Chapter 582 – Radiant Antler Deer

Chapter 582 – Radiant Antler Deer

The Winged Ones’ hunting party’s target was a herd of Radiant Antler Deer.

The antlers of Radiant Antler Deer stored light elemental force within them, and when the deer ran, they left traces of light elemental energy on the forest floor.

These traces could drive away other magical beasts, but at the same time, they also exposed the deer’s location.

By following the light elemental traces, the Winged Ones’ hunting party could track down the Radiant Antler Deer.

The Winged Ones seemed quite confident in their pursuit of the Radiant Antler Deer. The atmosphere along the way was relaxed—they walked at a leisurely pace, stopping here and there, following the light elemental traces while also gathering plant materials they encountered along the route.

It wasn’t until noon that they finally spotted the Radiant Antler Deer herd, which was crossing through a gorge.

The lead Winged One drew his longbow, and an arrow of condensed light elemental force took shape, shooting swiftly toward the herd and striking the antlers of the lead deer.

However, it didn’t cause the deer any harm. Instead, it erupted into a blinding white light that instantly engulfed the entire herd.

Truly blinding—even Mo Lan, positioned behind the Winged Ones’ hunting party, felt a slight discomfort in her eyes.

Fortunately, the white light seemed to have a limited range, concentrated only around the deer herd, so its effect on her was minimal. A few blinks, and she had recovered.

But the deer caught within it were in trouble.

After the white light faded, Mo Lan saw that their eyes had lost all focus and were streaming with tears.

The herd’s agonized cries echoed through the gorge.

But with their vision gone, the deer couldn’t even agree on a direction to flee.

Some crashed straight into the cliff walls, some charged directly toward the Winged Ones, and others stumbled into the gorge, stepping on loose rocks and twisting their legs…

Before the Winged Ones had even entered the fray in force, the Radiant Antler Deer herd was already battered and bruised.

The Winged Ones were in no rush to slaughter the deer. They simply herded them from both sides of the gorge, preventing any from escaping.

Only after the Radiant Antler Deer had exhausted most of their stamina from blindly crashing about did the Winged Ones begin the killing.

Mo Lan put on a pair of sunglasses, then began considering how to make her move.

This gorge greatly facilitated the Winged Ones’ hunt.

For Mo Lan, this narrow, desolate place was also an excellent spot to probe the Winged Ones’ memories.

“They’re all good little cash cows who can contribute mana to me. I should still keep my methods gentle…”

With that thought in mind, the moment the Winged Ones finished slaughtering all the Radiant Antler Deer and gathered together to tally their kills, Mo Lan struck without hesitation.

Mass psychic illusion, plus mass psychic control.

“One, two, three, four, four, four…”

The Winged Ones began repeating their counting process in a loop, and Mo Lan seized the opportunity to approach. She slit their wrists and began drawing blood.

After collecting the blood, she used Healing Magic to mend their wounds. Apart from everyone looking slightly paler, there were no major changes.

The Winged Ones had naturally pale skin to begin with—this slight difference was virtually unnoticeable.

With the blood secured, Mo Lan then copied each of their memories one by one.

The Winged Ones, with average lifespans of two to three hundred years, had memories that were utterly negligible compared to the Dragons’. The copying was done in no time.

After modifying their memories, Mo Lan swiftly retreated onto her invisible flying carpet and gradually released the psychic control and psychic illusion, step by step.

“…Four, five, six… twelve. Twelve does in total.”

“We’ve got fifteen bucks on our side.”

“And eight fawns.”

“Cut off the antlers and legs, and prepare to head back!”

The Winged Ones departed in a grand procession with their quarry, while Mo Lan simply lay down on her flying carpet right where she was and began reviewing the memories of the hunting party.

The Winged Ones who could join a hunting party were all in the prime of their lives, and powerful at that.

Mo Lan had originally thought that their lifetime of memories, from childhood to adulthood, would contain plenty of valuable information.

But as she went through them, it was like watching a long, tedious movie on a bad internet connection.

The vast majority of the memories were nothing but blurry, indistinct images—she could barely make out what the memory’s owner had been doing.

Among the few clearer scenes, the ones that actually yielded useful information could be counted on one hand.

They couldn’t compare at all to the Dragons’ long but crystal-clear life memories, or their information-dense, substance-packed inheritance memories.

Mo Lan had started out eagerly reviewing the copied memories, but the further she went, the more bored she became. Finally, unable to bear it any longer, she sped up the process.

Memories that would have taken ten days to half a month to review were finished in just a few hours.

All the valuable information was filtered, organized, and converted into knowledge memories that truly belonged to her, stored in her mind. After that, the Winged Ones’ trivial memory fragments—which occupied psychic power but held no real value—were completely purged and deleted.

This was also a good method of managing one’s psychic power that she had learned from human mages.

Human psychic mages didn’t just delete useless memory fragments copied from others—when their psychic power ran low, they would occasionally even delete their own past memories that were hazy or unimportant to them.

However, what counted as “unimportant” varied from person to person.

As a result, it was far from uncommon for psychic mages to over-manage their psychic power, develop mental abnormalities, go insane, or undergo drastic personality changes.

When Mo Lan had been reading in the Library Floor of the Mage Tower at the Imperial Magic Academy’s Psychic Branch, she had come across quite a few famous psychic mages whose early works and later works read as if written by two entirely different people—some even contradicted themselves from one passage to the next.

Mo Lan treasured her own memories dearly, and she had more than enough psychic power. This was actually her first time attempting to delete memories to free up psychic power. It was simply that she’d absorbed too many Winged Ones’ memories, and that inexplicable sense of haughty superiority had started to affect her. Better to delete them and be done with it.

This was yet another reminder of how precious Dragon inheritance memories were. She had copied so many Dragons’ inheritance memories and had never once been affected emotionally, because Dragon inheritance memories contained only pure knowledge—no emotions whatsoever.

Dragons learned all manner of knowledge from the inheritance memories carried in their bloodline, and Witches could similarly comprehend Witch Script and the Witch language innately through their bloodline.

The Winged Ones, on the other hand—though they also possessed a magical bloodline—had inherited no knowledge whatsoever from it.

Their language was Angelic, learned from the Angels and passed down through inscriptions on stone tablets.

Their magic originated from a book on the application of light elemental force that the Angels had given them, refined and expanded upon generation after generation.

Their archery was the result of combining their innate gift of superior eyesight with bow techniques—and those archery techniques, too, had come from the Angels.

Learning all this, Mo Lan finally understood why the Winged Ones revered the Angels so deeply and maintained such devout faith in them.

When everything you had came from the Angels, it would be stranger not to worship them!

To Mo Lan, the Winged Ones as a race seemed utterly devoid of creativity. Everything they possessed—their skills, their abilities, their very way of life—bore the Angels’ fingerprints. They had nothing that was truly their own.