Time passed as explosions reverberated throughout the destroyed cave.

  At first, they were too votile and so destructive that some parts of the cave colpsed even more.

  However, at some point, the explosions became milder—or rather, more controlled—as their potential energy was directed only where it was needed.

  Illyan was crawling through a very small crevice, completely bloodied from the friction of his body against the surrounding rocks.

  The body that he dragged along that narrow pathway was almost bare, as his clothes were torn apart, and the remainder of his skin was dirty because of all the dust and soil.

  His hands were in front, digging further into who knew where.

  When there was softer soil, he would scratch with his long nails infused with flow.

  If the rock was too hard, he would explode one of his fingers using [Blood Ignition].

  In this manner, he was slowly crawling towards the entrance of the cave.

  He didn’t just dig mindlessly without a care but used his spiritual perception to feel whether there was some remaining wind flow.

  And he found one such opening.

  Although it was minuscule and would not fill the air inside the cave faster than he used it up, he was able to find a way thanks to it.

  It was a bloodied path, but he didn’t mind. The sweat his body was giving off was stinging his wounds, but he didn’t show his discomfort.

  He only focused on the front where he dug his path forward.

  Thanks to his incessant use of [Blood Ignition], he also managed to learn to ignite the bloody trail he left behind every time he used the spell to explode one of his fingers.

  With that, he stopped worrying about his spilled blood and focused only on getting out of this space.

  Cnk

  Suddenly, the sound of two hard things cshing against each other resounded as Illyan’s body got stuck.

  “Ugh…” He growled in annoyance as he had to pull one of his hands back.

  There was almost no space to do that, so he had to use [The Way of the Body] together with his spiritual control to dislocate his shoulder and other joints to move the arm back.

  There, the longsword was strapped to his back, and its hilt was hitting one of the rocks above him.

  He had to move the hilt away so that he could continue.

  ‘Haah, this is so cumbersome…’ Illyan sighed in frustration.

  However, letting the sword go was not an option. He had already lost some of the throwing knives because of the cave colpse.

  But at least he got another type of spoils this time.

  Illyan gnced at his waist, where a mace with a crimson crystal at its tip was strapped.

  ‘This thing should be both a mace and a wand that helps the magicians in casting. It should be perfect for me…’

  Illyan thought so happily as he started to hum on his way.

  His humming was irregur as he was short on breath and doing physical bor, but it didn’t make him stop.

  Instead, it felt that it suited his humming even more, as if the difficulty in life was the theme of that humming.

  It was the imperfect tune that Aurelia was humming to herself during the patient’s treatment.

  Illyan found great soce in that tune as he found it retable and soothing.

  In this manner, he was digging farther and farther from the node until he finally felt a small breeze against his face as the rock in front of him cracked with just a small push of his arm.

  “Hehe, it looks like I survived once again.” Illyan grinned as he pushed his half-destroyed body through the small hole, falling from a small height onto the ground.

  If one looked from afar, they would think that Illyan was on the brink of death. His flesh was scraped by the constant friction and sharp, uneven rocks, while his entire body seemed to be just bones and skin.

  [Blood Feeding Technique] used most of his muscles, making him look extremely malnourished. Together with his pale countenance and bald head, he looked like a frail and sick man.

  But Illyan didn’t care about all this at all as he y on the ground on his back and enjoyed the air by taking deep breaths.

  ‘This was quite difficult. I wonder how much time has passed…’

  In a dark cave where no daylight could enter, Illyan had no way of finding out how much time had passed.

  But it definitely took him quite a while.

  Extreme hunger and thirst were tormenting his body as he felt parched.

  When he felt that his mouth was too dry, he would always bite his tongue to roll around some of the blood in his mouth before gulping it down.

  However, that was only treating symptoms and not the cause.

  His body couldn’t generate energy. Thus, he was now in dire need of food and water.

  Feeling that lying here would be a waste of time, Illyan stood up with difficulty.

  ‘This is…’

  Far from the starstone stele, he was enveloped in darkness.

  However, Illyan used his spiritual perception to feel the surroundings.

  ‘I don’t know this path… It seems that I didn’t get to the entrance where we came into the cave or the path I threw Aurelia into…’ Illyan thought as he started to limp forward, using the sheathed sword as a cane.

  At this moment, even beggars would feel sorry for him and give him some pennies.

  But despite all of that, he stood tall, and his face didn’t reveal any negative emotions.

  Suffering was already part of his life. It was nothing to make a fuss about.

  In fact, whenever he suffered, there was always some kind of improvement on his side.

  This time, his proficiency in [Blood Ignition] drastically rose, and he found a new application for the flow.

  With such a mindset, he started to feel for Aurelia's blood track to find his way out…

  ……..

  In the following days, Illyan tread forward as he moved further and further from the desired cave exit.

  It wasn’t because he couldn’t find a path or anything.

  With the help of Aurelia’s blood track, he could faintly feel from which direction they came. However, the problem was that the tunnel he was going through went in different directions.

  There were only a few branch tunnels so far, but those didn’t go in the right direction either.

  In the end, he could only use the phanges runes to choose the best path.

  This time, the result was vague.

  The branch tunnels all had neutral runes, while the main tunnel had the result ‘Intangible Misfortune.’

  “What does that mean?” Illyan sighed. While Kaoran taught him a lot of the combinations the runes could form, some of them were hard to decipher.

  But it was better than no result, and so he continued to tread forward.

  However, at some point, after walking for days, his nose twitched as he smelled something.

  ‘Iron smell? It’s blood…’ Illyan’s face hardened as he slowed down and unsheathed his sword.

  He covered the bde with soil so that it didn’t give off any reflection and stealthily moved forward.

  The farther he went, the stronger the smell became.

  However, another smell mixed together with the smell of blood.

  ‘Rotten flesh… Is Aziro close by?’

  Illyan knew that Aziro’s biggest trump card was his undead army. Dead bodies that were rotting for who knew how long.

  Of course, it didn’t have to be him. After all, Illyan also knew that Aziro had shown the ability to disguise the rotten smell with the use of fragrances and flowers.

  However, that only applied to the carefully prepared bodies.

  If he had to create some of them along the way…

  ‘We will see…’

  As the smell grew more intense, the tunnel also started to widen, and the tunnel began to branch out more often.

  But Illyan didn’t hesitate as he followed his nose.

  And after a while, a horrifying scene unfolded in front of him.

  Corpses were everywhere. There were bodies of normal soldiers, gang members, and even some of the monsters from this mountain range, like blood-sucking bats and gremlins.

  However, most importantly, there were around a dozen dead wendigos surrounding one corpse.

  “W-what… in the world…” Illyan muttered as he came closer to that one corpse.

  The corpse was charred bck and was pierced through its chest by several blood spears that pinned it to the wall.

  Despite this, Illyan could easily recognize whom this body belonged to.

  “Ezekiel?”

  Illyan had a surprised expression written on his face as he came closer to the body before inspecting it.

  It was the same man he fought a year ago for his life.

  He was hanging there limply with most of his body ravaged by fmes. If the man had some valuables on himself, they were already burnt to a crisp.

  “How in the world—Wait, no…!” As Illyan continued to look at the body, his eyes fshed with a golden hue.

  ‘There are small differences. Normal people who didn’t have Eyes of Truth wouldn’t notice.’

  The realization made Illyan feel uncomfortable. He felt that the body was Ezekiel’s but wasn’t at the same time.

  ‘What in the world is this?’ Illyan was so focused on the body that he didn’t even notice movement behind him.

  It was only after he felt his scalp tingling that he realized he was being ambushed.

  “Graaaghl!” Guttural noises reverberated through the creature’s vocal cords as it lunged at him.

  Illyan, however, didn’t panic as he sidestepped to the side and made a diagonal ssh.

  *Squelch*

  The creature’s body was bisected at its waist as it helplessly fell down.

  “Undead?”

  However, before Illyan could even do anything else, the upper half of the body started to reach for his legs as the corpse opened its rotten mouth to take a bite out of him.

  Illyan frowned as he lifted his left leg and subsequently stomped on the undead’s head.

  *Spsh*

  ‘Is Aziro really close?’ Illyan looked around vigintly.

  If Aziro really managed to kill Ezekiel, then he was the most dangerous enemy at this very moment.

  Although he was inclined to not believe this since Ezekiel’s body looked suspicious, he didn’t just blindly believe in his deduction either.

  After all, the body could be different because Ezekiel modified it. The body that was hanging on the wall even had all its limbs, even though Illyan had cut off his hand and leg.

  Unfortunately, he couldn’t think for too long as he heard cracking noises around him.

  The bodies that were left on the cold ground were now writhing as their joints cracked.

  Soon, more undead stood up, prepared to attack him.

  They were covered in blood and wounds but were probably more dangerous than their living counterparts.

  Most of them discarded their weapons and brandished their teeth and nails.

  Their hollow eyes stared at Illyan as they charged forward.

  Illyan started to ssh them as he avoided their attacks. No matter how they attacked, it would cause him more than just physical wounds.

  ‘They are rotting, and who knows what else. I could be infected by something. In my current state, it could spell my doom,’ Illyan thought as he rolled on the ground when one of the creatures jumped at him.

  When it didn’t charge into him, it spttered against the wall with flesh bursting in every direction.

  Living bodies would instinctively protect themselves by limiting the power of their muscles. However, the undead lost this function.

  This gave them strong power but also made them more fragile…

  Not that most of the attacks fazed them.

  Unless the head was broken or the body was completely crushed, it wouldn’t stop moving.

  However, it was still manageable.

  At least until the bodies of the monsters and wendigos started to rise.

  ‘Shit… I won’t be able to fight them all off.’ Illyan gritted his teeth as he sheathed his sword back and instead took out the new mace he had acquired.

  The space was wider than before, but it was still cramped compared to the outside. Not to mention that he shared the space with dozens of undead beings.

  With a clean swing, Illyan burst open the head of the wendigo that tried to get up before it could even make a move, then jumped on it to avoid other attacks from behind.

  “Grraaagh!”

  Several undead had already swarmed the spot he had been standing in before, while the small gremlin undeads were climbing the rge body of the wendigo.

  Gremlins were small and mischievous creatures living in this mountain range.

  They were shaggy-headed with big bat-like ears and a smile that stretched across their faces, revealing yellow fangs.

  Normally, they wouldn’t attack a human head-on and would instead torment him from a distance.

  But this time, it was different as they clung to Illyan’s legs, trying to bite him.

  Illyan frowned as he sent flow through his legs, infusing it into the bodies of these creatures.

  Since he knew their heads were their weakness, he didn’t expend too much flow, instead ravaging their brains before they fell weakly to the ground.

  However, other undead were already prepared to fill the empty space the gremlins left.

  Blood-sucking bats flew through the air, spitting rotten blood at him, while a skinny wendigo climbed the wall to jump at Illyan from above.

  In the end, Illyan decided to make the best decision in this situation.

  ‘Run!’

  “Grawl?!” Just as the undead chomped down on the spot where Illyan had been, they once again bit only thin air.

  Looking around for the target, they soon noticed that he had disappeared.

  Only in the distance could Illyan be seen sprinting deeper into the tunnel…

  Sorry for te releases tely. I found a new job and am still getting used to the new environment. Hopefully, I should be able to pick up pace soon. :)