“Gahaha, Your Majesty, your most loyal Count Bran has arrived!”
Count Bran flew up excitedly from Arthur’s pauldron, landed on the skeletal horse’s back, and looked down.
However, what was crouching on the horse’s back was not the green figure wearing a crown and a red cloak he had imagined, but two little slimes blinking their tiny eyes.
One of them looked slightly smaller, sitting up perfectly straight, its little eyes staring at him with a sense of familiarity he couldn’t quite place.
The other was a bit plumper.
Seeing that it wasn’t His Majesty, Count Bran was immediately disappointed.
He tilted his head, leaned in close to the two slimes, looked left and right, then hopped halfway around them, peering from the side and from behind, muttering to himself.
“That’s not right, the body shape is wrong. His Majesty isn’t this small. Could they be wild slimes that fell out of the Mana Tide?”
“But the color is too perfect, exactly the same shade as His Majesty.”
He stretched out one claw and waved it in front of the two slimes.
“Hey, little envoys, you haven’t forgotten how to talk yet, have you?”
As he spoke, he didn’t forget to boast about himself. “If you understand, bounce once. This Count is a learned scholar who can easily understand the slime language.”
Chen Yu stopped pretending, blinking his eyes. “Count Bran, long time no see.”
Upon hearing this familiar, soft voice, Count Bran’s body stiffened, his little eyes widened, and then he spread his wings wide, pulling him into a hug. His excited caw rose a full octave higher than before.
“Gah! It’s His Majesty! It really is His Majesty! Retainer, come quickly, His Majesty has come personally to take us back.”
“Wuwuwu, Your Majesty, do you know how much this Count missed you? Those damned elves, and those endless shadow creatures, chasing me and Arthur day and night. I lost several of my beautiful, noble feathers! Look here, and here, and here...”
He spread one wing and brought it close to Chen Yu’s face, pointing at his feathers with his beak, his tone filled with indescribable grievance.
Chen Yu blinked his little eyes. In truth, he couldn’t see any wounds at all. In fact, Count Bran’s feathers seemed even shinier and sleeker.
When Arthur and Count Bran were together, they often slept in the open and endured hardships, so looking a bit ragged was normal. The fact that he’d been fed this well was probably thanks to Eserin.
“So, what happened to those guys who bullied you?”
“Uh.” Count Bran’s wing stopped mid-air. He tilted his head to the side, then reluctantly shook it. “It seems Arthur beat them all up. No, that’s not important. What’s important is that these wretches actually dared to show such disrespect to a minister of the Magical Creature Empire!”
“This Count is a count personally appointed by His Majesty, a true count of the Empire!”
His tone became even more indignant as he said this.
Arthur slowly walked over at this moment.
He approached Chen Yu, placed his right hand over his left chest, knelt on one knee, and said in a voice thick with obvious guilt: “I am deeply ashamed for troubling Your Majesty to come here in person.”
“After Count Bran and I entered the Shadow Mountains, we kept trying to find a way out. However, the internal terrain of this mountain range seems to shift when the shadows flow. I made marks on the map at every fork, but by the next day, the marks, along with their reference points, had been swallowed by the shadows.”
“Since we couldn’t find a way out, we could only wander around here.”
Speaking of this, Count Bran stepped back, using his beak to preen the chest feathers he had ruffled in his earlier excitement, his tone full of resentment.
“That directionally-challenged Arthur, every time this Count follows him, I have the worst luck. Either we discover a secret camp of gravediggers and get chased by their dogs, or we get mistaken for suspicious characters by an elven patrol. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even recognize which area we’ve stumbled into.”
“Strange, I remember the Shadow Mountains weren’t this big before. How can we not fly out now?” he muttered, scratching the feathers beside his ear with a claw.
Chen Yu hopped onto Arthur’s pauldron and asked, “How exactly did you offend those shadow creatures? Count Bran, that centaur spirit from earlier seemed quite familiar with you.”
At the mention of the Black Lance Knight, Count Bran fluffed up all his feathers like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. “That brainless fool!”
“Back then, those Shadow Scions were running around the Shadow Mountains, sowing discord everywhere, stirring up conflicts between several territories into a complete mess. This Count just happened to get caught up in it...”
“And then that big, black brute insisted I had destroyed the shadow pool in their territory. This Count doesn’t even know what that pool looks like!”
“He chased this Count for decades. It finally quieted down for a while, and I thought we’d finally shaken him off. But no sooner had we hidden in this cemetery than he popped up again!”
Chen Yu knew Count Bran well; things couldn’t be that simple. He just blinked his little eyes at him.
Count Bran couldn’t help but clear his throat a few times, pretending to be busy preening his feathers.
“Ahem... well, alright. Actually, this Count did have some old scores with that big guy. I used to frequent his castle, but I swear by the noble Rebel Queen, I never did anything bad.”
“Hehe, at most, I just casually picked up a few unwanted crystals. I didn’t even touch the flag hanging on his tower.”
Chen Yu thought to himself, he didn’t need to do anything bad. With Count Bran’s venomous tongue, just squatting on the windowsill of someone’s castle and chattering non-stop for days and nights would be enough to make any intelligent spirit want to throw him, feathers and all, out of the Shadow Mountains.
Looking at it that way, that Black Lance Knight really did have a pretty good temper. After being harassed by Bran for so long, he could still be so calm when bringing up old grudges.
If it had been a typical Greater Demon from the Abyss being tormented like this by Bran, they would probably have grabbed their giant axe and chased him across the entire continent long ago.
Putting Bran’s old accounts aside for the moment, Chen Yu looked at Arthur. “Arthur, how are you already Level 12?”
This speed seemed a bit too fast. It was almost catching up to him.
He remembered that when Arthur first entered the Shadow Mountains, he had only just become an Extraordinary professional. How was he now only a step away from Legendary?
Arthur shook his head somewhat slowly. His face naturally couldn’t make a confused expression, but the pause before he answered was noticeably longer than usual, as if he himself wasn’t entirely sure what the answer was.
“I’m not entirely sure either. Perhaps it’s a gift from those undead beings.”
Count Bran’s eyes widened beside him, and he bounced up from the saddle, clearly unaware of this as well.
“Retainer! When did you reach Level 12? Why didn’t you tell this Count?”
After his shock subsided, he suddenly remembered something and let out a proud cackle.
“This Count remembers now! That Sage called him a ‘Chosen of Nature’ or something, hahaha. My retainer is blessed by nature itself, so it’s only reasonable he levels up a bit faster.”
Chen Yu didn’t argue.
But he felt it was the mysterious power of judgment that was at work.
This judgment power not only dealt extra damage to undead creatures but also plundered their souls, strengthening Arthur’s power.
Seeing it that way, Arthur must have had terrible luck along the way, having to cut down that many undead just to reach Level 12.
After Arthur remounted his warhorse, Chen Yu asked, “Where’s Eserin? Did you two part ways?”
“Uh...”
The atmosphere suddenly fell silent. Count Bran, for once, didn’t try to answer first. He opened his beak, then finally said, “Retainer, you’d better explain.”
Arthur nodded. “Miss Eserin has returned to the Emerald Crown.”
“She left about a month ago. At the time... we encountered a Legendary.”
Chen Yu shook his gel body helplessly. The Shadow Mountains were vast, and yet they had to run headlong into a Legendary. Talk about rotten luck.
Count Bran finally couldn’t hold back anymore.
“This Count is furious! That elven Legend, I don’t know where he popped up from either. His name was something like Lothlorien or Loth-something. In any case, he definitely wasn’t a good person.”
Arthur added, “Miss Eserin seemed to know that Legend. She stepped forward and had a conversation with him, the full content of which we are unaware of, and they reached some sort of pact.”
“As a condition of the exchange, that Legend agreed to no longer bother me and Count Bran and allowed us to leave the confrontation zone. Before she left, Miss Eserin instructed me to find a way back to the Empire with Count Bran and report this matter to you and Lord Viola in person. She said you would know what to do next.”
Chen Yu muttered to himself.
But the problem was, he had no idea what to do. He had heard the name of that elven Legend for the first time just now.
However, he had a vague guess about one thing.
Could the Ancient Tree Council’s recent intense efforts to guard against the Slime United Empire, even going so far as to catch all wild slimes at the border and lock them in cages as spies, have something to do with Eserin’s departure?
Arthur reached into his breastplate and pulled out two containers.
One was a transparent glass jar filled with flowing, silvery-white resin. The other was a dark brown potion bottle, sealed tightly with a cork and beeswax.
“Your Majesty, these two items are the Silver Resin and the potion for curing the Withering Illness. That Legend didn’t seem to notice their existence.”
Chen Yu used his Divine Sense to bring the Silver Resin and the small potion bottle before him for a closer look.
The potion was a pale gold, the liquid faintly glowing in the dim light. It was standard elven craftsmanship, with a refined brewing technique, but it wasn’t particularly rare.
As for that jar of Silver Resin, even his Divine Sense couldn’t penetrate it. The bloodline of the Silver-leaf Oak seemed even more mysterious than he had imagined.
In the end, he didn’t open the jar for further inspection in the open expanse of the cemetery. Instead, he swallowed both items into his gel stomach.
“Since that’s the case, we’ll have to return to the Empire for now and ask Viola about the situation. She should know something.”
But with this, the Ancient Tree Council had completely offended the Slime United Empire.
Count Bran applauded heartily, raising his wings high. “That’s right! Your Majesty has thought the same as this Count. The Emerald Crown is huge. Who knows where they’ve hidden Eserin? Let’s go back first.”
He then puffed out his chest feathers proudly. “Of course, this isn’t to say that this Count is scared.”
“A mere Legendary? How could this Count possibly be afraid? I just think Your Majesty’s plan is very far-sighted.”
Arthur nodded again. “The Emerald Crown is vast, much larger than the White Horse Kingdom. Without any intelligence, the chances of finding Miss Eserin are virtually nonexistent.”
Count Bran flapped his wings and announced, “Then the plan is set! With His Majesty’s brilliant guidance, this Count’s sharp senses, and Retainer Arthur’s agility, leaving this Shadow Mountains will be a breeze. Retainer, let’s move out immediately!”
Arthur was about to mount his horse when Chen Yu said, “No need for that trouble.”
He focused his mind, spreading his Divine Sense outward. It passed through the cemetery’s shattered stone pillars, through the forest, and seeped down through the damp air vents of an underground cave. He soon discovered a sealed, urn-shaped subterranean cavity.
The cavity was surrounded by layers of shadow moss. Its location was very hidden, perfect for setting up a magic formation.
Chubby One bounced down. As it landed, its body swelled and twisted in mid-air, transforming into a black dragon that carried the skeletal horse and Arthur on its back.
The dragon’s wings unfurled with a dull thud, shaking the surrounding rusted iron bars.
“Transfiguration? His Majesty knows this kind of spell?!”
“Gahaha! Long live His Majesty!”
Count Bran cheered and flew onto the dragon’s back. The moment he got on, he started prying at the scales, clearly curious about the slime-formed dragon.
Chubby One flapped its wings and took off, flying over the forest remaining in the cemetery and heading towards the hidden cave at the foot of the mountain’s main peak, following the direction Chen Yu had indicated.
Soon, Chubby One reached its destination. It folded its wings and entered the cave, squeezing past a few shadow bats hanging in a daze from the cave entrance. The bats squeaked, circled half a turn at the ceiling, and then hung back in their original spots.
Only the entrance of the cave was damp; it was much drier inside. The ground was covered with a thin layer of dead leaf fragments blown in from outside.
Chubby One exhaled a breath, melting the stone wall to open the deepest part of the cave. It walked inside, shrank back to its original form, and then strained with effort.
Its round, gel belly visibly expanded, bulging higher and higher outward, and a green energy vortex appeared inside.
Chen Yu hopped over to the front of the portal.
“The opposite side is the Royal Palace.”
“A lot has changed in the Empire while you two were away. Come with me.”
Count Bran’s beak was half-open as he poked his head in. “Gah, Your Majesty, are you saying this door leads directly back to the Empire, without having to cross the Shadow Mountains?”
“As expected of Your Majesty! This Count has never seen this kind of spell before.”
“Just a small trick from a Legendary,” Chen Yu said, puffing out his chest. He bounced through the portal.
The moment his gel body touched the membrane, his figure was completely swallowed up, leaving not a single ripple behind.
Count Bran flapped his wings. “Retainer, let’s go!”
Arthur, holding his warhorse’s reins, followed Chen Yu through the portal.
After a burst of brilliant light, the cave returned to its former gloom and silence. Chubby One gradually shrank, crouching in a crack in the rock as if it had fallen asleep.