With the battle that happened, the atmosphere became tense on the Poria star. Not only did people refrain from scouting far from their gates but they also reinforced their own defenses, preparing for a battle that would shake the delicate equilibrium between the various gates and towers.
Lux had collected the information collected by his subordinates and with everything, he had updated his current understanding of this decisively new and much more dangerous world. After all, not only were there more towers, but there were more gates, active ones and the monsters were a lot more dangerous as well.
Simply looking at the updated panel kept him tense of the danger and everything that could go wrong on this celestial body.
Name: Poria
Size: Tier 1
Gate level: Lv.1 (15%)
Activated Cost: 14
Time Remaining: 2M, 17D, 7H, 10 min, 56 sec.
Environment level: 2 stars (89%)
Monster danger level: 3 stars (93%)
--> Tier 2 - Crypt Fiend (13%)
--> Tier 2 - Demonic Ape (10%)
--> Tier 2 - Razorback Hound (6%)
--> Tier 2 - Hundred-Eyed Rat (10%)
--> Tier 2 - Ash Spider (7%)
--> Tier 3 - Rotting Crocodile (9%)
--> Tier 3 - Thunder Snake (4%)
--> Tier 3 - Hollow Owls (6%)
Ressources level: 2 stars (76%)
--> Tier 0 - Coal Ore (19%)
--> Tier 0 - Maple Tree (10%)
--> Tier 1 - Blood Saffron (7%)
vTier 1 - Tangle Ivy (15%)
--> Tier 2 - Star Iron (5%)
Map: 36%
Gates: 6
--> Lux Arden: Lv.1
--> Scitt Haven: Lv.3
--> Avue Arven: Lv.4
Towers: 3
--> 4 floors (Locked)Cost per hour: 143
As this all happened, Lux kept the gate closed as he focused on a single thing and that was to improve himself. The new gate could wait for a while, at least until the stronger explorers came back from the battles in the town and started to explore once more in his portals. After all, despite everything, he had neither the strength nor the resources required to control this celestial body. The only thing he could do was use his customers and pay them, using money and connections to improve his chances at winning.
The town was slowly progressing to safety. Each day, more monsters were discovered and killed, gradually lowering the amount of enemies left in the town. The city lord was currently having many life professionals, those who preferred not to fight, repair the city wall and the various damaged or completely destroyed infrastructure.
Finally, Lux had taken the time to look over the orphanages of the town and he was happy to say that while some of them received heavy damage, all of the kids were fine and the sum of money they had received from him allowed them to live relatively well in the current turmoil of the town.
As for the more important subjects such as the current crisis of the baron or the danger of the surrounding towns after the new tower opened, releasing countless monsters, none of them was high in priority in Lux's current situation.
While the safety of the town was important, everything was already getting better after the beginning of the reconstruction and while there had been many deaths, it wasn't anything surprising in this day and age. People would rebuild and hope for everything to get better.
Perhaps a large part of the population would try and migrate to other towns nearby but in the end, the town would restart to prosper, attracting new people. It happened two years back and it will happen again.
The reason for the migration was due to the high amount of casualties amongst the professionals of the city lord, but he would recruit again and everything would restart at some point in the future.
Turning to his own studies, he immediately started to learn the new pattern, a pattern that would help him in fighting back against other gate users and helped in both destroying and reducing the amount of support the gate users could send to their troops on the other side.
Looking and memorizing the spell pattern, he immediately started his studies. While he wasn't expecting to complete it in a day or two, he hoped to be able to learn it within the next few days. After all, the peace was only temporary and improving his strength was paramount. As for recruiting new explorers, it wasn't something easy to do, especially since he barely had any members under him at the moment and they were only level 5 warriors.
While the levels could gauge the approximate strength of a person, the level truly represented the amount of energy in their bodies and what truly made a difference was the spells and skills they could learn. As such, while level five seemed quite strong amongst his customers, two level four who knew what they were doing could easily suppress and kill him or her.
The only huge difference would be during the major promotions such as from level nine to level ten or from level nineteen to twenty. Those levels would allow the user to not only greatly strengthen their energy, more than double the amount they had in their bodies previous to their breakthrough but it could also greatly increase the overall power of their spells.
A spell could increase in power in three different circumstances. The first being the amount of energy released in the spell, making it stronger depending on the amount. The second was by the spell level which could be upgraded once they completed the requirements and improved the spell pattern to the next level up to the twentieth level and finally was by the profession rank as every tenth level allowed the user to greatly promote their base strength simply through passive energy control and a better condensation of their energy making everything stronger.
While thinking of those bits of information which could certainly be useful once he properly set up his force, he stopped thinking of everything else and focused solely on his task ahead. To master this new spell.
Closing his eyes, he started the engraving of his newly bought spell.
With energy potions to support his high energy cost in his continuous tries, the hours went by. The hours were quickly followed by a day and finally at the end of the second day, the spell finally adhered and was absorbed by his space wanderer's core.
Everything was getting better and while it had cost him a huge 300 credits simply to speed up the process through his potions, it had been worth it.
Confirming with the girls downstairs that there weren't any problems and taking the time to confirm with his guards guarding his portal in Poria, he went straight back to his studies. Now, there were three spells to learn still and he hoped for the best.
With only three days until the closure of Proteus after extracting almost all of its resources, he couldn't spend more than those three days learning those spells. He would have to stop from then on to take care of the newly opened gate and process the newly gathered information and the subsequent war that would come from it.
Focusing on the Fog Cloud spell which would be especially useful to hide himself as he had plans on entering the new gate to help in the combat, especially to destroy the gate, he managed to learn it two days later.
While the spell was far from as hard to learn as the space disruption spell he had learned previously, as it came from a completely different profession, the druid profession, he literally had to start from scratch. The pattern of the space disruption spell had a similarly basic pattern with other space related patterns such as the space wanderer's pattern, the cosmic insight spell, gate creation and more.
As such, learning a spell from a new profession was like learning another language entirely. Furthermore, it couldn't be compared to French and English or Spanish and English. Instead, it was closer to the grecque language and the english language. Due to this, having to seemingly restart from the beginning except for his gradual mastery over the line drawings, it had taken him longer than he had hoped for.
Turning to the Nebula Veil spell, he concentrated on it for the remaining of his time and after continuous studies, practice and a healthy dose of potions, finally managed to learn it a few hours from the opening of the gate.
Getting down from the stairs, Lux looked up at the world ledger set up right next to the portal, recording the people still inside of Proteus.
Seeing over two dozen people still inside, Lux immediately called the surrounding explorers. "The gate of Proteus will close in six hours, 23 minutes and 33 seconds. There are still twenty-seven people inside, I will head in to bring back whoever is still in the camp and will grant you the location of the remaining ones. For everyone you bring back, I will give you ten thousand Bym." Said Lux who despite not being obligated to anything didn't feel like abandoning people inside of Proteus for who knows how long. Especially since there was practically nothing remaining in Proteus and he preferred not sending the explorers to their deaths.
"Yes!" Shouted the explorers. It was unknown if it was due to the money reward or because he refused to leave anyone behind.