Chapter 140. Demon Cult Annihilation Plan
Inside the biggest castle in the Great Dragon Academy, Catherina sat in front of an internet plant.
Despite its immense size, the castle has only three rooms: Catherina’s bedroom, a guest room, and her bathroom.
Every stone used in its construction is embedded with magical metals, enabling it to withstand attacks from high-level blessed. Surrounding her room are numerous valuable magical ingredients, metals, armor, prototype engines, and books made from magical plants that can endure for thousands of years. These items are worth enough to purchase two or three cities, yet Catherina simply uses them as decorative accessories for her room.
While Catherina was browsing the internet, her door opened, and one of her handsome butlers entered. He placed a stack of reports about recent news on the table beside her and bowed, “Lady Catherina, the field agents reported that the two human empires have started copying us and constructing their own magic academies.”
“Ohh..” Catherina casually responded. She turned off her internet plant and began reading the report. Midway, she asked, “How is the Temple’s response?”
After mentioning the Temple, Catherina fell into thought. ‘Apart from Elisa and the guy with god complex hiding within the Temple, none of the other forces pose a threat to me. I also sense that I will soon make significant progress and advance my level. While I definitely cannot defeat those two veterans with countless trump cards, advancing means I can reach their level and negotiate a deal. I still have an even more daring proposal that requires mutual agreement with them before I can move forward.’
The elf butler, upon noticing Catherina deep in thought, patiently waited until she finished before responding, “The Temple hasn’t taken any major actions; they've only increased their efforts to propagate their faith and recruit believers, while also investigating and eliminating demon cultists.”
Catherina nodded. “We’ll continue to leave some promising human seedlings for the Temple. As long as we share a few talented humans with them, they won’t be driven to the point of calling upon their god of magic. I can escape if needed, but if that old man targets the Great Dragon Academy, the academy is definitely doomed. One earthquake is enough to destroy my decades of efforts.”
After she inquired about the humans and the Temple, Catherina resumed reading the report sent by her subordinate while asking her elf butler, "What about the responses from the dwarves and elves regarding our academy?"
"The dwarves don’t seem to care much. Although they have also established a central academy, it mainly focuses on studying engines and physics, which didn’t collide with the Great Dragon Academy which mainly focused on magic sutdy. They mostly invite well-known dwarven masters and their disciples as teachers in their new academy. The dwarven council members appear to be intent on transforming their master-disciple inheritance system into a more systematic academy structure."
Catherina nodded and said, “It’s exactly as I thought. Those dwarves certainly recognized their shortcomings when it comes to talents and experts on the study of magic. The council members also understand their races prefer engineering over magic. Therefore, instead of opposing us to prevent magic enthusiasts from joining our academy, they choose to keep dwarves with talent and passion for physics from leaving to our academy.”
The elf butler agreed and added, “Regarding the elves, the elven queen attempted to establish a magic academy, while elder Elisa only made the elven school in her city more focused on arts, botany, zoology, ecology, and related fields.”
“Then, let’s give Elisa some face and give up the art major. From next year, we’ll push aside art related class and only make it available as elective. We’re a magic academy anyway, art class isn’t a necessity. I am just adding them to bait those elves to join our first batch of students.”
The elf butler nodded.
Catherina kept issuing commands until the butler left, then she started her training to raise her life level.
As the oldest and most powerful expert among those with divine strength, Catherina has already adapted her training method to fit her body perfectly.
During her attempt to develop a personal training method, she sustained numerous injuries, some of which left lasting damage. Fortunately, after her body transformed to the new dragon race, those injuries have healed.
Although the new body requires her to make slight adjustments to her training approach. She has gained much more experience and no longer causes severe injuries to her new body.
Since her level dropped to mid-level 4 after changing to a new body, it took her 200 years before Catherina’s level finally reached peak Level 4.
***
Inside the Divine Space, Cedric watched as the world entered a relatively peaceful time.
Apart from some fights between the Temple and the demon cult, a few skirmishes among human kingdoms, or some rare incident like their ship getting attacked by a kraken while trying to sneak past the mountain range, things are pretty calm in the world.
The world is now in an age where everyone seems focused on building up their own academy.
Even though the Great Dragon Academy still holds the top spot as the best and most impartial institution that studies the knowledge from all races, the battle for second place among the academies is incredibly competitive.
At this point, each magic academy already have their own specialty.
The magic academy built by the elven queen has now followed the school Elisa created and started focusing on biology.
The dwarves are still concentrated on physics. Over time, their academy’s reputation has spread widely, making it the go-to place for talented students who lack magical abilities. Some humans are even willing to pay a high price to cross the fortress and study in dwarven territory.
Among the human races, one human empire specialized in teaching magic and alchemy, while the empire hosting the Temple’s headquarters focused on magic and theology. In return for teaching theology, the academy received considerable support from the Temple.
This arrangement led to a significant advancement in technology. However, because of the unique technology development paths in his world, the technological level in the Crystal Cube world appears quite twisted compared to Earth.
In the field of botany, Cedric believes that the elves in his world are nearly on par with Earth during the late 20th or early 21st centuries. They already possess genetic engineering technologies that significantly boost crop yields.
The elves’ most advanced genetic engineering achievement is creating normal plants suitable as materials for Level 0 magic, which helps reduce the cost of Level 0 magic materials and supplementary components.
In physics, the dwarves have rivaled Earth’s late 18th or early 19th centuries with their steam engines and steam-powered factories. However, the dwarves mainly used these factories to pursue their hobbies, producing parts for underground mining railroads, cannons, guns, armor, and weapons.
The humans’ situation is quite unusual. Their alchemy technique is skewed all over the place, making Cedric unsure of its equivalent in Earth’s history. While their healing potions can treat flesh injured by beasts, their medical technology related to illnesses is quite limited. In some areas, they surpass early 21st-century Earth in achievements, but in others, they are only at a level comparable to Earth’s Middle Ages.
Apart from the races, the Magic Association, comprising creatures from various races, has also achieved notable results.
While they have not developed four-element spells, they already possess a much larger collection of three-element magic spells.
Although the Great Dragon Academy and other groups have also created some three-element spells, their numbers are significantly lower compared to the Magic Association.
Except for the creatures in the Crystal Cube world, Cedric himself has also reached a pretty important benchmark.
More than 200 years after his world advanced to Level 3, his annual GP has recently reached 20!
Meanwhile, his GP has increased to 5.000, allowing him to finally begin what he has been delaying due to financial constraints.
After reaching level 3, his world can accommodate an additional 3.000 GP of mana. However, he is exceedingly poor at that point, which forces him to delay adding more mana to his world.
The moment his GP reached 5.000, Cedric immediately spent 3.000 GP to increase the mana density in his world.
The 3.000 GP worth of mana directly raised the density of mana in the Crystal Cube world, which previously only had 2,000 GP worth of mana, by 2.5 times.
Lacius, Catherina, Elisa, and some of the blessed who have reached Peak Level 3 sensed the change in the world.
Although it will take some time for the 3.000 GP worth of mana to be released into the world, those experts have sensed the ambient mana that has been steadily increasing. As the mana grows, the quantity and quality of magical resources gradually rise.
The Peak Level 3 blessed interpreted this change as a sign to advance to a higher level.
During this period, the Peak Level 3 blessed are focused on preparing for their ascent to Level 4, resulting in a notably calm situation. They dedicated most of their time to developing a training method to reach Level 4 while gathering resources.
Even the high-ranking members of the demon cult, involved in demon creation efforts, have reduced their activity.
After a decade, the first elderly Level 3 blessed attempted to advance to Level 4.
The Peak Level 3 blessed is the ancestor of one of the human empire’s royalty, someone so old that he basically already has one foot in the coffin.
Although he does it in private, many forces can still overhear the result of the elder’s attempt.
After a week, his advancement failed, and he died from it.
The news of the Level 3 blessed’s death spread throughout the world.
Although the royal family has attempted to suppress the news, too many people are focused on the founding ancestor of their empire.
Following the death of the first Peak Level 3, several other elderly Peak Level 3 individuals forced their way to advance.
However, the Level 4 bottleneck is an extremely daunting challenge that has stumped even Lacius.
The remaining Peak Level 3 individuals sent their subordinates to infiltrate the forces of deceased Peak Level 3 members to steal their experimental notes.
Outside the Temple, nearly everyone, from dwarves, elves, professors from the Great Dragon Academy, council members of the Magic Association, branch leaders and vice leaders of the Adventurer Guilds, to the demon cultists, rushed to seize the notes from those blessed Peak Level 3.
Inside the Temple, Lacius heard the news from the current High Priest and had lifted his petrification.
Hearing about the chaos, Lacius quickly advised the High Priest not to interfere. In return, he shared some of his notes on developing a training method to attain Level 4.
Leaving the busy High Priest, Lacius headed toward the Great Dragon Academy.
After a long time, Catherina has achieved Level 5.
Since her potential level is beyond Level 5, she only needs to kill some demons to absorb the EXP they release once she reaches the completion of Peak Level 4 to progress.
With her personal strength as the foundation of her confidence, Catherina, upon hearing of Lacius’s presence, immediately allowed him into her guest room.
After some pleasantries, Lacius got to the point, “I want you to let the chaos goes on. This way, the Level 3 blessed from other forces will be greatly consumed, while the forces under the three of us will retain our strength, making us became the dominant forces for at least the next few centuries or even millennium.”
Catherina understood that the three Lacius mentioned are herself, Lacius himself, and Elisa.
She narrowed her eyes and said, “You didn’t mention something important. During this chaos, those demon cultists who’ve been a headache for your Temple have finally left their hiding places and lowered their guards. The longer this chaos lasts, the more cultist hideouts you can find.”
Lacius’s expression remains unchanged as he repeats, “But weakening other forces is still beneficial for us. The world's resources are limited, and we can’t let any other force rise, no matter how small the chance.”
“No. I honestly doesn’t care whether the remaining forces will be weakened or if a new top forces will be born.” Catherina offered, “In exchang of following your plan. I want the right to distribute the internet plants within your humans' territory without obstruction and to monopolize the internet plants business there. F course, I will wait for all the chaos to end before proceeding.”
Lacius’s eyes twitched slightly. “Giving you permanent right over internet plants management is impossible. But I’ll let you have the monopoly right for a century starting from the time you began spreading the internet plant to the human territory. ”
“I’ll be using my money to spread it, and you only give me a century monopoly right? I want at least a millenium!”
The two debated for a long time until they reached a deal where Catherina will get seven centuries monopoly right, while sharing 30% of the profit during her monopoly.
Lacius agrees to make sure no one blocks her as she distributes the internet plant across human territory. However, he won’t help if other forces try to cause problems after most of the internet has been planted. He can only guarantee that the Temple won’t be among those causing trouble.