Skill Extraction: Exploring Dungeons

Chapter 983 - 853: Joining External Defense

Hearing Orochi’s question.

After thinking for a while, Bedalin, who was beside him, said, "I should go. Compared to exploring outside the Mist, doing patrols at this stage gives way higher returns."

Hearing Bedalin’s words, Orochi nodded.

Even at a time like this, Bagri still didn’t forget to start setting out the desserts he’d made on the table.

At this moment, Archie turned his head and asked, "Bagri, you’re not going?"

Hearing Archie’s words, Bagri turned to look at him, then smiled and said, "Haha, I’ve always been on patrol."

Speaking of this, his tone couldn’t help but carry a sigh. "At our Five-Color stage, whether we’re exploring outside the Mist or doing patrols out there, there’s not much difference anymore.

Once you reach this point, the Mist doesn’t have much left to offer us. From here on out, everything depends solely on ourselves."

He seemed to be grumbling, but in fact he was using these words to tell everyone present something.

At the Five-Color stage, no one can help them anymore; no one can provide them with any convenience.

Only themselves; he hoped they would be ready.

There was basically no one here who didn’t have the potential to reach Five-Color; being Controllers of the Dungeon was itself the best potential.

At the Five-Color stage, you have to be prepared to wait and waste away in units of centuries, even millennia, just to have the tiniest sliver of hope of ascending to the summit of the supreme.

From bits and pieces of past conversations, you could indirectly infer that Orochi might have been stuck at the Five-Color stage for close to a thousand years.

And Bagri also had over a hundred years under his belt.

And that was just the tip of a tiny iceberg; there were countless people who had drifted even longer than they had.

For tens of thousands of years, the Three-Color stage—where one becomes a god—has already freed them from the limit of time.

And at this stage there’s rarely any consumption, so their numbers have piled up to quite a lot.

But even now, there are only a few Seven-Color Kings in total.

At this moment Lily slumped against the back of her chair, her whole person looking drained and listless.

"I hope all of you can join in, so my workload can be a little lighter. Those damned scum are always testing and probing, trying to get in. It’s really disgusting."

"Those bastards are like rats. I really want to catch them and wipe them all out.

Rip their souls out and tear them to shreds."

Lily cursed viciously, then slumped back into her weak, exhausted state.

The fact that there were already beings sneaking into the region outside the Mist meant the outer defenses had already been pushed to their highest alert, and it also meant this was the busiest time.

From the looks of Lily, this wasn’t just ordinary busyness.

At this point Orochi looked at Kane. "You just said you encountered two assailants?"

Hearing Orochi’s words, the few who had remained all turned their attention to Kane.

They hadn’t expected that someone among them had actually been attacked—and not once, but twice.

Meeting everyone’s curious gazes, Kane nodded.

"Yeah, just this last time. In that exploration we wrapped up a few days ago, our team ran into a total of two assailants."

"I remember the magazine saying your team is a five-person squad, right? That’s basically in a class of your own at the Color stage. Those two assailants sure were stupid."

Miraste, sitting opposite, couldn’t help commenting.

Because he cooperated with Kane’s Platinum Country, he was relatively familiar with Kane’s existence.

Among everyone in this meeting, he was probably the one who understood Kane’s group and the Platinum Country the best.

No matter how strong these assailants were, they wouldn’t be at the Five-Color level.

Running into a five-person team like Kane’s was absolutely just throwing their lives away.

"A five-person squad? That means Kane’s team has been climbing up together from the very beginning, and they all advanced to Three-Color together?"

Lily’s voice suddenly jumped several pitches higher, and she actually stood up from her chair.

Her voice was filled with disbelief.

The others just quietly watched her, as if asking why she was so shocked.

Lily had always assumed that only Kane and his fiancée had advanced to Three-Color together.

Turns out it was the entire team.

"I remember the previous issue of the magazine had a special feature on the Platinum Country. More than half the whole magazine was about Kane’s Platinum Country and some of their stories. You didn’t read it?"

Beside her, Bedalin stared at Lily and couldn’t resist teasing her.

Lily sat back down. "I’ve been out on patrol this whole time. It’s not like you don’t know how busy things are outside right now, so I didn’t pay any attention to the latest issue of the magazine at all."

Saying this, she fixed her eyes on Kane and helplessly shook her head. "It really is unbelievable."

Kane smiled and started answering Miraste’s question.

"You know as well as I do how inefficient and wasteful it is, power-wise, for a five-person team to act together exploring outside the Mist."

Hearing Kane’s words, everyone nodded. There was nothing wrong with that statement.

They were all at this stage, so of course they knew that when exploring the Mist, most of the time was meaningless; with bad luck, they might not even have a single fight in one or two years.

Only at this stage does the ’exploration’ in Explorer truly manifest.

Because aside from exploring, there’s nothing else.

And generally, when they ran into some crisis that was hard to solve, at most they’d go look for a friend or issue a commission.

Most of the time it was just two people acting together; only when they encountered some ridiculously extreme danger would they commission a third, turning it into a three-person team.

That was typically the upper limit of team size at the Three-Color stage.

Can’t be helped; Color-stage people are few in number to begin with, and each has their own affairs.

Those you can explore alongside with peace of mind, with enough trust to entrust your back to them, are rarer still.

If you can explore together, it already means the trust is deep enough.

If Kane and the others kept moving as a five-man party all the time, that really would’ve been a bit of a waste.

"So you split into teams? That actually is a pretty good choice." Miraste nodded as she spoke.

This was indeed the choice any normal person would make.

At this moment Lilyth asked curiously from the side, "So what about those two who attacked you? Did they get away? Or did you injure them? Scum like that really needs a proper beating."

"They’re dead."

"Dead?"

"Yeah, both of them are dead."

"Nice job!"

Lilyth clenched her fist and swung hard at the air, clearly delighted to hear the two attackers were killed, like she’d vented some pent-up anger.

When they heard Kane had taken out both attackers, the others were a little bit surprised, but they didn’t show much on their faces, and no one pressed for details.

"So, would your party be interested in joining the perimeter patrol?"

Orochi asked with some curiosity.

Kane nodded. "We were thinking about it, but we haven’t reached the outer ring city yet, we’ve only explored to a normal marked point."

"Don’t worry about that." As Orochi spoke, a card appeared in his hand, and he tossed it toward Kane.

Kane caught it and glanced at it. Wasn’t this the same kind of Teleportation Card they’d used before?

"Looks like you recognize it, so I won’t bother explaining. The destination of this teleport is the outer ring city. When the time comes, just teleport in directly from outside the Mist."

Kane nodded at the goodwill.

After chatting casually for a bit longer, everyone said their goodbyes.

Most of the people here were getting ready to join the external patrols, so they had to head back and prepare early.

Kane returned to the palace through the Teleportation Gate.

The moment he came out he saw Lilylu in the living room, cheeks puffed out as she munched on desserts.

"Kane, you’re back. That was fast."

"It was just a meeting, not some big operation, of course it was quick. How are Kreya and the others doing?" Kane asked.

Lilylu gave him a strange look. "You just said it’s only been a little while. Of course Sister Kreya and the others are still outside condensing Skills."

Kane walked over and poked her cheek, then headed straight outside.

He came to the garden and saw Kreya in the crystal courtyard, in the middle of condensing a Skill.

As for Longbei and Meizike, they were naturally condensing Skills in their favorite spots within the Platinum Country.

Here, they were pretty much absolutely safe.

Besides, if multiple people condensed Skills in the same place, it would cause the Rules there to fluctuate on a large scale and affect others.

Looking at Kreya, Kane smiled, then his figure vanished from where he stood.

When he appeared again, he was already at the border of the Platinum Country’s inner world. In the distance was a boundless sea, and Kane was sitting on a cliff over the water.

The sound of waves crashing against the shore echoed continuously nearby.

Kane sat cross-legged just like that.

A multicolored Magic Stone floated in front of his chest.

After this round of exploration, he had four Magic Stones left. He’d given two to Longbei and Meizike.

So there were two multicolored Magic Stones remaining.

Since Kreya’s Skill was already about to finish condensing, she wasn’t planning to waste a Magic Stone.

Kane was planning to spend another Magic Stone and condense a Skill.

Since his Rule Chain had already been fully used, giving him two Skills, if he tried to condense another Skill off that same thing, there would be a lot of overlap.

But after thinking it over, Kane realized something.

That is, he was ultimately using a Creation Skill to carry out Magic Technology creation.

Whether it was Universal Energy or the Automatic Combination Module, both could be compared to fairly basic forms of technology.

By using these two Skills, he could combine them into all sorts of things Kane wanted.

Mm, if he let the two Rule Chains mix together, or broke off parts of them to fuse with each other and then continued condensing new Skills...

There was definitely going to be redundancy.

For other people, spending a ton of time comprehending Skills, only to end up with overlapping Skills, was totally not worth it.

But Kane had figured it out.

He didn’t need to spend that much time comprehending in the first place, so there was no such thing as "waste" for him.

He had Magic Stones, these time accelerators, to let him jump straight to the results.

As long as he had Magic Stones, to exaggerate a bit, even if he condensed eight or ten big Skills that all overlapped, it wouldn’t matter.

As long as he had enough Magic Stones, even if the Skills overlapped in some aspects, it was still an overall boost in power.

Having thought this through, Kane decided once again to spend a Magic Stone to condense a Skill.

It couldn’t really be called wasteful.

The main point was that the Skill he wanted to condense this time could synergize with his two main Skills that were already condensed.

It would be like acting as a link between them, turning it into a 1+1+0.5 kind of equation.

If he spent Magic Stones to condense Skills later on, he wouldn’t be able to get this particular effect.

This was all thanks to Magic Technology—this sort of special ability gave rise to unusual ideas and results.

And of course, it was also because Kane having Magic Stones meant he wouldn’t be losing out.