Rise of the Legendary Emperor

Chapter 129: Metal Bending

After three days of close door cultivation, Don was finally having a breakthrough. The battle energy was surging inside of his body and strengthening all his organs. Don could feel the metals in the room as his metal bending skills had been increased due to him crossing from low level to mid-Star level.

"Is this an earthquake?"

While standing outside of Don's room, Arrora could feel the vibration and the ground beneath her shaking. All the metals around her started to move towards Don's room including her sword and daggers as she tightly held onto those so they couldn't fly away.

And when she peered through the crack in the door, the room was radiating a bright blue light. Fortunately, Don sealed the room with all kinds of stuff before starting to cultivate so the vibrations and energy radiation had been controlled to an extent.

Suddenly the battle energy surging inside his body broke the bottleneck and made Don finally stabilize his cultivation on the mid-Star level. Don slowly opened his eyes and his vision was blocked by a spoon as he took the spoon away from his eyes to see he was covered with all the metals in the room.

"Feels great"

Don cracked his neck as a pop sound came out of his neck and walked towards the door to get out.

"What happened? Did you successfully breakthrough?"

"What do you think?"

As he said, Don looked at Arrora's sword and the sword unsheathed itself and soared through to land in Don's hand.

"Cool, wow! what happened there?"

Arrora pointed at Don's chest as he looked down to see the circular device that Ken made him smoking.

The device created false magical fluctuations around Don when he uses the battle energy and the only downside was it could limit the maximum amount of battle energy he could use in a fight. Everyone in Don's army wore one so they wouldn't raise any suspicions about the hybrid energy signatures however since Ken had to create those devices in a short amount of time, he used many common materials he could buy so the quality was not so great.

Taking out the chain attached to the broken device, Don took a new one from his space ring and wore it around his neck and burnt the old one to oblivion.

"How long was I in there?"

"Three days, come on let's go to the throne hall. I can update you on everything that happened on the way"

"Alright"

Don started to walk towards the throne as Arrora started to update him

"First, we found some of the bandit camps"

"Good"

"Yeah and next, with Joel's help, we now have a file on every noble in the kingdom, including Lord Clemo "

The rain seemed to like Agoria and Don very much as the heavy downpour hadn't stopped from the day he came here. When Don entered the throne hall, he saw Joel was waiting for him with Lord Clemo who looked like he had lost a few pounds of weight.

"Your majesty"

Lord Clemo and Joel bowed towards Don when they saw him.

"Your majesty, the locations of the bandit camps are marked on this"

Don took the map from Joel's hand and opened it to see there were four 'X' marks on the map and all of them were located deep inside the forest except for the one near a faraway village from him.

Closing the map Don looked at Joel

"How was your trip around the kingdoms?"

"Nothing special happened your majesty, all of them were preparing their youngsters to enter the dungeon"

Don knew many kingdoms would hold kingdom wise tournaments to select the victors to enter the dungeon, unlike most of the rank 4 kingdoms that worked in Don's favor.

Otherwise, he had to go through the battle tournaments and hear the smack talk of arrogant young masters and misses before beating them to death as well as reveal his power in the process. Don and Knight competed in many of these kinds of tournaments in the divine continent and won most of them and lost some because unlike here, Don was just one of the countless powerful people in the divine continent.

However, that was rapidly changing due to the changes in this world and soon Don would face much more powerful and dangerous people here too.

"Lord Clemo, how many villages do we have in Agoria?"

Because of his fear towards Don, Lord Clemo started to study all night without any sleep about Agoria, farming, and even the history of it so he could answer any question of Don.

"We had a total of twenty villages, your majesty, now we have thirteen "

Don didn't have to ask the reason for the loss of villages as he already had the idea about the tax rate and the constant raiding of the bandits which led to the departure of the merchants.

 "Lord Clemo, send some guards to all the villages and bring the leader of each village to me"

"As you wish, your majesty"

"Alright, why are you still here?"

Lord Clemo startled when he heard Don as he bowed and ran towards the door as fast as he could while Arrora couldn't help but chuckle

"What about your thoughts on the bandit camps? any threats our men can't handle?" 

"I guess not Don, great masters have a better job than robbing people, even if the bandits have one, we can teleport them away and I'll deal with the threats" 

"Then I'll leave this to you, kill every bandit and bring me the leaders of each camp, alive"   

Don didn't want Arrora to bring the heads of the leaders because she tends to get more excited than she should when fighting.

"See you in a while"

Arrora disappeared from Don's sight with a flash leaving Joel and Don behind to hunt the bandits down.

"Joel, I need you to recruit more people to your unit from here and Emir"  

"Yes, your majesty but may I ask why?" 

Joel's unit of spies had enough people to spy the entire moon empire but hearing Don wanted more people, Joel was slightly perplexed.    

"More people, more information, more speed"  

Joel had a feeling of Don is planning something big so he didn't want to ask any further questions 

"Also, I want you to learn how to fight both physically and magically, I'll tell Ken to let you cultivate using the Apex"   

Hearing Don he was unable to control his excitement as he heard many about the Apex and the role it played in their cultivation from the soldiers of Everlight. Now he got the chance to use it himself made Joel very happy and excited.   

"Thank you, your majesty"    

"Let's see those files on the nobles"       

Joel grabbed the stack of files from one of the seats and handed it over to Don.

The first file Don read was Lord Clemo's since Don was entrusting some works to Lord Clemo, he wanted to make sure that he was not lying to Don although Don did not sense any lying from Clemo.

As expected and surprisingly Lord Clemo was as honest as a noble could get, of course, he did some shady things like embezzling the funds allocated for him and stole some lands which the file clearly said that he paid later for the lands. Other than that he didn't kill or wounded anyone but the surprising thing was that according to the file, he was following a widow woman and sending her secret gifts, especially red roses and chocolates.

"Is this red roses thing true?"    

Just like Don, Joel was surprised when he heard that from one his men too so he understood why Don was asking this

"Yes your majesty, he was making a frequent visit to the flower shop and sending the red roses to the woman"

"Is it love or he's just stalking her?"

Joel quickly shook his head because he didn't want to see Don kill Lord Clemo

"As far as I can tell your majesty, Lord Clemo is not a womanizer. My men told me that he didn't even go to pleasure houses and all of his maids were old people" 

"That's a surprise" 

It took Don several hours to finish reading all the files, and except for a few men and women, all the nobles committed more than one crime that would be punishable by death or years of imprisonment. Fortunately, the woman that Lord Clemo was in love with didn't commit any serious crimes but some simple ones, otherwise Don would have been forced to punish her in front of Lord Clemo. But still, she had to pay for the little crimes she committed.

"You're certain that all of this is true?"

Joel triple checked everything himself and with Arrora's men's help as well as the resources at his disposal, Joel was certain that all the information in the file was nothing but true. 

Don already had a plan of what to do with the guilty nobles and he decided to deal with them after dealing with the bandit problem first. After dismissing Joel, Don closed his eyes and started to meditate and familiarize himself with his new cultivation level.    

Since Agoria was only a little larger than Korrinth, Don knew it would not take much time to visit every village and bring them here plus Lord Clemo had the fancy-looking carriage with an expensive breed of horses to pull it.