Draco, Qiong Qi, and Clarent appeared before the herb garden. Even though the orchard and the garden emphasized plant life, the difference was that the orchard focused on trees while the garden was a mixture of flowers, vegetables, and shrubs.
Naturally, the focus of its production was also vastly different. While the trees of the orchard produced fruits, the herbs here produced seeds, leaves, stems, and flowers that had various uses.
Naturally, the management and harvesting of such reagents were much harder than the orchard. With the orchard, you just had to pluck fruits and maintain the trees, but here, you had to be careful or you would damage a whole bed of reagents unexpectedly.
But precisely due to its higher difficulty, the garden was far more precious objectively than the orchard. Divine Fruits could only be eaten or drunk, and that required one to possess Cooking or Brewing at the least.
However, the variety of reagents in the garden were uncountable, even Draco with his Divine Eyes of Caelo couldn't hope to identify everything here.
The contents of this garden could be used for Alchemy, Cooking, Brewing, Fishing, Architecture, Scrivening, Scribing, Privateering, and more. Various seeds, stems, roots, leaves, flowers, pollen, and even soil could be used for a wide variety of purposes.
If he could capture and maintain this herb garden, Umbra would never lack top-tier resources. Well, they would never lack top-tier resources assuming their number stayed below 100,000 members.
If they tried to use these resources commercially or for a bigger number, it would never be enough. However, if they were used for their member's personal growth, with the total number being relatively small, it was great.
Of course, this was jumping ahead and forgetting that one needed to be at least, Grandmaster Rank in Farming to manage either the orchard or the herb garden. Anyone else would just be wasting their time.
Draco stood outside the garden and analyzed it carefully. The range of his Divine Eyes was still unlimited, but the Rank limitation was quite a bother. However, the tradeoff was that he could 'see', 'see through', and 'see beyond' anything within his Rank with ease.
Previously, he could only 'see' and sometimes 'see through'. 'Seeing beyond' was something he figured he would be able to do at Rank 6 and above.
Draco once again summoned his angelic wings and took to the sky. He then observed the garden from up there, trying to ascertain the monster and herb distribution.
He was unsurprised to see that it was similar to the orchard with demarcated zones. Each zone had a different type of herb growing there, and the quality ranged from Epic reagents at the outer ring to Divine reagents at the center.
What did make Draco frown heavily was that the monster population were primarily plant life and bugs. What was even worse was that most of these monsters lived within the herbs themselves, forming a symbiotic ecosystem.
If he wanted to kill Rank 2 enemies like these with ease, he would have to use his sword skills mixed with fire magic. But if he was stupid enough to use fire magic within the garden, he would only have himself to blame if he destroyed the reagents.
This was a dilemma. Draco was not willing to gamble that the reagents could withstand fire due to the fact that they were Epic and above. If they could withstand anything, then why should one fear when harvesting them?
Just pluck them out, take the parts that you want and put them back in. Because they are of a high Rank, everything should work out fine, right?
Hehe, too ignorant.
Draco came back down to the earth as his wings disappeared, and his expression was pensive. Qiong Qi yawned and lay down lazily, while Clarent scratched his torso and blew out smoke rings.
Draco ignored their antics and thought about how he would resolve the issue. He needed to kill all the monsters within a demarcated zone before they could even know what was happening.
He needed to do it cleanly and simultaneously so it would not damage the herbs. He also needed to do it in a way that only harmed monsters, but purposefully excluded the reagents.
This dilemma would have stumped any other player in this situation, even if they had a Legendary or Divine item. After all, even though those active skills were OP, they would still raze the area to the ground.
However, Draco recently found an ability that allowed him to slaughter an Area Zone silently and without damaging even a single leaf.
It was naturally the enhanced Mind Blast of his Devil Form!
｢Mind Blast – Active Skill
Effect: Send out a wave of mental energy that stuns every single target in an Area Zone and deals 1,000% mental damage.
Duration: Same as transformation.
Cooldown: None.｣
This was how it looked when Draco activated his Devil Form. That form lasted for only 30 seconds and had a cooldown of one day, but with the Richmond's Herald title, the cooldown was slashed by 50%!
That meant he could transform every 12 hours! This was a great boon to Draco. If he was able to traverse all the various resources zones of the Treasury, he could theoretically clear a whole one in 12 hours.
By the time he reached the center of the treasury, he might have more than 3 months left! That would definitely save him a lot of time overall.
Sigh, Divine Classes were truly powerful. Just like when his bloodline had appeared during the Flora and Fauna quest, an unpredictable change had occurred for this Unique Quest.
With his Devil Form's abilities, he was the perfect candidate to explore this quest. Now, it was time to end this show and get onto it.
Draco smiled and kicked Qiong Qi and Clarent to their feet. "Lazy blokes, it's time to kill."
Qiong Qi jumped to his feet with an excited look. "Finally! I thought I was going to die having to look at your face all this while!"
Clarent also took to the air. "Sigh, I had to combust cl.u.s.ters of my brain cells to keep myself entertained. Truly boring."
Draco ignored their complaints and entered his Devil Form. His 'scales' shifted about and became like that of futuristic kevlar-style armor. His facial features became more perfect and Draco overall became slightly more delicate.
He now looked like the most handsome pretty boy in the world, the type that might even be classified as a trap! Even Cobra or Vano would have to kowtow in worship to the current Draco.
Ignoring the snickering of Qiong Qi and Clarent, Draco entered the first zone of the herb garden leisurely. He noticed that the various monsters here suddenly discovered his presence as some of them rushed over.
The rest stayed where they were. After all, the types of monsters here were vastly different from the orchard. The orchard mostly had melee and ranged monsters, who preferred to be confrontational.
The garden though, had a large majority of ambush and assassin monsters. Plants that blended in within the patch that would strike when you tried to pass by or harvest a herb.
Bugs with caustic poison that hid under leaves or within the soil, waiting for you to put your hand there for biting. Once injected, you would melt like the witch from the Wizard of Oz.
This was why Draco had to resort to this. If he tried to kill those monsters, he would definitely have to harm some herbs in some way, so it was only by using the mental attack of this form that he could weather this trial.
Draco's eyes glowed a resplendent blue as he used Mind Blast. Immediately, a wave of blue light erupted from his body and silently passed through everything in a 360° radius, starting from his location.
His Intelligence was now 500 points, activating the 10th stat boost. The first threshold was 50 points, the second was 100, the third was 150, and so on. In essence, the effect of his Intelligence stat was its base value times ten!
However, that was normal. This boost was meant to be enjoyed by monsters like World Bosses or notable monsters in general. Otherwise, how could they decimate hundreds of thousands of players that tried to raid them?
It was impossible for a normal player to ever reach 500 stat points in any stat. Even a Luckmancer would not reach 200 stat points in Luck alone by Rank 7.
As was shown earlier, stat points became even more precious at the later Ranks. At that time, the emphasis would leave stats and move to equipment as well as techniques.
As such, Draco was currently at the level of a World Boss in terms of Intelligence alone. Of course, he was only able to become a World Boss for 30 seconds, but it was still enough to deal with anything below Rank 3.
With Mind Blast dealing 1,000% damage, the raw damage value shocked even himself.
-3,750,000!
For one person, especially at a mere Rank 1, to deal so much damage was unheard of. Previously he had theorized that this would be his base damage, but he ever expected it to be so absurd.
That was because this damage was what he dealt after deductions! This meant that the base damage for Mind Blast based on his stats would be around 5,350,000 damage!
Amazing!
Naturally, these Specialist Rank monsters all had their heads blown open, regardless of their size, location, or form. As long as they were classified as monsters, they were killed in one hit.
Most of their HPs did not even pass 1,500,000 so how could they survive this?
The Sergeant Ranks in the areas with Legendary zones all died at once, their heads exploding like burst watermelons, splashing brain matter around haphazardly.
None of them had HP surpassing 2,000,000 so what did you expect? They perished immediately.
It left the boss monster in the Divine zone, who suffered more than 65% HP lost in one hit. It was a large monster made up of countless vines and tentacles.
If an anime girl dared to enter its zone, she would be finished.
Draco smiled. Only 5 seconds of his transformation had passed, so he used Supreme Apportation to bring himself and his two allies directly in front of the boss monster.
｢Name: Viney – Captain Rank monster
Level: 91
HP: 1,950,000/5,700,000｣
In his True Devil Form, such a monster was nothing but a plaything. Draco used two abilities, the first being Mind Sunder and the second being Devil Minions.
The Archetypes of Devilkin appeared behind Draco. Before they could attack, he commanded them to go and collect all the loot from the other dead monsters first.
Speechlessly, his minions could only do so with defeated expressions. As for Viney, it screeched in agony and thrashed about while its split mind fought the other half.
Clarent and Qiong Qi blanched as they saw this. Last time, they had been blasted away and suffered intense damage, which was why they hadn't seen much of Draco's Devil Form.
Now that they were subjected to this sight, their blood ran cold. What buttressed this point for them was the look of enjoyment on Draco's face from the suffering of Viney.
It was like a wine connoisseur sniffing the best wine he had set his eyes upon to date. The chaotic emotions, the pain, anger, and fear roiling through Viney were slowly absorbed by Draco, bringing him joy.
It replenished his spent bloodline energy rapidly while providing a minuscule increment to his Intelligence and Spirit stats. This increment was around 0.0001%, but if he were to do this many times, he could harvest 1 stat point eventually!
This was the equivalent of a Legendary potion, and all he had to do was cause horrendous pain to a target!
Draco opened his eyes and gazed at the agonized Viney with a cruel smile, an evil light shining in his eyes.