“Damn! It’s… Green now!”

My energy was always silver white since the beginning. But now it was pale green, giving a weird impression like I had the source of life running in my dantian and meridians.

I felt that my energy was getting up, getting stronger when I was dealing fervently with the dark energy from before. But it seemed I underestimated the benefits, not knowing it was enough to push my energy towards the higher step.

Cool! This was an unexpected gain from this battle indeed. I checked this energy and made sure nothing was wrong there.

Then I cut my palm with my dagger, and like before I selected the left hand. From the battles I fought so far, the value of letting my left hand control the techniques was immense.

It gave me freedom to use my right arm, the stronger one, to wield weapons and even fight.

“Word for portal? Let’s use a link,” I thought before trying to write with my blood. The moment my blood gushed out from my wound, it hung in midair and followed my fingers while writing the word.

But when I finished, a weird thing happened. The word I wrote and was clear in the air started to fade away fast once I stopped writing.

“What went wrong here?” I looked at the place the word took before, as it was now just empty air. “Did I use the wrong word? Then let me try the portal itself.”

But when I finished writing it, the same thing happened again. The word was written beautifully before it faded away as well.

I didn’t rush to conclusions before I repeated this over a dozen times. With each time, I felt like part of my energy was gushed out to write the words. So after all these failure attempts, I felt slightly weak.

“I… Didn’t eat or drink for such a long time,” I decided to take a break, thing about this more thoroughly while feeding my body.

“I have to check over them,” just sitting there, my thoughts started to grow rational. I realised I was gone for too long, an entire apocalyptic day. That was forty-eight hours.

I was totally absorbed in understanding what happened and getting to know how to deal with these creatures and exiles. But I totally forgot about my forces, their ongoing battles, and the current situation of war.

Part of me wasn’t worried. First I clashed with most of the hostile forces here from most of the regions. I fought against Hector , two paragons, the combined armies of races from the north, two armies actually.

Only the army made out of Selvators and Dragons was left alongside the mysterious human army.

So looking at the general map now of the central region, it was clearly void of any threatening existence to my forces.

Also the lack of the always distressing messages from them gave me more confidence. If things went south, then they’d have bothered me with tons of messages, asking for help or guidance.

Where are you now? What are you doing? And what happened during the past one day?

I sent this message to all of my team and waited for an answer. As I waited, I kept eating the stored up meat and drank from the liquor.

“I need to find more chefs and let them make real food,” I muttered while looking at this piece of meat. Even the best food would taste like dirt after a long time of eating it without any other dishes.

But even after I took my time to eat three pieces of meat, I got no answer from any of them.

That looked… A bit weird. They never ignored my messages, not even once.

Even if few were busy in a fight, others would respond. But for all of them to not send even a greeting message to me? That was unheard of!

As I grew worried, I opened my channel and started to look for the feed of their subchannels.

And as I did so, I couldn’t help but stand on my feet, looking at the flying screen in front of my eyes.

The screens kept flashing, showing feeds from every single one of them. They looked like they were together, standing in the same place with the same background.

But the screens never showed them standing with each other. Only each one stood alone, making me feel they were either in a very vast place with repeated backgrounds or something else was going on.

And with the presence of such ugly and hideous looking face at the back of each screen, I knew there was something wrong.

“Gods… Who is following my boys’ channels… Can you explain this to me?” as I had no other way to know what happened but this, I asked the gods without shifting my eyes away from the screens.

The screens showed me everyone standing in their place, fighting herds of weird looking monsters. They weren’t big, as small as half of human size. But they were many, so many to make anyone be threatened.

The first impression I got was they were fighting in a dungeon or something. But I knew the fight here couldn’t be over this soon for them to try out dungeons.

Besides I was the only one able to control dungeon keys here. Everything looked weird in my eyes, and I started to have a bad feeling about this.

These monsters were like small pigs, with sharp teeth and long flexible horns coming out from their heads. These horns were the real deal here as they kept twisting and acted like someone thrusting out spears at my team members.

The gods who followed them said that they are in an illusion

“Illusion?!!” It hit me. It made sense now. Everything made sense.

They all stood in the same place, facing the same threat, but they weren’t with each other. I looked at the feed of their channels again before asking:

“Any info about their location? Who is trying to kill them using an illusion?”