Having the Spider Acolytes watching over the Blood Dancers was starting to show results already the next morning. The girls were almost subdued when they came downstairs for breakfast. Sure, they were hyper and chatty and looking forward to morning training to perfect the skill that they had started learning late last night after they were caught outside their room after lights out, but this was significantly less chaos than they usually caused.
"How long do we have? Can we check out the tower here before we go? It's way bigger than the one at home, and I want to see what it's like to hunt targets with that much space." One of the girls asked King Aggramor as she finished eating and got ready for her morning training schedule.
"Of course. It's only a short hop through the transport circle from here to the Castle at home, so there's no reason you can't train in this tower today." Aggramor agreed, reviewing the morning documents that his assistant brought him.
Cain was immensely glad that he had Svetlana for the actual upkeep of Long Fang Valley. She was also already hard at work with the day's paperwork, in her office in what passed for downtown Long Fang City.
Cain was just getting ready for a relaxed day around the house when an emergency notification from Cixelcid in Port Nefheim came through over the Guild Chat. They had been studying the distribution of dinosaurs and other monsters on the Eastern Continent, with the help of the local hunters, and had found a very disturbing trend.
Unlike before, the distribution of the daily spawns was not random. Both the numbers and power levels of the monsters in a region were directly proportional to the population in a region.
The more reclusive elven cities with small populations and lower power levels were seeing relatively few and weak daily arrivals, whereas the areas around the Capital cities, and Port Nefheim itself were either seeing many more magical beasts or much more powerful ones. Port Nefheim had a lot of Mythic Awakened residents and visitors, largely due to having the only training tower on the Eastern Continent, and this morning they had seen their first Mythic Beast spawn.
It was an Albino Snow Leopard, and only half grown, but it was Mythic Quality.
Kone had been visiting, so the monster wasn't killed, it had been subdued and captured as her [Bonded Beast], which caused her to undergo the Mythic Awakening herself, so they were expecting to see this level of threat again in the future.
They were on the stronger side of the Eastern Continent, but many other areas had called in Mythic Awakened guards from the Southern Continent where they could, and if Cixelcid's theory was right, their very presence on the Continent would encourage the world to balance the daily arrivals to account for their existence.
More disturbingly, there were now an awful lot of Mythic beings on the Central Continent, thanks to Cain. It was possible that eventually, they would be seeing the same thing. The Eastern Continent was between one and two hundred levels ahead of them before the change, so by Cain's estimate, they should have at least a year before the slowly advancing power level reached the point that the Central Continent could support such powerful creatures.
What was more concerning was that the power level of the Southern Continent was already very high, so the chance that they would see a Spirit Beast as a random spawn in the near future was a very real threat.
A large part of the continent was already in chaos, fighting for power, and someone was assassinating the competition while others tried to consolidate and Cain's allies tried to expand. Unless it happened to spawn near the farm where the Echoes could tag team it with summons a single Spirit Beast had a good chance of taking out any small city it encountered, where the guards couldn't take it with the pure weight of numbers.
The expansion was going well though. They had gotten six more Farm Residents appointed as Guardians over the last week, and gained ten more allied cities through their Guardians joining the Guild for the benefits offered. They were at over thirty villages and cities now, covering hundreds of square kilometers, so the alliance could rightly be called a Kingdom of its own, though they weren't that closely affiliated, and had more of a mutual defense pact.
The news was spreading in the Guild Channel, and slowly, confirmations were coming in from across the Central Continent of the same phenomenon, but on a lesser scale. The Desert was almost empty, as it had no real residents, but anywhere between five and ten beasts in the level one hundred to one hundred fifty range were appearing near the Castle every night.
They had originally thought it was just the ones from the desert coming to them, as they were the only source of water and food nearby, but the travelers had noticed that there were even fewer monsters now than there were before. The new arrivals often killed the naturally existing ones for territory, reducing the overall numbers.
For the Castle it was great news, their source of free experience and food was coming to them. For places like the Skyview Capital, Landis City, and the Demon Kingdom, it was terrible. They all had a lot of higher-level noncombatants in their territory, which would mean more powerful nightly arrivals and more danger.
The Blood Dancers thought it was incredible news though. Tamii loved to fight, they loved to fight, and there were more monsters to fight, how could it be a bad thing, right?
King Aggramor informed his guards of the news so that they knew to position themselves so that the higher population areas got better guards, instead of the current random rotations, which kept everyone cycled home on a more regular basis.
Tanya dragged all the Blood Dancers out for morning training, wearing them down a little before she would allow them to go to the tower and burn off the last of their energy so that they could be calm for the afternoon. They had attracted a crowd today though. The combat skills that the Blood Dancers and the Commanders had weren't something that you could find just anywhere, so a lot of local residents wanted to join in.
Ever since the tower went in, training had become a favorite pastime among the farmers with a system and the townsfolk. They could do the quest daily, which not only helped them in their daily life, and provided a small sum of money, but also had a chance of giving useful items that they could trade or use at home.
So, the training session went from ten young demons to a hundred assorted beastkin and ten young demons, led by two Commanders and their four Jackalope Lieutenants.
There was some disappointment that Tamii was a Jackalope though. The pronged horns got in the way of headpats, preventing a smooth pattern from front to back, the way that was customary with a normal Bunny Kin.
Of course, Tamii had no idea that patting bunnies for luck was a thing, until Cain explained it to her, and attacked the first few people who tried, causing mass confusion, and some suspicion that certain villagers had bad intentions. None of them had ever heard of a Bunny attacking someone who tried to pat them before. Eventually, Cain had to come out and explain that Jackalopes weren't quite like Bunnies, and the tradition didn't normally extend to them, so you had to get permission first if you wanted to try, and it probably wouldn't bring you luck.
The people of Long Fang Valley weren't sure that Cain's explanation was correct though. Shouldn't the hard-to-pat Bunnies give more luck if you could get them to let you actually do it? That seemed more logical to them.
All ten of the Blood Dancers went into the tower at the same time, immediately after their morning training, and repeated the process no less than five times, despite only getting quest rewards for the first one. The problem was a simple one, they all finished on floor seventeen. It wasn't until the fifth run that one of the girls made it to floor eighteen and won the competition and they all collapsed, exhausted, and curled up on the floor for a nap before being brought back into the Manor by Tamii.
"Do they do that a lot?" Cain asked, watching the exhausted girls being carried back inside.
"That's actually the first time I've seen them take a nap. Usually, they are 'all go all the time'. Things might really be looking up for me at home." King Aggramor laughed, noticing how cute they were when they weren't making him want to pull his hair out.
They were awake again an hour later, but much calmer, and more interested in playing games in the house or swimming in the lake at the other end of the valley than causing trouble.
"Why don't you head home and the Commanders can bring them back when they get bored of playing here in the Valley? There is a lot more room for them to explore here than in a proper city, so they won't bother anyone if they head out for a day-long excursion to look for monsters or play in the lake." Cain suggested as the King's assistant came with more work.
The unfortunate demon looked more and more stressed as the day went on, but that was normal for him. Everything that the Demons thought should go to the King went through him, and he had to sort through much more than just what he brought to Aggramor, and the position couldn't be entrusted to just anyone, so he hadn't found an assistant of his own to help out.
"I think I will take you up on that. Grandpa will likely come by at some point to give them bad ideas and reprimand them for the mistakes they made implementing the last round. I swear he's no better than they are sometimes." King Aggramor informed Cain, making all the Companions in the room laugh, and Cain smirked at the memory of all the records of the former King and his Gnomish Queen sneaking away to the Ancient City for evenings alone.
Hopefully, they could still do that with the city now partially inhabited. He had left puppets there with instructions not to mess with certain buildings though, so it should be fine. Cain was starting to realize that there were a lot of things that he should be doing, but he really had no motivation to do them himself. That's what subordinates are for, right?
