Heaven's Greatest Professor

A day passed, and Warden wholly committed himself to repairing the barrier on the west side of the camp. As the Elder mentioned, the main shell had been damaged over 70%. However, he had failed to mention that it would be better to build the shell from scratch instead of repairing it.

Moreover, it was the main shell through which the other shells were powered. So when Warden began removing the scripts from the main shell, the other shells were deactivated. Dozens of people came to complain about it. Their worry was not unfounded; what if a horde of demonic beasts attacked the main camp when the barrier was down? It had surely happened before and could happen again.

Unfortunately, they had failed to notice that the barrier had been barely intact and hardly capable of withstanding a proper attack from a horde of demonic beasts.

Explaining all that to the first dozen people had wasted more of Warden's brain cells than his actual work. Ultimately, he put his two new assistants in to explain to the crowd. At least they would be of some use.

The team of assistants Elder Ming had offered wasn't much of a team at all, nor much assistance either. There were only two of them, barely adept-ranked runesmiths who could barely craft tier-3 runes of a few kinds. Certainly, he could put them to use when it was time for the laborious task of repeating the same runes again and again, but that still needed to wait another day.

Before establishing the final array of scripts, Warden needed to make sure the connection between all the other shells would be top-notch.

On the second day, the elder sent a couple more assistants, much to his relief. Although their expertise wasn't higher than the present adepts, they could reduce a lot of stress from him as they began the laborious task of crafting the array.

They would need to carve runes into three huge-sized steles; each one would bear 64,000 runes on them. An impossibly arduous task to complete in a week. Not to mention the most difficult part where he would have to join the three of them into one shell.

As more than two-thirds were merely Tier-3 runes, Warden was certain of completing about ten to twelve thousand of them a day. He was fairly certain of completing a stele of 64,000 runes on his own, but the dull faces of his four assistants didn't inspire any success. Each of them was barely capable of crafting a couple of thousand runes—perhaps a thousand more if they stopped complaining.

But that would be barely enough to complete another stele.

Warden would need four more adepts to complete the task within this week.

Unfortunately, his problems didn't end there. There weren't enough resources to reconstruct the barrier. The bone dust and blood essence of demonic beasts were easy to obtain, but the issue lay with essence gems. He lacked a couple of hundred gold-grade and a few thousand silver-grade essence gems to finish the work.

The sheer wealth at play here was staggering, but considering it was the main shell of one side, Warden wasn't really surprised.

With his shoulders slumped in exhaustion, Warden carried himself to Elder Ming's office to inform him of the problem he was facing.

"So, how's the work going?" Elder Ming asked as Warden entered his office. "Are you positive about completing the task within this week?"

"Not with the resources I have," Warden said with a sigh. "Elder Ming, I'm fairly dissatisfied with the assistance you provided."

Elder Ming furrowed his brows. "How many more days do you need?" he asked. "You should be aware that a full infantry had to be deployed to guard the west side as you work."

"Well, I do plan on finishing the shell this week, which is why I came," Warden said. He brought out stacks of paper that held the blueprint for his improvised shell and handed them to the elder to see. "I'd need more adepts and resources."

Elder Ming said nothing for several moments. "You have more than doubled the number of runes in the shell," he said with a twitch in his voice. "You even plan on implementing Tier-4 restoration runes instead of Tier-3."

Warden nodded. "I want the barrier to stand for a decade or two, at least."

"With what I'm seeing in the blueprints, it seems to be a foolproof plan that the barrier will withstand a century."

"Only if the shells aren't damaged, or there's no noteworthy attack on the barrier," Warden said.

Elder Ming contemplated that for a moment. Warden thought he might complain about his improvising on the main shell too much—it certainly had stressed the amount of resources he was afforded to implement in this endeavour.

"I'm actually a little surprised when I checked the shells of the barriers," Warden said. "They aren't too low-levelled, but they certainly didn't inspire confidence in the safety of the camp. For how long have they stood?"

"Around thirty-nine years," Elder Ming said. "Of course, back then, it was barely tier-1 and 2 runes. We have improved it over the years. The last work was eight years ago when we had shifted all the runes to at least tier 3. Runesmithing has been the greatest discovery of the last century, and we have improved greatly in the last couple of decades."

Unfortunately, Warden didn't think so. "Has there been any attack led by Fiends, equaling the strength of peak gold rankers?"

"There were a couple of times. Why do you ask?"

"How did the barrier withstand the attack?"

"It did not," Elder Ming sighed.

Warden nodded, expecting exactly that answer. "Forgive me for speaking bluntly, but as I see it, the barrier could not withstand the full force of a gold-rank powerhouse. Hell, even a horde of low-ranked fiends could eat their way up through the barrier. As it stands now, the barriers are merely a glorified blob of magic to give the soldiers and staff a sense of safety from the demonic beasts."