Chapter 493: Tracking The Dungeon II

Adrian quickly bid farewell to Tiger and his people before moving on to visit the other tribes in the region.

The next few tribes didn’t exactly surprise him too much.

He visited the Blacksmithing tribe first. Even though their weapons were supposedly infused with mana, they just could not rival a perfectly forged steel-tipped spear made in Adrian’s dungeon.

The way they infused their iron with mana was pretty simple. The actual blacksmithing process was the exact same as what Adrian was used to seeing. They just quenched the hot metal directly in mana water instead of oil or regular water. That way. some of the mana from the water would seep inside the metal.

It was just that tiny difference. They also had this weird habit of submerging iron ingots inside bowls filled with mana water, but that didn’t really do anything. Adrian didn’t even bother correcting them.

As for the tribe that was known for their cooking skills, things were a bit more interesting.

They did not exactly cook the food inside the mana water. The mana water was pretty much unstable. Applying too much heat would release the mana out, and on top of that, the orichalcum granite didn’t do well with heat. This was also the reason why the blacksmith tribe could only quench a weapon once inside the same bowl of water. They had to use multiple different bowls for every single time they quenched a piece of metal.

So, the one thing that made the cooking tribe so much better was the fact that they literally just made food items that did not require boiling or heating up the water at all.

They used pickling methods. Instead of boiling, they had their own separate dishes. Some were regular dishes, and others were special.

The special ones were obviously the pickled ones. Pickled vegetables and pickled roots soaked in salted mana water.

But they also had a special starch that they extracted from a local root that was very similar to a potato. These potatoes were something that Adrian wasn’t used to seeing on Earth. They were less sweet than sweet potatoes, but sweeter than regular potatoes. They were somewhere right in the middle, and they were extremely huge.

One single bulb pulled from the ground could be as long as one meter and as thick as fifty centimeters. It was an extremely massive tuber.

The way they processed this was pretty simple. They washed it, peeled the tough outer skin, washed it again, and basically ground it down to a fine pulp. Then, they soaked the mushy paste inside the mana water.

They repeated this process again and again by literally just tossing the old water out and waiting for the next rainstorm to fill up the bowl.

The reason why this specific tribe could do it so well was because they were one of the few tribes that had access to an extremely huge, carved stone container that could hold a massive amount of water. It couldn’t exactly collect much from the sky on its own, but just from the collective effort of the tribe, they could manually move water from smaller bowls into the bigger one.

By repeating the process of adding more water and rinsing the pulp every few days, the starch that settled at the bottom would be infused with a pretty decent amount of mana. And the rest of the murky water also did not go to waste since the tribesmen just drank it like regular water.

These food items worked very similar to the monster meat that Adrian had access to. It wasn’t anything magically special or overpowered. But just the fact that these tribesmen had managed to progress and invent these methods in such a harsh environment was impressive on its own.

It was only after Adrian visited these two specific tribes that he finally set off to meet the last tribe. The tribe that was considered the second strongest in the region, according to Tiger’s words.

And while Adrian was on his way, there was a certain bald man a long distance away who looked in Adrian’s direction.

He looked toward the exact direction where Adrian currently was before he looked away and continued walking. He frowned as he looked straight ahead, staring at something that others couldn’t even see. His eyes moved back and forth almost like he was reading something.

"Fucking quest," Yuusha muttered. "Let’s just hope it’s worth it."

He just continued walking calmly without any rush.

Just a few moments later, he reached the tribe that was directly in his path. He found a few familiar faces among the tribesmen. One of them was none other than Anderson.

Anderson instantly recognized the bald man, but the very first thing that gripped his heart was pure, suffocating fear. There was something incredibly off about this bald man right now. He felt completely different from when Anderson had first met him ann his instincts just screamed at him to run.

And that was exactly what he did.

Anderson immediately turned to look at his men. Well, at least the eight men that remained.

"Run," Anderson ordered.

Not a single person needed any extra explanation to follow his orders. They just turned around and ran right behind him.

Yuusha didn’t bother chasing them. He just chuckled and watched as the local tribesmen looked at the fleeing knights with confused expressions. Some of them even chuckled and made fun of Anderson’s group for running away for no reason.

But there was a small group of three tribal warriors who were actually alert. They stood with their iron spears drawn and pointed them directly at Yuusha.

Yuusha just laughed. He didn’t even bother to glance at the three warriors.

"Look at them run like rats," Yuusha said. "Well, not like it matters. A few people running away barely does anything. Those guys should be high-ranking knights, but it’s been so many days that I feel like they wouldn’t have any mana left anyway. Considering the fact that they are foreigners to this continent... hmm."