The skies were chaotic! It was easy to get in trouble, and it was equally easy to shoot at other ghosts and cause them trouble. These conditions hardly allowed progress, so the team either had to risk it all, or stay out of fights all together!

  The team chose the prior. They entered a battlefield, strategically as to avoid getting shot at, but regardless of how cautious they were, the situation was still prone to escalating significantly. A huge opponent appeared deep within the battlefield, who stripped their strategic approach out of any value it had!

  This opponent was big, transparent red, and was shaped a bit like a crab! Being as tiny as they were in this phantom form, the team instantly knew that they were outmatched by this big opponent, so it was stupid to start a fight with it!

  “Are we supposed to shoot at that big bastard?” Arvena asked, and she didn’t want to take any risks right now, because she didn't want to return to her body just yet.

  “I don't know…” Tim admitted, “This is the first time I saw a ghost this big!”

  This issue was perplexing. Considering that the crab ghost was tearing through all of the other, smaller ghosts, it was crystal clear that there was no fighting it, it was stupid. In his past adventures, Timothy had suffered a deep, thorough defeat from ghosts who were a lot smaller in comparison to this one, and today, he didn’t want to know what it would be like to be defeated again, by a bigger opponent. He knew that it was stupid to underestimate ghosts!

  “Let’s slip away while we can,” He guided his team.

  Since there were a few hundred more smaller ghosts in front of them, fighting each other, Timothy and the team had some time to flee, so they did exactly that. This was the best course of action, as they did not want to return to their bodies so early!

  It took little time to fly two-hundred meters away from where the battle had broken out, and at this distance, they should be invisible to most threats. The air around them was more colorful than he remembered, so essentially, the team were hidden as well as a tiny spec of dust, in the middle of a gigantic rainbow! They were safe, but overall, they were also very confused.

  “This is not how I expected the ghost world to look like,” Gustav expressed, and he was the most shaken up of all. “Everything is just empty, and colorful… it's weird.”

  “The colors are actually called gas, or various gasses other than oxygen. My theory is that ghosts are made out of gas, or something similar, because they can't be made out of nothingness, it wouldn't be possible for them to be made out of nothingness.” Timothy added.

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  Behind the explanation he just made, modern, earthly science was included, but he tried to dumb things down as best as he could. He did a good job, as his friends understood what he meant, or at the very least they were catching up with the concept of gas itself.

  “So… all that explosive gas in caves and stuff, is full of ghosts? That would explain why the caves whistle on their own sometimes.” Gustav followed along.

  This topic was interesting, but it had to be put aside for now. The team was quite stressed at the moment, and they were stressed because they realized how incompetent they were in this phantom form, and inwardly, they blamed themselves for such incompetence, even though it wasn't their fault.

  The information about improving one's soul strength & quality was very limited. Society didn't encourage such development, and lesser creatures were oblivious of the possibilities, and these couple of facts excused the team's incompetence! The improvement of one's soul wasn't as straightforward as the improvement of plain, blue mana.

  Despite all of these facts, the team still felt like crap, apart from Timothy, who was up here solely because he wanted to understand mana channels better. The rest of them felt like beginners, and carried most of the worries that beginners would carry! They felt powerless!

  Although she felt horrible, Arvena was always solution-oriented about her problems, so she asked. “Okay, we obviously can’t fight these spooky hooligans as often as we want to, so we can’t harvest them. Is there an easier way for us to fill up our phantomized mana pools?”

  “Yeah,” Tim nodded, “We need to find a couple clouds of phantomized mana, and then we harvest it. This is gonna be a bit of a problem, because there are clouds everywhere now, and it looks like we can't harvest most of them, so things are gonna be confusing.”

  “We need to find clouds that are appropriate for our poor mana quality, then? It sounds simple enough, and it's better than leaving this place early.” Ortana added.

  The solution they built on didn’t promise the quickest progress, but slow progress was better than failing all together! If they were attacked, and had their souls sent back to their bodies, they wouldn't be able to use the Explorative Soul ability again for a week, and such a sentence-like failure would certainly put a toll on their mental state!

  Furthermore, even though they were surrounded by these endless, colorful clouds of gas, they were still aware of where they were right now. They were well over three kilometers above the ground, and this fascinated them more than anything else could! The sense of exploration that came along with this fact, enthralled them, so they didn't want to go back to their bodies today!

  The slow method was the best method, so they hid within the clouds, and floated slowly until they made a safe distance away from the battlefield. The team filled up their mana pool halfway already, and they could feel that they needed just a few hundred more points if they were to level up their phantomized mana quality!

  Timothy was a bit closer in comparison to everyone else, because he had absorbed a necromancer's soul a few weeks ago, so he was especially excited! Not to mention, all of those ghosts that he just killed, got him a few hundred system points, other than mana points. He was having a lot of fun up here, and was the least depressed!

  [You now have a total of 46,000 system points,] The system beeped.