Chapter 1013 - 849: One Million Tons of Magic Metal

The Duke closed his eyes, his spiritual power extending out along the thousands of branches of the faith channels, like lighting one delicate lamp after another in the darkness.

Each node that was lit corresponded to a believer of the Shadow Council, and he could clearly sense the current emotional state and the intensity of the spiritual power fluctuations of each believer.

Most of the believers felt uneasy and confused, as Marcus’s Life Stone had just extinguished not long ago, and the energy fluctuations of the descent ceremony were so intense that even the outer sentinels could sense the anomaly, which undoubtedly caused considerable panic among the believers.

The Duke did not directly comfort them; instead, he focused on investigation.

He retraced each faith channel, meticulously examining every believer.

Low-tier believers were quickly checked, while the Level 2 Peak Shadow Mages were slightly more complicated, as their Spiritual Sea still retained the Shadow Marks bestowed by Salonos, but since the faith channel was hijacked, these marks had lost their energy source and were dissipating at an extremely slow rate.

He subtly accelerated their dissipation using the power of the Light Divine Status.

The Spiritual Seas of the three Great Mages were the deepest and most complex, with the infiltration of Shadow Energy reaching deep into the soul core.

However, this deep infiltration made it so that any remaining foreign will had nowhere to hide, and he could see clearly that the anchor points of faith for the three had completely shifted to him; the Power of Shadow Rules in their Spiritual Sea remained the attributes given by Salonos, but the control had been entirely stripped from its original owner.

There was not a single anomaly.

By the time he investigated the last believer, the first ray of morning light had already penetrated through the window.

The Duke leaned back in his chair, slowly withdrawing his spiritual power from the crystal.

Salonos indeed hadn’t left any backdoor.

This was not entirely out of caution; more likely, it was due to stinginess.

Transmitting items across planes is extremely costly, even for a god.

From the transmission records left in this crystal, Salonos had bestowed only a handful of holy artifacts upon the Shadow Council, each transmission accompanied by a substantial consumption of the Power of Faith and resistance from the Plane Barrier.

Finding this piece of Shadow Soil in the Oracle Plane wasn’t easy, and cultivating believers took a long time, but to him, these believers were more like a field where seeds had been sown.

No need for careful nurturing, just timely harvesting.

In Salonos’s eyes, the Shadow Council was merely a tool for collecting the Power of Faith, not worthy of further investment.

Those five holy artifacts were likely all Salonos had spent a great deal to send over, initially prepared as a backup plan for himself, yet the Duke had found a loophole.

Three months in the Oracle Plane flowed like a gently coursing river.

In the joint archives of the Rising Sun District, the first batch of students who completed basic Meditation Technique training had graduated and returned to their respective districts as seed teachers, spreading the knowledge they learned to more grassroots believers.

The joint patrol teams of the Three Great Sects and Light Sect established a fixed sentry post network along the boundary line of the Rising Sun District, upgrading the previously scattered patrols into a systematic joint protection system.

The Shadow Council sunk into complete silence, with Marcus stationed at the northern fortress and Lucia and Caitlin guarding the southern forest, both north and south, no longer clashing with sect forces, and occasionally providing information on abnormal activities in district peripheries to the Light Sect via Duke’s intelligence channels.

All the gears quietly turned along the tracks preset by the Duke, and the most direct change for him was the increase in the Power of Faith.

The expansion speed of the Divine Court nearly doubled compared to the past, and the surface of the Spring of Life expanded by a circle as well, with the patterns on the long-dormant World Tree Seed in the depths of the spring seeming more distinct than three months ago.

On this morning, while the Duke was reading a weekly report submitted by Robert in his study, a Message Mage from the Earth Sect hurried to Furnace Castle, bringing an exploration report signed personally by Baroque.

The Earth Sect Message Mage’s soil-colored robe still bore the dust of the mining area, clearly having rushed directly from the exploration site.

The Duke took the report, opened the first page, and his gaze slightly hardened.

The report meticulously recorded the Earth Sect exploration team’s discovery of a giant Magic Metal ore vein deep in the northern mountains.

The main ore vein lay in a low hilly region at the junction of the Rising Sun District and Wind District, with sparse vegetation and exposed rock layers; the exploration team was initially conducting routine geological surveys there, but during sampling they unexpectedly broke through surface sedimentary rock and found a richly concentrated Magic Metal ore layer beneath.

Baroque personally led a preliminary exploration, confirming the ore vein’s surprisingly long main body, with an average width of several dozen meters, a thickness up to nearly ten meters in its thickest part, and extremely high ore grade, with Magic Metal content in some areas far surpassing any current mining site of the Earth Sect.

Baroque scribbled a note at the end of the report: The scale and grade of this ore vein are unprecedented in my centuries-long mining career; given sect’s current technology, it would take at least several hundred years to exhaust the vein.

He suggested that the Duke himself should inspect it, as the ore vein might hold great value for him.

The Duke closed the report, said "lead the way" to the Message Mage, and then stood up to set off.