and 3,600. The most powerful magic that Saleen knew required chanting 36,000 magic runes.

Few mages were willing to learn such magic, as it was impossible to use mental powers to guide magic chords to enable silent casting when one just began to learn a new spell.

A new spell meant that one had to start all over, every single syllable of the runes pronounced correctly. How long would it take to chant 36,000 runes? And how long would it take to repeat the chanting until one was able to achieve silent casting?

It was hardly surprising why so few learned lightning magic even in ancient times. It required the mage to possess unparalleled mental powers. It would take up to 10,000 experiments to achieve the rate of progress comparable to learning common magic.

Saleen was not discouraged. He had acquired the ring from Arbola and if the ring was completely restored, it would expand his mental powers to a frightening level. It was possible to train in lightning magic once he possessed powerful mental powers.

Furthermore, lightning magic needed powerful mental powers when picking spells up. Once a mage mastered a lightning spell, it would cost little more than ten times the mental powers needed to master common magic spells at most.

It would enable a mage to cast spells that were beyond their level. Even though no other mage learned lightning magic, Saleen saw a need to try.

Saleen, Nailisi, and Eleanor all developed some comprehension of lightning magic, which was why all of them were steeped in observation and research.

Isabella and Truman knew nothing of lightning and did not intend to take the path. They simply observed the ground below to see if there was anything from the ruins that needed to be cleared out.

Time flew and the observation took Saleen over ten days. December came without any of them noticing and the ruins were dead. Nobody from the Holy See appeared, and the clouds that had gathered around dissipated.

Saleen felt once more that the earth contained a myriad of mystical powers and matter.

The dark clouds were probably formed because of minerals underground.

The sky and the earth were never separate. The relationship between earth and wind, as well as between water and fire, had always been a mystical and beautiful subject to mages.

Saleen did not have to stay around if there were no clouds. The church was gone and there was no need to look for fights with the Holy See.

Saleen allowed the water puppet to take control of the magic tower and continue heading south. The price for the learning process was losing over 100 demonic spirits.

Nailisi resorted to summoning more demonic spirits from the purgatory of the devils, replenishing the number to 3,600.

Due to the setback, Saleen took the Magical Element Tower at a lower altitude. He looked around with his Elemental Eye, seeing if it was possible to find Agares.

He found nothing. He contacted Daliang City and the mages from Holy Rock had taken over the posts that originally belonged to people from Alchemy City, fighting the Holy See with Agares’ mages.

The number of fossilized gods in the cemetery of the giant began to dwindle, but Saleen knew that there were more fossilized gods waiting in the deeper reaches of the cemetery.

Furthermore, the fossilized gods in the energy barrier were far higher levels than the ones outside. Jalin almost died, and that was from only one or two fossilized gods going for her head.

If every single fossilized god within the energy barrier was awakened, Saleen speculated that it would take the entire mainland’s professionals to fight against them before it even became possible for them to come out on top.

Saleen did not worry about the treasures of the cemetery of the giant being taken away. The mages from Golden Plains, who knew what was going on, simply could not afford to venture inside. They simply waited to see if there were any changes happening to the cemetery, before talking about going in deep.

A new city emerged in northern Qin: the Nature City that Don had been building.

The location of Nature City was at the coordinates of the temple that Saleen knew about. Don did not know the details, and Saleen had simply told him to build a city there to spare himself further trouble.

None of Saleen’s men stayed at Don’s side to help. The knights corps of the Nature Faith expanded to 10,000, protecting Nature City.

The landing of Saleen’s Magical Element Tower caused quite a ruckus in the city. The nature holy masters almost attacked Saleen’s tower.

Don built a simple, unceremonious temple at the center of the city. Saleen’s tower landed right on the plaza in front of the temple. He walked out of the tower and was received by Don and several hundred knights. There were over 100 holy masters by Don’s side.

“Greetings, Your Highness.” Don bowed to Saleen solemnly before turning to the holy masters around him. “This is the king of the Kingdom of Metatrin, and a backer of the Nature Faith. It is thanks to His Highness’ help that we’re able to spread the faith.”

The holy masters all sported expressions of reverence. Nature Faith’s doctrines were unlike the Holy See. The nature holy masters were very respectful to the ones who backed the faith financially, as the Nature Faith promised nothing in return.

Even if you donated to the cause, your soul still would not be destined for heaven.

The Nature Faith had amicable relations with the nobles in the early days because the doctrines of Nature Faith were not aggressive and invasive. The Holy See, on the other hand, had taken the land that had the most resources in the Tanggulasi Empire.