Translator: AnubisTL
A hot wind, carrying sand and gravel, swept through the Hemlock Hills, emitting a faint, mournful wail.
Garos slammed the Rock-Crushing Worm onto an open patch of ground, his dragon claw pinning its armored head to the earth. The massive creature, nearly twenty meters long, coiled into a tight ring under his restraint.
Were it not for the insect-like carapace covering its body, the Rock-Crushing Worm, with its immense length and girth, might easily be mistaken for a colossal serpent rather than an insect.
"Rock-Crushing Worms live underground, burrowing through the earth is their innate talent, and they excel at concealment and ambush," Garos mused. "If I could tame one, I could use it to steal black oil."
"No, not steal. The black oil reserves are unclaimed resources. This is simply claiming what's rightfully mine through my own skill."
The Carmel Black Oilfield was heavily guarded, and there might even be subterranean defenses. However, the Sierre Wilderness contained multiple oilfields, some smaller and less heavily defended, offering better opportunities to extract black oil.
As for Samantha, her alchemy couldn't be relied upon for now. She hadn't yet mastered the techniques for extracting and refining black oil.
Even if she could use alchemy to directly extract black oil from demonic beasts, the efficiency would be too low.
Black oil itself is the result of an extremely long process, formed by the special reactions and sedimentation of demonic beast bodies deep underground.
Unless one's alchemy skills are exceptionally advanced, directly refining black oil through alchemy requires a vast number of demonic beasts to yield only a small amount of oil, making the effort disproportionate to the reward.
The primary source of black oil remains natural deposits.
Refining crude black oil, however, is feasible.
Though Garos had never tasted higher-quality black oil, he imagined the difference would be akin to that between ordinary metal and hundred-forged steel—refined black oil would undoubtedly have superior effects.
His gaze fell upon the Rock-Crushing Worm.
Garos exhaled deeply, his claws clamping down firmly on the worm's head, preventing it from escaping his grip.
Quasi-spell skill: Mind Sense.
A white glow flickered in his dragon eyes as Garos immediately closed them, focusing his mind. He extended an invisible tendril of mental energy, touching the worm's head to sense its consciousness.
Garos had spent considerable time excavating the Mind Sense skill from his bloodline.
Whether it was luck or the clarity of his intent, his Adaptive Evolution Talent had activated.
Garos awakened this skill in short order.
It allowed the caster to sense the target's emotions while simultaneously allowing the target to understand the caster's thoughts, enabling a degree of communication through their spiritual worlds.
This gave Garos a chance to subdue the Rock-Crushing Worm.
Ferocious beasts like the Rock-Crushing Worm possessed limited intelligence and were difficult to communicate with. Only skills akin to Mind Sense could bridge the gap.
Due to the vast difference in mental strength between them, Mind Sense successfully worked on the Rock-Crushing Worm.
In Garos's perception, primal urges like hunger and destructive impulses surged first, followed by fragmented memories: the salty, fishy taste of kobold corpses while gnawing through mineral veins, the frenzy of mating with other Rock-Crushing Worms, and the terror of being snatched into the sky by dragonkind, torn from its subterranean home.
The Rock-Crushing Worm's consciousness was hazy and indistinct.
A dragon-shaped silhouette of light, representing Garos's mental will, materialized within its spiritual world.
Garos surveyed the surroundings, finding the Rock-Crushing Worm's spiritual world exceptionally dark, like the pitch-black depths of the earth. The worm's will lay coiled in a cavernous pit.
"Submit to me, and I will let you live and grant you food," Garos's voice echoed within the Rock-Crushing Worm's spiritual world, resonating in a way it could perceive and understand.
"Oh," the Rock-Crushing Worm responded blandly, as if neither life nor food held any significance.
Recalling what had previously excited it, Garos paused, then said, "Submit to me, and I will grant you unlimited opportunities to mate with other Rock-Crushing Worms."
As expected, the Rock-Crushing Worm's emotions surged immediately.
To it, this seemed to be the most sacred and vital aspect of its existence, even surpassing the value of life itself.
"I... agree," it replied haltingly.
Excellent! I didn't expect it to be this simple, Garos thought with satisfaction.
Although communicating through Mind Sense wasn't true enslavement, given the worm's limited intelligence, it lacked the concept of deception. As long as Garos could provide what it desired, the worm would remain loyal to its instincts and serve him.
This was more akin to a mutually beneficial arrangement—a transaction where each party received what they needed.
Just then, something unexpected occurred.
Crack, crack, crack. The spiritual world, as dark and deep as the earth's core, suddenly trembled. The Rock-Crushing Worm's consciousness filled with awe, reverence, and terror.
"What's happening?" Garos asked.
"The King... has come," the Rock-Crushing Worm replied in agony.
Simultaneously, its mental will began to convulse. Cracks appeared across its surface, and the creature shattered into fragments. From the wreckage emerged a much smaller worm, its form more solid and lifelike, almost tangible.
It had no eyes.
Yet Garos could sense it staring coldly at him.
At that moment, the Rock-Crushing Worm's entire spiritual world began to collapse. The smaller worm gradually turned transparent and vanished.
Garos opened his eyes.
The Rock-Crushing Worm before him twitched a few times, then went still, its body now a soulless husk. There were no fatal wounds, yet it was dead.
"Taming the Rock-Crushing Worm seems more complicated than I thought," Garos sighed, but he didn't lose heart. His spirits lifted almost immediately.
The world didn't revolve around him. Setbacks were inevitable. The key was overcoming obstacles, making flowers bloom from thorns, and turning rough paths into smooth highways.
"The King came... The last worm that appeared must have been the Worm King."
"Can it directly control the life and death of its subordinates? Destroy their minds?"
Garos remembered the Worm King he had seen before. Its carapace gleamed with a cold, metallic luster under the sunlight, and its hundred-meter-long body was truly terrifying. Its life grade was at least level 12.
To reach level 12, a red dragon would need to be around 40 years old, while an iron dragon would require over 50 years.
In other words, the Worm King's life grade was at least equivalent to that of a young adult dragon—far beyond Garos's current capabilities.
"Strange," Garos mused. "The inheritance didn't mention that the Rock-Crushing Worm King possessed such mental control abilities."
"Perhaps it underwent some mutation, granting it skills beyond those of ordinary Worm Kings."
Garos pondered this.
Next, he returned to the abandoned mine, using wild beasts as bait to lure out ordinary Rock-Crushing Worms. After capturing them alive, he attempted to subdue them using Mind Sense, following the same method as before.
The result was the same: the Worm King interfered once again.
This realization dawned on Garos: unless he could deal with the Worm King, his current methods would be insufficient to tame the Rock-Crushing Worms and make them work for him.
"You're ruining my plans," Garos vowed inwardly. "Just wait and see."
He mentally marked the troublesome Worm King.
Sooner or later, he would capture it and force it to mine ore and oil until it collapsed from exhaustion.
As the saying goes, there's always a way for a dragon. If you're determined to achieve something, you'll find another approach. While this swarm of Rock-Crushing Worms proved difficult to tame, Garos still had other targets in mind.
(End of the Chapter)