Exodus

"It'll take me a couple days to get there and I'll have to stop for blood at least once on the way," Loralei said to Vixen telepathically. 

Vixen assured her it was fine and was awaiting her arrival. In the meantime Vixen and Ferde'La explored alchemist mountain. Vixen made sure to grab and store all the valuable alchemical ingredients she found in her spatial storage while being on the lookout for the Arbitrator. 

The Arbitrator was there to make sure you paid the prices for the herbs picked since once picked they would go bad. Vixen did not need to worry about that part so much since the partial storage stopped time and prevented decay. 

While traveling she had to periodically toggle her thermal vision to find the highest concentration of energy. Even if it was magical energy being emitted it still reacted to thermal vision. 

"OK I'll summon Umbran and you summon your familiar. The three of you will attack me. I want to get more used to fighting multiple opponents at once while utilizing more of my abilities simultaneously," Vixen explained. 

That is how the next couple days through the mountains proceeded, gathering the most rare and expensive of the alchemical ingredients and fighting off mutliple opponents. Vixen had developed a technique called blood shield. 

By damaging her enemy, or using her own blood she created a shield that followed around behind her covering her blind spot. The creating the shield using someone else's blood was not as effective, Ferde'La had more control since it was his blood and she hers. She was not sure what stat of hers effected blood control yet and if her blood would listen to the command of some of the older more powerful vampires solely to higher stats.

She was fairly confident that she had higher stats than Ferde'La which was the reason she has hypothesized using your own blood was better because someone else would have a harder time taking control of it. 

[Obtained Dragontongue -B]

[Obtained Nettlebrand -A]

Vixen threw the rare ingredients into her spatial storage. They had taken nearly fifteen pounds of ingredients from the mountain and have been slowly making their way to the summit. Her thermal vision has been leading her to a tree that seemed quite a bit larger than average in this forest. 

After a couple more hours the they had run into a checkpoint where a high level guard was preventing people from advancing forward. 

"That's the direction we need to go, sigh why is everything complicated," Vixen told Ferde'La. 

"Please take out any and all ingredients and lay them out on the table for pricing," the guard said nonchalantly. 

"We don't have any ingredients yet. Haven't found what we are look for," Vixen replied. 

"Your hands are awfully dirty for a woman who hasn't been pickin' things out of the dirt."

Vixen glanced at her hands and they were pretty dry and dusty from doing just that. Instead, she was going to bluff.

Raising an eyebrow, "You're welcome to search our persons if you don't believe me," she said with a smile and a wink.

The guard quickly agreed, "Don't mind me miss, standard procedure, you understand?"

She nodded.

He first went up to Ferde'La and frisked him, but quickly. The same type of pat down you'd expect from bouncers at a bar.

With the man out of the way, he could take his time to thoroughly inspect the woman.

He started to unlace her boots, a place he hadn't checked Ferde'La, then on his way up rubbed the inside of her legs. His rough, corse hands from being in the outdoors tickled her flesh. She could feel herself getting moist as his hands traveled upwards.

He rubbed her crotch area and massaged her ass cheek, not that her cloths had room to hide precious ingredients there anyway, but teased her there for a while. She moaned involuntarily as she could feel her pants dampening, he checked her waistband for the contraband and found nothing. 

His hands grasped her leather top and pulled it up exposing her breasts to the warm air. When nothing fell out of her shirt, he frisked her cleavage. Her breasts were large enough to hide something there without a doubt, but he also used the opportunity to massage and grope her, teasing her nipples. 

Vixen's legs grew weak as she tried to prevent herself from cumming, the "inspection " of her chest stopped after about five or so minutes. She managed to prevent herself from orgasming, but only just as she was nearly dripping through her pants. 

Breathing hard, "Proven my innocence have we?" Asked Vixen readjusting her clothes. 

"I suppose so, did you want to take a break from your mountain climb?"

"As fun as it would be I am in a hurry, perhaps another time."

"Just say the word miss," the guard finished as they walked pass him without glancing back.

"Master," Ferde'La began, "is that man stupid? Does he not know of magic in this world? Also, why would you let him grope you?"

"Quid pro quo my friend. He probably knows exactly what I did, but since space/time magic isn't common he has no way of inspecting me. I let him do that because now he can tell his superiors that he gave me a thorough inspection and found nothing. He did his due diligence, he also got to feel me up in exchange for keeping his mouth shut for the most part. He'll probably just say he inspected two individuals on suspicion but found nothing. It was a win for all of us really."

Ferde'La nodded in understanding as they inched towards the source of the energy within the forest. That night, Loralei was able to catch up to them where her real training began. It was nice because they were all training. Ferde'La, Loralei, their familiars, and even Umbran were coordinating attacks against Vixen while she utilized everything in her arsenal to evade, block, and counter attack. 

It took them another few days to reach the tree larger than all the others, but each day Vixen survived longer and longer vs her ferocious teammates. 

"Here Empress, please drink this," said Lorelai handing over a vial of red liquid. 

"What is this?" Vixen asked curiously because it didn't look like a potion she recognized. 

"It's blood, I assume you've gone without for a few days and wanted you to be satiated. I've got several more with me as well."

Emptying the vial quickly Vixen responsed in kind, "That was good thinking thank you. I have been starving myself. I'll have to expand upon this idea in the future."

The group had finally arrived at the tree and up close it was much bigger than she was expecting as it radiated off magical energy. 

She walked around and around trying to figure out why this tree was special, when she saw something embedded halfway up the trunk. 

Vixen walked up the side and stared at the golden medal that was partially fused in the tree and a notification presented itself. She was taken aback because it hasn't happened like that before, but she smiled as her plans started to get more extensive. 

[Emblem of the World Tree- Artifact: Fusing with Artifact with a living tree turns it into the world tree. The world tree alters the plants and animals within a certain radius granting them magical properties. This increases both their strength and value. The process takes a long time because the artifact needs to absorb divine energy.