Emperal looked at the ring one more time before sliding the ring onto his finger. A second later, his lips curved slightly.

"Either way, it doesn’t really matter who it was for. As long as they couldn’t track it back to us."

Calder looked at him for a moment and sighed. "You really are something else. Didn’t the stuff inside excite you?"

"It does, but...I have seen way more valuable stuff than these. So valuable that, even if you sold seven generations of your family, it still wouldn’t come close."

Calder’s eye twitched when he heard that. "This brat!! I’ll kill him one day!"

Despite all the cursing, he couldn’t help wondering about his identity. Suddenly, his eyes widened as he looked at Emperal.

"Are you...one of the descendants of the Elders of the Dragon Council?"

He stammered at the mere thought of that. Hearing this, Emperal smiled.

"Something like that."

"Hmph! You are bluffing; I can sense it!"

"Indeed, I was."

Calder snorted and just turned his head, refusing to talk to the loathsome existence in front of him.

After a bit of lighthearted joking, Emperal’s eyes turned serious.

"Alright, let’s go. We have four hours before Greenvale fully wakes up, and it’s only a matter of time before someone connects the godown to the storage," Emperal said, already walking forward.

Calder quickly jogged to catch up to him. "Where are we going, by the way?"

"To find a Verth Wielder Beast," Emperal said. "We still need the core."

Calder nodded his head. "Right, that’s the bandit territory fee."

"Yes."

"So after robbing a manager, killing an Alchemist, and stealing an entire godown...we are going beast hunting."

"I’d prefer it before sunrise."

Calder no longer opened his mouth; he was too stunned to speak. His life...which had been boring and monotonous a few days ago...had suddenly become a life-threatening adventure. He decided this was his life now and kept walking.

...

After hunting for three full days, Emperal and Calder had secured just one Verth Wielding Beast core. Emperal’s appearance had returned to normal; this was the thing he was worried about the most.

Since his picture had been released in the capital of Draventhar, he was sure it would have circulated across the entire Draventhar.

But for now, he was safe, as he was on the border. With just two pills, he had roughly five days’ worth of disguise.

But there was no way he could infiltrate that deep as a newcomer with a beast core. So, together with Calder, he made a plan.

The main objective for them under the five days was—Antagonize!

If they successfully pit the two bandit groups against one another, Emperal was sure he could definitely get inside the mine unhinged.

It was rough, but that was basically the plan. At the dawn of the fourth day, they moved through the forest towards the contested territory.

Calder had obtained some information about a Stage Two Verth Wielding Beast, a territorial predator that patrolled a specific ridge located two miles east.

He knew this because one of the four hunters he had watched earlier mentioned it in their conversations before they spotted the Ridgeback Boar.

And Calder...being Calder, naturally heard it.

The ridge was exactly where Calder had said it would be, and even his dramatic way of explaining the surroundings was true.

But...the beast on it was not exactly what either of them had pictured. It was a Stoneback Rhino, Verth Wielder Stage Two. It was roughly the size of a small house!

Its hide had absorbed so much ambient earth-affinity Verth over its lifetime that its skin...along its spine, covering its entire back, was literally calcified into layered stone plates.

At this point, it couldn’t even be called armor anymore. It was actually stone, grown from the inside out.

But the most terrifying thing was the beast’s own body having converted Verth saturation into physical structure over decades.

In layman’s terms, it was hard. Unbreakable.

Calder looked at it from their position in the treeline, then at Emperal. Then back at the Stoneback Rhino.

"That," he gulped, "is not how a Verth Wielding Beast should look."

It was certainly a lot larger than he had expected it to be.

"It is...sleeping," Emperal added.

"But that thing is almost as hard as a Dragon’s scale."

"Its balls aren’t."

Calder opened his mouth wide when he heard that, looking at the underside of the Rhino. He really saw a pair of coconuts hanging down there, squished between the rocks and its body.

"But how are you going to target it?"

"We wait."

And they did. They waited for eleven minutes before the Rhino shifted and rolled to the other side in its sleep. One massive leg extended, the stone plates grinding against each other with a sound like boulders jabbing.

A section of its underbelly and its coconut balls became briefly accessible. The underside wasn’t soft exactly; the skin there was still thick and Verth-hardened, but there was no stone overlay.

Emperal’s eyes shifted, and he moved before the Rhino finished its roll.

In a single step, he covered the distance faster than Calder could track. The Infernal Dragon’s passive body enhancement converted directly into acceleration that his Verth cultivation could never have produced.

"Kraeth’sol."

The compression in his fists happened in an instant. With a swing, he kicked its balls and punched its underbelly in one swoop!

The Rhino’s eyes snapped wide open...then slowly closed. The ground shook once as several pieces of the Stoneback Rhino rained down onto the ground.

Emperal stood up, taking heavy breaths.

"Dammit, just using it once is draining me entirely! If it continued like this, I would definitely die in one-on-one combat."

Emperal muttered as he took deep breaths, checking his hand. He found that it was mostly undamaged aside from the slight redness.

Calder gawked at the scene, staring at the Rhino. He had expected a prolonged fight—but this, Emperal ended a Verth Wielding Stage Two Beast with just a single punch!

"What a...monster."