Both men stood on the top of a tower, installed in the center of the recently repaired subcity that Zytal and Andovar had destroyed. What would have normally been weeks of construction was carried out in mere days, with the help of the Planetary Core and its unlimited range on the surface of Earth. With the sheer weight of wealth that the faction was able to throw around at this point, tens of billions of credits, almost anything was possible. The dangers of being on a newly initialized world were legion, but so were the advantages. The body parts of E Rank monsters could go for hundreds of millions of credits, or even billions. Many of the invaders also were outfitted with powerful artifacts that went for similar prices.
Most importantly, Okina had found out how to access the Multiversal Bank, one of the boons promised by the Multiversal citizenship that the inhabitants of Earth’s universe had been granted for the actions of Berrigious. It allowed for a faction to invest in all manner of things, from the futures of powerful sects to industries a dozen universes away. It was a great boon to the rapidly growing faction.
Even though only a few weeks had passed in the real world since Sam stepped foot into the Tower of Transcendence, compared to how long he had been there, much had changed. Near instant construction was a great boon for expansion, and the numbers of aliens who flocked to the faction’s banner grew by the day. At this rate, there would be more of them than humans.
“We really have come a long way since the early days of the System’s coming,” Lao mused.
“That we have,” Jeffrey replied. “In fact, the grandeur of the faction’s main city rivals that of my home planet. We already have E Rankers, and as such are on a comparable level.”
Both men smiled as they gazed proudly down at the citizens of the subcity. The higher level warriors of the faction were encouraged to live in the outer regions of their territory, to act as a bulwark against invaders. They were compensated richly for this service, in both credits and cultivation supplements.
Sam and the other faction elites had never needed any such things, but for lesser cultivators, a near infinite panoply of pills, natural treasures and the like existed, for the sole purpose of enhancing breakthroughs and easing the overall process of cultivation. Ranging from the multiverse’s answer to Adderall, a supercharged amphetamine that boosted focus for weeks, to crystallized fragments of Daos, they could be used by anyone, and at any time. Of them all, though, the former was by far the most popular.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
For most cultivators, it could take weeks of closed door cultivation to upgrade a Dao, a process alien to Earthlings, for whom the System hadn’t existed but a few months prior. Despite this, the survivors of Earth had begun to adapt to the new world. There were even a few newborns being carried around, in the safest parts of the faction lands. It turned out that concentrated pellets of Life elemental energy could speed up pregnancies, allowing for warriors to get back into the fray more quickly. Few and far between were those who wanted to bring a child into the dangerous world of the System, at least this short of a time after its arrival, but Earth had to be repopulated somehow.
The population of the faction was creeping up towards ten million, nothing compared to the previous population of Earth, but a sizable number in terms of power. Just ten F Rankers could have fought the armies of Earth to a standstill, to say nothing about an E Ranker. Conventional weaponry would have been useless, and more powerful weapons, like nuclear bombs, would have been trivial to dodge with superhuman stats. For an especially potent E Ranker, surviving such a blast was a possibility.
As the two faction elites watched, they eventually lost interest, and leaped down off the building, and into the city. Jeffrey passed a cloaking device to Lao, similar to the one that he used to blend in with humans. Though, he tended not to do so anymore, as he was no longer the only alien in the faction. With the arrival of the System, many of the social norms and tastes of humanity had shifted. With one of Jeffrey’s prime motivations being that of women, he was more than happy to do whatever it took to attract them. There were plenty of people out there who found his avian form just as attractive as his human one, if not more.
Lao slid the bracelet on, and his visage changed, turning into that of a middle aged man, with a few wrinkles but an overall strong physique. A mane of silvery grey hair coursed down his back, and muscles showed beneath his nondescript shirt and trousers. He was still Chinese, but nobody would have recognized him as Lao. With both men disguised, they headed into the town, posing as simply a few F Rankers, newly arrived in the subcity. In between cultivation sessions, many of the stronger captains liked to roam the cities of the Arbiters of Justice, blending in with the ordinary citizens.
