CHAPTER 527: THE WAKING LEVIATHAN

While the Dragon Knight has finally reawakened, albeit with a little bit of missing memories in his brain, the situation with the sleeping beast underneath the sea has been on the rise. Every day, the adventurers are seeing plenty of signs that the Leviathan is very close to waking up. And with the impending awakening of the beast, there is also an active time when the monsters are popping up all around the Merfolk Kingdom.

Many of the residents of the Merfolk Kingdom have already fled to the land to avoid the danger of the Leviathan, while some merfolk seem to have developed an obsession with the Leviathan and started to become devout followers of their belief related to the beast, to the point that one can even lump them with a cult due to their behavior.

And what makes them worse than a regular cult is that they are preventing adventurers from conducting their regular checks on the surroundings of the Leviathan, since they want to stop any attempts to stop the Leviathan from waking up. They wanted to have the Leviathan wake up and show its glory to everyone.

As a result, a few of the adventurers have already assaulted a few of them in the process, which also resulted in those people reporting those adventurers to the higher authorities.

Because the governing forces of the Merfolk Kingdom are divided between those who worship the Leviathan and those who want it to be gone, chaos always ensues. Liliana and Rakkan have their hands full thanks to these situations, but thanks to Fohl, who is currently helping the adventurers deal with the opposite side of the Merfolk, they are still holding on.

However, they are worried that the deadline that they put on Elaina will be shortened further due to how the Leviathan seems to be hastening its awakening. Sooner or later, the Leviathan will open its eyes, and before that happens, they hoped that Elaina had already finished the potion they needed.

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Elaina stretches her arms as she gathers the medicinal plants that have already matured and are ready for use. She planted a lot of these, which is why the Feys are helping out with harvesting each medicinal plant. She even has the Gelatinous Dynamite Fruit ready as well, after successfully growing it and turning it into a functional tree that would grow fruits. Thanks to the fertilizer, the seeds have grown so much in just a matter of days and allowing Elaina to even harvest a lot in the process. So, even when it is still not the harvesting season for winter crops, Elaina had already done the necessary things to make it happen.

"These plants smell quite strong, boss. Do you really need to plant this much? It seems like it is kinda oversupplying ourselves," Bam asked as he hauled the harvested medicinal plants done by his children to the nearby container.

"It’s better to have a lot of supplies than to lack the supplies we will need in making the potion. Just because we have already secured how to make the potion without wasting ingredients, doesn’t mean we won’t make mistakes. There are unfortunate circumstances, and having the extras solves that. And besides, even if there are extras, it doesn’t hurt to have more," Elaina explained while not fully delving into why she did it.

Thanks to the fertilizer, the medicinal plant that would take weeks, maybe months of growing has grown in just a few days after planting. Elaina made sure that the plants would be plentiful and they are ready to be used, and she already calculated how many potions would be made based on the ingredients. She did overstock a few of the ingredients, as some of them can be used on other reagents and potion recipes, so even if she already fulfilled the order of her grandparents, she can still make them and continue doing so.

With the supply ready, she called Julia and Yona to help out with the potion-making process. Since the two are more than willing to help out, the process was much quicker than ever, and the three quickly managed to store the potions, ready for use and delivery.

"Thanks for helping out with making these potions, you two. Having someone help out just shortens the workload a lot," Elaina thanked the two after cleaning up the mess from the potion crafting.

"No worries, Sis. As I said before, the work is necessary, and it’s not like you are burdening us with doing something we don’t want to work with. And making a potion that is unfamiliar to you at first, but getting familiar with it as you continue working with it is a good way to keep your mastery over it," Julia smiled, clearly not minding the extra work.

"Learning new medicines and potions is a good way for me to keep on learning potion brewing. Learning these potions, there may be a day we will need these specific medicines in the future. Having learned them beforehand would be a more ideal way to keep things working," Yona also doesn’t mind the inconvenience and thinks of it as something packed with something useful.

"So, with the potions now done and ready, what’s next? Are you going to call Fohl?" Julia glanced at the crates of potions they made using all the ingredients grown by Elaina on the farm. There surely would be a lot, and she doubts Fohl will be able to carry them all by himself.

"We will have to wait. We can even ask Mier or Alessa when Fohl will return so that we can tell him that the product is ready for delivery."

While the potions are ready, the other side has the tension rising as the signs of the Leviathan starts to get more and more noticeable. Even some of the officials who thinks that Leviathan is a necessary monster and that it is a god, has started to fear on the event that Leviathan would wake up as intended. It is clear they are still supporting their other oblivious compatriots, but they are already secretly preparing to leave and evacuate to the point that they would even hire some adventurers to escort them out of the kingdom just to avoid the eyes of their comrades who are still unaware of their betrayal.

Despite learning of these kinds of hypocrisy from the Merfolks, the Adventurers did not betray them and just continued to obey within contract. After all, they are not there to fight and kill the merfolk, they are there to fight the Leviathan. So even if the other merfolk decided to betray one another, the adventurers are out of this matter. Those matter is a matter that only involves the Merfolk after all. They can kill each other for all they care, it isn’t their business.

Still, tension continues to rise as more clues of Leviathan’s awakening being accelerated has slowly been growing and due to that, Fohl and Elaina’s grandparents decided to discuss their next move on what to do next. Discovering the situation is not ideal for them who don’t work normally underwater after all.

"Are you saying that we will have to rush Miss Elaina on the creation of the potion?" Fohl frowned upon hearing the suggestion given by Rakkan.

"Although it is still technically not rushing but creating small batches slowly, but yeah, we needed to do that soon enough," Rakkan shook his head as he slid through the reports that the adventurers had been reporting while keeping an eye on the situation with Leviathan.

"Yeah, we are basically forcing her to make something as soon as possible, but with how a monster is ready to wake up and cause chaos, we can’t wait any longer. We have to cut down the number of days needed for the supply to be ready. We are competing against the waking Leviathan after all. The later we do this, the more problems we will encounter once we face off against the monstrosity," Liliana added.

"Isn’t that just asking for the impossible? I heard that Miss Elaina is still busy procuring the medicinal plants needed for the potion, and considering that some ingredients are not easy to procure, this is just like punishing someone with impossible odds to win!" Fohl clearly disagrees with them, yet both Rakkan and Liliana shook their heads.

"We believe in our daughter. And we also know she can do the impossible things with that farm of hers. Just tell her about the situation, and I am sure that she will understand it. In fact, there is also a chance that my granddaughter has already fulfilled the necessary tasks and is just waiting for us to pick up the cargo."

Fohl thought that these two had some unrealistic ways of pressuring their granddaughter on something troublesome, such as potion-making, but little did he know that he would be the one who would be surprised by what he would see the moment he arrived at Elaina’s farm, with the crates of the Underwater Breathing Potions ready for delivery and use.