About 1300 Kilometers, northeast.
Alex knew exactly how far they had traveled and in what direction before he even arrived at the new destination. When he arrived, he looked around and saw that he was standing on top of a Teleportation formation.
'A receiving formation that can accept a teleportation through talisman,' Alex thought. That was some incredibly complex stuff that would take him years to learn how to make.
It was difficult to coordinate two completely different systems into working together. Whoever made this was extremely talented for sure.
They had arrived in a dark cave with cold floors and ceilings. The walls glowed with scripts and formations, that were of such number that it would take Alex some time to tell what their purpose was.
"I suggest you don't try to fight, Your Majesty," the leader said. "You'll find us not very receptive to bad manners."
Alex turned to look at the man and saw him smiling back at him.
He was a tall, muscular man with a squarish face and a roughly shaved patch of beard. His hair was unkempt for the most part, but it was short.
He wore a black dress with no feature about his dress at all. The other two men who followed him wore similar clothes as well.
One of them was a shorter man with a thin face and gray hair in a ponytail. The other man was just as tall as the leader, but very thin and with a long beard and mustache.
Alex looked at the leader's hand and the ring he held there. "You're too strong to be simply bandits, and you know who I am. I assume you were planning to kidnap me from the start?"
"That was the intention, yes," the man said. "We were after you, or at the very least your pills."
Alex said nothing. There was some confusion he had about the man that just didn't stick right with him.
First of all, they knew their flight path. The only person who would have known their flight path was either the Gold King or the Imperial Army.
Alex doubted the Gold King would have anything to do with this, so it could be that this was the Imperial army that had done this. But then… There was little need for them to set up such an elaborate ruse.
Alex was already on the ship. Many of the army members were there as well. Couldn't they have just attacked him?
'Are they trying to not make the rest of the army look bad?' Alex wondered. 'Or maybe they are a secret group of the army that was sent here to steal his recipes.'
"How did you know where I was headed?" Alex asked.
"We had people follow you around," the man said simply. "We had people waiting on all sides. As long as you didn't teleport away, we would have caught you."
The man answered Alex's question rather freely. He seemed so nonchalant about it that Alex found it hard to believe that he was telling the truth. For all he knew, he could have been lied to.
'Are they from the army or just a random bunch of strong people who are trying to take advantage of me?' Alex felt either possibility had a high chance of being true.
The man started walking and one of the other men pointed a sword behind Alex's back, pushing him forward. Alex stepped down from the formation platform and followed him.
"I'm going to guess that you will not give me your name, will you?" Alex asked. "So, I might as well ask what pill you are hoping to find."
"My name? I do not mind giving it, but my colleagues fear repercussions of our name leaking, so I won't be telling you it for now," the man said. "As for the pills, we are interested in any that can help us."
The man turned around. "Can you tell us what pills you have?" he asked.
Alex stared at the man for a second and said, "Why do I have a feeling that you already know some of the pills I have?"
"Haha, no, no," the man laughed a little. "We saw the list of what was being sold on the auction and knew that the pills sold at the end were yours. "We were just hoping to get you to make some for us."
Alex continued walking with them. "Do you want me to make pills that aid you spiritually and protect you from poison?" he asked.
"And helps us learn new dao, improves our spiritual roots, maybe even makes us a pill that can help us reach straight for immortality," the man said with a grin. "No? That's alright. We'll settle with what we can get."
"You were at the auction then," Alex said.
"No, we just had the list of what was being sold," the man said. "Seeing the list of pills and everything, we knew we had to get you. We needed you to help us."
They arrived in front of a massive door.
"And why do you think I will be making pills for the three of you?" Alex asked.
The sword in his back poked him a little harder before stopping. The leader didn't turn around, and Alex could only hear the slightest hint of laughter in his breath.
"The three of us, you say?" the man asked and pushed open the door. "You will be making pills for all of us."
Behind the door was a large balcony, looking down into a massive hall down below. Alex walked up to the balcony and looked at the hall.
Tall pillars carved from the mountain itself rose to the top of the hall. White marble filled the floor to the edges of the hall. The hall barely had any furniture and had no decorations either.
However, it did not look barren at all. What it lacked in furniture and decorations, it made in the people that gathered there.
Dozens of people sat around the hall or walked past each other, each minding their own business. Alex felt their cultivation bases and a look of shock appeared on his face.
Every single person down there was a Saint and not just any saint. They all had a cultivation base of Saint Core or higher. This sort of strength was not something Alex had ever seen in such concentration.
This felt like a meeting of high-level cultivators, and not a normal one at that.
The men and women in the hall looked up dozens of meters high to see the four of them arrive. A few of them murmured when they saw the group and some even pointed at them.
Alex looked down with an array of confusing thoughts going around in his mind.
"You really aren't a group of random bandits," he said softly. "Just… just who are you people?"
"To say who we are would be to betray our purpose of existence," the man said. "We are a force that this empire needs right now, a change that it deserves."
"We are the ones who will free it from the shackles that have been put onto it, and we will do anything to make that happen."
