'Dedicated Travel'

The event location I visited was marked by what looked like a cluster of leaves and turned out to be a similarly densely forested locations of trees and shrubbery to the location where I had acquired my emperor scorpion mount.

The forestry here was so dense that I could only see the light of open space beyond. Back then, I was traveling with Lil, Go, and some of the others but now I was on my own and could do as I pleased. This meant that I could continue capturing my enemies for experience that was worth much more than their deaths.

Lengthening and enlarging my arms and hand to then divide my fingers into a couple dozen spinnerets, I simply shift my feet and boots into something more like clawed hands and gauntlets with which I simply walk up the trunk of the closest bordering tree. Once I reached the branches around ten feet off the ground, I calmly strolled my way along and over the limbs of two or three trees like a casual demonic monkey.

Once I was beyond the dense undergrowth and frosty blue vines, I could clearly see a moderately sized grove of little more than an acre in which only a few different types of flowering or fruit bearing plants grew. However, these plants all grew plentifully on the root-gnarled ground surrounding a single giant evergreen that towered branches and all above the surrounding trees.

In the lowermost branch over a hundred feet above me was a giant hollowed burn bigger than the average house in village outside the Winter Wood. Around the burl which bore several large rotten openings buzzed a dozen bigger-than-average ice bees bringing in goods from the surrounding area. Lower down in the roots of the giant dying tree lay a snoozing ice rat as big as the mama ice rat boss I met soon after entering the Winter Wood.

Just like that elite or boss mob, this giant ice rat bore a blade chain of ice for a tail was covered in ice mana blades rather than quills. Just like the previous big rodent I bet that I could take this one down in a single hit. Unlike that time, though, I could probably do it without a weapon.

However, my current goal was not to hunt these mobs but to rely on my Luck and level to boost the strength and numbers of the enemies I meet. Sadly, it did not seem like I was lucky enough to warrant numerous elite rats or more than a dozen elite insects.

Leaping out from my current perch, I simply spew cordycep silk out toward the bottom of the evergreen. Dozens of streamers of heavy and adhesive material stretched a couple dozen yards out from my airborne positions, lowering themselves almost lazily down about the sleeping ice rat. The elite ice rat never even knew what was happening until her was covered with numerous yards of silks attaching its prone body to the ground and tree around it.

I never stopped spitting silk until I hit the ground, layering a couple hundred pounds of adhesion about the ice rat's body. Even with its ice mana blade hardening the silk there were so many layers that it did not matter how much it writhed and struggled. In fact, like the constriction of a snake, the more it struggled the tighter bound it became until it was struggling just to breathe.

Only a second after I had landed and caught the full attention of the mobs, the dozen insects in the air around the burl suddenly streaked downward through the air with their buts and dagger-like stingers curled forward at the ready. Then, just a second behind them, three even large ice bees crawled out of the burl hive and dove straight down to the ice rat.

Luckily for me, those boss bees were absolute idiots who only ended up ensnaring their butts and legs about in the silk covering the ice rat. Before I had time to appreciate their foolishness, though, the dozen ice bee drones were already entering close quarters and thrusting their stingers at me.

Like my Infected Ice Emperor Scorpion, I simply let these dozen bees stab into my body while corrupting myself around them. Each sting was only worth a couple percent of my HP and only amounted to a little more than five hundred damage. Even after their legs started stabbing into my corrupted state, my health did not go below seventy percent.

Moments after being stung and stabbed a few dozen times all over my body, I received the Capture notification for these bees and then Infect them before making my way forward. The boss bees were still struggling against the silk, stretching its upper layers up into the air as they tried to fight with flight. The rat, though, had long since given up and had even started losing HP.

With the boss bees pulling the surrounding silk, they were probably choking the ice rat! What a way to go, killed by your own comrades. This was the kind of fate I would not wish on my enemies and thus I rushed forward to subdue the boss bees with more silk.

After binding up the boss bees I briefly captured the ice rat and ended the confrontation. Once out of combat, I swiftly stored all of my captives within the clan store and announced a temporary restriction on their sales. These guys needed to save up for their Taurians before worrying about anything weaker but of the same value, even if it could carry you in flight.

The next few minutes were spent digging up magical plants and collecting their fruits before storing all of it in my Player Inventory. Half of the actual products, though, went to the clan store while I kept half and the actual plants for my own use.

Now that the clan was actually actively growing I was beginning to realize that the needs of numbers were greater than I expected. If I wanted every clan member to have both a Taurian and a flying mount, I would need to capture hundreds more bees. That was only because bees were the only ones somewhat readily available and I only now had enough for my entire party.

Stonewall, though, was simply too big for one of these and would require a creature on Imperial's level to use as a flying mount even if it was only for travel and not for battle.

Leaving the grove behind, I started circling around the camp marked on my map menu in search of another event location. After half an hour of searching, though, I only found myself faced with a confrontation against fifteen heavily armed trolls. After capturing these trolls, I decided to go ahead and return to camp for the night.

After thinking about how over leveled I was compared to the area it made sense that I would not only have less confrontations but also less events. The mobs themselves should pretty much fear me and the region should offer little in the way of bonuses to those who could travel and succeed in even grater locations.

Wondering what all the others had experiences, I headed back to camp and only experienced one more confrontation along the way. This time it was a combination of a dozen trolls and twice as many ice birds. Like with the ice rat's ice mana blades, though, my abilities were now so strong that the projectiles of these ice birds could only cut through my silk after prolonged exposure.

Their ice blades and feathers simply traveled through the air too quickly to do more than nudge my silk around, making a few strands go off-target while the others all found their marks. Not even the trolls were spared from this treatment as their bone and stone weapons struggled to match my cordycep silk. Less than a minute after the confrontation began it was ended and the mobs were all thrown in the clan store.

Throughout this short trip, though, I had amassed well over ten thousand experience points after capturing around seventy mobs each providing a few hundred experience for capturing. That was around ten percent of the experience I needed in order to reach level one-thirteen.

It was nothing compared to the continual levels I had gained traveling through the Winter Wood previous but it was also better than nothing at all. In order to get the same rewards I would probably have to spend all day hiking the Canfor Region capturing every mob I came across. Those, though, would hardly be worth anything even to sell to the Golden Ferry.

Because of that fact alone, I hoped to avoid spending too much time in Sierra as a whole. Like the other clans had done, I planned to leaving a main chapter in the noob city of Sierra where I started and move the main clan body to the capital. This was the seat of imperial power and thus the best place for a player who just acquired a first class imperial knighthood to broaden their horizons.

It was also the second major trade hub in the continent with the second largest city on the continent being a port city on the southern coast. Everything on the continent passed through the capital with a certainty. However, everything in the world passed through the port before it ever reached the capital.

When I returned to camp it was to find that most of the others had also returned from their own short adventures. Like me, they had only seen a couple of confrontations which contained large numbers of enemies but only a couple of us had actually found an event location. It turned out that the main requirement for finding such locations, now, was Luck.

After half an hour the others had all returned to camp and it turned out that out of eleven of us only five had actually come across an event and only Stonewall and I had found resource nodes like groves. The others all ended up coming across nests of mobs like the ice rat nest we came across long ago. Like me, though, they had also learned to start capturing as much as they could.

Despite the fact that they lacked an overwhelming trap card like my cordycep silk, even Conansson was now strong enough that the Quick Quake, Splash, and Frostbite skills he learned from us were enough to capture a few members of each enemy group he faced.

Overall, the entire party had added around two hundred Winter Wood mobs to the clan store. This was still not enough to give all of our members cheap elemental familiars who could be taught ranged magic and defensive support skills. However, at this rate, it would only take a couple of days before we had enough of every mob but the bees for our clan.

After all of our earnings had been sorted out between what to keep for ourselves and the clan or what to sell back in Sierra, the party was only too happy to turn in for an early night while the sun was still lightening half of the sky while our familiars went out foraging again. When morning rolled around, there were not only piles of whole plants and mob materials but also a couple dozen creatures and trolls tied up with a variety of vines and ropes and even cordycep silk from Cweeper and Hermes.

It took a lot longer to sort through all of their gains this time but it was not long before we were once again setting out on our private road.

Checking our progress on the map once we came out of Fast Travel at midday, I find that we had traversed nearly a full third of the way through Winter Wood. Thanks to the road itself as well as the highly raised levels of our land dragons, we were making even better progress than I had anticipated. This was also due to the fact that we saw far lass caravan attacks.

Since our familiars had proven more than capable of handling the region on their own, we decided to skip the midday rest stop once again. Even if we wanted to work on grinding in this region it would take hours for everybody else to accumulate around ten thousand experience now that we were not paving the road. It simply took up too much time, now.

That evening, everybody was given two hours to head straight out and then come straight back just to see what they came across. Like I expected, I was only confronted a few times and this time the only time I saw trolls was when I found my way to a cave icon on my map. All of my confrontations were simply different combinations of beast mobs.

From the types of enemies I faced this time, it was clear that the strength of the region itself was focused on its center around the broken plateau we left behind. This far out, the likelihood of facing trolls was now minimized while all of the other creatures became much more numerous. My first confrontation contained over thirty enemies divided between scorpions and ice birds.

After having spent my couple of hours capturing much more than a hundred mobs, I had managed to secure almost thirty thousand experience. I was now over a third of the way to my next level. In two days of 'dedicated travel'. These results were not as high as I wanted them to be but they were still higher than I expected them to be.

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