But now? I used a hundred pieces and didn’t even get enough to make me feel secure! I kept gushing out crystals, until I used one thousand of them.

I got many of these crystals, but if such consumption rate continued then I’d end up depleting this reserve in no time!

Damn! I never thought that fighting on the outer battlefields was just tedious and hard, much more expensive than fighting deadly and long battles in my universe.

Just when I finally filled the chariot shield with enough energy, I felt like the world all around was trembling.

Something… something was coming!

The enemy already mobilised their armies and came. At last I could spot their forces, and know about their races.

But… There was a little problem here…

“Lucias… Have you ever fought on the outer battlefields before?” and as I lost intel about the nature of races in the hostile universe, I had to ask the help from one who would know.

“Lord… This feeling… This energy… How did we end up on such fierce battlefields outside our universe?!!”

Lucias was already in my inventory. Yet when he came out, he seemed to be shocked by the circumstances around, and didn’t even respond to my question.

“I’ll explain later, but did you fight there? Do you know the races of that universe? Can you identify them?”

I knew by what he exclaimed amidst his shock he gave me the answer directly. And then I hoped he would be able to recognise the enemies coming, help me by telling what their strength was, tell me everything related to their strength and the way they fought with.

I had one single experience with the alien race fighters. And despite that clash ending in my victory back then, I felt how hard and risky it was to fight these fighters of the other universe.

And that was when I was in my universe, not negatively affected and cursed by this alien universe energy.

“I fought there, just like many others,” Lucias said, and at this moment I noticed how weak his orange fire became.

Before, I would never be able to see through the thick curtain of this orange fire and fog. But now I could vaguely see his body, and even a glimpse every now and then of his face.

“And?” I demanded for more. I didn’t ask for his life story, I needed his help by identifying the incoming enemies.

“I fought against many, and can tell my lord about them in great detail. But first, we need to see.”

Well… He got a point… That thick layer of cloud was getting on my nerves already.

“Pulse wave!” I got that the nature of these clouds were just like the fog that assaulted me in the tunnel while falling here.

As expected, once the pulse wave appeared, it pushed the clouds away.

But… The effect of it decreased! It didn’t manage to push the clouds for hundreds of metres like before. The clouds were sent only fifty or sixty metres away, before seemingly about to return back.

“Not a chance!” I felt that these clouds were moving towards me on purpose, like someone or something was driving them to do so.

And so I didn’t sit idle and pushed my chariot to fly over its limits. Yet it moved in slow, much slower speed than it used to thanks to that weakening effect.

But it was still enough to get me away from this cloud layer. And once that happened, I managed to see what was coming at me from the ground, and also see what was happening at these clouds.

“Why shall we stay here? Why not return back?” Lucias pointed at the tunnel opening high above.

“This…” however I wasn’t paying any attention to him, “what the heck… Are these things?!!” my attention was piqued with something else.

As I got out from the cloud entrapment, I came to see something bizarre up there!

The clouds were made of dense fog, red and black. But when I got out, I saw these clouds changed, and something else seemed to fester inside them.

The clouds gathered around my chariot and seemed to attack it. I thought it was the effect of that fog, but never thought that something was living inside the clouds.

“This… These are the flying serpent clan… Damn! They are fierce and hard to deal with…” At last, Lucias said something useful here.

He recognised these long and thick thighs twisting inside the clouds. When he said serpents, I couldn’t help but feel a great similarity with snakes. But these things didn’t look that much alive to me.

It felt like they were formed of the fog, with much denser bodies than other thin fog around, but they weren’t alive.

“Are you sure? I feel they are formed entirely of fog.”

“That’s true, after all this is just the manifestation of their techniques,” Lucias looked around, then checked the ground. My chariot wasn’t that far above the ground like it should be.

Only less than five hundred metres separated my chariot from the ground, almost a sign that the chariot was running on the intermediate mode, or the top mode was reduced to be like the intermediate one.

“Technique… So they are using cultivation techniques…” I realised this and recalled the fact that our cultivation originally came from the other universe. “What are you looking at?”

“The ones using and controlling these serpents can’t be too far away from here. We need to take them down first, or else more trouble will come.”

“They will use a higher form of technique?”

“No, the flying serpent clan are just the introductory clan in most of the big fights at the outer battlefield,” he kept looking around while speaking in such a hurry to explain things over to me.

“Once appeared, it meant a grand battle lies ahead. They just pave the path for other fiercer clans to come and build much deadlier technique on top of them. Usually, thunder hawks and the fiery lion clans will appear next.”