Tales of the Endless Empire

Chapter 406: So… My Passive Skill Is a Problem Now

"Jeez, is that damn lava hot," Thalion complained for the tenth time.He had wanted to test how much heat he could endure and whether any of his body-tempering methods would work here. With Eagly and the crippled Eclipsari, he only needed to eat or absorb the affinity.

With lava, that didn’t work at all.

Thalion could get as close as he wanted to the lava, but it only increased his pain without giving him even a sliver of progress. For the Sanguis Impera, things looked completely different. It had several vines hanging over the lava—some even touching it.

Thalion wondered.

It could be that you needed to activate a certain affinity before you could cultivate it. Just a theory, but what he say for sure was that it wasn’t working for him.

He scavenged through his spatial amulet, hoping to find some kind of body-tempering method for fire, but his quick search yielded nothing.

Since it was impossible to upgrade his fire resistance right now, he turned to working on his passive skill instead. The goal: reduce the range in which it applied.

Thalion also had an idea how he might the passive skill, or at least perceive it. With his eyes, he could only detect the range when a fire changed color, but with his title, he received far more information. For that, he needed to enter deep meditation and truly concentrate—otherwise he would perceive absolutely nothing.

There was one massive downside. He could easily lose track of time.

If he took too long, he might not have enough time left to find the grand treasure.

Another problem: he didn’t know the location of the largest volcano, and being underground made navigation harder. On the bright side, once his passive was under control, he should be able to find more treasures down here.

His mana was already at seventy percent and dropping constantly due to being this close to the lava stream. Reaching deep meditation quickly was not easy. It took almost an hour until Thalion finally slipped into the needed state.

The problem was that even though he could the edges of his passive skill, he couldn’t touch or influence it. He tried to pull the field inward the same way he manipulated his Mana Barrier… while the Sanguis Impera bathed itself in lava.

Its fire resistance was higher than Thalion’s, but still insufficient for a lava river. It dipped its vines into the lava for a second before withdrawing and healing the damage—then trying again. With each repetition, the vines grew sturdier.

Hours passed like this until Thalion finally succeeded.

At first he tried manipulating the passive skill like the Mana Barrier, but the solution was to treat it like aura control.

Once he focused properly, he could reduce the passive’s radius to zero—it wasn’t leaking at all. Perfect.

Thalion had expected he would need a long time to make almost no progress. Being able to rein the passive in like this was a godsend.

There was, of course, one downside:

He could it, but he couldn’t release it slowly or adjust it.

The moment he relaxed, it would snap back to its normal range, and he’d have to meditate all over again to pull it in.

He still had the passive when directly touching flames, but his control over his bloodline flames—the ones usually lighting up around him—was mostly gone. Without the passive’s connection, channeling mana into them was much harder, and only a trickle reached the flames currently burning around him.

It restricted him, but it was better than the alternative.

His bloodslaves had been waiting at the tunnel entrance, and Thalion jumped over after the Sanguis Impera retracted all its vines. The vines were still hot as molten iron, and Thalion winced when they slid back inside.

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Thalion cursed under his breath.

He had wanted to work on it ever since that chosen elf almost burned him to a crisp. But so far, he had made zero progress—something that was really starting to annoy him. The fact that he couldn’t grow stronger by simply enduring intense heat could have been a game changer. Instead, it meant he’d be in a lot of pain retrieving the treasure.

One jump brought him to the tunnel entrance where his bloodslaves waited.

"So, what have you found, and how much time has passed?" Thalion asked. He wanted this over quickly so he could move on. Judging by how many vines the Sanguis Impera had tempered, it must have been a few hours at least.

"A whole day should have passed by now. There’s a city with fiery dwarves, but we didn’t venture further. Did the stage quest say anything about them?" Aris asked, raising an eyebrow.

Right. Thalion had completely forgotten to check the welcome message and had instead focused entirely on his passive skill so he wouldn’t run out of mana.

Welcome to Stage Six

This place is corrupted and shows none of its former glory

Cleansing this place will reward extra leaderboard points

Good luck.

Okay, no harm had been done by ignoring this notification. You could get points by cleansing the place—cool, but Thalion was going for the big treasure anyway, so there wouldn’t be much cleansing on his side.

The biggest question right now was how to get to the grand treasure.

"Nothing special. Just something about cleansing for extra points. Let’s find the big volcano—I want the big reward as fast as possible," Thalion answered, motioning for his bloodslaves to go ahead.

They didn’t waste a second and shot down the tunnel, driven by their endless bloodlust.

They emerged into an absolutely massive cave with an entire castle inside it. The stone buildings and walls were seamlessly integrated into the ground and cave walls, showcasing the dwarves’ skill in stonework.

Thalion immediately spotted the first dwarves with his blood vision, and he understood instantly what the message meant by cleansing the corruption. The dwarves were aflame, their veins glowing as if molten lava flowed through them. They looked wretched—elongated teeth, fingernails turned into claws.

Flamebound Dwarf – Level 119

The level was relatively low for this stage, which was a bit surprising. Judging by their aura, their rarity wasn’t high either. Thalion suspected there might be some kind of swarm intelligence that activated after killing a certain amount… but so far, nothing. His bloodslaves had already killed a good number, and at the moment, each dwarf acted completely alone. They didn’t even acknowledge the corpses littering the ground.

Thalion could also see how far his bloodslaves had progressed: they had cleared the dwarves wandering outside the castle, but hadn’t advanced much further. Until now, everything had been straight tunnels without turns, but that was surely about to change.

The castle before them was quite large, and there had to be multiple tunnels connecting this place to other dwarven castles, cities, mines, treasures—and hopefully the massive volcano.

"Go clean this place up and try to find anything that points us toward the massive volcano with the grand treasure," Thalion commanded, infusing a bit of mana into his voice. His words echoed through the gigantic cave.

He didn’t need to say it twice. The bloodslaves were off immediately, carving a line of carnage through the dwarves. The dwarves didn’t coordinate or help one another. They only charged mindlessly when they spotted an enemy, screaming in a high-pitched tone sharp enough to shatter glass.

Thalion ignored them and went straight to the small gate on the largest tower. It was the biggest building, and Thalion hoped to find something valuable inside. A map would be an absolute game changer. Dwarves definitely wanted to know where their gold lay, so a map made perfect sense.

The tower was half-embedded into the stone wall behind it, making it appear smaller from the outside. The gate was still locked even after all this time, and Thalion had to switch to the crippled Eclipsari form to use the tendrils of the Abyssal Devourer to melt off the hinges. The metal was extremely sturdy, and he couldn’t break it any other way.

This brought him to another idea. Dwarves were also very good blacksmiths, and Thalion currently had no materials to rebuild his sword and armor. In fact, he didn’t even know if he wanted to build the exact same weapon again. Next time he would make it bigger and attach far more crystals to empower it. In hindsight, it would also be best to engrave all the runes with increased stability so it wouldn’t melt away a second time.

Same for the armor.

Thalion was still missing his mask, but next time he would integrate a proper helmet—even if the dark hood of his robe looked more ominous. Maybe he should build two separate kits, but the problem was that he no longer had a spatial ring, making it impossible to switch equipment properly.

The inside of the tower was quite large, which meant it had definitely been built deep into the cave wall. The entrance hall was empty, dust piled thick on the ground and on the statues standing along the walls. Otherwise, the room was barren, and Thalion made his way upward, still in the form of the crippled Eclipsari. In this form, he could see far better in the dark compared to any of his others.

No one was living in the tower, nor had anyone entered from the backside—if there even was an entrance there.

The first interesting discovery came on the fourth floor, where a massive anvil stood in the center, surrounded by shelves filled with scrolls.