The merchants of Carretas are a tier of citizens that stood head and shoulders above everybody else. The Church had yet to influence them, and Benjamin needed more allies, which is why he eventually chose to approach the merchants. However, these people were not interested in opposing the Church, what they were interested in was the ability to wield magic.

Thus, Benjamin held out an olive branch for them.

With this, the two parties made contact. The name ‘Mage Benjamin’ became a hot topic amongst the merchants; they secretly pa.s.sed on his name, saying that he was the writer of the Freedom of Promoting Magic. They claimed that he was available for hire and that he was willing to teach magic.

"Mage Benjamin, thank you for your time. When will our next cla.s.s be?"

Benjamin smiled, "We’ll talk about it later. I don’t have much free time nowadays, you’ll have to make a reservation."

At the moment, he seemed to be the only source of magical knowledge in Carretas.

The incantations in the Freedom of Promoting Magic were free to merchants and they could get it anytime; however, the higher levelled spells required meditation. Since the mages have all gone into hiding and the Mercenary Organization would not sell it to them, Benjamin became their only option.

If Benjamin wanted to, he could technically earn a fortune from his cla.s.ses.

But, this was not his purpose. Thus, he did not charge the merchants much and happily taught them to gain their trust.

This was the opportunity he had been waiting for.

Over the next half a month, Benjamin went all over Carretas and took in about thirty-four students. The students were from all over the country and Benjamin was feeling quite proud of his high demand.

"Are you sure you want to waste time like this? The Church has started deploying troops all over the place and the king is panicking because all his officers are slowly being subst.i.tuted with Church members. If this continues, he will have n.o.body to rely on."

In Amber, Mikel delivered the horrible news to Benjamin.

"Sadly, I can’t really help much with issues regarding governing." Benjamin shook his head helplessly, "I also can’t spread my influence in the army yet."

Ideally, he would obtain military support and use it to chase the Church out of Carretas, but this was not the case. Their power at the moment could not match the Church’s, so all they could do now was avoid the Church and concentrate their efforts in other areas.

If the king was pained by his loss of power, he would need to think of a solution himself.

"But... your time spent is being spent on all these merchants who don’t seem to be willing to give anything back."

"I don’t need anything from them specifically, I just want the number of mages in Carretas to grow." Benjamin shrugged, "Once the citizens have enough magical power, the Church will not dare reveal themselves and will be forced to cower behind the king."

Mikel stared at him for a little while before replying, "You are trying to become the father of magic in Carretas, aren’t you?"

Benjamin smiled slyly, "It’s a win-win situation, both sides get to reap the benefits."

"..."

With this, Mikel returned to the king and Benjamin left to search for more students. All along, Benjamin was sure that the Church was out of ideas and could no longer control the spread of magic in Carretas.

But, an unforeseen incident caused some major complications…

"Mr Tark, what are you trying to pull?"

In a town south of Carretas was a merchant called Tark. He had learned of Benjamin f

rom other merchants, so he too had hired Benjamin to help teach his daughter.

But, when Benjamin came to the town, he found that something was not right.

There were many suspicious people, weird mercenaries, and busybody travellers... he even found that many people were wearing crosses underneath their clothes.

A trap?

At that moment, Benjamin felt lucky. If he did not instinctively use his Water Elemental Sensing Technique everywhere he went, he would probably have walked right into it.

"There are many people laying in ambush here; unfortunately, I am alone. If I had brought more people with me, then I would gladly take them all on." He said inside his heart."

"You can try killing them all at once." The System said nonchalantly.

By now, the information from the souls of the elders had been successfully transcribed by the System. From it, Benjamin had learned a great ability: combined casting.

He was not sure how the combined casting from the cannibal mages varied from that of the Church’s. But after experimenting with it, he found that it was much more complicated and needed a much stronger bond between the casters. Not every Tom, d.i.c.k and Harry could walk up and suddenly use it together.

Because of this, Benjamin’s group would not be able to do combined casting. Thus, he only asked his three lieutenants that could use high-level magic to practice it.

But the rest of the information was corrupted, and he could not gain much useful information from the two memories of the elder. Most of it was gory images of them eating people and only a little extra knowledge on mental energy.

Turns out, there was a special form of mental energy training in the cannibal mage tribe. It could greatly focus a person’s mental ability, and decrease the usage of mental energy during spellcasting; it was probably a requirement for post-death magic as well. But right now, Benjamin was still researching it and was unsure of whether or not he wanted to use it.

In short... his plate right now was full with various aspects to improve on, so it was best to avoid direct conflict with the Church.

Thus, after learning of the ambush, Benjamin was ready to leave.

But, through the sensing technique, he suddenly noticed a weird name list on the priest's bodies.