When Dustan rejoined Debauchery and the Valyrians under the lonely mountain, he found only Yunan was taking the smithing lessons seriously, as for the other three they choose to just watch from a safe distance, they made the excuse that Balin only promised to teach Yunan and they did not want to intrude.
In reality, the kids were not so keen on learning the patience required to perform the trade, all except for Yunan who still had the old thought of learning everything he possibly could. As a result, the Valyrians were split up for the first time. Yunan was under the tutelage of the master Dwarves led by Mina and Balin while Reina, Leol and Lili were taken out to the battlefield with Debauchery, who have decided to start working on the branches of the cult they had discovered in the last year or so.
Debauchery left the science and technology department intact and merely used their resources to find more bases in the eternal forest region. They let the kids hunt around while they were cleansing whole bases after letting Bai read their minds one by one.
Bai had become an expert in searching the memories of the cult members, since they were taught the same way and respond to the same triggers, he could now isolate all the relevant memories and take them then move to the next person.
It took almost 4 months to clean every base in the eternal forest mainly because there were so many of them and they hid very well in the dens forest. Around that time Bai was informed that a member of the highest order is making an appearance to request some technology from the science department.
During that time, the growth of the Valyrians had stunted after reaching the 20th point in each attribute, they had failed to develop enough to hunt level 4 monsters while losing their edge against level 3 monsters thanks to Yunan being missing from the formation.
Under the lonely mountain, Yunan was advancing both his smithing skills as well as fighting skills, under the tutelage of the dwarfs he toiled besides the furnace until he made something of better quality than those from last week, and then learn the martial arts the dwarves had created around carrying a shield into battle, including to dual wield hammers or axes while providing protection with the shield on one's back.
Mina was heaving praise on Yunan as if he was her own son. Thanks to the effect of the spirit heart, the mental acuity of Yunan was still as sharp as when he started, even after 4 months of focus and hard work, therefore he was able to learn the complicated methods of the dwarves as well as any dwarf, and had evident and fast advancement in his works, currently he is able to reliably create level 2 arms and armour, something that would be applauded in any apprentice.
Drogon was having the time of its life under the lonely mountain, he would receive all kinds of meats and cores as repayment for spewing out flames for the dwarves to relearn dragon forging techniques that were left untouched for 800 years. It was also taught a size reducing techniques and some other skills that were recorded in the book called "the draconic encyclopedia".
Among those skills some were about how to change the size and control the heat intensity of the flames depending on the material that will be forged. Drogon had his own dedicated dwarven masters for his tutelage, since the draconic encyclopedia was written hand in hand with dragons and dwarves, it was easy to learn most of the skills in it, except for some that were species specific. Otherwise the Valyrians proved itself to be a talented young dragon.
As for Debauchery, they had their hands fulö with capturing the VIP that was visiting the science department, mainly because as soon as Debauchery ambushed them, they dispersed like flies in every direction, costing Debauchery a week of tracking to find every last one of them. Unfortunately the VIP escaped the hunt of Debauchery. And the information contained in the memories of the escorts were depressingly low.
The escorts only ever saw a masked man they called lord heir since they were kids, they were taught to obey all his orders and to never question him, they also were not aware of the location where he lived or where did he come from, they only knew that he would show up when he needed something from the cult departments and they were to escort and protect him with their own lives. There was also the knowledge about another lord heir who had his own escort team and that the two would meet up sometime in one of their sorties causing this bit of knowledge about another heir to exist.
Soon after the area where they held the escort hostages was flooded with search teams of high level adventurers, targeting Debauchery and the escorts, one of these teams was led by Debauchery to the captives to see what their orders were, and as expected the orders were execution. Debauchery did not miss out on the chance to get enough information about a military department and the locations of the bases where the adventurers came from.
One very disturbing thing was found from one of the highest leveled adventurers Debauchery killed, they found out thanks to him there was a base in the 25th level made by the cult and only those who were recognised as higher than level 25 can use that base to recuperate and forgo going back to the surface. Many of those adventurers are marked as dead or disappeared by the guild since some have not returned to the surface for decades.
After finding these pieces of information, an urgency to handle the cult was nagging on the back of their minds, therefore they decidedly returned to the lonely mountain and started discussing the matter and the new information with all members present to come up with a solution to this tumor they keep finding it bigger than they expected.