The point they reached was five days of travel from the point where they fought the tiger, this was after traveling day and night with just the occasional break after every few hours.
Neither the soldiers nor the national team members had any choice as this was the only way the to exit the Forest with such a small group. As always it was the number of demons that were the problem, especially below the Emperor level.
They didn't have the power to survive against pack after pack of Demon Herons.
After reaching the closest point they rested during the day in the Second layer knowing that the Tiger's even if free from the main convoy's attacks would only hunt at night and then travelled through the first layer at breakneck speed during the night knowing that the Demon Herons on the other hand would not hunt at night.
It took them team fourteen hours to exit the forest and find cover and the last two hours they had made it through under the sporadic attacks of various packs of Demon Herons.
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The team rested in Kolkata for a day and did nothing but relax before thinking about ways to get to Delhi, where the National Hall was, this was only a mission and their identies still frozen until they fought the second National Hall and gained their resources.
Cao Guang had a chat with Captain Rai about a quick fix.
" Are you sure that you want to buy us tickets to Delhi" Cao Guang asked the man, afterall their nationalities did differ in this tournament.
" Well I won't be buying you tickets per se but yeah, you don't that you guys are the only national team to benefit from the trip to the Sunderbans do you?" Captain Rai asked a rhetorical question that he would go on to answer himself.
" Any foreign national team cooperating with another military is really unusual and the world college tournament and every thing that proceeds and succeeds it are still an exchange of resources.
While the media and the attention the young mages get may have given it a perspective of being a competition to elect the best among the best isn't completely wrong it is nowhere near the complete truth.
Unlike the Hunter competition, this one started merely as a way to resolve the allocation of contested resources. This time your gain is also the gain of our national team and my younger brother also happens to be on the team. Now do you understand things a little better, but then again the opportunity to enter such a holy land is indeed rare for such young mages".
"I see, Holy land I am not sure what you mean by that?"
" It's an unofficial characterisation of elemental lands, so it's like this Elemental Spirit lands can and do give birth to spirit grade seeds and Elemental Sacred Lands give birth to Soul grade ones and as for Holy lands they have two such criteria one they have remained unchanged and pure since atleast ten millennia and have given birth to Heaven grade seeds in the past
Examples of these would be Sunderbans, Dunhuang, Himalayas, Tian Shan, Kunlun, Antartica, Bermuda Triangle, Amazon, Sahar and so on
Of course even among Holy lands there are different grades and the difference can be the same as heaven and earth, Sunderbans usually has a Supreme Monarch and as for Himalayas and Kunlun and such, the strongest beasts on the planet call these places home.
These rankings are also incredibly arbitrary and not official ones, atleast not yet. Some people even say that it is because we don't know the upper limits of Holy Lands well for obvious reasons.
That's one way the magic world differs from my previous world, there even if a theory or hypothesis is incomplete scientists would publish it and work towards completing or verifying them, here things go public only after verification, not sure why.
(A/n: Felt bad about calling mages with research as their focus as Scientists, so well from now onwards they shall be Magisters, like magister Feng Zhuolong)
Cao Guang returned to the group with a passes for a train from Kolkata and Delhi as the team was searching for scalped train tickets.
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So you have a Soul Container as well eh Cao Guang and it seems yours is better than mine, that would explain why your cultivation is fast. Using Soul Essences to speed up cultivation huh.
How long do you think you can keep up, with Uncle Lu Kun and Lu Nian's help I can keep going for a long time and besides your corpse will make a great research subject for Uncle's project. We'll see who has the last laugh, now my Wind Nebula break.... break, break for me aaaghh!