About Thirty Five days had passed since Lin Mu and his companions had begun the Two months long deadline.
They had embroiled themselves in cultivating while they prepared for the last remaining four people to arrive. But with each day that passed, their hope of them arriving reduced. ~huu~
Lin Mu let out a breath as he opened his eyes.
'That's it for the Five cores…' Lin Mu thought to himself as he glanced at the platform.
Lady Kang and Min Ju were sitting next to it while Daoist Chu seemed to be observing the platform closely. Monk Hushu was deep in mediation on the side, while no one was paying attention to the teleportation circle.
It was clear that even they felt like the chances of others coming were low and it would be a waste to keep on watching the circle. As such, they moved their attention to the platform with the keyholes instead, hoping to find something they might have missed or another solution.
Lin Mu had finished bringing five of the elemental cores to the Immortal level in all this time. He had consumed all the raw materials as well as low quality resources that he could before the limit of the Omnicore Ascendancy was reached.
For the fire core, Lin Mu even used up the Lava that he had taken from the previous trial and stored in the ring. Since the lava had Immortal Qi in it, that two of multiple elements, it was important for Lin Mu to only use it once the Fire, Metal and Earth cores were up to the immortal level.
With that done, he consumed the Lava, progressing the three elemental cores to a slightly higher bigger size. And with all that he had consumed, Lin Mu's Earth Core was the largest in size, with the Metal Core being the second largest and the Fire Core being the third largest.
'Even though I started them later, they still had the most resources.' Lin Mu thought.
The two elements that he already had a natural affinity ended up being the cores that grew the most. Though it was also due to the nature of the resources themselves, as they could be found everywhere and Lin Mu had them in abundance having been collected over a long time.
Once he had finished all the Five basal elemental cores though, Lin Mu faced an obstacle.
'I can't progress the Wind Core and the Lightning Core the same way. I don't really have many low quality elemental materials for them,' Lin Mu thought to himself. He had checked his ring and found that while he did have several spirit herbs of the Wind element; he lacked them for the Lightning element. And even for the Wind Element, he wouldn't be able to use the same method of using low quality materials and stacking them until he reached a high level since Wind wasn't something that was as plentiful as the other elements in nature.
'Even if it is technically everywhere, it isn't in a usable form for me… No wonder Wind and Lightning are both part of the Four Heavenly elements,' Lin Mu thought to himself.
~SHUA~
But while Lin Mu was thinking about this, he saw the Teleportation circle in front of him suddenly glow.
"It's activating!" Lin Mu exclaimed before standing up.
"What!?" The others quickly became alert and looked towards the teleportation circle as well.
They had been waiting a long time and wondered who was it that was going to arrive now.
A couple of seconds later, two figures appeared from the teleportation circle.
~drip~drip~drip~
The sound of water dripping could be heard, as two soaked individuals could be seen.
"I never would have thought that we'd spend more time lost at sea in the trial than we did getting to the islands themselves." A long eared man spoke. "It was indeed longer than I would've liked." The Hoarse voice of an old man could be heard, while water spilled from his armor.
"Elder Ho." Lady Kang saw the man who was supposed to be her guard. "It's Ziran," Lin Mu called out to the Half-elf.
"Ah! Daoist Mu Lin and others!" Ziran saw that they were surrounded by their companions and felt better. Elder Ho did the same and saw that the two people he cared about, Lady Kang and Min Ju, were both present, making him feel content.
"Someones missing though… Where's Qiao De and the Crown Prince?" Ziran soon noticed.
"They're the only ones left." Lin Mu replied.
"Huh… How long has it been?" Ziran asked, narrowing his eyes.
"More than five months." Daoist Chu replied. "Daoist Mu Lin and Lady Kang were the first ones to arrive." He added. "That's longer than I thought." Ziran said before taking out a small disc like object. "Our calculations were wrong."
Lin Mu looked at it and found it to be similar to a compass. But instead of having a single needle, it had six of them!
The needles were all of different sizes, with three attached to the center and three set at the bottom of the disc in a triangular form. There were also some characters printed around the edge of the disc to which the needles pointed. There were also several white and purple crystals embedded in different sections of the clock.
Looking at the crystals, Lin Mu could see that they were very faintly vibrating. These vibrations were minuscule and a mortal wouldn't be able to perceive them with their naked eyes. But for Lin Mu, they were still noticeable. "What's this?" Lin Mu asked, seeing something like this for the first time.
He couldn't feel any Immortal Qi fluctuations coming from it thus was sure it wasn't an Immortal tool. But the vibrations that the crystals on it were showing seemed to be a bit too uniform for them to be normal. At the very least, Lin Mu could tell that they played a function.
'Forget Immortal Qi, there aren't even Spirit Qi fluctuations coming from it.' Lin Mu thought to himself.
