Harry soared through the sky like a crimson streak held afloat and sustained by ungodly power. His body seemed imbued with the power of unending momentum as he rose higher and higher, quickly soaring over the towering city wall and continuing forward, leaving Lu Town in the dust.

  Then, the seemingly unending momentum vanished in a blink alongside the crimson glow, and Harry crashed into a vast field of grass that enveloped him, cushioning his fall significantly.

  The grass was surprisingly soft and thick; it reminded Harry of cotton but not quite…it felt imbued with faint traces of spirituality that gave it this special feeling.

  Harry thought that was strange; if the grass here had spirituality, why weren’t they being harvested by the city lord? Spirituality, no matter how faint, was valuable, even a peasant knew that.

  Harry’s mind raced as he slid down from the top of the grass and into the world of white roots below. They were everywhere, overlapping each other like mating snakes, forming a vast interconnected network of white hairy roots that dug into the ground, pulsing with faint spiritual waves.

  Even the rich black earth was covered in tiny, pulsing roots that spread everywhere in sight. It almost felt like waking into a different realm; his information on the grass fields was outdated, vastly outdated.

  He didn’t feel safe all of a sudden; the changes were just too much, and his intuition kept tingling; such a vast and rich spiritual holy land was bound to have numerous lethal predators. He broke out into a spirit. Harry had no idea where he was going, but didn’t feel safe.

  The nature of his arrival was bound to draw the attention of all those capable of sensing it; sticking around while not in peak condition wasn’t the best idea.

  What surprised Harry was that a sense of danger grew within him the further into the grasslands he went; it was as if his soul and authority were screaming at him to stop and turn back before it was too late.

  Harry halted instantly. One warning was bad, but two? He’d be a fool to ignore all that. The rat’s body twisted as he did a full 360 before bolting off, sighing as the sense of danger faded the further he went, completely vanishing once he neared the very edges of the grasslands, which ended a few meters away from the town road.

  Here, the spirituality in the grass was paper-thin, almost non-existent. Harry found it strange; it was almost as if all the grass fields were alive, like moving, breathing entities. He didn’t think about it too much and began digging down.

  The soul was surprisingly soft and easy to work with, at least until he reached a bit deeper. That was when he ran into his first obstacle: compact soil infused with bits of spirituality. White roots were everywhere; it was as if the dirt was formed from the roots and fed off them rather than the reverse, which was odd, very odd.

  The longer Harry looked at it, the stranger it seemed; why would someone grow dirt here? Why go through all that? Better yet, who could even do such a thing?

  Harry knew such spells and immortal magics existed, but….what were they doing in a place like this? Who would waste precious spirituality on mere dirt?

  Harry didn’t know, nor did he want to find out; he didn’t even want to stay here anymore. Something odd was going on, something he wanted to have no part in.

  The more the rat thought about it, the more odd it seemed, and the less he wanted to stay, but where would he go? Lu Town was not an option; Ballcrsuher would kill him the moment he went back inside.

  That only left one place: the road. Harry didn’t know where it led, merely that it went somewhere, to a place that wasn’t Lu Town or this strange grassland.

  It made sense, to Harry at least; the unknown seemed safer than whatever lurked here or in Lu Town, both were enough to make his soul and authority shudder, especially the danger that lurked in this strange, twisted grassland.

  And so Harry abandoned the hole without a bit of hesitation and sprinted to the dirt road, reaching it within a few seconds. He cautiously eyed his surroundings; the road was empty, which made sense, it was almost night, and few were willing to travel in the dark in a world where monsters were real threats.

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  This suited Harry just fine, though; his trait [Adrenal Burst] activated with a thought, and he sprinted down the road at blazing speeds, blending in with the encroaching darkness.

  Both sides of the road had grass fields, and though they looked different physically, Harry knew otherwise; they were the same entity spiritually. Ever since he awakened his authority and came in contact with spirituality and otherworldly forces, his senses to the unseen grew unnaturally sharp, and what was faint before grew clearer daily.

  The rat couldn’t see the flows of spirituality yet, but he felt that it wouldn’t be long before he could see the unseen energy of this world, the rumored ‘lifeblood’ of the immortal world.

  Time passed, and his trait was deactivated. Harry felt a pang of sudden weakness, which caused him to falter momentarily, but he steadied himself and continued running; though he couldn’t see Lu Town anymore, he still hadn't left the range of the strange spiritual grass. It seemed to stretch on forever and had no visible end.

  At least, that was what the rat thought, until he spotted pale blue lights in the distance fixed to towering wooden walls, patrolling guardsmen, and strange, four-legged shapes that followed them around.

  Harry grinned inwardly; this was another town! Although it wasn’t as impressive as Lu Town, it was still another town, one that Ballcrsuher hadn’t conquered or set foot into, one that didn’t have massive rat gangs that controlled every aspect of the city’s nightlife.

  Of course, this was purely speculation; Harry had no way of confirming any of this, at least not until he was inside.

  Harry’s intuition told him that it wouldn’t be easy, though, especially at hours like these.

  That didn’t mean it was impossible, though; the town didn’t have one entrance, in fact, there were four. Lu town didn’t have that many gates, so this surprised him a little, but that was normal compared to some of the other things he saw while scouting through the moonless night.

  The east gate cut through a massive forest that grew around the left side of the town and over the road leading to the south gate to connect to the forest on the west.

  Harry found it strange; why allow the forest to grow like that? He knew that such a phenomenon couldn’t be natural; there must be a reason why the city hadn’t fallen the trees encircling the other side of town already.

  Harry didn’t mind too much, though. The forest would be the perfect place for him to acquire new and exciting traits, even though the danger was extremely high. Already familiar with some parts of the surrounding areas after hours of scouting, it didn’t take long for Harry to reach the forest on the east side.

  It was smaller than its western counterpart, at least from what he could tell, but that worked in his favor; that meant that there was less danger here, at least that’s what he thought, until he neared the periphery of the strange forest.

  A patch of dried leaves suddenly burst into motion and shot towards Harry with lightning-fast speed. Harry was faster, though, if only barely, and managed to sidestep the incoming piece of ‘dried leaf’.

  It crashed into the ground not too far away and shook, causing the patches of leaves that clung to it to fall off and reveal its true form.

  It was a gleaming black centipede with a glistening black exoskeleton mired in innumerable tiny ghost faces! Its legs were a ghostly blue color and pulsed with strong waves of spirituality, a stark contrast to its sinister and ghastly exoskeleton, which bore no trace of spirituality at all. That wasn’t the most terrifying part of the centipede, though. Its stingers made Harry’s hair stand on end; they looked mundane and were hardly as eye-catching as the rest of the centipede’s body, but they excluded wicked and potent ways of spirituality tinged with poison!

  Harry found it absurd; his entire body felt like thousands of needles were digging into it, injecting potent spiritual poison that sapped away at his sanity and vitality.

  The rat burst into motion and activated his trait [Adrenal Burst], bursting with sudden speed as he leaped back into the air, becoming a crimson blur that shot through the pitch-black forest. Behind him chased a massive centipede almost twice his size, pulsing with a murderous aura, smashed through anything in its way as it pursued Harry.

  Harry’s heart was furiously pounding in his chest as he ran; he never expected to stumble upon such a powerful creature at the forest's edge! It was simply inconceivable and went against his logic.

  In his mind, the powerful creatures lured within, in the most populated areas that had the most spiritual energy and food, why would they be out here, where there were only a few noteworthy animals with barely any spirituality?

  What Harry didn’t know was that his logic was solid; it was just that this centipede was an anomaly like him and went against the norms of this world.

  Locals called it a Death Goshtface centipede, but nobody truly knew its name and were forced to come up with a name based on its deadly poison and the numerous wailing faces that adorned its exoskeleton.

  It was a killer with supreme might and unparalleled poison that few could survive. Contact with it just for a few breaths of time was enough to leave any normal creature with permanent brain and spiritual damage.

  It was especially effective on humans, who had one of the most developed minds in this world, outclassing numerous non-human species greatly in terms of intellect.

  The smarter you were, the more lethal it was, which made it even more terrifying to the scholars of the blessed races.

  Harry’s heart pounded like war drums when he realized that the centipede was gaining speed, its numerous legs pulsed with spirituality and eye-watering poison as it gained speed, forcing Harry to fully tap into his stats and stamina as he activated [Adrenal Burst] once more, stacking the effects.

  The crimson glow around him intensified, and the world seemed to slow down as he sped up, rapidly enlarging the distance between him and the centipede as he wove through the strange forest, leaping over overgrown shrubs with hints of spirituality, fallen trees, vines, or large twigs.

  He didn’t know where he was going, nor did he care; all he wanted to do was flee as fear gripped his mind and heart.

  By the time rationality returned, Harry had no idea where he was; he found himself surrounded by densely packed trees covered in overgrown vines that stretched upward like winding snakes. The trees themselves were massive and towered above him like stone giants, stationary, unmoving, but extremely imposing.

  The place was also deathly silent, not even the wind blew, and Harry’s heart pounded in his ears loudly as if it was the source of all sounds in this strange, sinister forest.

  He suddenly began to regret everything: moving out of Lu Town, coming here, and entering this forest. Everything was just too strange, too dangerous, it felt like his life was on the line at any given moment and could slip away if he ever got too careless, which was what nearly happened with the centipede encounter.

  Harry shook his head and cleared his thoughts; regret wouldn’t help him now, but a nice cozy burrow certainly would, so he quickly began digging into the soft, clay-like soil below, fashioning it into his design with his paws as he went until he felt comfortable enough to fall asleep.