Chapter 471 The Tower of Pain

While Cain was studying his Spell Crafting that night, he found the most curious of bookmarks. Between two pages, securely tucked in there was a single page of thin rice paper with handwritten notes on it.

The spell that it was tucked into was one to create Training Dummies, the sort that the Central Continent uses to train newbies, but much higher quality than any that Cain has seen before.

[What is this crap? Even for a beginner, this is too basic, isn’t it? I have created a much better version by following the advice of Karl our beloved Master and the God of Magic. Instead of some stupid dummy, I would make a tower of trials. The process is the same, you only need to bind the training targets inside a tower and add the separate space enchantment to create the levels.

What a bunch of simpletons, do they really think the students are this dense?]

That’s where the rant leaves off, but on the other side of the translucent sheet, there is a detailed description of how to create the Tower of Trials, as the student called it. There is even the diagram for the separate space enchantment, with a note that it’s possible that a Biologist might be reading this and wouldn’t have taken enchanting yet.

Cain counts himself as more on the Biologist side of the equation, and he certainly hasn’t taken the Ancient’s full course on Enchanting, so he puts his mind into memorizing the separate space enchantment.

By morning, he is pretty sure that he understands how it works, and he is getting eager to try out this new spell. But where should he build an enormous tower? In order to hold all the inscriptions, it will need to be over twenty meters tall, and the Separate Space enchantment can only enhance an area’s actual space by a few hundred times, so it will have to be a pretty big building to give the challengers enough room to fight freely and not feel like they are trapped in an arena..

ɴ[0)ᴠᴇʟ With some consideration, the answer is clearly Long Fang Valley. There are a lot of people there who need the levels, unlike here where they will get them much faster hunting Mythic beasts. Even if they are brand new to their system, with a Mythic attack ability and a group, they will race through the levels fighting beasts with so much power.

The Echoes have things pretty well in hand here, they even picked out the contestants for the City Guardian trials for Cain to review, so they can be trusted to complete the task. He doesn’t even have to motivate them, they did that themselves with the promise of new types of crops to hybridize once more cities fall under their influence.

Cain needs to be the one to add the Guild Member, but he can do that from a message without ever actually seeing them. Therefore, the Echoes will be his proxies for the Central Continent until he can return.

Building the tower likely won’t take too much time if he uses summons to build the actual structure, but there is a lot of trouble on the continent, and Neffie is too busy at home to go help Aggramor with his civic issues. He has the city itself under control, and repairs have started, but not having his successor in town has made a lot of the demons nervous about the future, should he somehow be killed.

Much more powerful beings have been reported lately, Awakened Monsters that have made their way from the oceans and the other continents. The Central Continent has never faced that before, and the few awakened among the Demons, with the aid of the Darklight Host, who can summon Mythic beings with the current setting of the Guild Skill, isn’t enough to calm all their fears.

[You could always make two. One for us, one for Uncle Aggie.] Moana jokes, using Neffie’s nickname for the Demon King.

[They’d likely make better use of it anyhow since so many of them are already high in physical quality and modifiers.] Vala agreed, thinking of a pure white spire stuck smack dab in the middle of the black stone Demon Capital.

It would be magnificently tacky, standing out like a sore thumb among the uniform surroundings. It would be a glorious practical joke. Maybe he does need to make them a tower of trials.

But before they go, Cain needs to find the owner of the farm. Now that the barriers around the awakened zone are gone, there is no good reason not to have a Guild House right here in the middle of nowhere. The buildings are large enough, or at least the modified barn that makes up the majority of the indoor housing and experimental animal holding area is, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

Asking around briefly, Cain found that he was even here at the farm right now, trying to convince the Echoes to give him a few cuttings of the Peach trees to plant at his own house in town.

“Welcome back, Duke Cain. I think I know what you’re going to ask, the Echoes have been hinting at it for a while now, so it’s no big surprise. I’ll give it to you for one Platinum bar and two cuttings from the peach tree.” The old farmer informed Cain with a smile on his face.

Not only could he get enough cash to safely retire, but he would also get a chance to grow the peach trees himself, which would make for an exceptional amount of side income selling the juice if he wanted.

Assuming he could manage to grow them without the intense amount of magical manipulation that the Echoes put into their cultivation. Mythic fruits didn’t just grow anywhere without any outside assistance after all.

“You’ve got yourself a deal. You might need some luck getting the cuttings to grow anywhere that isn’t as saturated in mana as this farm is right now, but I will gladly give you them as payment.” Cain agreed easily.

The old man even had the paperwork ready to be signed, and a few minutes later Cain was ready to expand the Darklight Host’s official sphere of influence.

[New Guild House Added]

[Name New Guild House?] Y/N

No, definitely not. Cain knew he was terrible at naming things, so the name could wait for later, once the others had a chance to brainstorm something better than he could come up with. Delegating responsibility for the parts you don’t like to do is the very best part of being a leader after all.

In anticipation of being accepted into the Tortuga group of international destinations, the Guild had made a spare pair of Intercontinental Travel Circles, so Cain borrowed one from the Guild Bank and looked around the yard.

This place is so busy that there really isn’t a very good spot to set up a circle, but it shouldn’t be too hard to set somewhere aside. The far side of the main house looked fairly promising. It’s out of the way now, since the crowd has long since outgrown the ability to actually stable animals in the small three-stall shelter. If Cain removes that and installs a platform it would make for a good spot to transfer in and out.

“Attention everyone. As the farm is now an official Guild House, I will be linking it to our other facilities. That means we need a platform and I’m taking volunteers to design and build something worthy of the Southern Continent.” Cain yelled to get everyone’s attention, unknowingly using his mental voice as well to make the shout just as loud at the edge of the farm as it was right next to him.

“Bloody hell that’s loud. I’m an architect and I’m willing to make up a great design for the platform. We might not be a walled city, but the Darklight Farm is a proper force to be reckoned with these days.” A large Youkai with a fox mask on under a hooded robe and seven fluffy white tails declared proudly.

“Then I will help build it.” A few Earth Mages stepped forward to catch everyone’s attention.

“We will plant a proper flower garden around it. The Southern Continent has a wide variety of plants nobody else will have seen before.” One elderly beastkin druid declared on behalf of the group that spent their days helping the Echoes develop the farm’s crops.

“I’ll leave you to it then. But since this is now a permanent location, I will be doing some upgrades.”

Cain called a group of Mythic Earth Elementals, upgraded from lesser quality with [Versatility], and ordered them to start building a collection of river stone buildings with slate shake roofs. One combined living room and kitchen with two bedrooms, every unit was identical, and they made three dozen at a time until they had over two hundred units, enough to cover everyone who lived in the tents near the farm full time.

“There’s nothing in them, but the wet season is coming, and they will be much dryer than the tents,” Cain informed the shocked crowd.

It wasn’t the act of generosity that startled them, Cain was well known for random acts of generosity. No, what shocked them was that he had the ability to make them hundreds of houses in ten minutes and they had been living in tents for months. Was it possible that nobody had ever asked him to upgrade the lodging, thinking that it might be asking too much and make him angry? If that was the case, they all felt just a bit sheepish at their reluctance to ask something that he clearly viewed as no big deal.

Even if he hadn’t bought the farm if he could assemble them that fast, he could level them just as quickly. They weren’t enchanted for defense or anything, so realistically any adult in camp could likely kick one to the ground in a few seconds.