" I thought I was going to be bait." Viona whispered while loading the brimstone on a clay bucket.
From the distance she watched Khali running away, on his heels was a massive red lizard that breathed fire in his way.
He turned to look at her with pleading eyes, his back was red after being roasted by the flames of the lizard.
She raised her hand signaling him that she was done. She saw him speed up and leaving the lizard behind.
While that thing was strong and massive, it was slow, at least slower than what she expected from a rank 2 beast.
She ran off as well before it came back, they rendezvous with the others. " We should go back."
He told them, they took all of the things they gathered here and went back up. After returning to the forest layer.
The fire mage, Viona and him immediately used flame abilities to burn a path open, they had no time to waste.
Of course the forest fought back and even sent treats against them but they managed to run away from them.
In their path they collected coal from the dead trees burnt by Viona the first time they went through here.
They arrived in the metal layer above, unfortunately they didn't have any mining tools.
So all they managed to gather were the few iron ores found on the ground. Of course while there were few.
That was in comparison to the number of iron ore in this layer. In reality there were too many of them for him and his gang to carry.
After taking all they could carry they went back home. Lucy was super excited about everything and couldn't wait to experiment.
But first she wanted to learn written language and maths which he promised he would teach them.
Khali had different plans, he went to check the door and realised the spiders were eating through it even faster.
His divine energy points were around 14 thousand now but their prayers were giving him less and less divine energy.
It was similar to a system of experience points he created during the great war. ' Perhaps I should create that again, it was quiet convenient.'
He sighed, if he wants his divine energy to grow faster, these people would need to have a stronger faith in him or he would need more believers.
It was unfortunate but he couldn't milk divine energy from the worship of the same people forever.
Overtime unless their belief in him grow, the amount of energy he can get from their worship will keep getting less and less.
He sighed, unfortunately his divine energy will not reach 20 thousand before these spiders eat through the door.
Which meant he had to work faster. After returning he sent a group of warriors to go gather clay.
This time it wasn't just men, after awakening women had become very strong as well, they could easily lift something weighing hundreds of kilogrammes.
Unfortunately for them men had a biological advantage when it comes to physical strength and that advantage shows even after awakening.
Which is why he gave women cultivation techniques that focused more on speed and flexibility rather than pure strength.
Of course this disadvantage is offset by their mage talents, in general women are more likely to be mages and better mages because magic requires one to be more in tune with their emotions.
After they returned, he showed them something he had drawn on the ground, they studied it for a while and had no idea what it was.
He started making clay bricks while explaining how to make them. They followed his lead.
A mage used wind to quickly dry the bricks and he burnt them in flames. Then he used them to build a forge.
It wasn't as complicated as he thought it would be. Even the others especially Lucy figured it out very quickly.
When he explained what it was for, she was super excited but she wasn't the only one. A muscular warrior with an affinity with a sub element of earth, metal was also excited.
Viona was too but for a different reason, if they learnt how to forge they could make her new weapons to play with.
The following day the forge was done, he even made a hammer using the iron clay. The hammer was too heavy and rough.
No matter how he tried to make it good, it was still clay and was bound to be flawed when it comes to making weapons or tools like hammers.
Then he started the smelting process, after extracting pure iron from the iron ore he put it into an oxygen furnace.
What came out was fine steel. Then the real forging began. The first thing he built was a proper hammer since he was going to need it to make more precise components.
During breaks he taught them numbers and letters. They couldn't learn the god tongue so he taught them the basic language of the universe.
The rune tongue, it wasn't actual runes but it resembled them. If one understood this language it was easier to learn runes as well.
Actually they were already speaking this language but they didn't know how to read or write it.
As expected Lucy was always the first to grasp everything he was teaching them. What he didn't expect was how slow Viona was.
Especially when it comes to maths, she was a blockhead. He realised all this woman knew was fighting.
And she was damn good at that, the one who surprised him the most was the muscular middle aged man named Sam.
He was the one with the metal attribute and took interest in forging. He taught him the most basic.
He grasped everything only with a few examples and he seemed enthusiastic about forging.
With his metal attribute, it was as if he could talk to the metal and knew what they wanted.
He worked with him to forge his first weapons, they started with the basic swords and spears as practice.
Then they went to the big things. During the night he went down to check on the door. " Two days, I hope that's enough time."