Aza'zel didn't return to his military tent after exchanging for points. Instead, he left the camp directly and ventured into the Nameless Valley again, as he couldn't sit by and watch as Wendy ruined herself.
Many of his future plans for the vultures rely on Wendy as a proxy in the middle. For example, he has some plans for Raksha Town. Although he desires the town, Aza'zel planned to manage it through Wendy as a go-in-between proxy unit.
The woman is smart, but she's too full of herself despite her tentative mind, as despite how rational one's thought process might be, lunatics aren't a rare species in this desolate and harsh, cut-throat world.
Knowing that he couldn't seclude himself to cultivate without the presence of the standard martial technique's second and third volumes respectively, Aza'zel made a beeline for the Nameless Valley after much deliberation.
He conveniently disposed of the note smuggled into his hands earlier through the inspector mole, but he opted for the action to be executed discreetly.
The oddly quiet pathway from the military camp to the valley piqued at the young man's vigilance. As sensitive as he was to noise, the silence proved unnatural all around.
Never mind the sounds of advancing teams under the guise of their futile stealth, there wasn't even a hint of nature-bred noises such as the chirping of birds or cries of insects in the scarce foliage all around.
Aza'zel halted his steps abruptly, a gentle wind teasing the hems of his trench coat, barely peeking through the outlines of his revolvers as they nestled near his chest, warmly kept in their respective hostlers.
He had the odd feeling that this area of the world was wholly isolated from the outside, even the wind started slowing down to a desperate crawl. Carefully, Aza'zel armed himself with his two revolvers, palms sweating from nervousness.
This omnipresent sense of danger truly poked his nerves. A drop of sweat slowly rolled down his cheek, curving toward the tip of his chin, and slowly descended to the ground.
This drop of sweat seemed to be the only matter that adhered to the principles of constant motion in this isolated world, even Aza'zel himself was oblivious to the slippery sensation as it trickled down his skin.
A slender finger stabbed forward swiftly, welcoming the descent of this droplet of sweat, followed by a voice that was awfully familiar yet distant to Aza'zel.
"Am I that scary now, little Aza?"
The voice seemed to dispel the sense of danger and replace it with a long-lost, intimate familiarity.
Aza'zel immediately relaxed his nerves to the point where he regained cognitive recognition of the world all around, realizing that his clothes were heavily doused in sweat.
"You truly scared me there," Aza'zel complained, breathing out heavily.
Then, he furrowed his brows and asked, "How many transformations have you gone through? You're quite unfathomable."
"I've long since finished my nine transformations," Caidie replied with a smug smile. "You are quite slow, on the other hand."
Aza'zel rolled his shoulders as he shrugged. "Look at you comparing yourself with a 15-year-old."
At the moment, Caidie was a woman in the prime of her twenties, both her physique and mind seemed to have elevated to a higher level after going through her nine transformations.
"This isn't the place to talk," Caidie switched topics immediately, turning around and heading off-road from the general path.
Aza'zel grumbled to himself quietly, but he followed her nonetheless, despite their subjective roles as a lord and a follower.
Caidie asked as the two walked closely. "How many transformations have you gone through?"
Aza'zel answered softly. "I'm about to prepare for my fourth transformation."
Caidie remained silent for a moment and figured things out. "You're planning to delegate your totemic seals separately?"
To the limits of her knowledge, Aza'zel had two totemic seals, and his first seal triggered the nine transformations prematurely while his second seal remained dormant for quite some time.
As she had only one totemic seal, her progress in the nine transformations was smooth sailing ever since she triggered her first transformation, nothing highly complicated. She didn't know the particulars about royalty with multiple totemic seals advancing, but she could infer that the journey wouldn't be so easy.
"How did you find out?" Aza'zel asked, quite shocked at how easily she saw through his intentions. At this point, the pair had delved deeper into the off-road territory where not many vultures were active.
"I know a little bit more about the Secrets of Nine Transformations than you do," Caidie responded offhandedly. "This is pure common sense, and I've arrived today mainly to provide you with more information lest you mess up your future transformations and subsequent evolution."
Caidie wanted to say that she hadn't expected Aza'zel to start building his foundations with an external martial technique, and mainly because she withheld from sharing the core martial technique of their bloodline back in the day.
In fact, she assumed that Aza'zel would immediately start practicing the technique, so she didn't share it the day he began exhibiting signs of transformation.
If Saxon hadn't passed down that martial technique, Aza'zel wouldn't have started building his foundations prematurely at the age of ten. However, since Caidie wasn't supposed to interfere with his decisions until he left Raksha Town, she had no choice but to watch silently.
Now that she thought about it, it was indeed not her fault that his bloodthirst awakening and the subsequent interaction with Saxon happened beyond her control.
Her guilty conscience immediately simmered down and she explained thoroughly, "You must have felt like something had upgraded in your body periodically during the last five years. More accurately, it would feel like invisible cogwheels in your body connecting up to channel greater power.
"Reviewing the profundities contained within the Secrets of Nine Transformations and their respective relation with the source crystal, source energy, and the minor levels in between each transformation, the best analogy would be the gears and cogwheels in a machine.
"If you consider your body to be a machine, nothing more than a stock machine at that, then you would want to start with the basic foundations of this machine if you want to upgrade it. These upgrades start with the rusty, barely functional cogwheels.
"Even with the best engine there is, if the machine itself is faulty, there's only so much an engine can do despite its stellar design. The source crystals take the source energy from the world around us and imbue this energy into our bodies on a genetic scale, upgrading our foundations from the inside out.
"You and I each have a nine-colored source crystal, the highest-tier engine out there. Therefore, our bodies experience something akin to enhanced maintenance through nine cycles, and each cycle is further subdivided into nine minor cycles."
Caidie explained as the pair rested while standing, as she patiently waited for Aza'zel to digest this amount of information. Aza'zel asked a few questions for the following few minutes, mainly for direct knowledge and terminology rather than analogies.
According to Caidie, the Secrets of Nine Transformations encapsulate the enhancement of an individual's genetics.
From the most basic state, the injection of source energy, coupled with the external and internal stimuli for evolution and adaptation, the body derives new and enhanced genes.
Each minor level of the respective transformations is known as 'Genetic Coding', while each successful transformation corresponds to the formation of something called a 'Genetic Sequence'.