Chapter 322 : Anomaly

    "What the...," Talia stammered, her voice laced with shock, as her eyes darted between the two women.

    "What?" Marina said casually, a smirk tugging at her lips. "If you don''t want him, we do. Did you notice how handsome he was? There''s no way we''re letting him slip from our grasp!"

    "Well said," Celine chimed in, her green eyes shining with mischief as she nodded in agreement.

    "You two aren''t serious, right?" Talia asked, her tone incredulous.

    "Why wouldn''t we be?" the two replied in unison, looking at Talia as if she was the strange one.

    "You do remember that he is our cousin, right?" Talia shot back, exasperation clear in her voice.

    "Vaguely," they both responded nonchalantly, shrugging in perfect sync.

    "And it doesn''t strike you as... a problem?" Talia pressed, rubbing her temples as a sudden headache began to take hold.

    "I mean, it''s not illegal or anything," Marina said with a dismissive shrug.

    "What about Amelia?" Talia asked, narrowing her eyes at the two. "He is her brother, after all, and you know better than anyone how insanely protective she is of him."

    The two exchanged a glance, their mischievous smiles growing wider. Turning back to Talia, they shrugged. "We''ll dodge that bullet when we get there," they stated in unison.

    "Why are you trying so hard to dissuade us, though?" Celine asked with a curious smile, tilting her head slightly. "Is it because you truly care about our family bond?"

    "Or," Marina added, her mischievous smile widening, "because you want him all to yourself?"

    Talia''s cheeks flushed crimson as she vehemently shook her head. "I already told you, I feel nothing for him!" she exclaimed.

    Yet, despite her protests, the wild pounding of her heart as she recalled the intense kiss they had shared moments ago told another story entirely.

    ****

    Unaware of the discussion the girls were having about him, Alex could be seen leaving the nobles'' district with a light smile under his mask.

    Alex took a few minutes to completely stretch his muscles before sitting down, just a few meters away from the bed, on the wooden floor, in a meditating position. He took out a bottle containing the yellow healing smoke and unsealed it.

    Before the cloud of smoke had time to dissipate, Alex took control of it. Spending a little of his mana, he made the cloud grow and grow still until the whole room was filled with smoke. Of course, he made sure that the smoke came nowhere near Amelia so as not to disturb her sleep.

    He then retrieved several glass containers from his space ring, placed them before him, and began to fill them with the healing smoke potion, after making sure to enhance its healing potency to be above what a normal grade 3 healing potion could achieve.

    He repeated the same process for a good while before he deemed that he had made enough healing potions. He then began making his potions that alleviated one''s exhaustion.

    By the time Alex was done, more than two hours had passed, and he had successfully made two hundred and fifty of each type of potion. He would have gladly made more potions, but he simply couldn''t—not right now, that is.

    Although there was nothing complicated about the process of making smoke potions, it was still a process that cost him far more mana than Alex would like to spend otherwise.

    As the Smoke Sovereign, the act of expanding and enhancing the potency of smoke, although taxing in mana, wasn''t overly demanding. The real issue was that to perfectly encapsulate the smoke within the glass containers. To do so, Alex had to channel his mana directly into each bottle, and it was this precise step that heavily drained his reserves. If not for this, he could have probably created thousands of these potions in one sitting.

    ''It doesn''t matter that much though,'' Alex thought, a hint of exhaustion furrowing his brows. ''By the time we leave Drisidd, I will have made several thousand potions.''

    With the intensifying war at the borders of Imperion, the competition to decide the heir of the Eswald family had been postponed. This meant Alex was no longer pressed for time and could spend more of it in Drisidd. He planned to use this time to properly train and create more smoke potions.

    However, he wouldn''t be spending all his time on training. He had other priorities, one of which was to learn and acquire knowledge to leave behind his previous state of cluelessness regarding topics that even random people knew.

    And he wasn''t going to hold back until he achieved that goal.

    With his mana reserves depleted and the sun barely beginning to rise, its faint light glittering on the snowy expanse surrounding the city, Alex found himself with nothing to do. So, he retrieved the stack of books Lilia had given him and carefully selected one to read.

    Usually, he would be reading about the various other races inhabiting Imperion and beyond. But today, his focus shifted to a specific set of books—those that explored the differences between known levels and sub-levels of power.

    By reading such books, Alex hoped to gain a clearer idea of how to gauge his strength compared to others of the same or different levels. In a sense, he was a unique existence. Thanks to the lust artifact, he had physical abilities well beyond those of a mere level 4, and he wanted to pinpoint just how far beyond he truly was and where he stood in comparison to others.

    Around thirty minutes later, after going through dozens of books, Alex found what he was looking for. In fact, he found even more information than he had anticipated. The conclusion he came to was that he was indeed an anomaly strength-wise.

    However, he wasn''t the only anomaly recorded, and among anomalies, he wasn''t even close to being the strongest.

    In fact, even among those at level 4, he wasn''t at the top of the list!