The lack of refining recipes for rank 4 and rank 5 Metacs means that any cultivator of the Dual Cultivation Pathway will have to create a new Metac if they want to advance to rank 4, which means that they will have to create a Divine Metac before they can advance to rank 4 and 5.
This is the kind of difficulty that those who want to advance to rank 6 in the popular pathways have to overcome. It is all because the Dual Cultivation Pathway is weakening and slowly falling into oblivion.
This is the explanation he came up with for why the rank 4 and rank 5 Branch Metacs of the Dual Cultivation Pathway that he ordered were a scam. None of them arrived even after a month of waiting.
But as bad as things are for the Dual Cultivation Pathway, the state of the Space Pathway, Luck Pathway, and Time Pathway is worse. It is said that there are no cultivators for this pathway anymore.
He doesn’t know how true that claim is, but he knows that he has never seen any Branch Metac of the three pathways. As if that isn’t bad enough, no one appears to have heard of the Time Pathway at all.
At least, the Luck Pathway and Space Pathway can still be remembered as ancient pathways, but the Time Pathway appears to be nonexistent. So he can forget about ever finding a Branch Metac to use with the Rewind Metac.
The only place he has ever seen any Metac of the three lost pathways has always been with Slav. This and the fact that Slav became another person in the past few timelines are making him suspect that Slav is the reincarnation of an old remnant of the three pathways.
But there was no use thinking about it as Slav has become somewhat useless to him, so he said to himself, "What I should be thinking about now is how to solve the problem of a lack of rank 4 Cloudy Date Metacs. I can’t possibly spend years slowly refining my internal energy from the early stage to the peak stage, now can I?"
He shook his head and said, "No, I cannot. Fortunately, I have two possible solutions to this problem."
After saying this, he said, "It is time to get to work."
So he stood up and marched out of the hotel.
The current goal on his mind is to eat rank 4 cultivators. The first rank 4 cultivator he is going after is Rusty.
The thought of this plan made his eyes glint sharply as he said to himself, "Since Cloudy Date Metacs are created by refining the energy well of cultivators and rank 4 Cloudy Date Metacs come from rank 4 cultivators, if I eat the energy well of rank 4 cultivators directly, I should be able to get what I need directly from them."
His confidence in this plan lies in the enhancement of the Devour Ability of Fenrir. He tried to do something similar a few timelines ago when he got the corpses of two rank 4 giants and one rank 4 transformation warrior on Earthly Battlefield E6-137. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.
The energy wells of the three warriors refused to fuse with his energy well. So he got the idea to try to devour the energy wells of cultivators of the same pathway as his, and the first pathway he decided to target is the forging pathway.
As far as he knows, there are two rank 4 forgers in this city. He is familiar with one of them and even has a bone to pick with that one rank 4 forger, which is why he is going after Rusty first.
If the Devour Ability still doesn’t work with Rusty, then he can only try to use the Cultivation Extraction Metac of the Dual Cultivation Pathway on the other rank 4 forge cultivator in the city. This is the second plan he has in mind to solve the problem.
That other rank 4 forger cultivator is a female, so the Cultivation Extraction Metac should be able to work wonders with her. And since the Cultivation Extraction Metac doesn’t have any restriction on pathways, he should be able to try out this plan with other female rank 4 cultivators.
With this on his mind, he went in the direction of his old stomping grounds. To be specific, he is going to the location of the factory of the Rusty Bolts Society.
He is going there because he doesn’t know where to find Rusty, but he knows how to force Rusty to appear. The thought brought a smile to his face.
He said to himself, "It will be just like old times."
His journey took him from the central market at the center of the city to the seventh street at the edge of the city. When he got there, he found the factory still standing and still operational.
This made him say, "Then again, the 10 months that I spent here were all spent in the future one year from now, after this round of the initiation program is over. So it is not surprising that the factory is still operational."
"How did it start again?" he asked himself.
Then his eyes lit up as he remembered, and he said to himself, "Ah, yes. I remember now. It started with a warning."
So he stood in front of the factory and shouted, saying, "This old building has been scheduled for demolition at the order of Rusty. If you cherish your life, leave now. Leave now, or it will be too late when this factory collapses on top of you."
"I repeat, this old building has been scheduled for demolition at the order of one Mr. Rusty. The demolition will take place now, so if you cherish your life, leave now while you can."
He kept shouting this warning to everyone, so all the workers in the factory stopped what they were doing and ran outside for their lives. His warning was effective because no one wanted to die for Rusty.