Chapter 135: The Curry Treasure Vault!
The Seventy-Two Transformations could turn one into birds and beasts, insects and spirits, flowers and trees, vessels and objects, gods and ghosts, humans and souls.
On the surface, many of those forms seemed to serve similar functions.
Take his Eagle Transformation and Bird Transformation, for example.
The eagle could fly high, move fast, and sustain long-distance flight. Its eyes were also exceptionally sharp, and it could even use Fiery Eyes and Golden Gaze.
But the target it presented was too large, and the aura it gave off was also stronger, making it easier to see through.
The bird, on the other hand, had explosive speed over short distances, and its body was small and nimble. It could conceal its aura extremely well and was almost impossible to detect.
The Flying Mosquito Transformation was practically invisible, but it flew slowly. If a gust of wind came along, Li Mu could end up taking a sightseeing trip with it. It was only useful in calm environments.
Every transformation had its own strengths, and once a corresponding form was enhanced, it would also gain special effects.
Still, if he wanted to infiltrate the enemy base, the most useful choice was still the Flying Mosquito Transformation.
Li Mu opened the enhancement node for the Flying Mosquito Transformation branch skill tree.
【Within a one-meter range, aura is greatly weakened. Beyond one meter, aura is completely concealed.】
【While in the Flying Mosquito Transformation state, Spirit Treasures and Divine Abilities can be used.】
Since the Flying Mosquito Transformation was his first transformation, those two entries were not expensive. Together, they cost only 500 points.
But those were currently all the enhancement effects available for the Flying Mosquito Transformation.
Further down, it only said 【Locked】.
This was not the first time Li Mu had seen that. He guessed it was the same as the upgrade method of the Heavenly Immortal Art.
More options would probably appear only as his cultivation increased.
After lighting up those two entries, Li Mu’s confidence surged.
He could now directly land on those elephants and let them take him back to the camp through teleportation.
The Flying Mosquito Transformation already had the effect of concealing aura, and with that further reduction, as long as he was not shoved directly into the face of an Earth Rank expert, Li Mu had little to fear.
At that moment, several people walked toward one of the elephants. Li Mu flew over as well and landed on its head.
Soon after, a group of Divine Elephant Nation people climbed onto the elephant and began chanting in the Divine Elephant language. The glow on the elephant’s body gradually brightened.
With a flash of light, the scenery before his eyes abruptly changed.
The surroundings instantly turned noisy.
Wave after wave of horrible stench rushed into his nose.
Li Mu even suspected he had just been teleported into an outhouse that had exploded in a heat wave.
He immediately left the elephant and rose into the air.
Looking down from above, he saw that this really was a camp.
A great number of Divine Elephant Nation people had gathered there.
All around them were vendors making unidentifiable food, shouting loudly to hawk their wares as people moved back and forth through the area.
It felt like a bazaar.
Farther away, there were quite a few soldiers drilling as well, standing in ragged formations while practicing unfamiliar offensive and defensive battle arrays.
Li Mu chuckled to himself.
People of the Divine Elephant Nation were still people of the Divine Elephant Nation. No matter what world or era it was, they were always this ridiculous.
In this world, after the resurgence of spiritual energy, the Divine Elephant Nation had become firmly convinced that quantitative change led to qualitative change, and that population was king.
So they focused heavily on childbirth, which had placed enormous pressure on society’s development.
Many people could not even secure a basic standard of living.
In nearly every respect, their development lagged far behind that of other nations.
Still, Li Mu had to admit that their population advantage really had produced a certain degree of success.
From above, the camp did not seem all that much larger than the Vacuum Zone around Tiger Roar Camp.
But just from what he could see at a glance, there were already five or six thousand people in this camp.
And the Divine Elephant Nation soldiers training below were not weak either.
There were quite a few Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Grade fighters among them. In terms of overall cultivation quality, they were no worse than the Abyss-Suppressing Army.
Of course, that judgment was based on cultivation alone.
The gaps in Cultivation Arts, martial techniques, tactics, morale, and other factors were a separate matter.
If one spoke only of combat manpower, this camp had roughly three times that of Tiger Roar Camp.
Before long, Li Mu fixed his gaze on something important.
In a huge open space in the camp stood a special elephant.
Its entire body was a pale golden color, as though it had rolled around in gold dust.
Even under the dim light of the Abyss, it occasionally sparkled.
Around its neck hung a pale golden collar.
And the elephant that had just brought Li Mu back through teleportation had appeared right beside this one.
Li Mu also noticed something else.
No matter where that golden elephant went, everyone around it, even the vendors and their stalls, would smoothly and automatically retreat far away.
Fortunately, the golden elephant only wandered back and forth within a single area.
And from time to time, the light of a teleportation array would flare up beside it.
Immediately afterward, another elephant carrying a group of Divine Elephant Nation soldiers would appear next to it.
Wherever the golden elephant went, the teleportation array would activate beside it.
Li Mu gradually understood.
That golden elephant was a mobile teleportation array.
The other elephants could only use some secret method to return to the golden elephant’s side.
But they could not use the golden elephant to teleport outward.
Huaxia’s teleportation arrays could also return people to the city, and they could also send people out through teleportation gates.
But compared to the Divine Elephant Nation’s method of teleportation, Huaxia’s approach consumed far more resources. If you wanted to establish a teleportation array here and create Return Stones, all of that required materials.
And it could only be fixed in one location.
The Divine Elephant Nation, by contrast, only needed this one golden elephant, which greatly reduced the cost.
After circling around a while longer, Li Mu began searching for where those Divine Elephant Nation people who had returned from the black ancient tree were heading.
The people riding back on the elephants with the flowers passed through the lively residential section of the camp and arrived at the camp’s Combat-Readiness Zone. This area was full of Divine Elephant Nation soldiers and officers.
Even from a long distance away, Li Mu could sense powerful auras emanating from two barracks.
Neither of them seemed any weaker than the turbaned officer of Profound Rank Second Grade whom Li Mu had killed.
They were probably two experts of at least Profound Rank Second or Third Grade.
For the moment, Li Mu had no intention of alerting the enemy.
He kept his eyes on the group that had returned with the flowers.
They arrived at a certain place and handed over the flowers they had picked from the black ancient tree.
Some black-robed attendants carried those crimson flowers on elegant wooden trays into a room.
Li Mu slipped in through a crack in the window.
The room was filled with the smell of herbs.
Someone handed the crimson flowers to a black-robed woman, and in front of her were already three wooden trays piled full of blossoms.
Then the woman carefully poured the flowers into a... garlic mortar.
What followed was, naturally, a round of vigorous grinding.
As she worked, she also added some unknown liquid.
About ten minutes later, red fluid actually began seeping out from the fine holes at the bottom of the mortar.
That red fluid looked almost exactly like blood.
In the end, the liquid flowed into a transparent glass vial.
Three full trays of crimson flowers produced only one completely filled vial, and by Li Mu’s estimate, it held no more than thirty or forty milliliters.
After that, the woman personally took the vial and headed down a long corridor.
At the end of the corridor seemed to be a warehouse.
The woman opened three separate locks in succession
before finally pushing open an abnormally heavy iron door.
Li Mu slipped through the gap in the door and entered the warehouse as well.
The woman placed the vial on a shelf, then left.
Li Mu landed on the highest wooden rack.
For no clear reason, his heart began pounding with excitement.
On that rack alone, there were at least a thousand glass vials just like that one, all filled with that same red liquid.
The place looked like a chemistry lab.
And in some of the larger glass containers, each one held three or four hundred milliliters of the stuff.
All of it was that same red liquid.
And those liquids were only part of the inventory in this warehouse.
On the shelves behind him were strange and eerie plants, bones from unknown monsters, monster organs soaking in jars, glowing crystals, metallic chunks, stones, and more.
The place was a dazzling array of treasures, and there was a great quantity of everything.
At the very center stood a stone platform, and on the platform rested a tiny piece of unknown metal.
It was only about the size of a thumbnail.
Yet Li Mu could feel that this piece of metal contained an extremely mysterious and powerful energy.
No wonder this warehouse was guarded by such a massive, heavy door.
So after all that, this was where the little curry bunch kept their treasure.