Kael and Priya walked deep into the cave, walking for around five ters before stopping at the center. This was a really big cave and would be considered luxurious to most solitary creatures.
In front of the two, a young woman sat cross-legged on the boulder in the center of the cave.
A ring of different pieces of tal hovered above the ground in a shockingly balanced and unwavering manner, rotating around her like the rings around Saturn.
Standing close to her, Kale felt a slight pressure, a small pull on his golden fingernails and teeth. Of course, it was barely noticeable if not that he was already very sensitive to it.
Kael could see that on the walls of the cave, there were tal bones lodged into the stone walls. The inlaid tals were present all the way to the ceiling, with so tal bones jutting out with sharp tips directly about Kael.
The woman with the controlled magnetic field around her and the multiple pieces of floating tal rotating around her was none other than Zabita.
"Zabita…" Priya called, her telepathic voice sounding like a whisper, as though she was reluctant to interrupt her daughter's ditation.
The young woman, who looked like a human in her early twenties, opened her eyes.
Her eyes were dark yellow, with wide but small black pupils in the center. The skin around her eyes, her eyelids and below, had a dark color.
It was like she had put on black eyeshadow makeup, giving her a dark and mysterious look. The eye black makeup made so serious contrast with her dark yellow eyes, making her gaze look more intense than usual.
Yet, her eyelids only opened halfway, not moving up by a single milliter anymore. She gazed lazily at the two figures standing in front of her, the rotating pieces of tal beca unstable for a mont before returning to their serene state.
"Kael, mother, good day," Zabita said, her lips stretched into a beautiful smile. Zabita's aesthetic really amused Kael.
Apart from the eye shadow, Zabita also wore black lipstick and her left nostril had a small shiny piercing.
Added to her unnaturally pale skin tone, she looked very similar to those emo people with dark goth aesthetics from Earth. All that remained was for her to put on so dark clothing and fishnet leggings and she would look the part.
"I see you're using these materials very well," Kael said as he reached out slowly to touch the slowly rotating pieces of tal. His fingertip brushed on one of the moving pieces that was the size of a finger.
"Yes, the moles did a great job. I've told them to leave so tallic materials for
but they spoke of N'bayé," Zabita said.
Kael nodded, "Yes, N'bayé needs those specific tals for her experints. But once she has picked the one she needs, you could take the rest." He said casually.
He used his thumb and index finger to gently pick out one of the moving pieces of tal. He felt so resistance as the magnetic field was strong, he still pulled it out easily though.
He brought the tal to his face, his golden eyes casting a dim glow on its rough body. The tal was coarse, looking like it had been poorly refined and it still had so impurities within it.
This could not be helped, Kael didn't have access to any advanced slting and refining machine.
The moles who were responsible for mining could only do so much and that was still with the help of N'bayé and Eidel.
Around the sa ti that the attack on the Azale Wolf Clan had been completed, Kael was processing the information he got from Natalia.
He had previously asked for information concerning the extraction of The Powder, a substance that could help montarily boost the chances of evolution upon consumption.
He had also asked for the whereabouts of the nearest mole communities.
For the first, Natalia had been unnecessarily generous. Not only did she give him multiple thods used to extract it from the environnt, but she also gave him a thod that could be used to store and quantify it.
Although Kael had intended to use The Powder as a form of currency, the problem remained that it was made in a state akin to crystallized powder.
It would be hard to think of animals trying to asure the value of a certain amount of powder whenever they wanted to trade.
Natalia had taken the ti to do the thinking for him, or maybe she just had others do it for her. Along with the web ball filled with information, she also sent three small white cubes.
If The Powder was like sugar, then these cubes would be considered sugar cubes, in appearance.
Looking at these powder cubes, Kael truly appreciated Natalia for this. Now that he knew how to use and quantify the powder, all that remained was to extract it.
In the anti, he looked into the information about the Moles, a race of subterranean rat-like creatures that were adept at mining and finding valuable mineral resources.
A week after the Azale raid, he ordered Nalii to handle the annexation of the moles.
Kael was thinking of taking a softer approach. The moles were not like wolves who were innately aggressive and needed to be handled with violence.
From one of the two tier 3 hearts that was obtained from the Azale raid, Kael allowed Nalii to take one with her.
Nalii also left with twenty wolves, all of them were tier 2. After the Azale wolves had been integrated, there was now a sudden increase of tier 2 wolves, increasing the Kingdom's overall strength.
The wolves were to follow Nalii just in case the moles decided to be uncooperative.
Nalii and her wolf guards walked for the whole morning and reached the location when the afternoon sun was directly above their heads.
Countless tunnels stretched for hundreds of ters under the ground, Nalii could feel them clearly.
She could feel the broken roots and how they wound around the connected tunnels.
Nalii had described how the moles scurried out of their burrows, their fur stuffed with dust and their pink noses raised to the air.
She described how their leader reacted to her arrival, calm and collected, his elderly eyes filled with wisdom.
Most of the moles had the power of earth or tal at first glance but there were also so with the power of fire in their ranks.
Just as Kael had hoped, their leader caved in after seeing the heart of the tier 3 wolf.
Although moles usually fed on insects, when push ca to shove, they would eat sothing else, especially if it could increase their chances of evolution.
Ever since that day, Kael and his kingdom had access to one of the best miners in the whole forest.
For now, most of the precious minerals that were found were simply kept sowhere safe as they didn't have any practical use for it yet.
Most of the animals used their claws or teeth to fight so there was no use in forging weapons.
N'bayé would sotis help out in refining the tal from the ores, though they didn't know exactly what type of tal they were dealing with. They just refined whatever they got and N'bayé would take anyone that seed special to experint with it.
Madam Vixy also saw a demand for these tals. There were a lot of evolved creatures in the forest who had the power of tal flowing through them.
Before, most of them had to be just like Kael or Zabita, reinforcing their bones, claws, and teeth before they could use their abilities effectively.
The porcupine that Kael had fought so months ago had employed the sa technique. He had reinforced his quills with tallic properties and used them like projectiles.
Sotis, the only way to get tal was by killing creatures with the ntal ability and extracting their tal bones from the dead bodies.
But Vixy saw an opportunity in this, so she decided to start buying the tal from the moles in exchange for travel protection and so specific types of food.
The moles had so strange requests, asking for certain insects or herbs. Carnivores like the foxes had difficulty identifying these items but Vixy managed to scale through after so guidance.
She and her foxes were quickly able to secure the collection of tals and started selling them to creatures who had tal powers.
The demand was even more than she had expected. Many creatures from both within and outside the kingdom sward the foxes, asking for any tal at all they could get their paws on.
The new tal market caused quite a stir, the appearance of this refined tal redefined the way their battles could be fought.
Madam Vixy was excited, she intended to monopolize this new item with her foxes, and she could already see herself swimming in wealth.
Of course, the moles and the lion royalty didn't need to buy the tal, they could just take it, which was why Zabita had so many floating pieces of tal in her cave.
Still, the other tal users of the forest would have to co to her to get refined tal, which was still a monopoly more or less.
Everything should have gone according to plan, she should have been able to use these new resources to generate wealth not just for her, but the kingdom as a whole.
Unfortunately for Vixy, her monopoly quickly dissolved after Ken, the white fox, decided to slick his claws into the tal market.
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