Epic Of The Demonic Sage

"You want to buy this, Young Lord Asher?" Gellor questioned.

"Yes," Lucius replied. 

"But you don't know what beast it is." Gellor spoke.

"Well I don't, but I can find out. Plus, seeing how much it troubled you, we do have an idea of its abilities. I may as well keep it for later and see if some artifact can be made." Lucius replied.

"Young Lord Asher will be making Artifacts too now?" Gellor and the team were shocked.

"I will be, indeed. I just need some more time to prepare." Lucius replied.

"I see… Young Lord Asher is indeed talented. Way more than we all are combined, perhaps." Gellor couldn't help but praise.

"That all is for later, for now we should get to the next task." Lucius spoke.

"Of course! The next beast we want to hunt is the Mist Veil Beast, right?" Gellor questioned.

"Yes. You all can set up a plan for and tell me what else you need. I already gave you the documents before." Lucius answered.

"Yes, we do have the documents. We shall get it ready, but I think it will take us at least a week. We need to rest and recover, not to mention we have to sell off all these Stampeding Bull corpse. 

We had killed a lot more than we could bring, thus we sold them in the towns nearby to the hunting grounds for a lower price and brought as many of them as we could. They will start to rot soon so we need to hurry." Gellor stated.

"Very well, do as you find fit." Lucius said.

"We'll take our leave then, Young Lord Asher." Gellor said and stood up.

Finch and the rest did as well and left along with the carriages that contained the Stampeding bull corpses. Today, the Inanis city would be getting some fresh Rune beast meat and the nobles will probably be enjoying quite a bit.

Lucius also knew that tonight's dinner would probably have something from it. 

Lucius took a deep breath and took the two boxes with him and went to the laboratory.

He placed the boxes and opened several books, trying to find what rune beast that crushed bug was. Lucius couldn't use Nexus on a dead creature and thus he would have to find it by correlating the features.

Plus, since he already knew the name of the gift, it was a bit easier for him to find the rune beast.

"Here it is…" Lucius muttered as he found the beast's entry.

——

Beast Name: Ember Flash Firefly 

Description: The Ember Flash Firefly is a C grade rune beast that lives in mass groups of over hundreds. They live in the temperate fields of the southern kingdoms and are often found at night.

They usually keep away from human settlements but can become dangerous when humans enter their territory. It isn't uncommon for them to turn a human to ash by swarming them and covering them fully.

When greatly agitated, their bodies will spurt out strong jets of fires that can cause wild fires. Thankfully, the areas that they live in are mostly moist and the trees there don't catch fire easily.

Capture and movement of these rune beasts is banned and will often be punished with a life sentence. There have been cases of these rune beasts being captured for the vanity of nobles who keep them in cages as a display piece.

Despite being C ranked they are weak when alone and can even be killed by a child with some luck. But when their numbers reach beyond ten, they can become dangerous.

——

Having read the entire entry, Lucius could kind of understand how the rune beast got to the grasslands. Their original habitat was further to the south, beyond the Grantz kingdom. Thus, the only reason one of them would be here is if some smuggler tried to smuggle it across the border and managed to let it escape.

Lucius was surprised there was no news about more wild fires happening recently. If they did, then it would have been apparent that the rune beast was around. Though this also gave Lucius a timeline and he wondered if it had only been a few weeks since this Ember Flash Firefly escaped captivity.

'Someone must have paid a great price to get one such beast. Though there is no information about their rune crystals in the entry here. I don't know if they are used for artifacts or not and how rare is their drop rate.' Lucius thought to himself.

Lucius then tried to find more information about the Ember Flash Firefly, but couldn't really do that.

"Perhaps I'll need to get it from the artificers guild again." Lucius muttered.

He knew that the books he had were only those for the beginner levels and contained the basic information about things. Seeing how this was a C ranked rune beast, he reckoned there was a chance it might be used in more advanced levels.

"I'll do that later. For now, at least I got the Stampeding bull rune crystal. The only ones remaining now are the Plow Worms." Lucius said to himself.

Getting the Plow Worm rune crystals was a difficult task, as it was outlawed to harm them. 

'Hmm… I'll first need to get information on some plow worms and see if any are nearby.' Lucius thought to himself.

Kiana, who was waiting for him at the side, knew that he was looking for something and offered her services.

"What is it that you need now?" Kiana asked.

"I need information about Plow worms. More about the locations of them in the nearby regions." Lucius replied.

"Alright. I'll write some letters and see if we can get some information." Kiana nodded her head.

"I'll wait for it. Though I think for this one we might need to go out on our own. Sending others might not be right for it." Lucius stated.

"Oh? I guess we will need to prepare for an outing then." Kiana replied.