Chapter 27: Worm King
Hot winds carrying sand grains swept across the Iron Fir Hills, producing faint whimpering sounds. Garoth slammed the Rockgrub worm heavily onto an open patch of ground, his dragon claws pressing firmly against the giant insect's head carapace, forcing the nearly twenty-meter-long creature to curl into a ring shape.
If not for the layer of insectoid armor covering its body, with its length and girth, the Rockgrub worm might easily be mistaken for a giant serpent rather than an insect at first glance.
"Rockgrub worms live underground. Digging tunnels is their innate talent, making them excellent at concealment and ambush," Garoth thought. "If I can tame one, I could have it steal black oil for me. No, it wouldn't really be stealing—the black oil deposits are unclaimed resources anyway. This would just be using my abilities to obtain them."
The Kamel Black Oil Field had tight defenses, possibly including underground protection measures. But the Ser Wilderness contained multiple oil fields, and some smaller ones had less stringent security, offering better chances to acquire black oil.
As for Samantha—her alchemy skills were currently unreliable. She hadn't yet learned to extract and refine black oil. Even if she could use alchemy to directly extract oil from monsters, the efficiency would be too low. Black oil naturally formed over extremely long periods through special underground reactions in monster remains. Unless one possessed exceptionally advanced alchemy skills, the process would require enormous amounts of monster material to produce small quantities of black oil, making the effort disproportionate to the yield. Natural deposits remained the primary source.
Refining black oil, however, was feasible. Though Garoth had never tasted higher quality black oil, he imagined the difference would be like comparing ordinary metal to hundred-fold tempered steel—refined black oil would undoubtedly be more effective.
His gaze returned to the Rockgrub worm. Garoth exhaled deeply, his claws maintaining an iron grip on the creature's head to prevent escape. Quasi-spell skill—Mind Link.
A white gleam flashed in his dragon pupils as Garoth closed his eyes to concentrate, extending intangible psychic energy to touch the Rockgrub worm's mind and sense its consciousness. The Mind Link skill was something Garoth had excavated from his bloodline after prolonged effort. Whether through luck or because his intentions were clear enough for his Adaptive Evolution talent to activate, he'd awakened this skill relatively quickly.
It allowed the caster to perceive the target's emotions while enabling the target to comprehend the caster's thoughts, facilitating limited communication through the mental realm. This gave Garoth a means to potentially tame the Rockgrub worm.