Chapter 122. The Infamous Toxic Redflag, Lacius
During this whole week, Catherina has been either watching elven drama, short videos, reading novels, or trolling on some forum.
Thankfully, there's no game. Otherwise, god knows how long Catherina will play after ten whole years of turning into a caveman, or cavedragon to be exact.
“I seriously shouldn't have asked you to visit my house.” The elf sighed when he saw Catherina had just stopped using the internet after a whole week. “At least you should pay rent or something. Don't you know how suffocating it is living in a small house together with a dragon?”
“But I don't have money.” Catherina shamelessly shrugged. But soon she felt a bit embarrassed. “Well, anyway, thank you for your hospitality. It's my first time visiting a civilization after a decade. So, my social skills have decreased to zero.”
“I might not have money now, but I'll find a way to repay you later.” Catherina patted the elf. “So, can you bring me to Elisa now?”
“Sigh… alright.” The elf brought Catherina to the government office. Then, one of the staff members who had received news from Elisa brought Catherina to the city center.
Once Catherina arrived there, she immediately saw Elisa’s massive tree body.
In front of it, there was a giant screen playing something.
Catherina took a look at the screen playing in front of Elisa, and her regressed social skills took control once again. “Are you watching the new murder mystery drama? The killer is actually the baker in front of the main character’s house. I never expected such a plot twist. This story is incredible.”
A branch immediately shot from Elisa’s tree crown and whipped Catherina, “No spoiler.”
Losing her mood to continue watching the drama, Elisa turned toward Catherina, “The god of creation has mentioned you to me. I've prepared three Level 3 blessed, 17 Level 2 blessed, and more than a hundred Level 1 blessed to help you level up.”
“Usually, these teams will gather demons and kill them within my territory to help me level up. But I knew my mobility was indeed quite low and unsuitable to fight against the demon king that would spawn in some random place. So, I'll lend them to you for the next forty years.”
“Killing a demon is much easier than capturing them. I expect you to reach Level 4 by then. Otherwise, I'll need to seek the help of that bothersome old man with a god complex if the demon king appears in my area.”
Catherina became excited, then curious, “You’re seriously lending me your subordinates? Also, who's the old man you mentioned?”
“He calls himself the god of alchemy. Anyway, he's extremely dangerous. You should stay away from him.”
Catherina immediately recalled one of the pictures Cedric had shared before.
It was from the album filled with handsome men of various races, used to tempt Catherina into reincarnation. She remembered that one of them was called La-something and was also known as the god of alchemy.
“Ohh… that handsome guy with an evil aura,” Catherina muttered while nodding.
Elisa, who had heard it, felt a bit speechless. She warned Catherina once more, “Even if you got tempted by his handsome look, you must still run away the instant you saw him. Right now, he should be as powerful as me.”
Elisa also added, “I know a human named Helion who escaped from human territory. He said that this guy is the true controller of the human world. Furthermore, he’s the mastermind behind most large-scale wars there and has a hobby of doing experiments. If you fall into his hands, he will 100% dissect you.”
Once he explained Lacius’s danger, Elisa looked at Catherina and became even more flabbergasted.
“Stop with that ‘I can fix him’ face. You’d be lucky if he didn’t dupe you really hard. From Helion’s words and some historical records, that old guy might even be responsible for the deaths of several transmigrators like us.”
This finally made Catherina serious. But she still asked another, “You keep calling him an old guy. How old is this god of alchemy, even? Aren't you the oldest creature around?”
“Who said that?! I am not old, I am just mature!” Elisa’s tree crown rustled in agitation.
Once she calmed down, Elisa added, “Honestly, I am not sure how old he is. But he's at least older than me by a hundred or two hundred years.”
This time, Catherina fell silent.
She only regained her senses when the team Elisa had prepared gathered around her and got ready to leave the city.
Recalling Lacius’s handsome face once more, Catherina’s feelings became complicated.
At last, she can only sigh, ‘As expected of a magical world. The anti-aging method is much better than any cosmetics on Earth.’
***
In the blink of an eye, twenty years have passed.
During these twenty years, Catherina has been traveling the world with a group of more than a hundred elves.
With assistance from Cedric, who has once again become a demon-detecting map, the hundreds of elves and Catherina almost wiped out every demon in the elven and dwarven territory.
They even cleansed more than half of the giant ant demon nests that are located underground.
If not for the giant ant’s complicated nest, she might have thoroughly annihilated all the ants in the nest.
Although not all giant ants were demons. But killing half of the giant ant nest, combined with the demons she had slain before entering it, has pushed Catherina to Peak Level 3.
Right now, she has reached peak Level 3, while there are still around ten years before the demon king's appearance.
For the remaining years, Catherina and a few high-level elves had planned to temporarily join hands with the force Helion created and travel to the human territory to kill demons.
As for Helion. While Catherina is busy leveling, he has already died from natural causes.
Before dying, he had recruited close to a hundred human students, which he brought to the elven territory to be introduced to his elves and dwarves students.
With Hellion's death, his several hundred students have created an organization called the Magic Association. A place focused on studying magic.
In a year, the Magic Association has created several new spells and propagated like a mushroom after rain.
They're especially popular among the blessed with divine strength.
Unlike those blessed by elements, those with divine strength only gain increased strength as they level up.
But with the help of magic, they can finally create fireballs, waterballs, or whatever balls just like the other blessed.
Of course, it's not without some problems.
For starters, because divine strength blessed gained their strength from the mana constantly circulating in their body. Once they use that mana to cast spells, their body will become weakened.
Not only that. The power of a divine strength blessed’s spell is much weaker than an elemental blessed's spell. Even when they're at the same level and use a similar amount of mana to cast a spell.
Although there are a lot of disadvantages for those blessed with divine strength blessed, they still happily learned spells. After all, although their punch still hurt more than the fireballs they shot, shooting fireballs is still more awesome.
Among those divine strength blessed, Catherina, who had also awakened as divine strength blessed, became especially excited when she cast her first spell.
She even planned to remove the ‘temporary’ part and permanently join the Magic Association once she reached Level 4.
With her new ability to cast spells, Catherina prepared to travel to the human territory together with dozens of elite elves who's at least a Level 2 blessed.
The one leading Catehrina and her group is one of the human apprentices Helion accepted.
Because most of the human apprentices Helion accepted had bad blood with the Temple, the Magic Association also opened several secret branches in human territory to gather intelligence and resources.
The target of Catherina’s group was one of these secret branches.
As for why members of the Magic Association willingly took on such thankless work and even revealed their secret branch, let’s just say they had been receiving a lot of investment from a rich lady, or rather, a rich tree. This made it incredibly difficult to refuse her requests.
Before leaving elven territory, all the elves following Catherina wore hooded robes to hide their faces.
As for Catherina. Because she has reached Level 4 from killing demons instead of growing slowly, her body is still around eight meters long. Even so, she's too big to hide inside a carriage due to her size, and wearing a hooded robe like the elves is an even more ridiculous idea.
This made them a bit troubled. Especially if they somehow need to enter a human city together with Catherina.
After discussion with the members of the Magic Association who often went to the human territory, they soon decided that Catherina should be identified as one of the Level 3 elves’ mounts.
In the past decades, some Level 3 blessed from the human races has traveled to north and south.
The northern mountain range was still extremely difficult to bypass, especially due to the high density of dragons that had been living there for several generations.
Except for special groups like those from the Magic Association, who had studied the dragons’ movements and obtained safe travel routes, it was becoming increasingly difficult for others to pass through the mountain range.
But the southern mountain is a different case.
Due to their increased combat power and status, those Level 3 humans set their sights on a possible new mount, dragons.
Compared to the dragons in the northern mountain range that lived in groups. The dragons in the southern part of the continent lived alone.
This led to the meager population of dragons there. Thus, the Level 3 blessed can occasionally capture a lone dragon and train them as a mount.
As more and more Level 3 blessed own dragons, they became synonymous with a high leveled mount. Thus, seeing a dragon in cities has become normal. It'll just mean there's a Level 3 blessed in the city.
Thanks to this fact, everyone could introduce Catherina as one of the Level 3 elves’ mounts whenever it's necessary for them to bring her into the city.
Although she's a bit unwilling, Catherina still followed the prepared plan and bypassed the mountain range.
Because they traveled together with Catherina, even when they met a group of dragons, the dragons only flew around Catherina a few times before leaving.
Soon, the group entered the humans’ territory.
After receiving information, the second phase of the leveling plan commences. This time, it lasted for ten years.
Most of the time, Catherina’s team followed the clues from the Magic Association’s secret branch, with occasional guidance from Cedric.
With their extremely efficient demon-hunting speed, news of a demon-hunting group that owned a massive dragon quickly spread throughout human territory.
They occasionally received invitations from certain kingdoms or were attacked due to the ire of other groups.
Except for the kingdoms and empires that flocked to them after learning there was a Level 3 blessed in their group, the Temple also took action and began gathering information on them.
But unlike the other forces, the Temple didn’t do anything further. They merely collected information about Catherina’s team, their location, and what they were doing.
After they gathered that information, it traveled upward throughout the Temple’s higher-ups before reaching Lacius.
When Lacius saw the news, he immediately told the Temple to secretly observe the situation.
After a year of observation, Lacius even made a move himself and observed from afar.
When he saw the elves traveling with a talking dragon, Lacius immediately concluded that the dragon was most likely a hero sent by the creator.
Recalling the last hero he met, who also traveled to fight a demon for the sake of fighting against a demon king. Lacius immediately told the Temple to prepare for combat while sending secret support to Catherina's group.
***
Although the Temple’s observation made Catherina’s team feel uneasy, especially since not only Elisa but even people from the Magic Association kept warning them about the Temple’s danger, they soon noticed a subtle but positive change.
Not long after the Temple began observing them, the other nosy forces from the kingdoms and empires finally kept their distance, while still maintaining a certain level of surveillance.
Not only that, it became easier for them to enter cities and gather the resources needed for their travels.
News about demons also became easier to find, even without relying on the Magic Association’s informants or using Cedric’s help.
Under the attention of many top forces, the team continued hunting demons until Catherina’s level nearly reached upper Level 4 within ten years.