Chapter 542: Over Compensation
[Hold up…Neytri? When did Nepherage change her human name? I thought it was Nicole or something like that,] Hurricroak asked the other kaijin.
[Last…week…read…it…somewhere…,] Frosttusk answered, not exactly elaborating.
Thankfully, Razorstella did it for him.
[Nepherage got really into adventure genre books, she picked up the name after reading a book about…what was it…an unusually buff botanist finding a lost civilization and hooking up with the twin prince and princess of said civilization? I think Neytri was the name of the princess.]
[Wait…was that the one with shirtless man on the cover with the “R18” in the corner?,] Spring Brawler asked, [because I read that and I have complaints on the usage of honey as-]
[OKAY, I AM ASKING LOGOS TO IMPLEMENT AGE LOCKS IN THE LIBRARY,] Hurricroak interjected.
[Wait, isn’t that section under Pathos’s jursidiction?,] Razorstella asked.
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=Pathos, what the fuck?=
=I thought we established that proto-kaijins counted as children!=
=Oh right…shit, you think that workshop is still there?=
=Right…think that old lizard is bitter about the scar?=
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Zhen Ba Yin couldn’t help but to stare at this old man for his flippant attitude. Normally, most people would recognize that the captain of the guard for a city as powerful Willow Scale would be given a modicum of more respect than what this old man showed, and if they didn’t, then Zhen Ba Yin would normally have no trouble teaching them the meaning of the word. However, when he was dealing with this particular old man…he couldn’t help but think that was a really, really bad idea.
As to why he came to this conclusion, there were at least two incredibly obvious reasons.
Firstly, it should be noted that as the captain of the guard, and as a member of the Zhen Clan, Zhen Ba Yin was trained to be able to detect a person’s aether, anima and/or any other energies at a glance. This meant he was able to pick up things such as the capacity and quality of one’s aether. Which is why, when one of the three women that showed up with his niece’s…acquaintances in their custory he could immediately tell that the one that was visibly taller in incredibly strange clothes was an Aether Grandmaster, at least.
This in turn meant that this old guy was most likely stronger than her, which lead to the second reason, and one that scared the shit out of him, he couldn’t get a read on this guy…at all.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t detect any energy coming off of him, Zhen Ba Yin could clearly detect aether radiating off of the old man the problem was that it was, for a lack of a better word, inconsistent.
In terms of raw power, it felt as if the old man had the power of a peak Aether Grandmaster or maybe even that of a first ringed Aether Lord. Zhen Ba Yin was more inclined to believe the latter than the former due to the disciple woman being an Aether Grandmaster, and as a general rule, the master should at least be several times stronger than their disciple…unless the disciple is a monstrous talent like a certain wonder child from the clan, but that was irrelevant for now.
The problem, however, was that the power in question was weird both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Quantitatively, it didn’t feel like this old guy had the normal aether amount of your average Aether Grandmaster. Instead, it felt like he had at least seven times the amount of aether that one of his level should have.
Qualitatively, it was even weirder. Most aether warriors only exhibited one affinity of aether, maybe two to three if they had an unusual type, but it was always a ratio that added to a whole. This old guy on the other hand was exhibiting seven types of aether at once, all of which were of different variants.
In essence, Zhen Ba Yin felt he wasn’t talking to a single mysterious aether warrior, but one that was essentially seven different warriors rolled into one, as insane as that sounded.
He had heard tales of forbidden aether formulas that could enable such thing via, transplanting one’s soul between person to person, but there’s not way such an unscrupulous cultivator would show up to Willow Scale, especially during the Sapling Festival…right?
Either way, the fact that this guy existed and had disciples, indicated that he also most likely part of a powerful organization of some kind or he himself was some lone powerhouse in the process of establishing one, meaning that it was in Zhen Ba Yin’s best interest to not anger or insult this guy.
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‘Godsdammit.’
Unfortunately, nobody seem to have given the memo to the Lei Family’s young master, who for some stupid reason, thought he had the authority to shout at the old man who was clearly stronger than him.
Zhen Ba Yin was just about to stop him, but at this point, the young master was on a roll of sorts.
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At this point, Lei Zhong and the fox-like disciple were about to throw hands with each other once again, but they were both stopped by Zhen Ba Yin and Neytri, respectively, by grabbing their cloth collars like they were rambunctious cats and pulling them back.
It made for a comedic sight, but it didn’t really resolve anything.
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The mere sight of the bottles caused all of the warriors present to instinctually understand that whatever the contents were, definitely had to do with elixirs.
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Having finished speaking, the old man proceeded to turn and walk away from this whole fiasco, signaling for his disciples to follow.
They were initially confused before shrugging their shoulders and going along with it, following the old man to one of the exits that just so happened to be guarded.
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The plaza in which all of this went down was locked down by Zhen Ren Fa’s orders, which was still the case as Zhen Ba Yin had yet to give the guards locking down the plaza any orders to the contrary.
A pair of guards that were blocking the exit was just about to do their job, until they received a signal from their captain to just let them through.
From a distance, they could see that their captain had opened one of the bottles to see what it contained. Whatever it was, it was enough for the captain to have this strange, almost haunted look on his face.
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Zhen Ren Fa was about to yell again in regards to letting the “Shen” people go without any further punishment, but once she saw her uncle’s face, it was replaced with a feeling of anxiety.
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The old man had indeed compensated for the price of the slave he just bought off of Lei Zhong, in fact, he had overcompensated.
The guy had to know that a bottle of Sacred Beast Essence, let alone two, was enough to buy a thousand slaves that was of the same value as that girl they just took…right?
If he did, then were these bottles just worth nothing to him?
If he didn’t, then where on Valresta could one find a place that allowed such frivolous expenditure.
Either way, Zhen Ba Yin knew there was something he had to do, something incredibly important.
‘I need to tell the Patriarch about this…now.’
