Ryuk asked with curious eyes as Isha hmphed.
"It's a big secret! It's not for free..." Isha said to him as Ryuk looked at her with furrowed eyebrows before eventually accepting.
'Hey, system, get me the best Frost Wyvern dish available...'
[Description: A high-quality dish, the best for Frost Wyverns. Possesses the capability to cancel out hunger in a beast for at least a year and also vastly stores within them Ice Apex Energy, which can be used to further boost overall potential and cultivation speed of a Frost Wyvern.]
[Is the host sure they want to purchase the Frost Drab Cube for 9,000 purchase points?]
[That's a bit too much, no?]
The system asked, but Ryuk nodded his head.
His reason for that was simple.
He had been asleep for six months, and he had also ordered Isha not to devour any beast she killed.
That meant Isha had essentially not eaten anything for almost six months! She might be a Frost Wyvern, a higher-grade beast, but he doubted she could go much longer without food.
She could have easily killed one of the beasts and devoured it, satiating her hunger, but she couldn't—because of his order.
What better way could he repay her loyalty for holding back her hunger than with the best dish in the world for a Frost Wyvern?
"Is this tempting enough?" Ryuk asked as he stretched out his palm toward Isha.
Right before her gaze, something materialized.
A giant cube in the shape of a crab, various runic lines glowing across its surface, and frosty energy emanating from its body.
Before Ryuk could even say anything more—
Isha's tongue shot out, snatching the cube and forcing it down her maw instantly.
A few seconds of chewing, strange gurgling noises, and Isha's eyes brightened with every bite before she finally finished it off, swallowing everything in one gulp.
Ryuk's eyes widened as her belly suddenly swelled up as if she had become pregnant.
A loud belch left her massive maw, raining down on Ryuk, who quickly waved his arm to clear the air. But surprisingly, it wasn't putrid.
"Now, that is the best thing I have ever tasted in my entire life. How do you even pull that off anyway? Bringing things out from naked air?"
"Do you have a second spatial ring that you're hiding from me?" Isha asked, her expression satisfied, her scales glowing with a brilliant blue light.
Ryuk cleared his throat.
"I've fulfilled my part of the deal. Now yours..." he reminded her.
Isha clicked her tongue before sighing.
"Tch, I should have asked for extra to call it a deal..." she muttered.
Ryuk snickered at her before she eventually conceded.
"Listen up, then..." she said seriously, laying on her belly beside Ryuk, her claw pointing into the distance.
"There are two reasons why the beasts here are so strong..."
"Firstly, the Mana in the air," Isha stated.
Ryuk furrowed his eyebrows, but only now did he see it clearly—his eyes flashing in shock.
When he had first come here, he hadn't noticed much about the Mana. It had seemed like the same quality as the one in the academy, and he hadn't thought it was special.
But now, the concentration of Mana had increased by almost a hundredfold!
Even more shocking was that Ryuk could now see every strand of Apex Energy in the air, and surprisingly, there were strange runic symbols within each one.
Symbols that oozed an incredible amount of Mana, locking it within the Apex Energy.
He hadn't been able to see these symbols before. But now that he could, they seemed to increase the Mana energy by hundreds of times!
"While there is this much Mana in the air, we outsiders can't access it properly. I can sense that the Mana is abundant, but when I tried cultivating, I barely absorbed much at all. It was almost like I wasn't cultivating to my full potential, or not all of the Mana was responding," Isha explained.
"With my very sharp intelligence, I could sense it. And after one day of a stupid monkey beast running across me, I used an offensive card and almost blew a finger of mine off."
"I got injured, and I noticed that for a split second, the Mana in the air seemed to open its doors to me, allowing my cultivation to increase by almost double!"
"For the next couple of days after that, those damn beasts wouldn't stop following me around, and I got injured again and again."
"And with every injury, the Mana opened up more and more—until now, I can easily access almost 70% of the Mana here."
"In short, while we outsiders can't access the full power of the Mana, if we get injured, the Mana shifts into our wounded skin, attuning our internal body to it and, therefore, vastly increasing our cultivation speed."
"That's the first thing I learned."
"Throughout your slumber, you didn't increase your cultivation, and six months have already passed. I'm sure you must be feeling a bit of haste now. So if you want to maximize the Mana here, you need to get a good beating, or you can just slice yourself open and let the Mana get in. Whichever is safer..."
"I think the former is the best, though. Hehehe, always fun to watch..." Isha said, cackling sinisterly as Ryuk clicked his tongue.
'You're getting more cunning and devious as the days go by, Isha...' he thought before she continued.
"The second thing I've noticed about why the beasts here are so strong is… Artifacts!"
Ryuk raised an eyebrow.
"Yes, artifacts. Cultivation artifacts, to be exact. It's not just the Mana that is abundant—artifacts are also abundant here. There are special leaves, special stones in the ground that store Mana within them. I named them Mana Stones."
"But I have tracked down the location of the four best Mana artifacts, and guess what? They haven't even been fully used yet."
"If you get your hands on just two of those artifacts, your cultivation would shoot through the roof!"
Isha's words left Ryuk's eyes gleaming—greedy light flashing within.