The river of time kept flowing.

Deep underground, Ben loses his sense of time as he works on his neural network.

[…]

The cave is still dark and silent.

[crack]

A few fingers appear from the wall. As they flow from inside, the wall begins to crack around the hand.

When the hands are all out in the air, they lay flat on the wall and push forward.

[flutter]

[cough, cough]

Ben falls to the ground. His appearance is not as comedic as before. For instance, the papers and stones disappeared, and all over Ben skins is a glob, a mixture between the Array materials, earth, blood, water, and some black matter.

[heavy breathing]

[cough, cough]

Only after he catches his breath, Ben stands up. His vision takes a moment to get used to the dark surroundings, but once it does, he removes any crucial traces around the wall and walks slightly closer to the exit, where he read before.

Ben arrives at the familiar place if one considers knowing the positions of the rocks familiar. Following, he places down the marble chair and table.

‘Lucky nothing appeared here while I was down there. ‘ Ben thinks as he sits down.

“I am so bored…”

‘Since I finished what I came to do, I should move. I can live a few more meaningful memories, hopefully.’

Ben looks at his dirt body and stands up. Then, he moves the table away from the chair. After searching the ring for a few more things, he puts another set of clothes on the table and takes back to the chair the blue spirit stone he used before plus some soap bottle.

‘Having a bit of expensive and useful stuff truly makes everything easier. I feel like I will get spoiled, craving to never lose such extensive space…’

Unfortunately, the reality won’t change so smoothly, and if anything happens where he loses the ring, he is left again with only the limited space in his chest.

“Staying around that guy, I don’t think things will be peaceful.” [sigh]

Ben readily removes the rest of his tattered clothes and steps into the chair. The space in the chair is more than sufficient for him to comfortably stand on it, as the chair is quite large, large enough to someone to sit with their crossed legs and have a bit of free space.

Next, Ben begins to shower. After so long, the dirt is difficult to remove, so it takes quite long for Ben to see his skin fully again. Once his skin is exposed, he can see a few black marks on it. They look like huge birthmarks, and they cover parts of his face, shoulders, chest, and back.

The black marks are from his seal. After keeping it loose for so long, it takes some time to make it retreat. However, since it is something he expected, Ben ignores it, and soaps himself. Soon, a greenish foam is covering his whole body.

Once he finishes showering, he takes another spirit stone from the ring, this one red. Following, a wave of heat surrounds Ben. The heat not only dries his body, but also the chair and the ground around which had become damp after such a long shower.

‘I should have put the clothes back into the ring….’

Ben walks with the chair towards the table before dressing up. Finally, he takes some food and drinks, but he eats them very slowly. Consuming small amounts at a time since his body had only depended on spirit energy during the whole time he stayed underground.

—

Later, the cave isn’t dark anymore. Inside, Ben studies at the table. At his side, a candle, a few books, and maps. Additionally, he is also slowly drinking water while regulating his body to its peak condition.

After eating, Ben rechecked his ring inventory once more and then begun to work on deciding where to go next. Eventually, he decides to go northwest from the plateau, pass by the Latwel Lake and then go to Deadhillow City to see if the fellow Earthling moved in as planned.

However, ultimately, his objective will be to arrive at the Myriac’s Range. Since he has the money to travel right now, Ben can’t choose to be lazy. Above all, the avoidance of the north was because of how long it would take to save up enough resources to allow him to stay on the move and not because of the traveling itself. Therefore, Ben started to plan his travel and, more importantly, how to cross those mountains, as specific preparations are needed.

‘I should change my act. I can’t be a convincing poor old man when I have such an expensive ring, and I can’t hide it. It is too big and shiny.’

To adapt his act, he does some work on his clothes and draws a few charms to keep closer to his body. Below the traditional technology, he hides his shallow conventional cultivation. By the end of the preparations, he creates the appearance of someone’s elder or attendant. However, most of the substance of the act will still depend on where he goes and how he acts.

‘The camouflage feels cumbersome and unnecessary. I actually got too used to hiding without exactly hiding.’

After finishing his notes on what he needs to do, Ben leaves the cave.

Because he checked the hand-clock, he isn’t surprised that it is morning outside, like time hasn’t passed at all. Sooner, he chose to wait inside and found things to do to avoid leaving while dark outside.

Thus, the first thing he encounters, when he leaves, is the morning sun and a light breeze. After a few more seconds, Ben thoroughly feels the cold and the silence behind the rustling of the leaves.

Ben frowns. ‘Why?’

Immediately, he walks towards one of the tree trunks and crouches down by it. Following, he takes one of the dual daggers, that he is now wearing in his lower back and cuts his palm.

Blood flows down, and Ben controls his body to increase blood pressure and production.

Surprisingly, the blood doesn’t dye the ground red. Once it reaches the soil, it seeps inside without leaving a mark on the surface.

Ben focuses and uses a considerable amount of energy to check the situation underground. Therefore, it doesn’t take much time for him to finish analyzing the ground status in a radius of a few meters.

‘It is all dead…’ Ben thinks as he stops the blood flow.

Next, he stands up and walks around, impatiently.

‘Fuck… Was my fate twisted or something? Or did something curse me?’

“So annoy…”

Ben stops, puts his hand behind his neck, and breathes deeply.

‘Why so many try to chew too much? Can they even do anything if the world ends sooner? What do they gain? Nature can only do so much…’

Questions arise one after another inside Ben’s head. Although people are greedy creatures, it is rare to see such throughout destruction. Right now, not one living soul subsists around here. The most obvious is that Ben sees no animal around, not even small insects. However, even tiny living organisms like bacteria are gone.

Similarly, the trees are also dead. While they might look green superficially, but if you look inside carefully, you will sadly notice they are empty shells. Since every tree has lost its primitive soul-like energy core, they should all dry out over a few months, or maybe less, without reproducing. They will all wither simultaneously, leaving nothing behind.

“A new sterile land… Doomed to become barren, maybe even forever.”

In Ben’s finger, the ring activates. This time, he takes five expensive Array bases slightly bigger then an adult opened hand. Those are placed above the marble table, while Ben starts working on them immediately.

Around one hour later, his fingers are red from overworking, his mind throbs from pain, but the tablets are ready. Therefore, he takes many natural spirit stones from the storage to activate the Arrays.

One after another, the Arrays are activated. Ben seems to order the tablets above the table with the moving of his hands. Soon, the first one disintegrates, and its engravings fly into the air, expanding into the surroundings. The second to fifth also starts not long after, and they all destroy themselves.

‘One to sense and four to support. Imagine what someone capable of scanning their surrounding would think of this if even I find this overkill.’

Once the initial phenomena end, Ben stands up and stores the rest of the materials away. Finally, Ben fully releases this large spell. The enormous gas like Array expands and covers a wide area of the forest before him.

‘It is an investment…’ Ben thinks as he closes his eyes. He surveys the area for any small discrepancy, focusing on all the data. Meanwhile, his mind and body are overworked to maintain the spell.

The wide net costs Ben quite a considerable amount. He burned around one-third of the spirit stone he received, and used half of the high-grade tablets obtained from Ginn, left now is only five plus one he had stored inside his chest centuries ago. Moreover, he also used high-quality drawing material that came with the tablets. For instance, those ten kits are the second most expensive part of the payment for Eloise’s treatment, only losing to the extraordinary book.

Nevertheless, Ben still hesitated very little, because however he can rob from such daring endeavors would make such investment worth.

‘I should aim for the core of the ritual. Even if I need to burn a few petals, it should be worth it. Since this should be the doing of someone from the very top. Powerful people doing unbelievable stuff should use quite the marvelous resources.’

However, for Ben’s surprise, as he searched, he founds no one. He thought that once the spell spreads far, he would see people around, but that wasn’t the case as the forest is filled with only the silence of death.

With the spell coming to its end after covering a radius of several hundred kilometers, Ben shocked face becomes even more exaggerated.

“What the… How big is the area? And did they left such thing unguarded?”

Luckily, after noticing he was finding no one around or signs of any protective measures, Ben changed the way he analyzed the data. He focused then on sensing the small amount of energy left in the air and how it is flowing. Although the results were much less than he hoped for, Ben could pinpoint one direction where things seem to be slightly unusual.

As the spell finishes, Ben is covered in sweat and quite red. He readily walks into the forest, hoping to find something with the data he collected.

He walks towards the direction where he felt the weird flow. However, since the spell terminated, he isn’t able to sense anything anymore. So he can only act while considering the data collected and is unable to do adjustments if something changes.

Following, he spends hours searching. Eventually, he ends up burning another tablet while using some unique material he takes from his chest to complement the new Array.

The night comes and goes.

A bit through the morning of the next day, Ben runs around excitedly. He seems to finally have pinpointed the exact location of some high-level camouflage array. At this moment, he runs holding two daggers and with a synthetic spirit stone in his mouth, sucking on it like it is some candy.

After running for some more time, Ben stops before a massive dead trunk tree. His appearance that of someone lost in the woods: covered in much sweat and dirt.

A big smile appears on Ben’s face once he stops and looks at the trunk.

‘Please, don’t disappoint me and have no one in it too. I can at least hope…’

His mood changes. The slightly disappearing birthmarks solidify back into deep black marks. Moreover, in his chest, the whole flower tattoo-like mark appears and is in the open due to his unbuttoned shirt.

Ben moves the dagger in his right hand towards the tree. Yet, it doesn’t hit something hard. Instead, it flows in and creates waves on the trunk’s surface. The same reaction one sees when you throw a stone in a tranquil body of water.

After fully sensing the illusion and doing his preliminary analyses, Ben makes broad movements with both daggers cutting into the false trunk before walking into the protected area, ready to fight if needed.