Chapter 4536 — At Last, the Teleportation Array
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
The deeper the roots, the more solid the foundation; the more solid the foundation, the richer the reserves. Great accumulation, then measured release—the harvest of this one month was far more precious than any overt breakthrough. Though it had been forced upon him by flight for his life, in a sense Wei Zhao had come away this time with a bountiful crop.
Ahead lay an open expanse, with no spirit beast on guard, and not far in front stood a teleportation array, much like the one he had seen in the Rufeng Forest. The sight made Wei Zhao breathe a quiet sigh of relief. If this teleportation array had been heavily garrisoned by the spirit beast clan, that would truly have been a mess; thankfully, the situation was far better than expected.
Seeing no one about, Wei Zhao hurried onto the array. Unlike the one in the Rufeng Forest, which could be activated simply by holding a token, this one plainly had no token to speak of; it required spirit jade ready at hand.
In principle, every activation of a teleportation required the consumption of a vast amount of heaven-and-earth spiritual energy. True, each teleportation array was designed from the outset with a complementary formation that gathered the surrounding spiritual energy, enough to keep the array operating normally—but that was only enough to keep it from breaking down. To rely on that for frequent back-and-forth teleportation was clearly unrealistic.
Therefore, before each use of a teleportation array, one had to add superior spirit jade to the array's core to provide power—a few hundred pieces at the least, or as many as several thousand, even tens of thousands, depending on the array's refinement and the distance of the teleport.
The array before him required a full three thousand six hundred pieces of spirit jade for each activation. Wei Zhao silently congratulated himself on having the jade pendant's space. Anyone else seeing such a demand would surely have been dumbstruck.
It was not that one could not produce that much spirit jade; the point was, who in their right mind would lug so much raw spirit jade around with them? Even if one had set out carrying it, one would surely have thrown it away during the flight to keep up maximum speed. At a moment like this, one could only stare helplessly—that was what it truly meant to weep without tears.
The array's core already held spirit jade, but it had long since lost its spiritual energy, plainly already spent. With a thought, Wei Zhao gathered this spent jade into the pendant's space and replaced it with three thousand six hundred pieces of superior spirit jade. Then he swiftly took his place on the teleportation spot, and the teleport began.
Wei Zhao had experienced the teleportation process more than once or twice, yet each time it always stirred in him an indefinable feeling—like a gifted schoolboy facing abstruse, difficult problems of advanced mathematics. He could not grasp it all at once, but after seeing it over and over, he would unconsciously come to understand it in his own way.
Each time he made a little progress, and perhaps one day, all of it might suddenly become clear.
The whole teleportation was extremely brief. In the blink of an eye, Wei Zhao had appeared in an entirely new place. Beneath his feet, naturally, was the teleportation array; ahead of him was still the dense forest that was the hallmark of the Southern Isle; but the scene behind him was truly somewhat horrifying—an immense swamp.
In a primeval place like the Southern Isle, swamps were hardly strange. During the month of flight, Wei Zhao had seen no few of them, and even earlier he had relied on swamp muck to shake off the pursuit of the old sect of the Western Hills. But a swamp as ghastly and dreadful as the one behind him—this was the first time Wei Zhao had ever laid eyes on such a thing. (To be continued..)