Chapter 290: Entering Rockwave.

The journey was long but thankfully not boring, thanks to all the stories this panda-like guy kept telling. But as I listened through them, only one thought kept repeating in my mind.

These pandas... they weren’t very bright in their heads.

I mean, I could understand all the melodrama about taking a family hostage to make people do their bidding, but... wouldn’t the children have it way worse if they survived such incidents anyway?

From everything this chubby old panda said, one thing was clear. Whatever this Spring of Necrol was, it was valuable as hell and too vast to be extracted all at once.

So, the pirates who had taken over the planet would keep extracting it slowly using the lives of the Spandals.

And extracting didn’t seem like an easy job to do, so there would be many lives lost in the process. To make up for it, they would need new labour, but the question was where would they get it?

But then again, the answer was simple.

The future generations of these pitiful Spandals.

The loop would keep going until those pirates sucked the spring dry, but even after that, I doubt they would let go of such useful and obedient slaves.

But then again, completely irrelevant to me.

I was just a guest in these parts of space for a few days until I could sail out by stealing a ship.

Still, I kept listening to the guy because otherwise I was afraid I would turn into Arza, who was currently doodling god knows what kind of artwork using the bones of some poor guy who probably rotted in this jail.

Though even without looking, I was sure she couldn’t be drawing anything else except a bunch of chocolates, given her love for them.

***

The rest of the journey continued, and despite being prisoners, the damned chickens were somehow far more courteous than I had first expected.

They offered their most delicious meals to us every two times in the last few hours.

Not that Arza or I ate even a bite of it because... their favourite and most delicious meal was made up of worms which were squirming in a piping hot soup of a strange red colour.

I knew alien food would be difficult to digest, and for that reason alone, I had packed more than enough food to last me for years but these chickens had confiscated my poor cloak and all my storage rings which carried that food.

And although I could recall my cloak anytime I wished, it wasn’t the time to do so.

So... overall, yeah, we starved.

And only I knew how difficult it was to control Arza from attacking the chickens with her body bound in those mana-suppressing cuffs.

But thankfully, I could feel the change in the environment, and from the slightest excited movements of the guards who came to bring us our food last time, I could only hope that... we were close to our destination.

That also meant the things I had put in motion were about to go off.

I turned towards Arza, who had somehow drawn a whole damn landscape of the annual ceremony of the planet Chocoloria with her own self drawn while eating chocolates in it.

Boredom really does make people artistic, huh?

I ignored the art made of dust on the floor and the bone of some poor guy and softly whispered in her ear.

"As soon as I give the signal, grab onto me tightly."

She looked at me with narrowed eyes without saying a word for a moment, only to nod a moment later.

"Alright."

With that done, I turned towards Pandelion, who was still going on and on about the different methods Spandals used to farm before the pirate invasion.

For someone who looked to be on his deathbed, this guy was sure as hell too damn talkative.

"By the way, Sir Pandalion. Is there anything we must know about Rockwave? Like any special conditions or any dangerous zones and people to avoid?"

I wanted to know what we would be jumping into before actually deciding to go through with it. Not that we had any choice, but at least breathing wasn’t a problem.

In this world, breathing was different and didn’t only rely on oxygen. As long as a planet had mana, anyone could breathe on it even if oxygen wasn’t present there.

The same principle could be applied to space too, but unlike the welcoming mana of planets, space was filled with spatial and void mana, which crushed a person with deathly chills.

So sucking in ambient mana in such places was countless times more difficult and people at lower ranks had no choice but to rely on their mana cores for breathing in such spaces and die when they exhausted it all.

Pandelion looked at me, his eyes turning slightly softer.

"The world of Rockwave is relatively small and is filled mostly with tall mountains and vast seas. And the only stable place to live is in my Empire of Svrunda. But except for that, it’s mostly peaceful, with rarely any strong beasts."

"Although there are some tribes of Spandals scattered here and there, most are currently under the control of Roga as well."

He continued in the same tone.

"The Empire is separated into seven different areas, with the capital being in the centre. It’s also the place we will be going soon because that’s where the transportation hub is situated and it’s the only place from which the planet Rockwave can be exited due to the special geography of the place."

"Though, I doubt you would need to know anything more since you won’t be spending much time outside. The pirates would probably sell you or use you as labour to extract the Spring of Necrol as soon as we arrive."

Tsk... as useless as ever.

But before I could ask anything more, the spacecraft suddenly vibrated slightly as I felt the command I had given to my Moon Cards activate.

The plans I had set in motion had finally started moving.