Fanny leaned lazily against Simon's chest.
"Even so, this Green Spirit Flower Sea stretching for a hundred miles is beautiful enough. When we have time in the future, we must go see that legendary Purple Spirit Flower Sea."
Simon said.
Chapter 62: Roland
As Simon looked at the beautiful scenery before him, he suddenly remembered that he was still cultivating the Laws of Water.
And the Floating Shadow Technique was precisely the signature ability of Water Element cultivators.
The principle behind the Floating Shadow Technique was not difficult. As long as one had begun the Profound Mystery of Mist Illusion, one could use it.
Simon happened to have plenty of Crystal Balls in his Spatial Ring.
So Simon took out a Crystal Ball and began recording a Floating Shadow for the first time.
When Simon had read the original novel in his previous life, Tomato had not written much about the Laws of Water. It had even given him the impression that the greatest use of cultivating Water Element was recording Floating Shadows for others...
Now, he wanted to try recording one himself.
After experimenting slightly, Simon mastered the technique for recording Floating Shadows.
When Napote and the others saw Simon recording a Floating Shadow, they all came over to join in the fun.
The scene reminded Simon of school outings in his previous life, when everyone carried cameras around to take photos and videos before posing together for a group picture.
"The only pity is that we can't post them on social media."
Simon thought to himself.
Since everyone had quite a few Crystal Balls, Simon simply recorded a Floating Shadow of the Green Spirit Flower Sea for each of them.
At the end of every Floating Shadow, he also included a group picture of everyone.
Holding the Crystal Ball in his hand, Hamut joked.
"If one of you becomes a super expert someday, the Floating Shadow in my hand will be worth a fortune. I can make a few copies and sell them. Wouldn't each one fetch several tens of billions of Inkstones?"
"Hahaha, I think Simon has the best chance of becoming a super expert. When that time comes, Simon, don't put on airs and ignore us."
Lona joined in the teasing.
Simon smiled bitterly. "You people... Do I look like the kind of person who puts on airs?"
"Haha, who knows? The present is the present, and the future is the future. If you start putting on airs and pretend not to know us someday, we really will sell these Floating Shadows everywhere."
Napote added fuel to the fire.
Elno merely watched them joke around quietly. He was the oldest and steadiest among them, so he generally did not participate in such teasing.
"If I really become the kind of person you described, then go ahead and sell them. I, Simon, am not someone who forgets his friends after making it big."
"Hahaha!"
Everyone laughed happily.
Fanny was delighted to see such a scene. "I really hope everyone can stay this happy forever."
"We will."
Simon held Fanny's small hand and spoke gently but firmly.
"Mhm~"
After everyone had played enough and admired the beautiful scenery to their hearts' content, they returned beside the Metal Lifeform.
Simon casually carved several caves into the nearby cliff. Everyone picked the ones they liked and entered to meditate and cultivate.
Although Simon gave them more than enough of a sense of security, their own strength was still extremely important.
Therefore, no one relaxed. Whenever they had free time, they cultivated.
Soon, two months passed.
That day, Kenchi once again gathered all the Fiends together, his face full of smiles.
"Sorry for making everyone wait two months. We can set out now."
Thus, everyone stopped cultivating and boarded the Metal Lifeform again, continuing toward Lier City.
At this point, the mission was basically half complete. Kenchi promised that they would not stop again along the remaining route and would head directly to their destination.
"In another two or three years, our first Fiend mission will be complete."
Fanny sighed emotionally.
Before meeting Simon, she never could have imagined that she would spend several years carrying out a mission for merely tens of thousands of Inkstones.
Her family certainly would not have believed it either.
But reality was far more fantastical than imagination.
Not only had Fanny done it, she had done so willingly.
Love truly made people blind.
Hamut had sighed over this more than once, especially whenever Napote was frequently bullied by Lona.
At such times, he was immensely grateful that he was single.
Yet whenever he saw the sweet scene between Simon and Fanny, he hated himself for having lived tens of thousands of years without even holding a woman's hand.
Thus, Hamut alternated between yearning for love and celebrating his single life.
Only Elno remained as calm as ever.
Only his diligence in cultivation could compare with Simon's.
Time passed quickly, and in the blink of an eye, another two and a half years went by.
Over those two and a half years, Simon made several moves as well.
Without exception, he wiped out every Highgod bandit they encountered.
With Simon's current strength, comparable to a Seven-Star Fiend, he would not be in any danger unless he faced the simultaneous siege of over a thousand ordinary Highgods.
Although those battles ended quickly, the experience of fighting Highgods still benefited Simon greatly.
It also allowed Simon to determine the exact power of his ultimate move, the Ice-Wind Prison. It had absolute suppressive power over Five-Star Fiends. Once they were trapped within it, they would completely lose the ability to resist, and the physical attack contained within the Ice-Wind Prison alone could easily kill them.
It also crushed Six-Star Fiends. They could resist slightly, but it was still futile.
During the previous battles, Simon had encountered only one bandit with the strength of a Six-Star Fiend.
That person resembled the leader of the Black Wind Bandit Group whom Simon and the others had encountered when they first arrived in Hell. He had likewise fused three low- and intermediate-grade Profound Mysteries, reaching the threshold of a Six-Star Fiend.
However, he lacked a powerful offensive ultimate move. This bandit cultivated the Law of Thunder, and all his strengths were focused on speed. His physical attack was merely at the level of a peak Five-Star Fiend, while his physical defense was even more ordinary.
Simon was best at dealing with people like that.
The speed that this Lightning Element Six-Star Fiend took such pride in was completely useless before Simon.
Simon merely used the Ice-Wind Prison. He did not even use the Ice Wind Space for support before instantly killing that Six-Star Fiend, who had been incredibly arrogant at the start!
Simon still remembered his expression after being caught in the Ice-Wind Prison, changing from disdain to shock and then despair.
That bandit's sinful life had come to an end.
This battle also completely established Simon's position as the strongest person in the caravan.
Everyone was astonished that a Midgod could be so powerful.
They now fully regarded Simon as an expert at the level of a Seven-Star Fiend.
The Wind-Annihilation Longsword in his hand and the Ice-Wind Prison formed by 365 Divine Power Azure Dragons had become symbols of the Grim Reaper.
This also gave everyone an incomparable sense of security.
They believed that once this mission ended, they would remember this experience for the rest of their lives.
The Leopard-shaped Metal Lifeform continued traveling tirelessly.
Just when everyone believed they would not encounter any more powerful enemies.
A sudden explosion reminded them once more that they were still in the dangerous Hell Wilderness.
However, the Fiends who had been forced to reveal themselves again were not afraid.
It did not matter.
Simon would make his move.
The group's utterly relaxed expressions made the bandits on the other side feel as though their positions had been reversed.
It was as though the other side were the bandits who had come to rob them.
Some of the opposing Fiends were even betting on how long they could hold out...
That unspoken contempt enraged Roland, the bandit leader who had recently succeeded in fusing the Four Profundities of Earth.
How long had it been?
How long had it been since anyone dared to look down on him like this?
Especially when he was being treated this way by a group of Midgods.
It reminded him of those difficult days when he had first arrived in Hell.
Having come to Hell as a Lowgod, he had suffered bitterly.
After the Prefecture Army casually threw him into a tribe, he had initially been full of fantasies about the future.
He thought that his beginning was merely a little difficult and nothing serious. As long as he cultivated diligently enough, his future would eventually improve.
After all, in his homeland Material Plane, he had been a peerless genius seen only once in tens of millions of years.
He had become a god with the ease of a genius, then been fooled by the Plane Guardian into coming to Hell.
Only after arriving here did he wake up.
A Lowgod was absolutely nothing in Hell.
From then on, he began a dark and hopeless life of illegal labor.
Doing illegal labor would have been one thing, but the key was that the results of his hard work over ten thousand years had been easily snatched away by others.
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