The Runic Alchemist

The ocean was indeed vast and not always calm at all. There were no islands on the way at all. Damian was going 100 kilometers per minute. It wouldn’t have taken fifteen minutes before he was there, but he did notice many dungeons on the way. For each one he stopped at, he built a small steel cage to trap a random monster underwater, collecting its ID.

The monsters knew better than to come near him with the level of mana and aura he exuded. He would have to think of something to make an underwater unbreachable place to give access to those dungeons for common people.

He could see the massive island from afar — it was in the all-natural island shape all around except one side, where it was a straight line, as if some half-cut cookie. Land-breaker’s work was indeed impressive.

Damian slowed down, moving closer — there was very little greenery on the island that was around 2000–2300 kilometers big, over 30% of which was just the rocky side. It was big. Damian sensed around a million and a half distinctive presences. He circled the whole thing first, seeing all the cities they had — their dark and gold structures were quite impressive.

Residential areas were built like large buildings with lots of little apartment-like rooms in them. There was one building that had even five stories. There were lots of big warehouse-like workplaces pushing black smoke out of the high chimneys. Without big-scale wars and with limited resources to get by, a nation would indeed learn to have a shared urgency for their future and a long time to invent new things. The island was seriously lacking in the natural resources department though.

The seawater around it had a strange murky dark green tint to it. Near the rocky area, there was a huge mountain of garbage. It looked like they gathered their garbage and dumped it all in that place. Large forests had been cut down to nothing but ugly stumps. Considering their place, someone would think for a second about growing some more, but these people had destroyed the land and all beyond recognition.

There were over 13 small and big dungeons on the island of demons. The largest city was built near the beach facing the direction Damian had come from. A big stony staircase was built in the middle of the straight-cut land going all the way up. The lower sea-level side also had a big wooden deck and had formed a small downtown area with many demons living or working there. Very few ships were remaining. Damian had noticed some ships on his way too, he had ignored them — they were not going to the mainland, more like just roaming around to and from the underwater nearby dungeons.

That would indeed be their only way to get more, unlimited resources. The price paid wouldn’t be small though. There were fewer monsters around the island underwater, but still there were enough to be a constant threat to simple wooden ships. They didn’t even have forests with trees. The dungeons would be the only source of wood, if it was a forested-type one.

Damian slowly descended in the biggest city. In the center was a massive dark, gold-material-and-stone-mixed structure that was used to make a giant castle. He could sense only one transcendent in the whole island country, and it was inside that castle. He had not hidden his presence at all. Even second-rankers could sense him easily — he was flying close enough to the cities that even the civilians could see him easily. Some did try to fly up to confront him, but he just threw them back with a simple big solid mana backhand.

The whole crowd of guards present in the black and gold castle had come out holding weapons, looking up. Their lord, the transcendent woman, had also come out. She was a mature-looking woman in her 50s or 60s. Not a single weapon on her, but Damian could hear her chanting from the second he started descending. The impressive thing, however, was that she was already holding two spells and this was the third — two of which were water elements and one chaos.

A mage. Probably a water-affinity one.

That would indeed be really valuable on this island — he had barely seen any lakes at all. Guess all their drinking and usable water was made by spells. There were big steel structures in city squares that people were generating water from using their mana.

The thing about demons was — all their people had mana in them, even before going through ascension. They could even use this small amount of mana present in their bodies for small spells before ascension. Just like pigmen, they too were evolved species — even if their path of evolution was forced by the demon lord himself. Damian assumed they had mutated more and more in these past thousand years since they got separated from the mainland. Otherwise, even the demon lord’s fucked-up darkness could not change a human permanently this much.

There were two–three kinds of different demon types Damian had noticed. Some that were direct or crossbreed descendants of beastmen could easily be spotted. The main type was the ones descended from the humans — looking mostly human with skin and all, but the horns and in some cases even eyes were different.

Damian wondered if there were any elf descendants. The real elves were almost extinct. Maybe their distant cousins had somehow survived.

“Dawnwalker? Or are you one of us?” the demoness asked. Her posture and facial expressions gave not a single hint of her three ready spells just waiting to be activated by her at great constant mana cost.

“I am Runebreaker. The second keeper of Sanctuary,” Damian said. “Your people lost the useless war. I don’t see many warriors here. Are you going to follow in their footsteps too, or do you have enough sense to understand you have lost?”

“A whole nation, kneeling to one man? Even for a transcendent, that’s some arrogance.”

“Your Demon King and his pet dragon might’ve disagreed—if they were alive.”

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