Chapter 564: Students Bringing Problems

Wanting to help Krysal was well and good, but the problem was that everyone else was trying to help too, often in opposite directions. Kai could make a difference in any given location, yet he still felt as though the city states were tilting toward chaos. It got to the point that whenever he was interrupted by anyone, he assumed that another disaster had struck.

That instinct almost made him snarl when Maggle showed up, then Kai paused as he recognized three of his students. He'd left Bonto and Tori back in Krysal some time ago, and Untariin had traveled there after awakening his Class in Goralia. Currently they were approaching together - Bonto was laughing uproariously at something Maggle said, while the other two lingered nearby.

"Yo, Kai motherfucking Clanless!" Maggle waved cheerfully at him. "I've brought you three of your students, who you have completely forgotten about. Downright shameful of you, especially given what you've been getting up t-"

"Do not be rude," Tori said. "Kai is our benefactor."

"Rude? Me? Have you ever, ever in your entire life, known me to be rude?" Maggle clutched his heart as if deeply offended.

"You were rude with that sailor," Bonto said, which prompted laughter from himself and Maggle. Even Tori and Untariin cracked smiles, so it must have been an inside joke related to their ongoing training. Though Kai was tempted to analyze them, he sensed that they had something more to bring up than just questions about their abilities.

"What do you need?" he asked the group.

"I have a request and a proposal." Untariin stepped forward and gave a nod that was, oddly, rather Goralian. "I've needed to keep a low profile here, but I've spoken to some old friends. There's a serious problem in Kartiis that we think you might be able to help with."

"Another conflict between ex-slaves and ex-crystalliers," Bonto said with a shake of his head. "You'd think having a crystal mine would make things easier, but it doesn't."

Maggle stuck his tongue out at the Birtaegali man. "Look at you, acting like you know our entire history."

"Bonto has really taken to Krysal," Untariin told Kai by way of explanation. "Soon he'll be more Krysali than I am, at this rate."

"Hey now, I'm the one who gets to decide who's Krysali! We had a whole revolution about this!"

"You'd let anyone join if they bought you a drink," Tori said quietly, prompting laughter from the others, loudest of all from Maggle himself.

It was nice that they enjoyed one another's company, in a vague way, but Kai mostly just registered that there was a problem in Kartiis. Another one that he'd have to solve, though at least this time he wasn't being given a ridiculous demand by either ex-slaves or ex-crystalliers. Between Maggle and Untariin they had both sides represented, so they wouldn't have come to him without something reasonable.

"So what's the situation in Kartiis?" Kai asked once the laughter faded.

"There's a crystal mine near the city," Untariin explained, "and their policy has always been that everyone has to go in and mine their own crystals. And the old nobles agreed to that and followed the rules. But now the revolutionaries are saying that isn't enough."

"Hey now." Maggle scratched his stubble, no longer feigning irritation. "That's not being fair to them. The old crystalliers started out strongest, so it's easiest for them to mine crystals. The mine is small, so they're monopolizing the good veins. They're grabbing everything, just reproducing... uh..."

"Reproducing the old disparity," Bonto said, as if he was quoting someone else's words.

"Right, that. I'm more familiar with another kind of reproducing, haha!"

Untariin folded his arms sourly. "I don't like being positioned as speaker for the old nobles, but you're not being fair either. The revolutionaries are demanding that they be taxed different from everyone else, their qi crystals given to miners who didn't work for them. That's not only breaking the treaty, it's going back toward slavery by another name."

They started to argue, a little less good-naturedly than before. If even Kai's own allies were getting dragged into this sort of problem, what hope did the rest of Krysal have? He resolved not to make an immediate decision before he had all the facts, but from the initial story it sounded like a difficult situation. Exactly what he didn't need.

"Thank you for bringing this to my attention," Kai said. "I can take a look, but since this isn't an emergency, it will take a while to get someone to teleport us to Kartiis. Meanwhile, how is your training coming?"

That cut short the potential argument, as they were all eager to update him on their work. For a while they were all talking together, sometimes over one another and sometimes sharing stories, explaining about how they had been training across Krysal. Maggle seemed to feel left out and joined in with stories that had to be lies, or at least Kai hoped so.

<

Name: Tori Quondan

Total Power: 165

Path of Steel: Bronze 9 (18)

Silver Hand: Quartz Rank (10)

Crystal Cultivation: 150 (17)

Physique: E-5 (95)

Soul Level: 5 (25)

>

Tori was struggling the most with 165 Power, though in her defense, her energy was spread across multiple different abilities. She had successfully fused her chakra into a "Silver Hand" ability and had also mastered the basics of crystal cultivation. Now that she could generate materials more quickly, she could fight better, but her style was still obviously incomplete.

<

Name: Bonto Birtaegali

Total Power: 245

Manalance: 26 (46)

Crystal Cultivation: 2097 (68)

Physique: E-8 (106)

Soul Level: 5 (25)

>

Bonto had kept developing his crystal cultivation, vocally loving it, and had reached a total of 245 Power. All that was limiting him now was access to qi crystals, since they were expensive and Kai wasn't handing out money. Apparently part of the reason he'd pushed Untariin to talk about the Kartiis problem was that he hoped they could mine some crystals of their own.

That part wasn't a bad idea. Kai wasn't sure if there was actually a good solution to the political problem, but if they could increase the total number of crystals instead of drawing them away from Krysali, that would be for the best.

As for Untariin himself...

<

Name: Untariin of Cuulisi

Total Power: 286

Crystal Cultivation: 9999 (125)

Rogue Class: 8 (18)

Physique: E-9 (107)

Soul Level: 6 (36)

>

The former noble had a total of 286 Power, still largely from his crystal cultivation, but he was obviously enjoying his Rogue Class. He had developed the most obvious abilities, being able to teleport his crystal knives back to himself, and he was working on teleporting them offensively as well. More than any of them, Untariin demonstrated the ability to use mana and qi together.

Actually, Kai got the sense that Untariin was eager to go back to Goralia and preferred it to Krysal. It said something about him that he had stayed and even stepped forward to help the others, because the mine would unquestionably help them more than him. Some people might be skeptical of a former noble, but Kai saw him as someone who had just been born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Overall, he thought his students were a good bunch. It would be easy to focus all his attention on them and ignore the Krysali, who could be so frustrating. Kai smiled as he looked over Bonto, Tori, and Untariin, thinking that-

"Hey, don't forget about me!" Maggle stepped into his line of sight and jabbed his own chest with a thumb. "I've been training too! Can't let these young folks jump ahead of me, wouldn't be proper."

<

Name: Maggle of N District

Total Power: 287

Crystal Cultivation: 9999 (125)

Acid Cultivation: 547 (39)

Physique Level: E-6 (98)

Soul Level: 5 (25)

>

Maggle was technically the strongest of the four... with 287 Power, just barely. Comparing him to the students, Kai was struck by how different their trajectories were. The other three had been blocked and rejected until less than a year ago, while Maggle had been on top of Krysal for years and had done much less with it. But there was no point making an issue of it, so...

"More like you got off your ass," Kai said. "Why did it take you so long to cultivate ten thousand crystals?"

"Because it's a fucking waste of time!" Maggle threw up his hands. "You get about a hundred from the first half, so it's boring just sitting around doing five thousand more, just for a little more strength. I'd rather waste my time f-"

"No kidding."

"But hey, these kids lit a fire under me. Once you help them with this mine problem, I'm actually going to head off to the acid pits, see if I can't get more acid in me. Ladies love an acid cultivator, right?"

They had a day to take care of business, which meant both Kai informing his wives about his trip and training with his students - Zae Zin Nim gave him a ship so that they wouldn't be delayed. Once again, he was impressed by how hard his students tried to overcome the disadvantages that fate had handed them. It was yet another priority among far too many, but he would keep helping them if he could.

Fortunately, in the case of Kartiis, he could help them at the same time he whipped Krysal into shape.

When an elite showed up to teleport them, Maggle had wandered off - ostensibly to train acid cultivation - so it was just four of them going to Kartiis.

Kai dimly remembered it from the war, though the entire area between the city and the mine had been overhauled. It was surreal to see how the two, which had once been strictly divided, were now one city.

Or at least they were supposed to be. As they approached, Kai saw that there were two crowds along the edges, shouting at one another.

The air was boiling, on the edge of a riot. He couldn't have arrived at a better, which was to say worse, time.