Evelyn opened her eyes to a new day. Getting up from her not-so-comfy bed, she went out of her cave and greeted her best friend Paprika, who was nibbling a nut on a tree, with an enthusiastic wave. ‘’I’m advancing to tier-4 today!’’ she yelled cheerfully. ‘’We’ll be able to leave this place soon enough!’’
Although she was getting used to walking around naked all the time, she knew it was better to forget this habit as her return to civilization was coming soon. She skipped back to the cave and picked up her most damaged snakeskin dress. There were only three left, and she was saving the best of them for her departure. I hope there are tier-4 snakes in that damned village.
Quickly dressed in the yellow one, she swiftly took her leather water bag and grabbed her pole before leaving the cave. With two [Wind Step], she jumped next to Paprika and gave her a hug. ‘’You stay at home today. There are some troublesome wasps near the trolls. Tomorrow we are moving to the village anyway.’’
Evelyn ran with her all might and passed some tier-3 beasts without even turning to look. What she needed was tier-4s and although this pocket world didn’t lack them, getting surrendered with a bunch was also a quick way to die. They usually just watched the fights without meddling, but if the winner was in bad condition, then it became prey for the observers.
That’s why Evelyn had to kill a relatively strong beast once she entered the village and claimed its territory with minimum injuries. Then she would slowly kill anything on her path till she reached the exit.
Despite being this early in the morning, the weather was starting to become suffocatingly hot, when she left the lush forest and entered an open valley, she was already sweating profusely. After two hours of running, she finally located the trolls. Two early tier-4s and one mid tier-4, even if they weren’t enough for her breakthrough, she was set on finding other beasts and got the necessary essence today.
With eyes screaming resolve, she took a deep breath and made a straight dash. The trolls alerted and took their handmade weapons before starting to shriek with delight at the food that delivered itself. Unfortunately for them, this food was hard to chew.
Evelyn activated [Berserker], gaining extra strength; she made a [Long Jump] toward one of them and smashed her pole to its mace-like weapon. Her pole became heavier and heavier as her swing continued, and when it hit the target, the troll gave a miserable wail between the crack sounds of its bones.
She used a [Wind Step] with another [Long Jump] and arrived at the other troll, swinging her pole to its shoulder. After crippling two of them in a surprise attack, she activated [Windy Dance] and started to dance as she gave a beating to the miserable trolls.
Seeing the situation, the other troll joined as well, but Evelyn was faster and stronger. Not to mention her most powerful skill [Blood Pressure] was already showing its effects. Trolls started to bleed from their noses, eyes, and ears. Their movements became sluggish.
The more she injured them, the more their blood wanted to go wild. Even at rank-2, the skill [Blood Pressure] was ensuring that prolonged battles just meant slow deaths for her enemies.
Still, going against numbers wasn’t easy. She took a few strikes, but with her tough bones, they barely left bruises. As the troll’s movements got even slower, she decided to take some risk and stabbed her pole into one of the troll’s heart. Even though her pole became like an extension of her hand after so many battles, she was still rather amateur in close combat, and she refrained from doing things like that for a reason.
At its last breath, the troll dropped its weapon and held her with its two hands. As she kicked the beasts to let herself free, a club hit the back of her head like thunder. Just two seconds of dizziness got her another strike and dislocated her shoulder, dropping her pole. When the troll she had killed collapsed, its hand opened ever slightly, and Evelyn got herself free with a [Long Jump].
She felt like her brain was throbbing as she sensed the wetness at her nape. The other trolls were not in any better condition, but without her weapon, she would rather run and come back later. But seeing that trolls weren’t giving any attention to her pole, she decided to go all out.
Ignoring her vision of blurry trolls and the ground, which looked about the start rotating, she used [Long Jump] and [Wind Step] together three times and made it to where her weapon was from the air. As she grabbed her pole with her left hand, she took another strike to her knee. Without faltering, Evelyn made a spin on her other leg and hit the troll’s head with a crushing sound. The last one tried to kick her, but she hit its leg before stabbing the pole into its eye.
Tumbling to the ground along with the trolls, Evelyn cursed her luck as she still didn’t reach tier-4. The injuries she got were severe, and she had to rest for at least half a day. Whatever, I had worse days, she thought just before hearing the buzzing sounds.
More than a dozen waps, each bigger than her head, were coming toward her in a frenzy. Two of them were at tier-4, and the rest were tier-3s. Evelyn struggled hard to not cry and stood up shakily. She stared at them stubbornly as the knuckles of her left hand on the pole and her jaw tightened simultaneously.
She returned to her cave after six hours. With a swollen face and bumps everywhere on her body, limping away with the help of her pole. Paprika ran to her as soon as it saw her. Evelyn gave her best friend an awkward wave and an ugly smile. ‘’Thier-4! Wfe can fyinally moove tomorhrow!’’ Passing by Paprika, what she thought, with an assuring smile, she fell down to her bed as an agonizing grunt came right after. ‘’Orl mahybe the dhay afyter.’’
With the constant pain in her body, she found it impossible to sleep. Lying down with her eyes open, it was really hard to not think about her old life. Clearly, she had underestimated the hardships of the life of an adventurer, but still, it was better than marrying a Bailey, because she couldn’t imagine herself living together with the people who killed her brother and pretending like he didn’t even exist, just like her parents did.
Her big brother Jason was a kind man who abhorred killing. That was why he chose the crimson pole as his weapon. If he needed to fight, he would beat his opponent and leave. This kind of attitude was never allowed in the big houses, and there were some extreme cases where the soft people got trained in a savage way until they broke. But that was not the case with Jason, because he had an elemental talent.
At the same time, it wasn’t surprising that this brought him more trouble. Someone with a high-grade talent like Evelyn was always a source of joy in prominent families, while someone with a top-grade talent was usually hidden from the masses and ultimately grew to be a secret weapon. But someone with an elemental grade talent meant that your enemies would work together until he or she died. Because the elementals at the tier-9 were basically nightmares, they had the power to fight against a dozen tier-9s. If he or she decided to stay in the lower realm for a hundred years, their family was destined to become the sole ruler wherever they were.
These were the things every big family knew in the Union, but what Evelyn couldn’t understand was the blatant shamelessness of these families and the mentality of disregarding the individuals for the sake of the family.
Just a few days after her brother was assassinated, one of their biggest rivals, the Bailey family, came to express their condolences when no one should’ve even been aware of Jason’s death. And just before they left, they had declared that Evelyn would be a good choice of wife for their son Arthur Bailey. This was another way of saying that the Bailey still had many trump cards while the days of the Morris family were limited, you’ll either merge with us or be destroyed.
When her family agreed immediately and started to discuss the dates, Evelyn decided to leave everything behind and escape, not from an unwilling marriage but to distance herself from the people who had no respect for her late brother’s memory. Since no one in the world was asking for justice for her brother, then one day, she would take it by force.
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With the conviction of not turning back until she was ready, she jumped to one of the three most dangerous pocket worlds known to the Azora. And every single day since, she had questioned herself. If she were to join an adventurers group and take it slow, would it be better? Since her family didn’t care about her or her brother, why didn’t she plunder their treasury? There were powerful sects at the Misty Peaks; why not join them and cultivate in silence?
In the end, she was too arrogant, but she was even more stubborn. Even with all this self-doubt, she kept going every morning. Her clumsy movements refined to passable in just a year. Give it a few more years, and she was sure to be on par with those geniuses of Azora. For every suffering she had, there was a bigger reward afterward. Only, she wasn’t sure about the loneliness. Did being in isolation for 15 months refine her will? Or was she just getting far away from the person she was once?
Evelyn, together with her reflections, spent the next day in the cave and hit the road of the village the next day, more resolute than ever. Dragging her bloody monster core bag with Paprika on her shoulder, she entered the center village of the pocket world, where the only exit was.
‘’Let’s show them there is a new monster in the town,’’ she whispered for Paprika to hear, who nodded with a serious face.
Every monster in the pocket world wanted to live here because of the mana density. There was fierce competition for the spots closer to the temple, and almost every territory was occupied by a late tier-4. What she picked first was the golden eagle who sat on the roof of a building in the middle of the town. She directly went for it and broke the beast’s wing in a single strike. Under the watchful eyes of other beasts, she killed the eagle slowly and cooked herself a meal at the bird’s old nest.
For the next two weeks, she challenged about 20 beasts in the town. Only the rhino couple got close to killing her, making her escape the village altogether and return two days later. But in the end, she finally stood before the giant lizard.
The battle took close to an hour, and even some of those sturdy buildings collapsed. Thanks to her [Blood Pressure] skill, the beast's aim got completely off after half an hour, and Evelyn managed to kill it with gory wounds and almost no stamina at all.
Without even taking the beast's core, she entered the temple with Paprika. The temple had an ancient rune that gave a repulsive feeling to the monster-blood, which only worked on the inside. She had to grab paprika and make haste to leave this place.
‘’It’s okay. We’ll leave in no time, I promise,’’ she said, hurrying to the statues at the back. ‘’Just hang tide. A minute at most.’’
She read the writings on the wall with an anxious Paprika in her hand before looking around, confused. ‘’What legacy? You mean the statutes?’’
She looked everywhere, but there were only weirdly imposing statues kneeling around another one. When trying to move them didn’t work, she wanted to smash them but only got a numb arm in exchange. ‘’Fuck! Don’t tell me someone got the goods long ago.’’
Although she was pissed, this was always a possibility. The most dangerous three-pocket worlds stood for hundreds of years; no one heard anybody going in them had returned. But what if some nobody went there and didn’t tell a soul about it? Hell, someone might’ve even cleared all of them and died not long after, taking his stories to his grave.
‘’Screw it! I got what I wanted. Let's get out, Paprika!’’ she decided and grabbed her bag before running toward the pool. ‘’Here I come, civilization!’’
Her feet didn’t even touch the water, and the next moment, she found himself in a forest full of space tears. ‘’W-What happened?’’ she mumbled with perplexed eyes. ‘’Is it the Ascendants? Or an apocalypse, maybe?’’
She should’ve appeared in the Ivory Woodland or perhaps Emerald Forest. Although the location of their entrance varies, every ancient pocket world fixed its exit around Serene Depths. Rumor said those areas were the perfect habitat for the monster who grew in the pocket realms. The moment the monsters passed the tier cap, they would be teleported to the southeast of Azora and keep cultivating there. That was why Evelyn dreamed about going to the free cities, even though she had never visited one.
Nonetheless, this nightmare-like scene was anything but what she expected. Looking at Paprika, who was still uncomfortable by the effects of the temple, ‘’Let’s hurry up, something terrible must’ve happened,’’ she whispered and started running toward the west.
Only a week later, she saw the core of the pocket world from a space tear and realized what was the fuck going on. ‘’You gotta be kidding me. Did I end up in another pocket world?’’ Evelyn lamented her luck before slowly realizing her situation. ‘’A dying pocket world, that no one bothers to visit, with no source of food, and god knows where the exit is!’’
After that, it was a lot of cursing, yelling, and crying for another week. Cultivators could indeed live with less food and water than mortals, but even they had a limit. There were water sources and some fruits here and there, but how long could they live here? Both Evelyn and Paprika were sure that they were going to die in this middle of nowhere, until one day, they heard a low sound. Evelyn instantly used her [Mana Sense] to hear it clearly, and she, after so long, heard someone speaking.
‘’I love you, Doug!’’
Even forgetting the Paprika on the ground, she dashed toward the love confession like a lightning bolt. And after so long, she saw another human, an adventurer, looking at her with fascinated eyes. Should I hug him? God, I wanna hug him. Is it too soon? I should probably wait for a few days.
‘’Whoa, talk about the Primordial Realm,’’ the boy said, turning to his beast companion. ‘’There are even cavewomen living in it.’’
The corner of Evelyn’s eye twitched. Should I punch him? God, I wanna punch him. Is it too soon? I should probably wait for a few days.