Chapter 44 Different Traces

On Ben's side, after going deeper for a distance, he randomly found a relatively spacious cave.

After a heart-to-heart talk with the cave owner, he moved in smoothly and started barbecuing by building a fire.

Looking at the fiery cave owner, Jemin lowered his head and took out the talisman magic tool he had used before from the bag and examined it carefully using alchemy.

"Hmm... As expected, there are quite a few damages on the rune circuits, but the base is not too damaged. It seems that even if the redundancy of the runes is increased, excessive release will still cause considerable pressure on the main body." Benjamin shook his head regretfully.

He thought of many ways to solve the problem that talismans and magical tools would be damaged if released excessively, but there was no good solution.

This type of problem is rare in wizard civilization. After all, ordinary wizard weapons can be released a limited number of times a day. Overheating and damage caused by excessive release usually occur in the magic arrays of certain floating cities or large stable facilities.

However, since these items can be engraved with a wide range of runes, they do not require much technical content and the problem can be solved by using excess redundancy.

Even more simply, the magic array can be designed in a modular way, and any broken part can be replaced.

However, this problem is difficult to solve when it comes to talismanic magical tools.

"Making the talismanic weapon bigger? Then there's no point in designing a talismanic weapon..."

As for carving the runes more finely...

If you want to carve more finely, you need stronger mental power, but for wizards, stronger mental power means stronger strength, and the intensity of witchcraft required will increase.

Stronger sorcery requires more complex runes, and higher carving precision is also required...

"It's a pure vicious cycle!"

After worrying for a while and having no good solution for the time being, Benjamin simply stopped thinking about it and turned to consider the problems he discovered during the battle just now.

"Although that fire elemental monster is quite powerful, it was able to withstand so many of my bombardments. It seems that it has a considerable damage reduction against attacks of the same attribute. It seems that next time I should create more attacks of other attributes... No!"

Jieming suddenly reacted with a flash of inspiration.

Why do you have to insist on attacking with attributes?

The biggest advantage of his talisman magic weapon is that it can be released continuously and quickly without consuming too much mental energy of the user.

Since victory is based on quantity, there is no need for him to focus on the lethality brought by that little restraint.

"We've almost hit a dead end... We could have just chosen pure energy bombs as our primary attack method!"

Wizard civilization does not have special attributes like "arcane", but it does have plenty of pure energy attack-type witchcraft without any attributes.

Jieming wrote this thought down: "Second... For enemies who can mobilize elemental forces to fight, the environmental elemental vacuum caused by the rapid casting of the talisman magic weapon is not just a negative effect, to some extent, it can even be my advantage."

Just like that fire elemental monster, because Benjamin acted too quickly, most of the surrounding fire elemental power had been sucked away by the time he was ready to counterattack, so that the destructiveness of the counterattack was greatly reduced.

"In a sense, this can be considered a form of artificial magic suppression, although I don't know what use this trick has for the time being."

…

…

After the repairs, Jemin continued to move deeper into the area where the elemental power of this plane was concentrated.

The previous combat tests were sufficient, and now he planned to focus on finding more advanced material samples.

Since entering this wasteland composed of red minerals, he has encountered monsters more and more frequently along the way.

The thorn lizard that can spit out poisonous mist, the ice wolf that can release ice shock, or the rock giant that hides in the rocks and has strong physical defense.

With each encounter, Jermyn's collection grew, to the point where he had to discard some of the materials he had previously collected from ordinary beasts.

Jieming also noticed that as he went deeper, the monsters he encountered would not necessarily become stronger, but they would become more cunning.

They are no longer as reckless as the first monsters they encountered. Instead, they will weigh the strength of both sides and evacuate in advance, and even know how to use tactics to ambush.

However, these did not pose any threat to Benjamin. At most, it would make him spend a little more time on the journey to find materials.

However, during these encounters with the monsters, Benjamin began to discover some unusual traces.

At first it was just minor details.

He found several boulders with scratched surfaces, and the wear marks seemed more regular than those formed naturally.

In a seemingly natural rock forest, some strange grooves occasionally appear on the ground. They don't look like they were trampled by wild beasts, but more like the tracks of some moving tools.

"Human traces?"

Benjamin stopped, squatted beside a groove, and touched it with his fingers.

The edges of the grooves have been smoothed by time, but the energy fluctuations that remain within them are subtly different from the surrounding elemental forces.

He activated the analysis technique and probed his mental power into these grooves.

A complex stream of information flooded into his mind. It was a more organized and restrained power fluctuation, which obviously did not belong to a monster that used its power unrestrainedly.

After confirming this, Benjamin moved more cautiously and began to consciously look for such traces.

Soon, he made more discoveries.

At the entrance of a hidden cave, he found piles of animal bones, but these bones were neatly stacked together, and some were even roughly polished.

A faint, dying smell of fire could be smelled from deep within the cave, but it wasn't the aftermath of a natural fire element, but rather the trace left behind by some artificial flame that had died out.

However, judging from the traces around it, this cave has been abandoned.

Further ahead, he saw a cleared forest. The trees had been freshly felled and the cuts were neat, obviously made by some sharp tool.

He even discovered a cleverly disguised trap—not for large beasts, but for smaller creatures, or... humans?

Benjamin studied the trap carefully.

It is a simple yet effective structure made of twisted vines and sharp stone spikes that emit a sharp sound when touched.

"There are indigenous people here." Benjamin made a firm judgment in his mind.

There was no surprise to Benjamin this time. After all, the environment of this plane was quite suitable for the survival of living things, and it was not incomprehensible that intelligent creatures and even civilizations could emerge.

but……

"When the wizards took over this plane, they should have cleaned up the local civilization... were these remnants left behind intentionally?"

This possibility is higher than the possibility that the natives of this world have special powers that allow them to hide and avoid detection by wizards.

(End of this chapter)