Outworld Liberators-Chapter 215: The Realm-Bound Ambition of Radeon

It was not only Jenkii who had won tickets. Students and disciples from other sects and schools had won their own as well.

The locals of Goldkeep Crownmarkets felt as though their luck had been stolen from them, yet there was little they could do but swallow the loss.

Beyond that, no one found it strange.

In a place like this, lives changed by the hundreds and thousands.

People came in one shape and left in another.

Winning here was not an outrage. It was part of the order of things.

Even so, Radeon Terraces still covered the cost of running the games and turned a profit besides. That was the nature of any gambling house worth its name.

Radeon, however, had arranged this outcome on purpose.

These schools might be earnest in their pursuit of martial arts, but earnestness and perseverance only carried a person so far.

The smaller schools, numbering in the hundreds, were led by little more than a gilded core, and many of their students did not even have a spirit stone to their name.

They were poorer by far than Fay had once been in the Everwritten Archivists Court.

Back then, even as a mere servant and not a disciple, she had still earned a spirit stone a month for tending decorative mortal plants no one truly needed.

Miserable as that court was, it still looked rich beside these people.

Radeon had seen all this in a brief pause and laid his arrangements accordingly. He had already foreseen which machine each of them would choose after praying at his shrines.

More than that, he meant to swallow these schools whole. Greed and gluttony would have looked like shy younger brothers standing beside him.

Even if these students could not compare to Jenkii or to the prime disciples of the great powers, they were far from worthless.

Their teachers had spotted promise in them, and that alone carried value. Yet his interest was not only in their young disciples.

The teachers themselves were treasures as well.

Cultivation resources did not spring out of someone's ass for just anyone to pluck whenever they pleased.

The teachers of these small schools clearly possessed the heart and essence of true teaching.

No sane man would pour away his own cultivation resources like that unless he carried real passion for it.

So many of them had been meant to win from the very beginning.

Some tickets granted discount coupons for cultivation materials, and from the way certain teachers received those with quiet relief rather than greed, Radeon began to make out the better parts of their character.

These were people who thought first of what their disciples needed, not of what they themselves could snatch.

Still, Radeon needed to shape the playing field of the Secret Realm before it began. He still wanted to observe the behavior of these youths, so he let more redeemable tickets rain down.

The blue aquamarine tickets yielded weapons and items fit for use all the way to the peak of the Nascent Embryo Realm.

The clear quartz tickets were humbler, offering uncommon weapons and tools that would still serve a cultivator well until they broke past the Gilded Core.

Even so, prizes continued to rain down in other forms.

But why would Radeon bother with any of this at all?

His thinking reached far beyond the little schemes most men mistook for ambition.

He was not building an army. He wanted something far greater than that.

He meant to forge an invasion force for entire realms, one that would number in at least the tens of billions.

If even the Samsara Realm beneath their feet could no longer sustain life, then they would simply have to keep moving forward.

Cultivation was a long road anyway, and long roads favored patient men.

As his observations continued, the new disciples were nearly done making their selections.

Even in the choosing of manuals, their temperaments showed plain enough. Radeon lowered his gaze to the system and checked what each disciple had taken.

[List of Disciples]

[Hatcheteer - Axe Splitter of Heaven and Earth]

[Speedy - Ascending Disdain of Space and Time]

[Manpowder - Particles of Mundane and Grandeur]

[Whiteblade - Sword of Withering Light]

[Finehanging - Hands of Molding Essences]

[Youngpoison - Unending Reversion of Cure and Venoms]

[Rumbler - Wild Abandon of Destruction and Demolition]

[Toolglove - Heaven's Hidden Toolshed]

[Smallsteels - The Man of Shadow Realm]

[Handlefiddler - Heart of Heaven's Faithless]

[Youngbanners - Heaven Profundity Forecaster]

[Raxutus - Heart of Internal Forge]

[Ropefist - Flowing Tears from Beyond]

[Daylightrays - Impostor Among Us]

[Irongrit - Quickdraw of the Armed Man]

[Sackmace - Telekinetic Procedures of Gravity]

[Reelfisher - Angler of Fate and Fortune]

[Lonequiver - Weaponless Myriad Bolts]

[Almsgiver - True Judge of Good, Evil, and the Fruitless]

[Tabulae - Universal Luck and Logic Gambit]

Raxutus was the last to undergo the awakening of his meridians beneath the Fire Meridian Tree. His problem had never been a lack of potential.

It was oversaturation. Like a child forced to swallow a whole pig every day until growth itself turned sluggish beneath the burden, his body had been smothered by excess.

Radeon did not bother explaining any of that. He simply let the Fire Meridian Tree do its work. Once it connected to Raxutus, it drew out what did not belong, stripped away the excess, and set his body back into proper order.

The change in him was the most dramatic of them all.

His swollen flesh and pimple-ridden skin began to seep black filth from every pore, so foul that Tabulae's eyes watered and her stomach nearly turned.

It poured out of him in greasy streams until at last the last of the corruption left his body.

What remained hardly looked like the same man.

Where once there had been bloated softness, there was now a hard and chiseled frame.

His face had sharpened into something striking, handsome in a rugged and undeniable way. Even his clothes, no longer held up by the bulk they had once clung to, slipped loose from his body and fell away, leaving him bare.

Rumbler, the most mischievous among the new disciples, could not help himself.

"Fellow disciples, our brother's third leg seems rather impressive now, does it not?" he said.

A few stiff laughs slipped out before Calyx turned his eyes on him. That was enough to kill the joke where it stood.

Raxutus, however, felt nothing of embarrassment.

What filled him instead was something far deeper.

He dropped to his knees at once and kowtowed toward Radeon, slamming his forehead against the stone hard enough to split the skin.

Blood ran down his brow, yet he did not stop. Tears poured from his eyes as he faced his master.

"I, Raxutus, have been given this chance," he said, his voice shaking. "For Master, I will climb mountains of blades and cross seas of flame."

This was everything he had ever wanted. More than that, it was something he had not even dared hope would come so easily.

Radeon stepped forward, lifted him back to his feet, and gave his shoulder a firm pat.

"Cultivation is a long and arduous road," Radeon said. "The fate of this world is turbulent. I only hope that after a thousand years, you still carry the same fire you do now."

While others offered thanks and made their vows, one of the new disciples carried on with his own business as though none of it concerned him at all.

Raj only spared them a glance before returning to his notes, calmly jotting down every detail he deemed worth studying.

Thaddeus noticed. He walked over to the boy.

"May I know why you are not choosing any cultivation technique?" Thaddeus asked.

Raj did not even look up.

"I do not believe in cultivation," he said. "I only believe in my own path."

Thaddeus did not think himself above the boy just because he had entered earlier. His eyes dropped to the pages in Raj's hands.

"May I have a look?" he asked.

Raj only nodded, his hand still racing across the page as he wrote down one thought after another.

Thaddeus read carefully, and the more he read, the more stunned he became, as if a new continent had opened before his eyes.

This was the very thing his Master Radeon had tasked him to seek. He read like a man possessed.

Raj had written down how he meant to test movement from the ground up, from kicks to punches, from stance to balance.

He had notes on guiding qi through the limbs, on making the arms both soft and sturdy at once, on shaping force without chaining it to any inherited form.

"Please allow me to borrow this for a moment," Thaddeus said.

With that, he hurried over to Radeon and began asking questions.

Radeon was not a man who spoke vaguely to the young. He reserved that sort of measured half-truth for old monsters like Calyx, the kind of ghost who would swallow a wholesome man whole if given the chance.

With Thaddeus, he spoke plainly. He had already seen what Raj was trying to do.

The boy lacked one crucial thing.

Creativity.

And that was not something a person could simply be taught.

So Radeon explained everything in detail. He told Thaddeus that Raj's method was both the best way and not the best way.

Raj, being an Asura, possessed a healing factor so absurd it bordered on the divine. Even Radeon would have had to temper his body and tear it apart again and again just to imitate a fraction of such resilience.

Raj could test dangerous ideas because his body could survive the cost. Others could not.

He made sure Thaddeus understood the danger in chasing that path blindly. He also made one thing very clear.

Raj was not human.

At last, Thaddeus understood what he needed to do first. Since he did not possess a body suited for such reckless experimentation, then he would have to build one through honest effort.

He began deriving what he could from body cultivation paths, turning his thoughts toward muscle, structure, and endurance.

By then, everyone else had already risen back into the air.

Only Raj and Thaddeus remained in the underground library.