Ethereal Ascendance: A Journey of Transformation

"In real danger, who has time to worry about being filmed?" Reed from World 12 was clearly one of those people Cyra said would care, but she just quietly moved herself out of the camera frame.

"That's great!" Luke Channing finally let out a long sigh of relief when he saw this. The only camera they managed to turn on was kept safe. Otherwise, the rescue team would have lost contact again.

To be honest, Cyra was in a special situation. What secrets were hidden in this abandoned M-country base? Not just us, but many people, including the H-country command center, were very interested.

"I think I found the interrogation room!" Just then, Adrian's voice came through the short-range radio.

As Luke Channing said, the interrogation room in the IAA headquarters was on the lowest underground level of the building. There were also many jail cells there.

"Strange, they all seem empty!" But after checking several jail cells, he didn't see any prisoners. Adrian started to doubt if Raydwin was really being held here.

"In such a big M-country intelligence agency building, there's not even one prisoner?" I wondered if the Vampire Ancestor set this trap hoping to catch us.

"That shouldn't be the case! Usually, anyone caught by the IAA would be locked up there..." Luke Channing had switched the video back to Adrian's side. He carefully studied the IAA building map again. Suddenly, he noticed a familiar-looking body lying on the jail floor and quickly asked Adrian to move the camera closer to it.

"I know him! He's one of the scouts survived after being attacked by vampires!" This was shocking. After Wayne Peng's team were attacked by the Ancestor himself, two team members did manage to escape. Those two members worked hard to track down where the other captured prisoners were taken, which led to the rescue team being quickly put together.

Shortly before our mission started, they lost contact again. Given how dangerous M-country was now, this seemed normal and expected. After we came here, we kept trying to contact them, but we never thought we'd find traces of them among the enemy bodies.

"They must have known I was coming to break people out of jail, but they still shot at me without hesitation. This shows they had already been turned into vampire!" Soon, they found another body nearby. If Luke Channing hadn't pointed it out, Adrian wouldn't have recognized these two guys.

The situation had clearly become more complicated. When exactly were they infected? Maybe the spies the M-country president mentioned being arrested in his public speech weren't actually Raydwin and Wayne Peng, but these two!

But if these two had already fallen when Wayne Peng's team were attacked, then the later information about where the prisoners were taken would be very suspicious - maybe the abandoned M-country base was just a trick by the enemy!

"We must find a way to warn the rescue team. They might face even more danger!" Thinking about how Cyra and the others had already been through an unusually tough battle, I quickly warned Luke Channing.

But the problem was that the rescue team's communication system was already broken.

"They seem to have found something new!" Surprisingly, when Luke Channing switched the screen back to Cyra's side, he saw the camera had moved to a very open indoor space, and there seemed to be more people around.

One of them was undoubtedly Cyrae. Disguised as a human mage from a parallel world, she hadn't been seen on screen before.

From their conversation, we could roughly understand the part of the story we had missed. It turned out that when Cyrae was searching the buildings in the abandoned military base, she accidentally found a huge magic circle in a warehouse!

Then, according to Reed from World 12, this magic circle seemed to be a kind of space transfer magic circle. In other words, were the vampires trying to build a new transfer channel on Earth?

In theory, this should be impossible. After all, Earth is extremely lacking in earth elements. Dreaming of building a new transfer channel to another world is just wishful thinking! But the situation in M-country was a bit different. The gathering of many magical creatures caused a large-scale breakdown of the Battle Qi that was originally very rich in Earth's environment. This was why I felt a rise in elemental energy after coming here.

The extra earth elements could, to some extent, make the space transfer magic circle work. Although it still couldn't reach the level of connecting to another world, if the target was set on Earth, it should be no problem.

"So, the vampires actually wanted to open a space transfer channel directly to H-country, and we accidentally stopped them?" Cyra concluded. As for why they wanted to do this, it was easy to guess. After all, H-country was the only country with angels who could threaten the vampires, and the space channel connecting to another world was also there. It made perfect sense for the vampires to want to counterattack.

"That was my achievement, okay!" But the voice that cut in was Raydwin!

Wow, he actually appeared on the rescue team's side! "If I hadn't used my wit to escape from the vampires and hide in the nearby forest, and then managed to take out their truck transporting magic circle materials, this magic circle might have been completed early!"

Unlike Reed, who had deeply studied elemental principles using scientific methods, the space transfer magic circles commonly used on the Eldoria Continent are actually very complex elemental manipulation systems. The whole magic circle area is designed to be quite large and needs some special materials.

Some materials like Mithril simply don't exist on Earth. Although they can be replaced by more common items to some extent, even for vampires who control all the resources of M-country, gathering everything isn't easy. Raydwin's actions could indeed have caused the whole plan to end early.

However, what I cared about most right now wasn't this issue, but the fact that we saw Raydwin with the rescue team!? This meant that after he was captured by the Ancestor, he wasn't kept in the M-country capital, but was taken to this abandoned base by the sea along with Wayne Peng's team.

"This is ridiculous. You call that escaping on your own? It was clearly Chan Layne who let you out! If Chan Layne hadn't been with you, with your beginner-level skills, you couldn't have hidden in this wild area for so long, let alone destroy the enemy's transport truck! So why did you have to come out and be a soldier? Wasn't it good enough to sit at home and play computer games?"

Although Cyra had been very eager to join the rescue mission for Raydwin but failed, now that they unexpectedly met during the mission, she still behaved like she didn't welcome him. It was clear that she was actually a bit unhappy about Raydwin's decision to join the H-country military.

"Mind your own business! What's wrong with me making a contribution to my country and humanity? Although I'm not as good as my master, I'm much stronger than ordinary people now. I'm more than capable of dealing with regular vampires! Moreover, Officer Chan Layne said so too. Without me, it would have been impossible to successfully intercept that truck!"

Raydwin's face turned red immediately. I have to say, he really cared about Cyra's attitude towards him. The two of them argued back and forth, and no one else could get a word in.

Next, the camera showed Wayne Peng and other main rescue targets going through the purification process. It seemed the operation was going more smoothly than imagined! Luke Channing and I could roughly understand the whole picture from their conversation.

It turned out that the turning point came from Chan Layne, the deputy leader of the scout team. Although the entire scout team, except for Raydwin, had indeed been infected and controlled, only Chan Layne somehow woke up on his own after a while.

Of course, no one else, not even he himself, knew exactly why this happened. But I suddenly remembered that I had once used memory alteration magic on Chan Layne! Although only a small amount of light element remained in his brain, it was enough to resist the mind control of low-level vampires.