Chapter 82: Journey to the Mirravele City
The Greymist Beast Mountain Range.
The deeper one ventured into the mountains, the more dangerous the beasts became.
Because of this, merchants and travelers always took the massive, days-long detour around the mountains to reach Mirravele City.
This was the quickest, most direct route to the great city, cutting the travel time down to only one day.
With his current strength, unless an army of late-stage Spirit Manifestation beasts ambushed them simultaneously, nothing in this mountain range could stop him.
Over the past night, she had successfully consolidated her cultivation and had even made another minor breakthrough, officially stepping into the second level of the Essence Condensation Realm.
ROAR—!
The Ironmare charger halted, letting out a nervous, low whinny.
Through the thick, grey mist, a massive silhouette slowly padded onto the path
Rhain’s awakened Spiritual Sense swept over the creature in a fraction of a second.
Rhain gave the snarling tiger a troubled look.
But his gaze drifted toward the girl riding beside him.
Seris had drawn her blade the moment the beast appeared, her purple eyes locked onto the tiger.
"O-okay!" Seris gave a nervous nod.
She wanted to stand beside him.
Feeling the sudden drop in temperature, the Tiger felt provoked.
Seris thrust her Frost-Bite sword forward.
Icy sword essence bloomed in the air like a mesmerizing field of frozen lotuses.
The brute physical force of a Level 6 beast was overwhelming.
"Don’t meet its raw power head-on," Rhain’s calm, commanding voice echoed from the side. "Your ice essence is meant to freeze and redirect, not to act as a blunt shield. Fluidity. Let the third stance flow into the fifth."
The tiger pounced again, its massive claws whipping through the air.
This time, Seris didn’t try to block it.
The claws missed her by a hair’s breadth, shattering a thick tree trunk behind her into splinters.
Squelch!
"Graaaawr!" the tiger shrieked in pain and fury.
It whipped its heavy, steel-whip-like tail, smashing directly into her hastily raised sword.
Frost Bite Sword clashed continuously against the beast’s calws.
"Ugh. Seriously... your stance is too wide," he muttered his complaints, while giving instructions.
The pressure of real, life-or-death combat began to strip away her hesitation.
When the tiger lunged for her throat, Seris didn’t just block—she pivoted, her blade blossoming into a chilling crescent arc that sliced a deep, freezing gash across the tiger’s head.
But after twenty minutes of high-intensity combat, Seris’s essence reserves were running dangerously low.
The White-Striped Blood Tiger, covered in freezing wounds and entirely maddened by pain, pounced at her aggressively again.
But she knew that she definitely wouldn’t be able to deflect.
Before the beast’s claws could even touch a single strand of her silver-blue hair—
Rhain didn’t even move from his mount.
He casually picked up an ordinary stone from the dirt beside his charger.
The stone tore through the air.
The massive beast didn’t even register what had happened.
The forest became quiet again.
She stared at the corpse, then turned her head toward Rhain in stupefaction.
"It was taking too long," Rhain quickly replied, brushing the dust off his fingers. "Also, good work. Your essence control is improving. You have already mastered it to forty percent, It should not be a problem for you to produce forty Ice swords."
Once Seris could comprehend it to a flawless one hundred percent, she would be able to conjure a full hundred sword lotuses simultaneously, unleashing the true, devastating power of the Epic-Grade art.
Hearing his genuine praise, a sweet, exhausted smile bloomed on Seris’s pale face. The exhaustion in her delicate body seemed to wash away instantly.
"I could have defeated it myself, you know," she muttered aggrievedly, lightly kicking a pebble at the tiger’s massive paw. "I still hadn’t used my special ice sword attack."
Inwardly, he didn’t doubt her words for a single second.
Against a Level 6 Essence Condensation beast, that strike would have shattered the tiger into a thousand frozen pieces.
"I know, but you must not rely on it." Rhain said sternly. "That attack completely drains your innate ice essence in a single strike. In a real battle, if you fail to kill every single enemy with that move, you will be left entirely drained of essence. A trump card is completely useless if it just leaves you helpless and waiting to be slaughtered by whoever is left standing."
She knew he was entirely right.
"That’s a good girl! Let’s go now. We are losing daylight." Rhain said, turning his attention back to his Ironmane Charger.
The two of them continued their journey.
But he didn’t let the fights drag on for very long, often finishing it quickly, if Seris couldn’t.
A day later.
Rhain pulled the reins, his dark grey irises reflecting the colossal sight before him.
The ancient stone walls stretched hundreds of feet into the sky and spanning as far as the eye could see.
Above the city, a few streaks of light could be seen zipping through the sky—if one looked closely, they will find a few people riding the back of flying beasts.
Compared to this towering behemoth of a metropolis, Greymist Town truly looked like nothing more than a forgotten remote village.
They had finally arrived in the Mirravele City.