The First Legendary Beast Master

Chapter 1423 Sneak Past

Before the pilgrims could respond, Karl was off at a run.

He had given them enough food to eat full meals for at least a month, and with the wagon, they wouldn’t have any trouble pulling it along on their journey. That put his mind at ease, knowing that they could turn away from this fight, skip the holy site and move on to the next one, even if he didn’t get back to them.

When the location came in sight, Cara was flying overhead, throwing stones at the giants and instigating a fight, while the leaders of the two forces postured and argued with each other.

[Sneak past them. This is going to take a while, and the trial should be open enough for us to enter.] Cara informed him.

What she was doing was distracting the Giants, who were facing the trial instance portal, preventing them from noticing that it had changed.

Once they did, the fight would be started, and the chance that anyone would sneak into the instance would be over. That would just make it harder for them to do the job that they were sent to do, and they didn’t even know if this was the right spot yet.

If it wasn’t the King’s burial site, they would just be wasting time in a trial. Karl decided to increase his odds of stealth. He activated both [Night Haunter] for the mostly invisible incorporeal body, and then [Invisibility] for an added layer of protection, before setting an [Illusionary Domain] over the whole area, so he could more easily hide himself if things started to get spicy.

The Giants weren’t particularly bright, so using the spell to hide the entrance might make them think that it closed if he timed it right.

But that time was not now. They were paying too much attention to everything, and some of them had obviously noticed the magic building around them, though they hadn’t determined the cause yet.

If the portal vanished now, they would attack everything in the area, looking for intruders and the hidden portal.

Karl did his best to hide his aura, hoping that nothing would notice he was headed for the portal, as both sides suspected that the other was the cause of the magic they could feel.

The Orcs were individually weaker without the System, but the Hill Giants weren’t that much stronger, and the Orcs had better weapons, finely crafted out of magical beast bones, so they would cut through higher rank bodies with relative ease.

It was a self perpetuating cycle. The Orcs would struggle against magical beasts and Giants on their own. But they had taken one down and made weapons. That allowed them to take more down, make more weapons, and now they could face off with physically superior creatures using their wits and combat skills.

It was a culture that brought them safely through the entire downturn, and one that they held sacred even during the System resurgence.

Silently, Karl snuck past the two groups, and entered the anomaly portal to see what was inside. Though, it didn’t take an intensive search to tell him that this was the right place.

For one, the space felt like a Tiny World, not a System Trial. For two, he could sense the System’s activity here. The rich miasma of energy that felt like his own skill activations.

But the interior of the space was not a burial ground in any way that Karl recognized it. There was no altar nor crypt. There was no monument to the great King Caramon.

Instead, there was a simple stone summer house next to a babbling brook, splashing over rocks as it circled the space.

Karl smiled as he realized the setup actually made the tiny stream something like a moat around a castle, if you could count a three bedroom stone house as a castle.

Perhaps the King’s body was inside?

Karl made his way across the grass, and then stopped when he felt power under his feet. The System Stones were here. They had just been buried inside the garden, covered by walkways and hedges, so that they wouldn’t be easily found by anyone who happened to walk in.

Now, the question was how Karl was going to remove them.

If he started to destroy the space, it would collapse. Then, he would be kicked out, and the stones would be in the open, free for anyone to grab. That would just make things more complicated, and it would almost guarantee that at least one part of the stone array would be destroyed.

Instead, Karl began to examine them, as he had done once before, with the stones at the temple.

That examination revealed something remarkable. These stones were not divine.

They were likely made by an Immortal, crafted as a replica of the real System Stones. His affinity for the Fundamental Rule of Mana Manipulation began to grow as he examined the stones, and how they were linked to the power deep within the planet.

It was a wonderful trick of magic to link them so deeply, but Karl realized that was the only way to make them functional. The System was an integral part of their world, you couldn’t separate off a bit of it to make System Stones without making an entire System to go with them.

Reading the runes was only the surface level of the issue.

The real difficulty came when you needed to understand how the System stones were linked to the planet, so that the powers left by the World Dragon could be activated and a Class granted to the one who used them.

But with that revelation came another, far more profound revelation.

He didn’t need the System Stones to activate the System at all. As long as the person had the affinity, he could simply draw upon the dormant power of the planet to cause an activation any time he wanted.

He could even pull up the class change menu for himself.

And he did.

There wasn’t a better option available to him, Beast Master Champion was the only available option on his tier. But he could see all the options that he had

turned down in the past, and that was something new.

It gave him a clear view of where they would have led, and insight into whether

he had chosen the right path.

Karl thought that he had.

Most of the others led away from the path of the Beast Master, and none of them led to an Avatar level ability. At least not in their core skills.

[Are you done messing around in there? The Orcs aren’t going to be able to keep things under control for long.]