Monster Integration

Seeing such dense energy on the 41st floor, a smile couldn't help but brighten up on my face, and I turned toward the doors. 

All seven of them are broken or opened, which is not surprising. The herbs halls on the upper nine floors are the most desired ones. It is natural that people would already scour through them; I just hope that I get something from them.

With that thought, I had entered the first opened door; since it is opened, I had felt no restriction. When I entered inside, I found myself feeling dense astral energy around me, it is four times denser than what is outside, and that is quite shocking.

The density of energy outside is already comparable to energy in the herbs halls of the lower floor, and nowhere, I found myself in four times denser astral energy.

Seeing that excitement couldn't help but bubble on my face. The denser the energy is, the more precious the plants would be. 

Hun?

The excitement had lasted on my face for a moment before confusion and disappointment appeared on it. This herb garden did not evoke the feeling of hunger from my runes; this had never happened before in any herb hall since I had entered the Astral Garden Tower.

Even when I had entered the herb hall, which only had four plants, one of them was desired by my vines, so when I did not feel anything, I couldn't help but get slightly worried.

The worry had lasted for few minutes only, while the Herb hall had been picked clean. The protected plants had remained, and their protection is very powerful. Tyrant could forget opening them with the raw power; only breaking this formation would work.

While there are several ways to break it, like using the raw strength and special artifacts, solving them is the easiest way.

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I scanned the formation with my calibrator and started to solve it, and it took three hours to do it. The formation is just slightly weaker than the doors of the Vice-Tower master's office, and one would think hundred times before using any special arithmetic type artifacts on it.

Why should they waste on the artifact for the single plant when they could have the whole Herb hall with it. Still, people have tried breaking it and used considerable force; the proof of that is all around the protection formation.

Hun!

With formation ready, I instantly projected the runes, and formation collapsed as it should, but my focus is not on the plant; my calibrator, which had run out of power when it projected the runes on the formation.

There is only 0.2% energy had remained. This calibrator had a very powerful energy core, but it had been spent within a single projection.

I could not break the formation by simply projecting the right formation. The projecting runes need to contain a similar level of power to the runes they are trying to break. The runes of this formation are taking nearly twelve times the energy than plant protection formations on the floors below.

It is extremely costly to break the formations, but I will do it because the plants are worth the price. The Toxic Gearb is a precious plant; the alchemist and poisoners would be willing to pay a very high price to get their hands on it.

It took me few minutes to collect the plant as it is extremely toxic, so toxic that if it had so much touched me, I would be writhing in pain while dangerous spores will appear on my body.

After I collected the plant, I went for another protected plant which also took me three hours to break. I continued breaking the protected formation and continued collecting plants; nothing strange had happened till I broke through the fifth protection formation.

"Huh!" 

Just as I broke the formation, my runes tinged with desire. It did not take even a moment for me to understand what is happening.

It seemed like the isolation of the formation is strong enough that my runes could sense the plant till I broke the formation. It was one of the reasons I had thought for being my runes not able to sense the desired plants but never expected it would be true.

I did not dwell on that fact for more than a few seconds before I collected the plant and move toward another protection formation.

While this is an interesting find, it did not change anything. I have to break the protective formations and collect the plants.

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Soon, I finished with all the protected plants on the first hall and went to the second one; there, I did the same but unlike the first herb hall. There I found some unranked Grimm Monsters and humans scouring through the hall, trying to find something useful in a place that had already been scourged clean.

I killed the Grimm Monsters and continued breaking the formation; as I did it, I became faster in doing that. While the difficulty of the formations has remained the same, I continued to become better at it, that by the time I started scouring the third herb hall, I only needed two hours to break the formation.

I feel that as I continued to break the formations, I will take even less time; I hope I do as the formations are going to get tougher as I climb higher, and I welcome the challenge.

I did not forget my target and how I have better my formation solving ability. My current ability is far from reaching the mark I need; I need to be much faster and a lot smarter if I wanted to solve that layered puzzle of the library.

The first two layers of that puzzle had already taken all that I had, and there are much more levels in it that are tense or hundreds of times harder than the first two I had solved. So, I have to be better; the library holds the key to take me to a place that every powerhouse in the world imagined to reach, but very few were able to.