Chapter 63

It was not a very hard sell since Timothy proved that he could take down rank two demonic beasts alone and if one pondered for a moment, they would realize that with the entire squad working again as a single unit, they could accomplish things much faster. And so the squad with Timothy leading in the front once more went deeper into the mountain range in hopes that they could accomplish their mission and potentially find a way to receive their highly sought after bonus.

Receiving resources and gold coins as well as a military rank was one thing, but the military offering seasoned officer level technique manuals could be life changing for everyone present even including Thomas who was an instructor that did not necessarily need such manuals to increase his strength over time. To commoners such as themselves, it would always be difficult to compete outright with those with even just middle class type backgrounds due to the difference in resources and training they would receive since they were children.

If the entire squad was able to get two technique manuals at the quality that they were expecting, it was possible if they trained hard enough to very easily close the gap with their cultivator peers that were already well ahead of them yet the same age. It seemed that roughly once every three or four days, another member of the squad found an opportunity to increase their strength whether it came down to becoming more proficient in using their element in attacks, or even just generally increasing their overall mana that was in their body. The students seemed to be rank three mages, but they could only be considered on the lower tier when they had first entered into the Demonic Mountain Pass.

However, after tempering their strength and constantly finding themselves putting their all in simply surviving different battles, they all after one month saw exponential growth and could be considered closer to the mid-tier of rank three mages. If one chose to just train alone in a room full of peers, it would take a cultivator around their age at least one year to make such a leap, and this went to show why those who chose to suffer through life and death scenarios as cultivators would always have an edge compared to those who did not!

The only difference in strength that Timothy had felt since the mission had started one month prior, was that he had achieved a very high mastery using the Flame Sword that Andrew gave to him. He still mostly tried to only use the lower quality Flame Sword that he once won entering into that tournament as a grand prize, but over time he realized that limiting himself using a lower quality sword did not actually help him with his training in becoming stronger. Timothy felt himself becoming stagnant and although he was happy that the rest of his squad was improving, he still wanted more for himself since this mission was for him to grow much stronger compared to just earning a lot of loot and some technique manuals which would be rather useless since he had the artifact to give him any high tier techniques that he could think up to aid him.

After another three weeks had passed by, Thomas was sitting in the camp grounds that the squad had made in order to have their own little base of operations and he was counting the amount of loot that there was to split with every other member of the squad. Earlier in the previous week, the squad had decided that they would be willing to just outright sell the majority of their loot moving forward while only keeping about ten corpses. And so this made it much easier to organize since Thomas could just use other storage rings to keep each member's portion of what they wanted to keep for themselves while having all of the rest in a single pile in the more spacious ring.

As a group, they had been able to kill over one hundred rank one demonic beasts and even five rank two demonic beasts since their mission started and so keeping everything organized was a full-time effort on Thomas's part as the squad leader. But as long as they could sell everything extra in bulk and at once even to the military for a fair price, they could just split the lump sum of gold coins five ways which was something that Timothy even agreed to since he underestimated how many demonic beasts they would run into in such a short period of time.

It could be estimated that a single full demonic beast corpse along with just the basic core instead of a soul as well, could fetch roughly twelve hundred gold coins for rank one demonic beasts. This meant that even before finishing the mission which the goal was one hundred rank two demonic beasts and one rank three demonic beast, each member of the squad had earned over twenty four thousand gold coins! Such a sum was more than enough for each of them to either live very comfortably for one hundred years as commoners including their families, or was even enough for them to use to purchase pills to assist them with their overall training regimen which in turn could most likely allow them in the span of five years to all reach rank five as mages as long as they used every last gold coin to do this.

"So you all want to head in and hunt down groups of rank two demonic beasts? It will be more dangerous but now that all of you have grown this much and no one's equipment has broken down and become unusable, maybe it would be good to try to swiftly complete this part of the mission so that we could head back. If we were to kill ninety five more rank two demonic beasts, we could close to double each of our current portions and I could retire from being an instructor and will work my way into breaking through in becoming a rank six light element mage!"

What Thomas had said was not wrong, with enough gold coins to invest in a single cultivator's growth, it was very possible to use that amount in order to rank up to that level since Thomas was already a peak rank four mage. But even Timothy thought that maybe his suggestion was considered to be a little too greed based rather than a squad leader making a good call for the safety of the squad. It was unclear if the squad could handle more than two rank two demonic beasts at once, and potentially risking their safety just to get things done sooner did not seem to be needed.

The only issue was, as he continued to look around to gauge what the other squad members were thinking, it seemed like everyone had become incredibly moved by greed especially since the time limit that Thomas had given them until they returned to the military base whether completing or failing the mission was six months. It was only one and a half months in and they had already made such progress so why would they take it slow when they could possibly finish everything up by the third or fourth month?