Day 7, Third month of Winter, 599th Year of New Age.
The Anta is city was being blessed with the warm orange light of the morning sun. If it wasn't for the blood that soaked the sands of the beaches covering up their beautiful yellow, and the red blood stealing the blues of the water, it would have painted a warm and beautiful picture.
However, the red and yellow of the blood and sand created a contrasting orange that made one's blood curdle. Only because people know how that orange came to be.
And a few hundreds of meters away from that beach, there was a fifty feet stone wall being supported with a million runic patterns. This wall hid the once beautiful Anta city, which has become a far cry from its glory days which weren't not that long ago from that day.
Behind that wall was the military camp.
The sand colored tents occupied by the brownish blood-soaked land that finally dried up after days.
In the middle of that camp, laid my tent.
My very own tent had a small tear on its roof.
Many people focused on my tent every day, but on that day, the focus was multiplied, because a neon blue colored translucent dome enveloped my tent. It was condensed mana.
Inside the dome, several small sparks of a brighter light were floating around. Those were of even denser mana concentration.
Bubble was looking at this whole thing with his eyes and mouth wide open.
He was also inside the dome as he guarded my entrance. He could feel his pores open as pure mana surged into his body and to his mana core.
In fact, even I could feel his pores open and mana enter his body.
Because I was the reason for that dome to appear.
In the middle of the tent, where the absolute center of the dome lies, I sat down. My seating position was where the concentration of the energy was highest. And there were several bright ethereal silhouettes hovering around me.
They were of all sizes and shapes. Some of them were rodents, some were birds, some were humans and some were of even demons.
In that position, I could feel every mana particle, every single one of them. I could feel the atoms of each and every single thing in that dome. From the grain of sand to the blood cell of Bubble, I could everything.
That was my spirit magic cultivation technique.
As a spirit magician, I use the mana to connect with the spirit world where the spirits manifest based on the reality of this world. In a way, the spirit world could be considered a mirror world that lies in between the mortal world and the world of an afterlife where the souls journey to.
When a creature dies, it travels to the afterlife through the spirit world, leaving its imprint behind.
That imprint is strengthened by the power of the spirit world manifesting them into spirits. As for how the strength of a spirit is gauged, it is based on the thoughts, wishes, and faith that these creatures developed in the mortal world when they were living.
These thoughts include praise, fear, belief, trust, and any other emotion.
As I cultivated in that state, I used my connection with the spirit world to create a zone that acted like a pseudo-zone. The translucent silhouettes that were around me were the imprints left behind by the creatures in this soil.
The energy from the spirit world took me as an anchor to manifest that zone in which the pseudo spirits were manifested.
They were manifested here and they attracted the mana in the surroundings to that zone. If my guess was right, that place might be the place with the mana of highest concentration on that day.
As the spirits were the creatures that connected with the world in the purest form without the need for the mortal body that was more often than not is filled with impurities, they gathered the mana in the most efficient way as well as in its purest form.
This allowed me to cultivate much faster than the rest.
And this unique cultivation technique of mine was created by my teacher at that time. It wasn't popular during that time period, but later in the future it became way too popular to the point, Spirit magic became as common as fire and wing magic.
Anyway, I don't want to bore you with the details.
All I wanted to tell you was that this allowed me to cultivate faster and improve my strength faster than my peers. And at that time, I wanted to be stronger than Arun at least, so that I could show him a middle finger and act as I pleased.
If not for the fact that I got a hit from Aelios, I would have stayed in that meditative state for a long time.
The moment I got that message, I released that stage. The dome disappeared by created a wave of mana that swept through the whole camp. I later came to know that even Deputy General Arun felt that wave even though he was in the front line that morning.
I think I have bored you enough with how I gain that strength, now let's talk about what Aelios wanted me to see.
As soon as I got the hit, I used the spiritual connection I had with Aelios to keep watch what Aelios was watching.
At that moment, Aelios was on a cliff watching over Parva City. To be precise he was looking at Count Javin's estate.
Parva City could be barely considered a City. The city was small and it didn't have too many routes leading to it. The only reason it was famous was because of the forests around it. As far as one could see from the city, it was covered with thick, lush, green forests filled with vitality.
It was known for its delicious fruit, different types of rich honey, and many herbs. On top of it all, there were many fauna that lived on these different flora.
The immediate surroundings of the city were covered with trees that acted as a natural barrier. The city walls were carved out of brown colored mountain stones. They looked like large pieces of dark chocolate.
And these chocolate-colored walls were covered with various vines, both climbers and creepers. One could easily mistake these vines for snakes. They were thick, long, and most of all dangerous.
If one mistakenly touched those vines, they could say goodbye at least to the hand they used to touch the vines.
The city had four gates from four different directions. All these gates had one thing in common, they like small tunnels and they were carved like the heads of wild boars.
That's right, the entrance of that tunnel looked like the open mouth of a wild boar. They were made in the honor of the guardian beast of the Varah Duchy.
In fact, the whole Duchy's forests were filled with different kinds of boar-type magical beasts. This whole Duchy was very suitable for cultivating earth-type mages and they did have the best ones as well.
Anyway, back to Parva City.
The city was filled with stone houses. Even the peasant's house you see there, even the poorest one was made of some of the best quality stone. Even if a third circle mage attacked it in point-blank range, they couldn't leave a dent.
The insides of the city were also covered with various trees. Not as tall as the ones surrounding it, but these were also dense, strong, and very very alive.
All four main paths from the four entrances led to the centre of the city where the stone statue of a Wild boar was placed. The stone was dark like the night. Its tusks to the shortest of its fur were carved out of a single special stone mined out of the mountain that was cleared to build this city.
It was one of the cities built during the foundation of the kingdom. So, it held a great significance.
The city square also divided the city into four different parts. One part had the administrative buildings and the estate of the marquis.
The second part had all the noble houses, big and small. The third part had the houses of all the soldiers and city guards. The fourth had the houses of commoners and merchants. Of course, there were some merchants who lived in military quarters because they were related to soldiers and there were some soldiers who lived in noble houses because they were of noble birth.
All I mentioned just indicates the presence of the majority there and it wasn't really anything absolute.
In the noble area, there was one estate that was bigger than the rest. It was also the estate that didn't have much greenery like the rest of the city. Most of its trees were short and the only greenery it had was from the garden which was obviously not looked after well enough.
It was the estate of Count Javin.