"Are you sure you're not the evil master here?" Sophia looked at Ray with a wary smile. "I almost feel sorry for them. Almost."
Ray explained his plan, and by the time he completed it, Sophia started to see Ray as a scary person and thanked whatever being sent him here — for the simple reason of his reaction to the last situation.
"Then you're in?" Ray asked for confirmation.
"Of course, but you think we really can take him down?" Sophia asked in concern. "We didn't use the fusion ability. Are you sure we can take him down without it?"
One of the sub-abilities of the Fate Contract grants the ability to fuse the spirit with the cultivator's material soul, elevating it in both attribute and tripling the host's fighting power. But it has its negatives and aftereffects if used too long.
"Of course." Standing up, he took a pair of daggers. "With the fusion, I'll jump to his level. Even if it's only for a couple of seconds, it's enough."
Ray entered back into the truck, standing in the middle. He took a bottle of some silver liquid and a brush and started to draw a formation in the center.
After finishing, he stabbed one of the daggers into the center, and feeding it soul power, it shone along with the additional formation.
"So this is the teleport formation?" Sophia recognized the formation and asked, "And why is there no coordinate sequence?"
And since she was quite knowledgeable, Sophia noticed the missing part.
"Because it's not fixed," Ray answered and popped the other dagger in front of her. "These are soul tools I created before. They allow me to send anything I touch with one to the other's position. It's a failed prototype though."
While training and studying during his past times, and maybe thanks to the heavy use of formations and runes in the crafting process of the soul tools, Ray found it easy to create some "simple" gadgets based on his past life's fantasy work.
"I think it's good enough though. How is it supposed to be a failure?" Sophia was confused at his train of thought — after all, a tool that can help you change position is equivalent to gaining a new skill.
exepet Ray was actually intent on creating space marks (Minato style?) but ended up with only a pair that could shift between them.
"Well, the idea behind them was on another level, so there's that," Ray added and confirmed the formation was working. He stood there for a second before looking at the walls.
"I don't know if you'll even understand, but make sure to seal everyone I send from now on."
Leaving those words, he slipped away — not noticing a couple of roots sprouting from the ground. Like snakes, they wrapped the dagger formation, generating a small net around it. After it completely formed, it rose on top of the formation, creating an altar-like structure hovering above it. The latter's light dimmed and vanished, leaving only the dagger below the hovering altar.
An hour later, a couple of hours after midnight…
In a small mountain, not that deep in the Dou Forest, Ray was almost done investigating the ground around the base of the evil masters.
And now a small white fox could be seen jumping from tree to tree until he came closer to the other side of the mountain, coming face to face with the main hidden entrance of the said base.
Ray was about to start his plan, seeing the last part of the hunter group entering as the door got sealed.
From the memories, Ray figured out the movement pattern of the group — most of their members did whatever they did at night and would retreat to this base in the last hours before dawn. The base itself was sealed, forbidding entry or exit all day.
Half an hour later, what Ray was waiting for started to happen — the mountain's early morning mist began to gather and intensify.
Nodding and activating his Light Material Soul, and with a deep breath, both his rings lit up, followed by Ray breathing out a dense crystal mist.
The crystal mist Ray released blended with the natural mountain mist, taking on its visual and physical properties as it slowly invaded the area.
This was one of the things that made his ring skills unique and overpowered — the second "Material Shift" soul skill. It not only allowed him to fuse attributes into his crystal mist but also to change its properties (visually and physically) to any form, as long as he knew its properties or had it around him.
The first time Ray used it, he somehow got stuck with the idea of a chameleon in his mind.
He kept on generating this type of mist until he was almost out of soul energy, then stopped for a few minutes to let it recover, repeating the process couple of time.
Sitting in meditation, he started to recover his energy and regulate his condition for half an hour. By the time he stood up, the sun was starting to rise.
Standing up, he retrieved the second pair of daggers he had left.
"Let's get started." With a jump, his body changed — hair turning silver, fox ears popping up, and nine tails appearing.
The moment his leg touched the ground, his body broke into light particles, seeping through the cracks in the wall.
The moment the light particles (Ray) appeared inside the cave, they started to change color and vanish amid the mist. Ray used his elemental body to infiltrate the cave corridors with one purpose — the prisoner's whereabouts. But that wasn't all. With smart use of his light manipulation, he changed the frequency of his light to invisible wavelengths.
Sadly, with the already high consumption of the elemental body, he had already surpassed his regeneration rate. So the moment he entered the imprisoning hall, he was forced to deactivate the ability.
Thankfully, his crystal mist was already blending with the natural mountain mist, giving Ray the same concealment feeling as the mist they used to.
Sitting in a hidden crack on the wall, he began to regenerate his soul power again, taking almost ten minutes.
After finishing, he chose to start by observing the base first.
Closing his eyes, he started to sense his own mist, and a full map of the inside and outside of the complex base appeared in his spiritual sense.
With it, Ray now knew the position of all the breathing beings inside and their strength based on their auras. This let Ray sigh in relief.
Not counting the over a thousand captives beside him, there were almost 80 to 90 soul masters, with their strength not passing 4 rings.
The strongest one had 7 rings — hard, but with his advancement and Sophia's help, he could take him down. The good part was that he was in a cave far from the populated sections, and from the look of it, he was in deep meditation, so Ray had time to clean up before fighting him directly.
Slipping outside the crack, he saw rows upon rows of people of all ages chained to the walls and ground, eyes closed. After checking a few, he found them thankfully still alive and only unconscious.
Ray looked at the sleeping guards nearby. Observing the place as he got closer to them, he noticed they had dark numbers engraved. He stabbed the dagger into the first one. Moments later, he vanished from the place. Ray stabbed the second one, and he also vanished.
Taking cover, he closed his eyes and called upon Sophia. "How's it going there?"
"You won't believe this, but the tree actually swallowed the formation you added!" Sophia's surprised yet excited voice came through. "And yeah — it works, and perfectly at that!"
While Ray infiltrated the base, he arranged for Sophia to stay beside the tree on guard — just in case they tried to escape or any situation popped up.
But Sophia was surprised. The moment her eyes left Ray leaving the place and went back to the tree, she didn't find the formation Ray had set. Instead, a root altar hovered over the dagger.
Not wanting to bother Ray (and intrigued), she kept inspecting it, not noticing the time passing.
Moments before she heard Ray's voice, Sophia saw a man appear out of nowhere on top of the altar's empty spot. Before she could react, the altar wrapped him in the same membrane before a root grew from one of the openings and dragged it inside.
Surprised yet delighted by the situation, she confirmed with Ray the success.
"I guess all's good then. You can jump into Plan A now," Ray sighed in relief. "I'll start sending people there now. Most of them are unconscious for some reason."
"Got it. How many are there?" Sophia asked, already jumping into an opened gate.
"Ask the family and your cub for help — we've got almost a thousand or so," Ray replied, snapping the dagger into his holster and starting to free the humans inside.
While at it, Ray activated his first Material Soul, using the mist around to disrupt the directional sense of all the awake cultivators.
That was Ray's plan — instead of starting by attacking the evil master, he would first send the hostages to Plan A and have them wait until he and Sophia took on the evil masters.
Sophia proposed blowing up the whole base after saving the prisoners, but Ray refused in favor of testing his limits — something Sophia agreed to only because Ray could retreat to Plan A anytime.
"Got it, and…" Sophia affirmed, but inside Plan A she found a view that left her speechless.
Beside the forest, right at the border of the open plain, she spotted a log house — and from the looks of it, it wasn't newly built. She was sure it wasn't there last time they were here.
Confused, she got closer to find her child actually playing with the children of the human family — who were evidently older.
_____________________
and her the chap , enjoy