Yarra’s Adventure Notes
Chapter 859 - 123 The True Purpose of the Sands of Time

Chapter 859: Chapter 123 The True Purpose of the Sands of Time

Thus, Catherine also assumed a blank expression and exchanged a glance with the equally impassive Vivian. She leaned in behind Mr. Pannis and cleared her throat before asking tenderly, "Dear Mr. Pannis, may I ask what this is?"

"It’s the documents I took from up there." Pannis leafed through a stack of papers in his hands, answering casually, "I just thought, since Freya’s mechanical spiders won’t trigger the traps, why not just let them transport all the paper items down one by one, and sure enough, there was quite a bit of information."

"In that case, dear Mr. Pannis," Catherine’s smile was sweet, and her tone even more tender, "why didn’t Catherine and the others know about this?"

"I saw them discussing who should go up with such seriousness and they seemed to enjoy it so much that I didn’t want to disturb them, hahaha... When they realize what happened, their faces will definitely be priceless, it’s just too funny to think about, hahaha..." Pannis’s attention was still focused on the papers in hand, and he spoke without thinking. However, in the next instant, his body stiffened, cold sweat beaded on his forehead, he swallowed hard, and said in a hoarse voice: "Well, actually I was just bluffing; I just wanted to test something, right, just an experiment. I didn’t really expect it to work, so I didn’t tell them, and who knew it would really be successful, yeah, it’s like that, really, trust me, I absolutely did not want to make a joke out of them."

"Of course, I always trust you," Catherine said gently, so tender that even the sound of her unsheathing her sword was gentle, "so I really won’t get mad at you, I promise."

"I don’t believe that one bit." Pannis stuffed the papers into Catherine’s hands behind him, and as she caught them, he had already sped away, hiding behind Muir and peeking out to say, "If you want me to believe that, put away your weapon first."

"Hmph, important matters come first. We’ll settle our score when we get back home." Catherine gave Pannis a sharp look and handed the neatly arranged stack of papers to Vivian, saying, "Take a look at this, isn’t this their Array design?"

"Let me see, oh yes, this is mostly the same as the Arrays we’ve seen before that were destroyed. The parts that differ are probably the broken sections." Vivian took them and confirmed the answer just by looking at the first page, but her expression grew worse the more she read. Seeing her look, Pannis stopped causing trouble too. The group gathered around the young Mage, carefully watching her face. After ten minutes, Vivian finally took a deep breath, closed the papers with a thud, closed her eyes wearily, and said in an almost murmuring voice, "It’s truly horrifying, what exactly do they want to do? They’ve absolutely become inhumane."

"What on earth did you see?" Catherine asked with a frown. "Didn’t they admit it themselves? They want to take away the time of everyone in the city and use it to cause a quantitative change, and thereby peer into the secrets of the rules of time, to become real Deities. It’s already inhumane to do such a thing, so why are you repeating it? Did you see something even more outrageous? Are you saying that all this isn’t their ultimate goal?"

"I think indeed it’s not their ultimate goal, but that’s just my guess," Vivian sighed and placed the papers in Freya’s hands next to her. She pulled out a notebook, roughly sketched a Magic Array, then drew a larger sketch composed of sparsely placed small black dots and said wearily, "Take a look. The first Array here is what they’re using, the magic Array that steals others’ time. The black dots on the second sketch represent the Arrays, and based on these dots, a large Spell Array has been formed. Within the area covered by this Array, even if there’s no actual Array under your feet, it still produces the same effect. They are using this fact to achieve city-wide time plundering."

"Why not just draw a massive Array instead?" Catherine asked. "Wouldn’t it be simpler to create one big Array to cover the entire city?"

"No one can control an Array that large," Muir interjected. "The larger the Array, the more energy it requires to activate and maintain its function. An Array covering a village already needs several Mages of Legendary Rank to supply energy or over twenty thousand Tael in Crystals. If you expand it to cover an entire city, the energy needed would likely require several Demigod Mages working together or several hundred thousand Tael in Crystals to maintain. The problem is, they don’t have several Demigod Mages, and there aren’t that many Crystals with a capacity of several hundred thousand Tael in the world."

"Exactly, the key issue is the power supply," Vivian nodded. "Using their method, each small Array can be powered by Crystals, with each requiring only three or four thousand Tael of Crystals for activation. Although this will consume a lot of Crystals, it turns the impossible into possible."

"I understand what you’re saying," Catherine nodded. "But what does this have to do with what you just mentioned, their ultimate goal?"

"Well, it’s related," Vivian sighed again and said, "Pannis, I remember you’re quite familiar with the maps of various regions on the Continent. Could you draw us a map of the Butte Plateau, scaled down to the size of this paper?"

"Hm?" Pannis seemed to immediately understand Vivian’s idea, his complexion turning sour as he twitched the corner of his mouth and asked, "Are you certain?"

"Heh, I wish I could be uncertain," Vivian said with a bitter smile, "That’s why I brought it up for us all to discuss."

"Alright, I get it." Pannis took the notebook, hastily drew a simple topographic map of the Butte Plateau, and very consciously marked most of the cities with dots on the map, "Here, the map you need."

"Thank you." Vivian took the map, glanced at it, and nodded her head, saying, "Sister, do you remember how many cities we found with this kind of array on our way here? Mark them on the map."

"Seven, no, eight," Catherine also seemed to realize something, her fingers trembling slightly as she picked up the pen and marked on the map, "Here, Frost City, over there Secluded Valley City, and Hurricane City, Misty Cloud City..."

"Alright, now everyone have a look," Vivian said, picking up a second array diagram composed of black dots and overlaying it onto the map, looking at it against the light and commenting, "Pannis, your drawing is excellent, the scale is just right. Looks like you really do understand. Now, what are everyone’s thoughts after looking at these two diagrams?"

Looking against the light, the black dots circled by Catherine, representing the eight cities, almost perfectly overlapped with the eight black dots on the second array diagram comprised of seventy to eighty black dots. This scene made everyone involuntarily gasp, as it was clear what this meant: even these cities were just a minuscule part of their targets. Their actual aim was to use each city as a complete node, then form a higher-level spell array, expanding the range of plunder by hundreds of times.

Pannis narrowed his eyes for a while, then took the map and used another sheet of paper to complete the drawing of the entire spell array covered area. He stroked his chin and said, "The range covers half of the Butte Plateau and a small part of the Falar Empire, even including a small section of the Whispering Swamp and the Sighing Desert. However, these two areas barely harbor any intelligent beings, so they can be neglected."

"Maybe... we are overthinking it," Lina traced a square over her chest, forcing a trembling laugh, "Within the covered range, there must be tens of millions of people living, maybe even twenty million. That’s one-tenth of the human population in the Yarran World. No matter how ambitious they are, they couldn’t possibly think of slaughtering so many people at once, haha, haha, surely we are overthinking it."

"I doubt even you believe your own words," Vivian sighed again, "But there is one thing I do find strange. With such a large area and this much work, how could they possibly finish it? Indeed, demigods are powerful, mages are mysterious, but not omnipotent. Even if they began preparing right after getting the array more than a decade ago, with their numbers, it seems unlikely they could complete such a huge project, and besides, all of these would require local cooperation. Even as a demigod, I don’t think Victor has the authority to make everyone work with him, especially not the mage-lords of Butte, so there might be something we haven’t noticed yet."

"Discussing this now is of no use," Pannis said, his expression extremely strange, something the girls hadn’t seen since they saw the Temple of Danacus on the plains, he spoke in an almost flat voice, "No matter what their grand plan was, they are all dead now. What we need to do is quickly clean up the arrays within this city, then notify Chairman Warrensen to have a sweep of all the cities or regions represented by those seventy or more nodes."

"That’s true," Vivian nodded, "Leaving them would be a risk; it’s better to clean them up quickly."

"Yes, so let’s split up and take action," Pannis said, "You follow the node map Vivian drew and clean up those seventy-plus locations completely, leaving no risks."

"What about you?" Catherine asked with concern, puzzled by Pannis’s behavior yet refraining from pressing for reasons, "Aren’t you going with us to take care of it?"

"Heh, I have other matters," Pannis said with a mysterious smile, his eyes narrowing into slits, "After killing two of their students, I owe them an explanation. Sending a death notice is something I’ll take care of." (To be continued. If you like this work, welcome to Qidian (qidian.com) to cast a recommend vote, or monthly vote. Your support is my greatest motivation. Mobile users, please visit m.qidian.com to read.)