Wandering Storm
Chapter 7: Scrutiny

The faintly glowing string led Damian to a deep valley, surrounding it was mountains with kilometers height and jagged peaks. Despite the desolated vibe of the mountains, the valley somehow maintained its liveliness. Tall, huge trees grew wildly, grass and mosses covered the soil and trees’ trunks. The valley looked like a secluded jungle. However, no animals could be found, only a few snails and bugs were living under the mass of fauna.

In the middle of the jungle, a small wooden cottage could be found beside a little stream of magically blue water. Faint yet immeasurable divine energy could be felt outside of the cottage, blurry angelic feathers seldom fell down from above.

Inside the cottage, there was a young man who was drinking herbal tea while looking at the flow of the stream. He was handsome, uncannily so, his face was perfectly chiseled, with clear blue eyes containing ivory light, his perfectly golden hair was tidily combed neatly with no flaws in sight. If some one said that he was an angel, no one could deny it. He wore a simple white linen robe, the outfit that low-ranking priests usually wore.

After triple-checking, Damian confirmed that this was indeed the true body of Alexander I. Or at least what the grand cardinals and Lord Hidain believed. Because from the young man’s body, Damian found yet another even fainter string that connected elsewhere. This was not the real body at all!

Even Damian, a weirdo who had seen countless bizarre wonders from millions of worlds couldn’t help but “wow” slightly “So even the leaders of the Church don’t know about this, what is this weird guy doing?”

Tracing along the string, Damian came to another place which had no correlations to the 2 previous ones at all. It was inside a forest, but that’s not just any forest, it was a place very popular to adventurers. In the midst of the trees, the string connected to an… odd figure.

He was bald and sickly pale, his head was so smooth that it looked more like mannequin’s head. He had tiny slit eyes and thin red lips, which made him seem rather “ugly”. He held a normal wooden staff, and wore a normal yellow tattered mage robes which was made for adventurers.

He... he was sitting around a bonfire, with some other adventurers, and they were just casually chatting in the night. And they call him with the name Alex “Why?” Damian confused as he couldn’t understand why the Pope became an adventurer, a normal but creepy one at that.

After the bizarre yet surprising revelation of the Pope, Damian could only shook his head and smiled. He decided to move on the rest of the ranking instead of touching this issue any longer, because it would bring him nothing but wasting of time.

As he moved onto the 2 top ranking, Damian found yet another 2 almost empty pages. The first page read “Margus, the Sword of The End; strongest attack: Final Descend.” and the second “Verllion, the Archmage of Cosmos; strongest attack: Novae Implosion.” That’s all, no more further information was written. But would that be able to stop Damian?

He spread his sense and covered the entire planet and found 7 hyper-powerful spots of light that contained powers beyond that of the Pope.

1 deep dark spot, with the densest amount of power was inside of a dilapidated capital, belonged to Ao the Undying Death. 4 dimmer ones each belonged to the other 4 Unholy Beasts, Zergish the Wandering Storm who’s walking towards the city Damian’s in( he already knew about this and barely cared), Luma the Deep-sea Terror who was in the deepest part of the ocean, Ihn the Endless Labyrinth resided in the depth on an ancient dungeon, and a single spot that shared by 2 giant snakes named Laquan and Ouco in the middle of a lively jungle.

The remaining 2 spots, which was considerably dimmer than the 5 above, belonged to the 2 humans “Found you” Damian smiled.

The first Rank 1 that Damian chose to look was The Sword of The End. It was in a peaceful farm in the highlands far away from the society. There, a man with a normal looking appearance could be seen living there alone with his farm.

He had short bright white hair, his face was young and handsome, but not to the point of angelic beauty, yet very charming He had bright cyan blue eyes, no beard, his brows were of the same color of his hair he wore a casual white tunic and brown cheap fabric pants “Finally, something that is not white” Damian commented.

He lived there alone, but happily. In his humble brick house hid a sword, it also looked casual, just like its wielder, wooden hilt and steel blade, that’s all. Yet Damian could only found one flaw on it, while he saw countless on the Legendary Bow Ember’s Sentence of the Rank 6 Gudan, and that bow was extremely revered “Do people here have a quirk to be young?” Damian compared Margus to Alexander the Pope.

Even his rank was higher, he didn’t seem to have the weirdness of the Pope So Damian moved onto the last spot of light.

He found yet another young man, who was also reading a book just like him. He was also young-looking, with an effeminate face, and he was short, like 1m6. He had chin-long dense blond hair, his eyes were in deep dark colors with no light or reflections “Looks like a femboy, ugh” Damian slightly weirded out by Verllion’s look.

He wore a pure black robe, Damian felt that something was hidden, so he erased the outer layer, and a beautiful starry pattern was revealed on the dark background of the robe.

He sat casually on a balcony, under bright moonlight while reading a book, the scene looked quite romantic. The book he was reading, was just a simple cheesy love story between a soldier and a noble lady.

Having finished digesting all the information that he needed, Damian put the 2 thin books back on the shelf. Their new and modest thickness stood out oddly in the middle of thick and ancient grimoires. Then he stretch out and released a big yawn, and walked out the library while finishing his Capri-sun. Without caring much, he threw the juice box into the trash can, not minding whether some one would found this bizarre little box in it.

He resumed his activities the same as last time, buying dinner and rented a room, etc.

In the next morning, he came to the tower to apply his recruitment into the raid of Zergish. Same procedures as last time, but this time, he emphasized more on the lightning spells for an obvious reason. Sonia, the blue robe mage who checked him last time, however, didn’t change one bit in her assessment. “Guess my brown robe still makes her look down on me, heh.” Damian mused.

The same line-up was recruited like last time, the brawny barbarian, the taciturn assassin, the noisy yellow robe mage,… Damian heaved a sigh of relieved, because if he didn’t control much of this world’s flow, the butterfly effect would take place. His simple action of not selling a rune stone like last time and his time spending inside the library may not seem significant, but tiny changes could heavily affect the course of the time flow.

Together with the recruits, he was led into the same meeting room in the main tower. 4 same people were sitting there waiting for them, and like last time, the man in noble attire also the one who announced the purpose of their recruitment. The same surprise and gasps were replayed, and Damian also acted like how he did last time.

After the brief meeting, they were dismissed. Damian left the tower and went home like others. However, this time, he changed something. Before leaving, he planted a seed into the noble man’s mind, which provided the man with certain strategy that Damian found applicable. To say it specifically, Damian wanted to try out that if all the attack focused onto a single spot on Zergish’s head, would the beast be defeated.

The main idea was minimizing the focal point of the Cannon of The End onto the smallest spot on Zergish’s head, as the beam covered the entire head of the beast last time and could only charred the outer fur layer.

Time flew, and the 3 last months of preparation was almost up. During that time, Damian kept on secretly feeding information to the leaders of the raid team.

All was set. 3 days before Zergish’s arrival, countless monsters rushed towards the city madly like last time, as they were fleeing from the surging storm from far far away.

Just like the first loop, magic circles erupted wildly and explosively. However, the defense were now more calculative and more abundant, as Damian himself had secretly tampered it. He tried to modestly help the city defend against the lesser monsters first without piquing their attention, and he had succeed. He did all this just to eliminate variables and study the main event better, not because he wanted to help the city or anything. This is still his vacation after all.

The second day came and the greater beasts were starting to flooded out. Only to be again, welcomed by the arrows and artillery spells from the city. As the city’s wall defense was miraculously improved, the mages and clerics had more time to focus on enhancing arrows and strength of the melee combatants.

Finally, the third day came, the colossal outer wall still had 3 times the amount of mana it had had in the previous loop, and the bullets, arrows, weapons were still abundant.

The monsters were still rushing towards the wall, and suddenly they were all stunned by a deafening roar from afar. The roar shook the entire grassland, along with the cacophony of buzzing electricity and booming lightning. On the horizon, a boundless gray swirling thunder storm was approaching, and right under it was a milk white figure of a unicorn with the muscles of a dinosaur. Its towering legs covered the ground and its beautiful deadly coiled horn connected with the thunder storm.

“Little horsey is here…” Damian smiled at the arrival of the main actor of this act. Zergish, the Wandering Storm, the ancient Unholy Beast had once again awoken from its slumber and continued the path of pure destruction.

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