“According to what I experienced before… Such distance… Hmm… It will take roughly a month,” I looked at the map, tried to compare the distance separating me and that door to the core underground world with the entire map.

Well, it was wrong! It took almost one month and a half months to get there. The world was already silent, and travelling for so long without having anything else to do was deadly boring.

“At last!” I was so damn eager to get out of this place. It was weird. I always craved peace and tranquillity, but when I got them here I wasn’t as happy as I thought.

It seemed I got infected with the hectic atmosphere back at the apocalypse. I wanted action, wanted to fight, to struggle and keep winning despite all odds.

And standing at this big gate made me realise that I was going to live through those hectic battles again.

This gate wasn’t as huge as the gates I found at the paths. But what made it give me such a terrifying feeling was the air emitted from it.

Thick bellows of scarlet red fog, sometimes black, something coming out with echoing thunder and faint roars, kept coming out from the gate in front of me.

It had no doors, no guards, as if the ones who built it left it open for anyone daring to come in and trespass what lied behind.

I looked at the heavy presence of that air coming out from the gate and sucked in a deep breath.

“Come back,” and before going in there, I decided to put an end to the soulers journey in this world.

They got enough food, enough for now. I needed them to start fighting on my side. Something told me I’d need them, and so I didn’t hesitate to call them back.

Then I led my chariot into that gate.

The first thing I felt was the thick bellows of smoke coming from a deep hole, and this gate was just the opening of that hole.

My shield kept everything away, but after a few minutes, I couldn’t see clearly what lay ahead.

I kept following the path I could vaguely sense by the sounds of friction coming from the clash of my shield with the rocky walls of this deep tunnel.

Aside from that, I felt like I was submerged into water, red and black water, so thick to prevent me from seeing through.

Even when I used my Hawk Eye skill, I failed to see through. The only thing that worked was my pulse wave attack that pushed the gas away, letting me see the path I was treading.

It was a long, very long tunnel that extended for hundreds of metres down below. And that was just the reach of what my pulse wave attack cleared for me to see.

“I… Don’t like this…” after going like this for half an hour, I still couldn’t reach the bottom. I felt the gas getting thicker, but that was everything I got.

I never expected going to the core would take me such time. The distance was covered in five hours, and the main reason for this was for me not seeing anything.

So I had to make my chariot slow down. Falling at such a low speed made me cross the distance for such a long time.

But I was wary about what lay in that smoke. What if enemies appeared? What if I threw myself into the middle of the enemy armies?

And just as I was thinking about this, I finally got out of this tunnel. “Damn! It seemed I jinxed myself!”

I got out from the end of this tunnel to find myself descending from a hole in the sky. But there was no sky here, only thick clouds of red and black smoke with little lights escaping from the ceiling above.

I was sure the ceiling was made out of sturdy rocks, made of a special ore that kept shining faintly from time to time in an irregular rhythm.

But that wasn’t the issue, the world here was. When I looked down, I found that this place was enormous!

I couldn’t see the end of it! Such a dimly lit world filled with such thick clouds of red and black gas wasn’t a problem for me.

It was just like when the sun went down and we had to live into a week of dark nights.

My eyes were adapted to see through such circumstances. And what I saw made me frown!

“Don’t tell me it’s spanning just the same space as the world above!” This was a scary thought for me.

Wasting more time while walking through the same space up above? This would be a torture for me.

*Boom!*

However, just as I was lost in my thoughts, I heard such loud booming coming from down below.

My chariot was at least a mile high above the ground. And unlike the world up above, this ground was barren, void of any green plants or anything that could be considered beautiful.

“This…” however when I just turned to see what caused such an explosion, another explosion erupted from another direction, then another, and another.

“Five… There are five different explosions… These are the missing five areas I was looking for,” I was slightly happy by this. After all it felt good for one’s guessed to come true, right?

Each explosion released a thick pillar of smoke rising high up, even reaching to the level of clouds, the level of my chariot.

One red, one green, one brown, one silver, and one golden… These were the colours of the five smoke signals issued from the five different directions.

“They must be calling for their forces,” seeing this made me realise a big fight was going to happen. I didn’t know what was coming at me. Even when I used my Hawk Eye skill, I couldn’t see anyone at the ground, no one was around these smoke signals.