Badge in Azure

Chapter 844: Windfall Gain (Part 1)

The Mechanical Soul was lucky, as only the Ancient’s core magic power furnace was still running. All the other defense mechanisms were no longer working. If every measure for combat on the ship was activated, even gods from the spirit realm would not have been able to have it under control, let alone a mechanical being.

The machine room was not the bottommost room. The bottommost floor was filled with a great number of hermetically sealed rooms, with their insides hollowed out. A great number of hibernating soldiers were stored in those rooms.

The Mechanical Soul’s metallic tentacles extended further and further, devouring all machine parts it was able to find and assimilating them.

“Hahahaha! Saleen, just you wait…Arrghhh, oww, oww!!!”, the Mechanical Soul forgot its place and blue electrical sparks jumped from the broken jade deep within its soul flame, electrocuting it and teaching it a lesson.

“Master, your highness, forgive meee…”, the Mechanical Soul’s body was so massive that the shock experienced ended up rocking the entire warship.

It was, of course, a given that Saleen had not been watching it all the time. It finally calmed down after spending a good amount of time getting frightened, vowing to itself that it would never speak ill of Saleen behind his back ever again.

The area devoured by the Mechanical Soul got larger and larger, its inherent properties growing stronger and stronger. The quality of ancient alchemic machinery was such that it could hardly be damaged by magic, yet it was nonetheless being assimilated by the Mechanical Soul quickly and without a glitch, turning the materials into spirit metals. The Mechanical Soul then went for all of the hold’s metallic parts after it finished devouring all the mechanical parts.

Walls, floors, defensive interlayer, pillars…

There was a total of eighteen floors underneath the vessel armor of the Ancient, and the Mechanical Soul worked its way from the bottommost layer. Storage bays, auxiliary power rooms, and the sealed rooms containing the ancient warriors, began appearing above the power room.

Those things seemed to have been locked up in the Ancient by force during the first dynasty. The ancient warriors had laid there in wait since, waiting for orders from their commanding officers, to fight for the first dynasty.

The Mechanical Soul dared not even touch the ancient warriors. It simply devoured the outer layers of the rooms they were stored in, wrapping them up and preventing even the slightest bit of air getting in. It continued working its way upward, devouring the entire warship. The Ancient, which was a massive warship of a mile long and three-hundred yards wide, ended up devoured by the Mechanical Soul.

The Mechanical Soul was something capable of growing to the size of mountains on the spirit plane. Devouring one such warship was nowhere near its limit. The largest Mechanical Souls in existence were capable of reaching several thousand yards tall and stretched for thousands of miles. Any spirit passing by would have ended as food for one such mechanical being.

Mechanical Souls were also able to create doubles, creating another copy of themselves using just a wisp of soul flame.

Other spirits did not dare split their soul flames, as doing so would severely damaged their souls. The split flame would not be their other selves; these split flames would, instead, end up as newly reborn independent spirits, which would have attacked their originals, in attempts to meld into one complete flame.

If a spirit was to be devoured by a spirit spawned from their pieces of split flames, said spirit would end up truly dead, disappearing from the spirit plane for good.

The Mechanical Soul’s special feature at creating doubles allowed it to slaughter spirits at frightening speeds. It felt its power being restored, as its previous act of creating doubles reduced its level. It now had returned to grade-7.

The golden soul flame with the Mechanical Soul jumped for a bit before expanding by ten times. The Mechanical Soul split ten pieces of flames without a second thought, which turned into ten human shaped puppets. The puppets were all three yards tall each and looked rotund. They began making for each and every corner of the ship after being split from the main body. The three topmost floors were opened up by Cloudflow people and were under their control.

The Mechanical Soul’s doubles charged upwards, and two of the doubles tried cursing at Saleen; those two blew up soon after. Their soul flames got blasted into pieces by streaks of blue electrical sparks in them, killing them instantly.

The experiment proved to be a failure, so it left the Mechanical Soul no choice but to take direct control of the puppets. It had them devour the metal puppets of the Cloudflow people. They also devoured each and every piece of magic equipment they were able to find.

As the Mechanical Soul’s level rose, so did the number of rooms put under its control. All parts of the ship below the three topmost levels ended up being a part of the Mechanical Soul.

The three topmost floors were almost taken apart entirely by the Cloudflow people, and were installed with rooms of their design. Those places were hardly of any value to the Mechanical Soul. The Mechanical Soul’s level eventually stagnated at grade-9. Due to it being a slave of Saleen, it was not able to advance to grade-10. The Mechanical Soul could not help but cursed after discovering the fact, but it did not dare directing those curses at Saleen; they were instead directed at the Cloudflow people. It cursed viciously and repeatedly at the Cloudflow people in the spirit tongue. It had even created hundreds of doubles just for that.

Nailisi and Nicholas had cleaned up the rooms above. The thousands of spirits from the Dragon Skeleton Combat Vessel fought to the very end. There were less than two-hundred of them left when the fight was over.

The Dragon Skeleton Combat Vessel stayed lodged into the deck instead of returning to sea. Several hundreds of the Mechanical Soul’s doubles boarded the vessel and bowed before Saleen.

“All of you, follow Soldier from here on out,” Saleen gave the command to the doubles to the winged skeleton, as he did not want the trouble of taking charge of them things. The Mechanical Soul’s temperament was akin to a human thug’s, which proved incessantly annoying to Saleen.

“We will only listen to the master’s orders!”, the doubles said unanimously.

A Mechanical Soul double’s chest blew up with a bang by streaks of blue electrical sparks. The golden soul flame housed within its body completely extinguished, as it slumped on the floor.

“My order for you lot is to follow Soldier’s orders. Any one of you not liking that, can go straight to hell,” Saleen told them coldly.

Tam’enm told them too many secrets of Dragon Island. Knowing that there were so many professionals serving Grand Duke Iron Blood had him feeling envious, but at the same time, also feeling worried.

There was yet another Ancient warship on Dragon Island, but that ship had yet to undergo any modifications and repairs. That particular mage Saleen captured was able to deceive the sorcerers in Alchemy City and made it far into the northern seas, due to its stealth capabilities.

Grand Duke Iron Blood got wind of Metatrin City producing magic nuclei, which was hardly something Saleen himself considered a secret. The grand duke simply postulated that people of Metatrin City must have found a good hunting ground at sea, which enabled them to easily capture magic beasts capable of producing magic nuclei, in groups.

There were up to one-hundred and twenty-eight islands under Grand Duke Iron Blood’s control, but hunting grounds among them were few and far between. A good number of the equipment found in the ruins of the first dynasty, required high level magic nuclei to serve as a power source. They were a resource that the grand duke lacked, preventing him from developing valuables found in the first dynasty ruins. He might have had more than one-thousand mages serving under him, but he was hardly able to use the Ancient as little more than a massive moving collection of turrets.

Grand Duke Iron Blood was adamant in taking Metatrin’s hunting ground at sea for himself, and so deployed the Ancient to intercept Saleen’s fleet. There were more than a dozen sorcerers, eight ancient warriors, and a good number of the ship’s inherent large scale equipment, prepped and ready to work on the Ancient. The arsenal the Ancient carried was sufficient to destroy more than three Cloudflow fleets. Equipped with such impressive power, the grand duke thought himself to be unbeatable.

He had not expected the ancient warriors to be incredibly weak against incredibly low temperatures though, so much so that they returned went into sleep mode as soon as their environment got really cold. The control measures he developed were rendered completely useless. The grade-9 sorcerer in control of the Ancient was deceived by the water puppet. He was made short work of using the Crystal Finger.

Saleen was not in the mood for taming the Mechanical Soul. What he needed most at that moment was to have complete control of the Ancient, as only by having complete control of one such warship, would the routes leading to the oceanic ice block be truly secured.

The hundreds of mechanical doubles were overwhelmed and silenced. Saleen did not bother negotiating terms with them. Slaves remained slaves, and slaves had no rights, no matter how capable they were.

“Genga, make more doubles of yourself. Have the Ancient under control, and move northward,” Saleen gave the order, which the Mechanical Soul followed begrudgingly.

“Master, the warship lacks power. There was only one magic power furnace, and its fastest speed is sixty miles per hour, which is about half of our fleet’s,” a double explained as soon as the order was given.

Saleen narrowed his eyes to a slit and looked at the double, thinking for a bit before asking, “Can you make it go a little faster?”

“The limit will be eighty miles per hour if we have high level magic nuclei. Any faster would require auxiliary power to run at their fullest. With that, the warship will be able to make it to one-hundred and twenty miles per hour.”

“Alright, just stick with eighty. You won’t be able to control it well going too fast,” Saleen said as he took out thirty-six standard-sized grade-9 magic nuclei and handed them to the double, and continued, “Keep up with the fleet. I will need you to have complete control of the ship before reaching the oceanic ice block. Repair the defenses and weapons of the ship in accordance to the schematics!”

“Yes, master,” the Mechanical Soul dared not negotiate terms with Saleen anylonger.

“Soldier, have the bone warships follow,” Saleen said to the winged skeleton, as he noticed Nailisi and Nicholas made their way back to him.

“Let’s move,” Saleen did not ask how the fight went. Nailisi’s temperament would have prevented her from leaving any loose ends behind. They were not on land. The soldiers simply had nowhere to run in the middle of the ocean. There were more than five-thousand crew and soldiers of similar number on the ship. While it might have seemed to be massive, there would have easily been near one-thousand that ended up dead or injured when the Dragon Skeleton Combat Vessel rammed and boarded the Ancient’s deck.

Nailisi became a role model for the spirits. Casting a death magic spell in the hold was enough to ensure that there would have been no survivors left in said hold. Battles fought at sea were several hundred times more cruel that those fought on land.

The Dragon Skeleton Combat Vessel stood up wobbly under the winged skeleton’s control, making its way along the deck and toppling a few masts that the Mechanical Soul labored to erect, before jumping into the sea.

The vessel’s jump created a hole several yard deep on the rear deck, angering the Mechanical Soul so much that it cursed over and over, but it did not dare say anything bad about Saleen.

“Master, why are you in such a hurry?”, Nailisi was baffled. Her understanding of Saleen’s personality had her thinking that she should have checked his prize thoroughly before going anywhere.

“We best not stay here for long. If people from Alchemy City were here, they would have taken the Ancient and we would have suffered a great loss. Soldier, I will take over the Dragon Skeleton Combat Vessel. You get down there and keep an eye on the fleet behind!”