Odyssey of the Blind God

Ophelia chose to fuse with the Phoenix Fire which Erio had released in front of her. She devoured it without a second of hesitation.

Her entire body was engulfed in the blazing flames of the Phoenix Fire that tried to burn her down to a cinder. However, rather than turning into ashes, Ophelia closed her eyes while slowly absorbing the fire that attempted to devour her alive.

Several days passed in the blink of an eye and the Phoenix Fire disappeared inside her body just like that. A black reeking mass of impurities was expelled from every single pore in her body and Ophelia had to burn it down to the finest atom to make sure that the reeking stench wouldn't linger on her body.

The Phoenix Fire Lion cubs had finally opened their eyes and they were playing around while Erio took care of them. Erio may be the strongest Devil under Nial's control but he didn't even think of using Erio to conquer dungeons with Kaeldur, Tyrant, and Ryu since the Eclipse Fire Lion had other responsibilities to take care of.

Male Lions were not particularly known for raising their cubs but they always played a key role in protecting their pride. The number of members in Erio's pride had dwindled drastically since there were only the young cubs left behind, but that gave Erio even more reason to pay more attention to them.

He mostly ignored Ophelia and the other Originals, and had accepted the fact that his mate's Phoenix Fire was now inside someone else. It was not easy to accept this since he never expected his mate's fire to change the owner, let alone to find out one day that his mate had disappeared just like that, killed all of a sudden.

They had been living happily, only for their happiness to shatter all of a sudden. Erio didn't really want to accept this but he knew that things would change from now on. He was not completely free anymore, however, that was not actually a bad feeling since he could tell that Nial was an Original who was not a dictator or a tyrant to his subordinates.

He wouldn't abandon them or tell them to sacrifice themselves so that he could survive in a dangerous situation. There were a few other factors Erio liked as well, which balanced out the disadvantage of losing his freedom.

Once Ophelia was done fusing with the Phoenix Fire, her talent as a blacksmith skyrocketed. She could easily purify metals just from using the Phoenix Fire in the melting process. Instead of being forced to spend several hours, or even days to purify a metal, Ophelia had to spend only a few minutes heating up the ore and reducing the ore to the metal.

That was an exceptional advantage, which allowed Ophelia to create even the most difficult and intricate structures when forging. She slowly got to know how to control the Phoenix Fire which further improved the results of her work. Her results were extraordinary and it made things much easier in the construction of the shelter's foundation.

Instead of spending days purifying the metals they needed, Ophelia turned into an incarnation of a master blacksmith as she purified every single piece of metal that had to be purified in a fragment of the period it would usually require.

Erio was doing the same with the sole difference that he came over once in a while to release Eclipse Flames inside the forges before he disappeared to teach his cubs how to survive, hunt and how to awaken their Phoenix Fire Crystal.

The Eclipse Flames were even stronger than Ophelia's Phoenix Fire but that didn't mean the blacksmiths were able to control the flame like her. Ophelia was still faster in the purification process while the other blacksmiths who worked with the forges that harbored the Eclipse Flames were struggling and needed her intervention every now and then. Some ores were reduced to broken metal ingots since the temperature of the Eclipse Flames was too high, causing the destruction of the metal's veins.

This forced the blacksmiths to limit themselves to the purification of a single metal that required the exact same temperature as the Eclipse Flames. Fortunately, this type of ore existed which made things much easier.

Several months passed in the blink of an eye and the core region of the shelter had been finally constructed. Millions of citizens could live in the core region which was quite exceptional considering that the core region mostly consisted of a huge forest in the center where the fragment of Yggdrasil's branch had been planted, a Colosseum, a humongous shopping mall, numerous skyscrapers that were likely to turn into the headquarters of various organizations, the core forging-hall, the House of Alchemy, the Runiciers' home and a gigantic library that had yet to be filled with books.

Nial was certainly satisfied with the final result of the new shelter's core region and he couldn't wait to give his new shelter a name.

Rather than something as simple as Alliance City, International Port, or something similar to that, Nial thought that he might as well use the name he had already given to one of his organizations, Orion.

The Orion Shelter was created and it was about time that the second stage of the shelter creation was initiated; inviting the first set of inhabitants. The Elves finished creating the spatial portal that led to the Forest of Life and returned not long after to report on the progress of the construction process of the Orion shelter.

At the same time, Nial returned as well but mostly to tell Melheim that he could initiate the advertisement of the Orion shelter and to relocate the headquarters of the Orion Artisan Guild and the Onyx Association to the new shelter as well.

The Orion Shelter would become the new home of their organizations even if that didn't mean they would abandon their branches in the other shelters. For the time being, they still needed the other branches since it was not yet too dangerous to keep them operational in different shelters.

Currently, the strongest monsters and Originals that roamed around on Jundra would be at the Mythician rank. At this rank, it was not even unlikely that astray attacks would destroy any of the other shelters in the blink of an eye.

If someone were to target the shelters of the origin humans, it wouldn't even require them to be at the Mythician rank to obliterate the shelters. An Original at the Kelta rank, or someone wielding a Broken Tier-3 Runic Armament despite being at the Deux rank would be more than enough to destroy the shelters.

It was just that nobody was actually interested in the destruction of the origin human's shelter, for now. There was more than enough space all over Jundra for the time being to build individual shelters, but that would change soon enough.

Once more races and more members of a race desired to come to Jundra the entire planet would turn into a big mess! Nial knew that the Orion shelter's walls were strong enough to endure the attacks of a powerful Mythician-ranked beast. They had tested that over and over again.

At the same time, he knew that he was strong enough to raze the other shelters to the ground if he were to desire that. But then he would be delusional to not know that if he was capable of that, others would be able to do the same.

But until someone else was to desire the destruction of the origin human's shelters, Nial would wait with the proposal to migrate everyone to his Orion shelter! That way, many things would be much easier for him.

Furthermore, he was not doing it for free either!