New Business Venture

The battle against the Fan and Restari rebels had ended in Deon's and the others' decisive victory! On top of that, the king was forced to support Deon, his former target, and the person responsible for his major headache!

There were two main reasons that he was now forced to accept that Deon had won this round, and that he needed to continue supporting Deon throughout the mountain war.

Firstly, the Fan King called off his deal with this new Restari king. He no longer trusted the new Restari King and pulled out of their arrangement, going so far as to cut off communications between them. At first, Deon was confused, after all, the man was already the King of Restari, what else could the Fan King do to help him?

After speaking some more with the king and admiral, Deon understood that he had thoroughly underestimated the difficulty in maintaining the throne, even after being accepted as the new rightful king.

Whilst the new king's factions was now by far the largest and most powerful group in the kingdom, that wouldn't last if he was unable to continue paying his subordinates generously. On top of that, he would need to bring others across to his side…even if he had access to the kingdom's resources, the price he would need to pay in order to sway someone's loyalty was well beyond their ordinary wage.

As such, the agreement with the Fan King was that in exchange for deliberately losing a battle on Jing Mountain, the Fan King would actually pay the Restari King up to one half of the Fan kingdom's earnings!

For each battle he threw, the new king would gain a large amount of resources. On top of this, he would be losing fewer of his own men in these battles. Alternatively, some battles were set up as death traps that he used to kill off those who were irreversibly loyal to the old king.

This wasn't all though. The other reason that he was forced to accept Deon and even support him, was for the same reason that he was now completely unable to throw this war: public opinion!

In his original plan, the new king's idea was to slander the old king, then blame the loss of the war on his incompetence in starting an impossible fight.

But how the hell was he supposed to do this now, when the very first major action he took as king was to decimate an entire Fan Kingdom platoon?!

Deon used General Senlin to spread the word that the new king had embarked upon an epic escalation of the mountain war. This fabricated rumour was 'proven' to the public soon after, when it was confirmed that they had won this recent major battle against a platoon of elite shamans…they even killed half a dozen enemy Fan 2-Star elites!

This was the largest blow that either side had suffered in a single battle! Even if they lost tens of thousands of ordinary soldiers, it wouldn't have been such an immense loss to the Fan Kingdom!

This reduction in 2-Star shamans would have a big impact on the Fan Kingdom's war power. Whether it was damaging the nation's morale, or spreading their 2-Star elites across their territories more thinly, this was clearly detrimental to their overall might.

Public opinion of the new king improved even further with this most recent victory, but at the same time, his public support was now reliant on him continually achieving success in the mountain war!

At this point, even if the Fan King had agreed to continue with their arrangement, the new restari King would now be unable to do so! He was forced by his tentative popularity to follow the people's hearts, and right now, the people loved him for his success in this massive war.

Even though this battle would certainly escalate the war to a new level, the mountain war would not immediately spiral out of control.

In fact, this recent battle was so extreme that both sides needed some time to recuperate; the Fan needed to completely reorganise their ranks after losing so many elites, whilst the Kingdom of Restari had its own internal issues, namely the matter of the remaining two admirals not yet declaring their loyalty to the new king.

One of those admirals, Admiral Josef, was the War Admiral, the admiral in charge of the entire War Division. This naturally meant that he was also in charge of managing the Jing Mountain War.

Remi's uncle was thankful that it seemed like this arrogant person had somewhat accepted him, largely due to his success in this most recent battle. It helped that Deon lied to Admiral Joseph, repeating that this was all the new king's plan to deal a serious blow to the Fan kingdom, and that the rumours about the new king being a traitor to the kingdom were falsehoods propagated in order to deceive the Fan King.

Like this, everything settled down.

Although there were currently no plans to engage in another major battle anytime soon, this period of peace was exactly what Deon needed right now.

With this brief respite, Deon planned to spend much of his time learning the languages that Blood God's inheritance books were written in. This way, he would finally be able to study those books. He also had many spirits he wanted to sell and refine.

But more important to Shi, was that they would finally be able to properly embark upon their business venture!

Deon was also quite excited about this. He knew that undamaged origin souls were simply too valuable, even if they were only peak stage 1-Star souls. Unfortunately, it was impossible for them to sell undamaged origin souls, something that Deon only properly understood when Shi explained their options when selling origin souls.

"All origin soul storage spirits are extremely valuable, this is true even for the worst and lowest class ones. Luckily, you actually managed to gather so many 2-Star spirits in that last battle. Between us, we can gather enough funds to afford whichever option we want."

In total, they managed to gather seven 2-Star spirits in the chaotic battle. Shi only found two, but Deon actually managed to take five! Well, actually, he originally looted six, but one of those spirits died the evening after the battle, whilst he was hurriedly trying to identify them all so that they could work out how to feed them.

Shi was able to unbind and feed most of her spirits temporarily in order to bind those 2-Star spirits which were deteriorating most rapidly, whilst Deon also bound a single 2-Star spirit to sustain it for now.

One week later, they finally identified the seven spirits. They placed all seven 2-Star spirits in containers along with their various foods.

Spirits varied when it came to their feeding needs; some needed a continual stream of food, or else they would immediately begin to wither rapidly, whilst others could eat a single resource once every month, sometimes even less often without any detriment to its health.

Of course any spirit could alternatively be sustained by a shaman's origin energy.

Two of the spirits were too tedious to feed, so Deon exchanged them for a shocking amount of resources from the kingdom. Shi thought it was wasteful that he would actually trade away two 2-Star spirits just for a bunch of resources, half of which were only basic things in huge quantities.

Only Deon knew just how much he needed these things.

Shi continued to explain their options when engaging in the trade of origin souls.

"The most common, lowest quality and cheapest option, is the soul shroom spirit. Here." Shi drew the spirit for Deon and described it to him.

This spirit was 1-Star and gold class, but it was extremely expensive and uncommon for a gold class spirit, surpassing most platinum class spirits in value. It grew in damp dark forests, looking like a small inconspicuous mushroom no different than any other. This spirit grew unpredictably, it was impossible to replicate the conditions to produce it.

Since it was almost impossible to find unless a shaman actually touched it with their origin energy, it was naturally very rare. However, Shi was certain that they could source multiple of these spirits easily if they had the funds, which they did.

However, Deon frowned after she was done describing it.

"This spirit is terrible, isn't there anything better?"

"You…well what did you expect?" Shi stared at him speechlessly. "Not all origin soul storage spirits are freaky things like yours!"

"But this spirit isn't even specifically for storing origin souls! Surely there is something more specialised that doesn't have such a terrible deterioration rate?"

If a single peak stage 1-Star origin soul was placed within this spirit and the spirit was left unbound, it would deteriorate to one half of its original strength within three days. If the spirit was bound, this improved to ten days. For every additional origin soul that was added, the rate would become proportionally worse; two origin souls would lead to twice the rate of damage and three would cause a three times faster speed of degradation.

On top of that, the spirit would no longer be able to protect the origin soul once the damage reached 80%, at this point, the origin souls stored within would immediately collapse…this was indeed quite poor.

"Well there are other options, I thought you'd dislike that one. I know about two others, only one of which is specifically intended for origin soul storage. Only…"

"Just describe them both."

"Fine."

The second soul storing spirit Shi knew of was a platinum class spirit. It was even less specialised than the first, it was basically just a storage spirit for all incorporeal forms, meaning that it could store both spirits and origin souls! It was also stupidly expensive and was no more protective of origin souls than the last spirit. The only benefit was that it could store quite a few origin souls, up to nine in fact.

As for the last spirit, Shi was reluctant to go with this option, whilst Deon's eyes shone and he decided that this was most definitely the best.

"Really? This is no cheaper than the second option, and even though it can store three origin souls…people rarely use this to exchange origin souls, they would only use it if…well…"

"If it was three high quality, mostly undamaged souls, right?" Deon laughed. The more he looked at the picture she drew of this gross looking green worm, the more he thought it was actually quite cute.

The soul pouch worm spirit, a 1-Star platinum class spirit near the latter end of the pricing range for platinum class spirits. Its value was actually slightly above a typical ordinary class 2-Star spirit!

Towards Shi's unwillingness to splash out, Deon rolled his eyes.

"We definitely need to go with this choice. The whole reason we will be able to enter this market as amateurs is thanks to the extremely high quality of the origin souls that we're selling, so we need to preserve these souls properly."

"Maybe…" Shi was still unsure, but since they did indeed have enough funds to buy a couple of these spirits, it was worth at least trying.

The origin souls stored within the soul pouch worm spirit would take ten months to weaken by one half even when it was left unbound, and this improved to 1000 days, almost three years, when the spirit was bound!

Most importantly, this rate would not be affected when storing three spirits compared to just one. It was obviously superior to the other choices by a long shot.

Honestly, all of these spirits were much worse than what Deon had expected. His soul extraction spirit could store 99 1-Star origin souls indefinitely. Not only that, but it doubled up as an extraction spirit, extracting origin souls without inflicting any damage to the soul!

Deon was sure that there were better options out there than those that Shi showed him, she just didn't know about them. She had never cared about the origin soul trade until now anyway, so why would she know about these uncommon spirits? It was already sheer chance that she happened to know about these three.

After deciding on the spirit they would use for the transportation of the origin souls, the next matter was one that Deon was looking forwards to…

The location of their prospective buyers!