“Take your time, and don’t forget to get out,” but waiting for them to get over such a state of mind would take days, even weeks! So I started to move again, going towards the next gate.

It took me a week to get to the next gate! This… If the distance between gates was the same, then I’d take just slightly over six months to move in between these gates!

It was… A really long time without doubt! I already saved the location of the zones by my staff, but I never expected just moving around the gates would take such time.

And fighting the beasts inside took four more days!

Each beast did the same as the first one I killed. They all blabbered about how their abilities antagonised mine, how the system was locked here, and how they’d end up eating me!

But in the end, all of them failed to do any of that! I ended up adding twenty-four more beasts to my shadow world using my techniques.

Each beast I killed would send me back to the gate I came through. Then I’d go inside, and work over their colossal bodies and garnish my heavy loot.

Bones, organs, meat… I collected everything! Even their blood was collected in liquors for future assessment and use.

I took nine months to wrap things here. Each time I’d clear a path, I’d speak to those standing outside.

And not in a single time I was met with a different response than what happened at the first path.

They all wept, fell on the ground, and looked very emotional when they heard my words.

I have stayed here for over a year now. That… It was the longest since I came back in time. It felt long, slightly boring, and filled with depressed responses from the people I was trying to help.

There was no cheer, no shouts of joy, or any sort of celebration from them. The only thing that made me sustain all this time was the great loot I was getting from this place.

It wasn’t just in the form of the harvest of the beasts, but also the great number of souls I kept gaining even after one year!

I didn’t know how or why, but even after one year the soulers led by Lucias didn’t manage to clear everything!

They were close to being done, as if they packed their advance based on my progress. But they were working without any moment of rest.

Races needed food and drink, good bed at night to rest. But soulers… They only needed to eat souls. These soulers kept working for the past year without taking a single moment of rest.

And I doubted they even wanted to have such rest.

After one year, my soul count rose up to a staggering five hundred million souls. That was the end after deducting my personal usage for the sacrifices I used, the consumption of the soulers, and the consumption of my general.

I knew they ate souls all this time, and that made that general consumption to reduce to less than one fourth of what it was initially.

Yet getting five hundred million souls was really something! I never thought I’d get such a figure without the need to get into a huge war after war.

The last big brutal war on the Hector continent ended up with almost one hundred and fifty million souls harvested by me.

And that was just the total amount of souls gained. If I calculated my consumption, then almost half of them remained at the end.

“They should get out in a month or something,” I was curious about the people I left behind. Would they move and leave this cursed place or what.

So after one week, I used my staff and returned to the first path I cleared. I was shocked to see them still crying, with many sitting on the ground motionless, looking in daze at the horizon, at the rear where they lived, or wasted their lives there.

After this visit, I started to grow more curious. So I returned back again after killing the beast and collecting its loot.

But for a month, they didn’t show any change or intention to leave. Just at my last visit to them, I grew wary and worried over the integrity of their souls and minds.

I never expected the effect of such a place would be this deep. But when I visited them one week later, I was surprised to see the last batches of them walking towards the path.

Phew! They got me scared for a moment there, or a month.

After this, and as I had nothing else to do during the long periods of travels, I started to grow this habit.

Each week I’d jump back to one of the oldest and earliest paths I cleared, checking on the people waiting there. And gradually, I even started to line them up, according to the time taken for them to make such a decision.

The fastest? Damn! They were my soulers, or the souler race descendants. They weren’t spared from getting emotional, but they overcame that in just two weeks!

That was remarkable. As for the longest, it was a weird race that had scales at their bare chests, forming a shape of two wings, with long strands of smooth hair curling down from the narrow space in between the two wings.

They looked strong, but they took almost two months to get their clansmen moving through the path up front.

After getting a little fun doing that, I got to solve one little problem left; the missing five zones.

Even till now, I was sure there were twenty-five zones here when this world was formed. But there were five missing, and I got a hunch about their place.

*Flash!*

I jumped using my staff towards one of the saved locations at one of the zones. The twenty zones were all arranged in circular fashion, making them all away from the central region by the same distance.