Now Cain knows why so few people go inland on the Southern Continent. Large portions of the continent are awakened areas, locked to most, and too dangerous to travel even if they weren't.
Which, of course, means that Cain absolutely must see them. What greater adventure could there be than exploring the regions of this world that have been locked away from the public and reserved only for the elite?
Of course, it is a shame he can't bring everyone with him, but that is temporary. It is possible that more of them will power up enough to see it in their own, and with his help it is all but guaranteed that most of his inner circle will be able to personally experience the adventures he is planning to go on.
The question is how much time will he have before he needs to return to see his children born and raise baby Ancients through their awkward baby phase.
Or do they even have an awkward baby phase? For all Cain knows, they could be born like Octopus, ready to go the second they emerge, or the opposite could be true, and they might be like Elves, children for decades.
Either option could be fun, but at the very minimum, he will have to leave an echo around to keep an eye on them at all times.
From what he had learned, nothing short of an Ancient can control another ancient, which might also apply to the children. Cid and Lickity have enough problems with Neffie, and her Demon King heritage only amounts to one-sixteenth Ancient.
A lot of that had to do with being born a mimic, though. The class abilities from day one were a disaster waiting to happen. Once they had leveled her up enough to be intelligent and safe with her powers, she was also high enough level and smart enough to be ambitious and curious.
Looking for a few solid answers, Cain goes to see Dana, the Elven Doctor taking care of Misha's pregnancy progress.
"Hey Doc, how is everything?" Cain greets her, startling the doctor who was in the small side Ron she has adopted as her office, reading over her notes.
"Good, very good. I'm sure you are curious about the due date, as any father would be, so we can start with that. Going by the progress, it will be a normal human-term pregnancy. Nine months, give or take, with seven and a half left. They are slowly growing more humanoid as they develop, so their final forms might be something in between your natural form and hers, and not entirely tentacle based." Dana explains.
"And what might the chances be that I get murdered for going to the southern continent to chase information on Ancients?" Cain jokes.
"Fairly low. Misha has been pretty busy lately with the outreach work, Guild affairs, and the pregnancy. I think you should be able to spare at least a few months to go on a trip if you tell her that it is for the children's good." Dana answers in all seriousness.
If he is leaving from here in Long Fang Valley it should take him about a month to make it to the Southern Continent by boat. The outside world doesn't have many, if any, travel circles linked to the central continent, as far as he could learn.
If Nila Captains the ship, she can bring it back afterward, maybe with trade goods. That seems like the best course of action, so Cain mentally informs the Companions to prepare for a trip. One of the clones of each can stay behind, but there is a chance that they might all be necessary during the journey.
He sets the departure for three days from now since that is when the Echoes should have him to level 300. Until he leaves, they both have permission to compete against each other in the dungeon full time, hopefully cutting a day off the required time to level.
With everyone else taking care of the day to day matters and preparations, all Cain has to do is learn this book full of essential Spell Crafting Skills.
The beginning was easy, just learning some new skills and writing them out. Cain even managed to get his talent to Apprentice 7. But then the lessons moved into completing an ability from partial information, and everything went downhill.
There was some level of common knowledge he was missing that wasn't provided in the book, as they assume that everyone should understand it from another essential subject that Ancients would have learned in childhood.
Even though the skill was [Lightning Lance], which was very similar to [Chain Lightning] but cohesive instead of arcing between targets, it still wasn't close enough for Cain to understand what he was missing.
Nothing in his Summoning repertoire could use the skill, and none he has found had any idea how Spell Crafting worked, so Cain was all alone in this.
His first thought was to try substituting in the section from [Chain Lightning] and then modifying the ability to not chain, but that wasn't it.
The next idea was to work his way through the ability like he was casting it, which at least had given him an idea of where he was going wrong. Each error led to a restart, and each success moved him further down the line.
By his hundredth try, Cain was ready to give up. But at number 107, everything just clicked.
The knowledge he had been missing about the interaction between segments of a skill pattern finally made sense to Cain. On the next attempt, he understood the little changes that he had to make in the earlier sections to have the last section flow properly, and the spell was finally functional.
Cain decided to celebrate with a few drinks, only to find that he had been working on that one skill single-mindedly for an entire day, and it was now the early hours of the morning.
Sneaking into bed, Cain found that sleep still wasn't an option; his mind was full of possibilities, and he knew that if he just had the time, he could create an entirely new personalized custom skill and not have to use [Modify] to grant it to others.
The amount missing from Lightning Lance in the instructions amounted to one page of four hundred, and it took him over a hundred attempts to make the skill functional, so surely this would not be a fast process, but he was now sure it was technically possible.
No wonder the Ancients were famous for losing track of time, with their constant experiments and ageless bodies. The appeal of trying new things is simply too high.
