CHAPTER 364: CHAPTER 364: TWO YEARS LATER

Two years later.

If things always went as planned, Kael would have to believe that something was wrong somewhere.

Fortunately or unfortunately, his plans didn’t always work out to one hundred percent success.

World domination wasn’t as easy as it looked, even with the power of the arkship at his command.

It wasn’t a matter of not enough force, politics was a little more complicated than that. Kael had fixed himself to calm down many times when he almost shaved off the continent out of frustration.

It was truly frustrating.

Wiping out or tearing off the whole single continent from the surface of Eridoria was not something he couldn’t do. Personally, it was far beyond his capabilities, but with the arkship, it was only a matter of time and energy cost.

The upgrade Kael had gotten thanks to the arkship was not small at all. He might not be that powerful individually but he was sure he could hold his own against a tier 6 or 7 lion with the arkship.

Maybe even defend himself against a tier 8, he wouldn’t know until he met an actual tier 8, and he wasn’t hoping for that.

Still, the arkship was just external power. There were many situations and scenarios that Chloe had presented where Kael would have to depend on himself for survival, not a machine.

But for now, the golden lion had hoped to be able to achieve wild domination easily with the arkship. Alas, it wasn’t so easy.

The rise in Origin Essence was the start of something Kael was not able to control, an intelligence revolution.

It had completely slipped Kael’s mind.

Whenever a creature evolved from just the regular super creature with an awakened heart to the equivalent tier that grants them the ability to transform into a humanoid form, it also came with other perks.

Things like baseline telepathy, stronger bodies, longer lifespan, and greater intelligence were added to the mix.

More tier 3 equivalents were popping out of the shadows after just a few months and Kael already had two castes rebel.

The elephants and the crocodiles.

Supremely annoying.

It made Kael wonder what those lion lords whom he had orchestrated rebellions in their territory were feeling.

Now, the scenes have changed. It wasn’t as simple as forcing them to cooperate. The elephants were the most troublesome and Chloe had talked about how they had been a source of unrest for the greater lion civilization.

Luckily, the crocodiles had only rebelled once and had been beaten back to submission by Diane.

What made it so frustrating was that the crocodiles had used the river system to escape to the vast ocean of the planet.

It had taken the contributions from a lot of water lions and aquatic creatures to be able to round them up and track them down.

After the first failed rebellion, the crocodiles fully submitted to the lion regime. Although it was too late as their bold actions had caused the deaths of many crocodiles, young and old.

The elephants on the other hand were just plain stubborn. Many of them were willing to die rather than submit and if they even submitted, it would be temporary.

Kael had imagined that it would be the hyenas that would give him trouble, but it was actually the elephants that worried him the most.

It was after much research and consultations with Exalon that Kael understood why this was so.

As anyone would have expected, it was related to the law they were affiliated with, the Law of Rules.

And for Elephants, establishing and breaking rules was very normal for them. They were vengeful, powerful, and diverse with their emotional spectrums.

Kael learned that elephants would instinctively try to break rules that they had no hand in establishing. It was a natural thing for them.

The solution to the problem was simple: Kael would have to allow the elephants, or at least, their leader, to contribute to the lion regime by creating some rules for everyone to follow.

As simple as it sounded, many caste leaders immediately called for the immediate genocide of the elephants after hearing this.

Even Marcus, who had now become somewhat of Kael’s right hand, was absolutely for the extermination of the elephants.

In a world that was constantly changing, change itself was a source of blessings and curses. The caste leaders loved how everything was now, there were few rules and everything was great.

The predators from castes like wild castes, Hyena caste, bear caste, and so on, could freely hunt members of the other grass-eater castes.

Things like this were the reason why there were very few rules. It was hard to think of ruling a kingdom of mixed beast races and enforcing a law that restricted predators from hunting their prey. That would just lead to hunger, resentment, and more rebellions.

Although most creatures never thought of hunting an elephant as they were no pushover, the elephants definitely didn’t see it that way.

It was certain that the elephants would push for a Law that prevented meat eaters from eating meat. And knowing the elephants, it may not even stop there, they may engineer genocide against large meat eaters like bears and wolves.

Marcus could already tell that giving the elephants the privilege of establishing laws would be detrimental to the vultures too.

Kael stalled, not knowing how to handle the matter.

And the more he took his time to make a decision, the worse things gradually became.

Over the past two years, the elephants had almost turned many herd castes upside down. Different heroic elephants had risen and sought to lead the herd creatures to rebel against the lion regime.

Thankfully, Priya had spent a lot of time conditioning the minds of these herd creatures and their leaders and reinforcing the Enforcers sub-caste.

Fighting the elephants wasn’t easy, the weakest elephant with an awakened heart was equivalent to a tier 4 lion. At the start, they were almost on par with the tigers of each valley.

Now, with the rise of the Origin Essence, many individuals of the elephant race had ascended to tier 5 equivalent and some were pushing into tier 6.

They were indeed no pushovers.

As it is now, with how spread out they were, if Kael wanted to take them all out at once, it was theoretically possible. But it would probably cause a lot of damage to the planet.

That was the only reason why Kael had not yet attacked. He saw the planet and many of the creatures on it, his personal tools, his assets, his investments.

Destroying so many assets just because of the elephants was not a sound decision.

If he had known, he would have started a genocide campaign right from the start and eliminated every last one of those long-nosed troublemakers.

However, the elephants were just one side of the dice. Other things had happened in the past two years.

One was that every lion on Eridoria had now joined Kael’s Lion System, every single one of them.

Kael had the Lionhood Bar to thank for this. If not for him adding an addictive element to the system, he might not have achieved it.

In total, that was about one million, five hundred thousand plus lions on Eridoria alone.

There would have been more but they tended to kill themselves before they reached adulthood, even then, they weren’t that safe.

Even newborn cubs were being added to the system as soon as they were born. The parents were hungry for that high as well as the Conquering Points.

All the lions that had succeeded in pushing their Lionhood Bar all the way to one hundred percent now worked hard to keep it there. The issue was if they didn’t continue taking missions or posting missions -in the case of pride leaders- their Lionhood Bar would eventually start to go down.

This has sometimes led to shocking levels of violence and surprising depression.

The lions would need to leave Eridoria soon if they wanted to continue like this.

For now, Kael had turned one of the chamber worlds of the arkship into a meeting zone for the lions, a place where they could stay and remain detached from their vassals little the royalties they were.

It was like their own personal heaven.

These days, the lions just spend their time collecting tributes and bossing around the other castes.

Compared to the lion’s global population of more than a million, the combined population from different castes was mind-boggling.

One of the things Kael had been pushing for now was the progress of the lion’s individual strengths to set them apart strength-wise from the vassals.

Due to the rise in Origin Essence, there was now no such thing as an ordinary lion. All the ordinary lions of the past had either died at the claws of a stronger lion or had evolved under pressure.

The new cubs of today all had awakened hearts as soon as they were born.

And speaking of new cubs, Kael was now a father.