Chapter 166: Chapter 163: Henrietta Vin

Krysta

“How much do you think the Luck stat affects the War of the Chosen?” Henrietta Vin asked from behind the oversized black cauldron the Vin Clan’s army’s crafters had made for her.

“It’s probably relative like the Trial Tower.” Krysta thought for a few seconds as she proceeded with her own alchemy. “The general’s Luck stat I would guess matters most, followed by the commanders, and then the soldiers. But I’m not sure what it would do, as every stage is the same for all the competing forces except for those that occasionally involve more than two armies.”

The Forest Cauldron had only a single army in the War of the Chosen as they didn’t have very many warriors and it wasn’t a particularly powerful one, so, when they met the Vin Clan’s main army, where princess Henrietta was one of the commanders, they’d lost quite badly.

They had, however, managed to cause damage before their surrender, so Krysta and seventeen others were brought into the Vin Clan’s army, some as warriors and some as alchemists.

Krysta had been brought in as both, but she was enjoying the alchemy part a lot more, especially as she and Princess Henrietta had quickly hit it off.

Princess Henrietta had been born with an extremely powerful bloodline, Mistress of the Eternal Flame, which gave her immense affinity to the elements of fire and time, but for her the bloodline, which she inherited from her mother, had been more of a curse than a blessing. Her father was the Vin Clan’s youngest A rank, the current emperor of the most powerful elven empire in the universe, and he was a water and darkness element swordsman. As a result, he’d advanced his race to be extremely yin aligned, so Henrietta had been born with a Legendary grade yin aligned race which greatly conflicted with her bloodline.

As such, she’d been bedridden for most of her life and had to keep taking medicine from the Vin Clan’s alchemists in order to stay alive, starting her own interest in alchemy.

Cultivators who reached A rank or higher rarely if ever managed to have children, so the Elven Emperor had tried everything he could to help his daughter fix her race to better align with her bloodline, but for a long time he was missing one key ingredient, a Highgenion Flower. Thankfully, he managed to trade with an unknown cultivator and was then able to use several powerful treasures to transform Henrietta’s race from yin aligned to one specializing in fire and time.

As a result, Henrietta didn’t look like most of the other elves in the Vin Clan’s army. She didn’t have blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin, and she wasn’t willowy and lithe. Instead, she had fiery orangish-red hair, green eyes with golden specks, and her skin was a healthy reddish color. Also, while no one would describe her as voluptuous, she didn’t look like she’d be knocked over by a strong breeze like most elf women. So she stood out from the crowd in the army almost as much as Krysta, with her silver semi-translucent hair, dark brown skin, and entirely black eyes.

“Do the two of you need anything?” Sarra Lin’Talic, one of the other utility cultivators in the Vin Clan army, a healer they’d picked up a few rounds before Krysta, came over and offered her assistance like she always did whenever she returned from a scouting mission.

“No.” Krysta smiled at the extremely pretty quarter jinn woman. “But feel free to sit down and chat if you don’t have anything else to do. The pills we are working on right now don’t require our full concentration.”

“Thank you, Lady Krysta.” The healer bowed slightly with both hands clasped in front of her. Then she sat down.

“What’s your goal in the War of the Chosen, Sarra?” Henrietta asked, a smile on her face.

“Me?” Sarra seemed to think about it for a few seconds. “Originally, I just wanted to earn enough points to buy some natural treasures to help my race increase in grade when I advance, but now that it seems I might be able to advance quite a bit further than I originally expected, I want to see if I can find a way to help my ancestor. He’s been stuck at the peak of D rank for thousands of years and is approaching the end of his life, but he’s so talented. It’s not fair that I received so much help from him but he never received help from anyone.”

“He rose to the peak of D rank on his own?” Krysta asked, finding herself interested. “What cultivation technique did he use?”

Sarra’s Aura briefly filled with resentment and she didn’t hide it on her face, but then she took a deep breath, the resentment fading, and she answered the question. “He didn’t use any cultivation technique at F rank, only starting with a basic non-elemental technique at E rank. As he grew up in a tribe suppressed by the local power on his F rank planet. He didn’t know cultivation was a thing until it showed up on his status after he advanced to E rank.”

Krysta felt uncomfortable as she realized she’d asked a rather ignorant question. Her mother had told her most cultivators didn’t have the same amount of resources she enjoyed and most of them barely had any resources at all, but it was one thing to hear about a statistic and another to meet someone who’s family had been affected.

“Reaching the peak of D rank with that kind of start, he must be amazing.” Henrietta, despite not having gone out of the elven royal palace much at all during her childhood, had received lessons on statecraft, so she handled the slight awkwardness caused by Krysta’s mistake much better than Krysta could, bringing a smile to Sarra’s face.

“He’s amazing.” Sarra’s eyes were almost sparkling. “Having not used a single natural resource in his life and never having gone to even a C rank planet until well after he entered D rank, he managed to train Laws of all twelve elements up to the Law Pupae stage and even bring eleven of them up to middle grade.”

“Wow.” Krysta was genuinely impressed. Sure, she had a high grade Law Pupa, one grade higher, but she had an extremely powerful race and bloodline, her affinity for the space element probably among the top three in the history of the universe for E rank. And she’d spent almost all her life on an A rank planet. “That is impressive.”

“Right.” Sarra was all smiles again, looking very proud of her ancestor. “He recently gained some enlightenment on his last element and thinks he’ll advance it within the next few centuries. If I as his apprentice can reach C rank within the next few thousand years, allowing him to gain a System boon and make up for some of his flawed foundation, he’ll have a 30% chance of advancing and extending his life. He can already beat C ranks as a D rank, so how amazing will he be then?”

Krysta immediately thought of the Foundation Mending Pill the Forest Cauldron generally sold for 156 B rank credits. With just one such pill, which cost only about 47 C rank credits to produce, Sarra’s ancestor’s chance of successfully advancing would go from 30% to closer to 95%, but there was no chance Sarra or her ancestor would be able to afford that price.

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Sarra herself, however, was very impressive. Her stats weren’t that high for an E rank, as she was only level 37, but the Violet Mountain Sect seemed to value her, and the Vin Clan had chosen to take her in as healers were extremely rare, especially one’s like her who could help regrow limbs as only an E rank.

Sarra’s class, however, was primarily about contracts, and she had excellent people skills.

Around some of the other members of the Vin Clan, for example, she wouldn’t allow her emotions to be so apparent. According to Henrietta, Sarra had just decided not to hide her emotions when dealing with the two of them, mostly because she couldn’t, their Aura stats much higher than hers.

Part of what Krysta was supposed to do during the War of the Chosen was to find potential new members for the Forest Cauldron, and Sarra would be an excellent fit for a merchant role helping to sell the Forest Cauldron’s pills, maybe even an auction host.

In that case, Krysta could justify giving Sarra’s ancestor a Foundation Mending Pill to help ensure loyalty, and that would make Krysta feel better. Such a talent as Sarra described shouldn’t be stuck just because the universe was unfair.

“Gyaaa!” Krysta looked over at the scream and the first thing she saw was what looked to be a fire element spirit flying down from the sky in the shape of a large songbird, landing on the shoulder of one of the Vin Clan’s soldiers. Reginald Vin was young, only about Krysta and Henrietta’s age, but in the next War of the Chosen he would almost certainly be a commander of the Vin Clan’s main army, or maybe even the general of its second army. He was powerful, yet, when the songbird landed on him, he was almost immediately burnt to a crisp.

And he wasn’t the only one being killed by spirits.

There were seven other spirits also attacking and Krysta, who quite enjoyed reading and learning about monsters, realized each was in the shape of a fabled grade or higher beast. The songbird burning soldiers was actually a phoenix. The light element spirit creating illusions so the Vin Clan’s soldiers would attack each other in the chaos was a nine-tailed fox. And the life element spirit seemingly killing soldiers by flooding life energy into their brains to create blood clots was a white stag.

The large spirit of water restraining three of the Vin Clan’s commanders was a miniature leviathan. The spirit of darkness running through the shadows and assassinating anyone who tried to take command during the chaos was a moon-eating wolf. And the death element spirit who had already killed two of the Vin Clan’s commanders was a twin-tailed ghost cat.

The most powerful two spirits, however, were the yin spirit shaped like a twin-headed serpent king which was coiled around the Vin Clan’s general and the yang spirit shaped like a winged horse which immediately killed one of the Vin Clan’s commanders and was now fighting with five more by itself.

Krysta expanded her senses and then noticed their camp was completely surrounded by coran warriors, even though it was only an hour after the stage had started, and each of those warriors was wearing a set of silver armor, which was the scariest thing of all.

Those armors looked like a massive set of law armor, capable of allowing everyone wearing the armor to share energy for defense and to greatly empower a few powerful combatants with the energy of everyone else. They were a staple of armies throughout the universe, but they were hard to make, so they generally wouldn’t start to appear in the War of the Chosen until maybe the tenth or eleventh round, and even then only from forces with really, really skilled crafters.

This was only round nine, and the enemy force, seemingly one of the Bronze Legion’s armies, already had over 600.

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