[Lord of Abundance] Chapter 46 — The Watcher Within the Dense Forest

Chapter 46 — The Watcher Within the Dense Forest

Kun turned toward the guards beside him and said,

“Search through the ruins. Besides ordinary-sized skeletons, see whether there are any exceptionally large remains, or any skeletons roughly the size of fairies. Bring them all to me.”

“Yes, my Lord!”

Under Kun’s orders, the guards quickly spread out, rummaging through the piles of bones scattered across the ruins.

Kun murmured softly to himself,

“So the Ancient Elven Empire built such a magnificent ruin… merely to enshrine this covenant tablet.”

To the ancient elves, this clay tablet—though made of nothing more than ordinary mud—had likely possessed irreplaceable importance.

But now the Elven Empire itself had perished.

Naturally, the covenant no longer held any meaning.

To humans, this was merely a lump of clay with some historical significance.

Its value probably didn’t even compare to the rusted weapons and armor scattered throughout the ruins.

Yet there was no disappointment on Kun’s face.

What he sought was history itself.

And this was undoubtedly a fragment of historical truth.

He had already gained the knowledge he desired.

He had already seized the “treasure.”

After all, throughout the continent, records regarding Titans had existed only within myths and legends.

Whether such a race—beings tall enough to hold up the heavens and powerful enough to oppose gods—had truly existed remained one of the magical world’s greatest mysteries.

But now, with this covenant tablet as evidence, that missing piece of history could finally be filled in.

The Titan race had truly once existed upon this continent.

As for the Yimi—the diminutive race—

this was the second time Kun had encountered that name.

The first had been within the ancient elven travel journal he’d found in the Marquis’s treasury.

Back then, he’d assumed the book was merely the drunken fantasy of some elf.

Kun pulled the elven travel journal from his spatial ring and placed it beside the covenant tablet.

“So everything written here was actually true…”

“There really were Titans.”

“There really was the Yimi race.”

“Then does that mean the sections about the Violet Moon, the divine wonders, and the half-elves… are true as well?”

“My Lord, we searched through all the bone piles in the ruins’ core area, but we didn’t find any skeletons matching your description.”

“But we did find these.”

One guard carried several dark-red spheres roughly the size of footballs in his arms.

Most were damaged, split apart as though slashed by some sharp weapon.

Only a few remained intact, though they had long lost their luster.

Kun couldn’t sense even the slightest trace of life from them.

They resembled nothing more than red stones drained completely of magical power.

Another guard held several miniature pieces of exquisitely crafted armor and weapons.

“No wonder we failed to notice these when we entered. Objects this small hidden among the bone piles would’ve been impossible to spot.”

There were weapons and armor left behind—

but no skeletons from either race.

Kun recalled the elven travel journal mentioning that when Titans died naturally, they returned to mountains once more.

Mountains were stone and earth.

That suggested Titans weren’t flesh-and-blood lifeforms, but elemental beings—or something similar.

The Yimi race likely worked the same way.

After death, they probably dissolved directly into pure magical power.

Which explained why within this sacred temple dedicated to the covenant of the three races, only elven remains could still be found.

The other two races had left behind only traces of their existence.

Kun sighed quietly.

“The endings of those two races were probably no better than that of the Ancient Elven Empire.”

“At least the ancient elves left behind the glory of a once-great civilization.”

“One race became legend.”

“The other vanished so completely that even historical records no longer remember them.”

To be utterly forgotten by history—

perhaps that was the saddest possible fate for a civilization.

Beside the Three-Race Covenant Tablet rested an ordinary-looking wooden box.

Its material matched the altar itself, carved from the branches of the Mother Tree.

Yet like the roots outside, it too had lost all life.

With a heavy heart, Kun carefully lifted the box.

As he slowly opened it, his heartbeat thundered wildly.

This was the first time in his life he had ever felt this excited.

Even his hands trembled slightly.

It was as though he were holding the final hope of an entire civilization.

The object guarded by warriors of all three races within this ruin had not merely been the covenant tablet, whose symbolic meaning exceeded its practical use.

It had been whatever lay inside this box.

At the center of the covenant tablet was a carving of a seed.

If Kun’s guess was correct—

then the box should contain a seed of the Mother Tree.

A seed meant to preserve the civilizations of the three races in times of catastrophe.

Calling it the inheritance of ancient elven civilization itself would not have been an exaggeration.

Crack—

The lock, once formed from living branches, had long lost the support of the Mother Tree’s immense vitality.

Kun opened the box with ease.

“The… the seed?”

“Where’s the seed?”

“My enormous seed—where did it go?!”

Still unwilling to accept reality, Kun forcefully tore apart the fragile, dried wooden box piece by piece, searching for hidden compartments.

In the end, he stood motionless amidst scattered wood splinters.

Anyone whose emotions had just plunged from heaven into the abyss would struggle to remain calm.

That had been a seed of the Mother Tree.

And Kun was an Abundance Mage.

If there existed anything on the Eternal Dawn Continent that Kun desired most—

or longed most desperately to witness with his own eyes—

then the Mother Tree undoubtedly ranked first in his heart.

To lose his dream object like this…

No one could easily suppress such disappointment.

In Kun’s original expectations, even the worst outcome had merely been that the Mother Tree’s seed, like the roots within the ruins, had its vitality stolen by the crystallized skeleton warrior’s broken blade.

But even that would have been acceptable.

As the continent’s only Abundance Mage, Kun believed that whether it took ten years or a hundred—

one day he would eventually discover a method to revive the Mother Tree’s seed.

To make the greatest and most miraculous plant upon the continent—

the ultimate evolutionary form of all vegetation—

sprout once more upon the Eternal Dawn Continent.

To take root.

To grow again.

And yet that damned bastard had destroyed the seed so thoroughly that not even a trace remained.

If the crystallized skeleton warrior’s soul hadn’t already been annihilated, Kun would’ve dragged the thing out of its grave and killed it another hundred times.

“What is gained is fortune. What is lost is fate.”

“Perhaps this is simply the will of the Eternal Dawn Continent.”

“Civilizations that have vanished should not be reborn.”

After letting out a long sigh, Kun slowly calmed himself.

Aside from the destruction of the Mother Tree’s seed, which deeply disappointed him—

this unplanned expedition into the ruins had yielded tremendous rewards.

And since the harvest had been enormous, what was the point of wearing a mournful expression?

Originally, Kun had merely hoped to profit as the fisherman while the Ore-Eating Earth Dragon and the Blood Horror Demonic Wolves fought each other.

Yet both threats—each of which had posed serious hidden dangers to the Fengrao Territory—ended up dead without costing him a single soldier.

That outcome had already been the best and least likely possibility he could imagine.

The corpses of those two hundred demonic wolves alone—

even after the Earth Dragon destroyed a large portion—

still contained a massive quantity of harvestable materials from magical beasts.

And these weren’t ordinary materials.

They came from Blood Horror Demonic Wolves, infamous across the continent for their ferocity.

Few mercenary groups willingly provoked them.

Their rarity only increased their value.

Once those materials were transported south and sold in major cities, the Fengrao Territory’s construction funds would no longer be stretched so desperately thin.

At the very least, his tax officer might lose a little less hair.

Then there was the fourth-tier ancient dragon corpse…

The ten-thousand-year spirit wood filling the ruins…

The highly concentrated magical holy water…

Every one of those treasures was extraordinarily rare.

Only fools would exchange such things for gold coins that could be earned again at any time.

Thus, Kun decided to impose strict secrecy upon the guards.

Using a precious contract scroll he had confiscated from Leon’s spatial necklace, he could easily bind them to silence.

Absolutely no information regarding this place could leak.

Otherwise, trouble would inevitably follow.

Of course, Kun had no intention of being stingy with rewards.

This was one of the ancient customs between lords and knights.

All spoils belonged to the lord—

but the lord also bore the obligation to reward and punish fairly.

In a sense…

It was simply an organized division of loot.

Before returning to the Fengrao Territory to continue his great farming enterprise, Kun first used ice magic to freeze the magical beast corpses.

Otherwise, bacterial growth and swarming insects would lower the quality of the materials.

Especially the fourth-tier earth dragon corpse.

Its size was simply too enormous for ordinary transportation.

Kun ultimately cut it into more than a hundred separate pieces.

All those materials would first need to be stored within the cellars of Blackstone Castle before further processing.

As for the remaining spirit wood and concentrated holy water—

aside from secretly taking one piece of spirit wood for himself, Kun decided to leave the rest within the ruins for now.

After all, the ruins weren’t going anywhere.

Later, he could simply establish defensive magic arrays here and seal off the entrance entirely.

The Fengrao Territory lacked proper facilities to store such materials anyway.

Finally, using a drop of earth dragon blood, Kun cast Golden Law, imitating the aura of the living dragon and scattering traces of its presence all along the path from the Blood Horror Wolf den back toward the Fengrao Territory.

For a considerable time, no magical beast would dare approach this region.

That would allow him to safely dispatch more manpower to transport the remaining spoils from the wolf den.

After leaving the boundaries of the Forest of Eternal Darkness, Kun glanced back one final time toward the direction of the ancient elven ruins.

His brows furrowed slightly.

This journey to the wolf den had undoubtedly yielded immense gains.

Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had overlooked something important.

There was also that strange sensation…

as though something had been watching him.

What Kun failed to notice was that atop a towering tree somewhere deep within the forest, a pair of tiny eyes stared at him in confusion.

The next instant—

just before Kun’s spiritual perception swept through the area—

the figure vanished from the branch entirely.

Its speed was astonishing.

Upon returning to the Fengrao Territory, Kun immediately threw himself into the work of spring planting.

Spring waited for no one.

Dawn’s injuries caused widespread panic among the territory’s residents.

After all, in the eyes of the common people, Dawn was the territory’s strongest warrior—a famous third-tier Great Warrior of the kingdom.

Yet even he had lost an arm within the forest.

Surely some horrifying monster had appeared there.

Only after wagon after wagon of Blood Horror Demonic Wolf corpses were dragged out from the forest by the guards did the people realize that they had been sleeping beside a wolf nest all this time.

At any moment, they could have been attacked.

The lord himself, upon learning of the danger, had personally led the guards to exterminate the wolf pack.

That pillar of white light which appeared at noon had been one of the lord’s high-tier spells.

And every last wolf had been wiped out.

With the three territorial officials personally testifying and vigorously spreading the story, the people’s panic gradually settled.

After all, people could lie.

But the hundreds of wolf corpses piled before Blackstone Castle, awaiting dismemberment, could not.

A massive wolf pack truly had been exterminated by their lord.

He had protected the Fengrao Territory.

The residents, long plagued by attacks from magical beasts, were filled with gratitude and admiration.

To them, Lord Kun was practically the perfect ruler—one impossible to find even with a lantern.

As Kun’s prestige within the territory grew increasingly stable, the policies and plans he introduced began proceeding smoothly as well.

The resistance faced by the three territorial officials diminished more and more.

Even those who failed to understand the purpose behind the policies no longer objected.

Everything was slowly progressing onto the track Kun had envisioned from the beginning.

Once the Fengrao Territory’s overall framework was established, he could finally free his hands.

As for the later work of gradually adding flesh and blood to this massive structure—

his subordinates and the residents themselves could slowly perfect it over time.

A true leader only needs to control the direction.

If one insisted on handling every detail personally, it would instead breed dissatisfaction among subordinates.

They worked day and night for over half a month.

Even Latifa, the beautiful mage, had tanned noticeably darker.

The Green-Armored Bear King—whose strength rivaled a third-tier magical beast—looked utterly exhausted.

Only then, just before the end of the spring planting season, did they finally finish sowing every field within the Fengrao Territory.

A total of six thousand seven hundred and thirty-seven mu of farmland.

Every field was planted with the high-yield seeds Kun had obtained through immense effort.

They carried not only Kun’s ultimate goal of unlocking the Abundance Mark—

but also the farmers’ hopes for a bountiful harvest.

Riding atop the massive Green-Armored Bear, Kun traveled along the newly constructed roads between the fields.

Looking over the vast stretches of fertile black soil, now neatly planted row upon row, he smiled in satisfaction.

Though countless complications and difficulties had arisen along the way—

the seeds had finally been planted.

And what he planted was not merely seed.

It was hope.

One only needed to look into the eyes of the territory’s residents.

Every single person’s gaze brimmed with eager anticipation for the future.

Such a thing had never before existed upon the lands of the Fengrao Territory.

The residents who once avoided Kun now not only stopped hiding from him—

they actively stepped forward to greet him respectfully.

Some even stuffed wildflowers, mountain fruits, rabbits, and birds they had personally gathered into the hands of the guards accompanying him.

And this treatment wasn’t limited to Kun alone.

The three territorial officials experienced the same thing.

Whenever they walked through the territory, they inevitably returned carrying some small gift.

Though none were particularly valuable, they represented the finest offerings the residents could provide.

Kun genuinely felt he hadn’t done anything extraordinary.

He had merely built his own private garden.

Merely planted some fields to unlock the Abundance Mark.

Besides—

sowing the seeds was only the first step.

Harvest season was still far away.

So why were these people so happy already?

Kun truly couldn’t understand it.