“You’re alive!” Ortana rushed over, and hugged him. She was relieved.

  “Of course I am?” Timothy hugged back, and looked at the rest of the team. He was w what was going on. “You’re alive too. I guess?”

  The group chuckled in respohey were enjoying his fusion. He might as well be fused, because he only saw this womaerday, a she acted as if he had been missing for ten years!

  “I’ve been looking for you for five days…” She then said, “The guards said that you got killed, aen, so I gutted a lot of bugs in order to find your body. Those guards are liars, they lied to me with a straight face!”

  Befustav could chime in on that st statement, Timothy cut his words short because no one wao be lectured right now, and then he emphasized a question. “Five days? We've only been here for an hour. Maybe an hour and a half, give or take.”

  With that said, both sides caught up with all the drama almost instantly. Time worked differently in this universe, and that was what caused all of their w. An hour here, was about five days ba Valporovus!

  “Needle universes are uime moves fast here, or it moves very differently at the very least.” Arvena tried to expin this situation based on what she knew, she tried to sum up a proper expnation for her friends. “I don't have enough books with me to prove a point, but we could stay here a year, for example, and we would've only aged a year, not a day more, but in Valporovus, decades would pass! 50 years, a hundred? I don't know, but we'd certainly walk into the future.”

  “So we have our own personal time mae, then.” Tim added, his excitemeurning as quickly as the pgue. “Something weird happened back there, girls, I close the portal now, and I also open new ones.”

  “Bug problem solved, the's get out of here before the priest curses us instead of blessing us. By the time we get to the portal, ten whole days would've passed since your disappearance. Let's go cim credit for the bugs that we've ‘stopped’ before anyone else does.” Skendus said, as he insisted oing out of here.

  Tim wao pin about the corpses that were in the castle, he wao remove them, but then he figured that even if they came back here after a month, the corpses wouldn't have aged for more than a couple of hours. With that said, he wasn’t worried about them stinking the pce out, they could toss the corpses out of the castle some other day.

  However, Timothy didn’t want the castle to be attacked by anythiher. He didn’t want to know what those tipedes were capable of, so they took the mantis brain out of Gustav’s bag, and then he went into the castle with it.

  As he ran, he shouted. “Wait outside, I'm gon the security system!”

  Sure enough, two mier, the main doors shut as if magically. No one could ehe castle now without his say-so, and he left the mantis brain on the dining room table too, which was on the first floor. He hoped that the tipedes would get disced from breaking through the castle floor boards like this. The mantis brain should scare them.

  Afterwards, he went to the fourth floor of the castle, and climbed out of a hat order to get on top of one of the four, short towers that this pce had. Tim then summoned a couple of bones, floated down from the tower of the castle ever so gently with the aid of those bones, and nded in front of his friends.

  “Okay, we're good to go.” He nodded.

  …

  When Tim was told that the needle universe of Purpureus Mundi could give him more mana per hour, he was over the moon! The system hadn't bothered to tell him about this, but it was true heless!

  [In Purpureus Mundi, you gee around 1,200 mana points an hour, and it's also sidered natural. It's not a cheat.] The system expined, once she was asked.

  “Hell yeah!” He celebrated, inwardly, but he was sad that they couldn't stay here for long, because they had to get back to Valporovus. “We gotta get back here when we don't have anything else on our ptes, or else it would be too much of a risk to disappear for months. I bet the dragons miss us a lot as well.”

  …

  The team of four, and Gustav, made it to the portal. They walked here cautiously sihey didn't have a mantis brain to protect them, and thankfully, they hadn't run into any bugs along the way.

  While they traveled here, Timothy and Gustav took one look at the giant, dead tipede, and were infinitely happy that they didn’t have to fight it, and its friends. A one-hundred foot loipede was a nightmare in anyone's book, it would indefinitely be a nightmare, unless one was a four-hundred foot tall chi, who could eat these tipedes. The tter was less than pusible.

  As they moved on, they noticed that the fire which Timothy previously caused, had died down already, because the fire didn't have much to burn sidering how small this needle universe was. Tim also believed that he had sent a message with that fire that he caused, as he ily warned every critter in the area, to not approach goblins uhey wao be torched in a way simir to those trees! He believed that he warhem, though realistically he didn't have the slightest clue how i brains worked.

  Anyway, as they were about to leave the portal, they instinctively turned back to have a st look of the pce, and ended up spotting something that her of them wao see. They saw twe tipedes chargiher towards them, or towards the portal - Either way, they were ing here fast!

  “Hell nah, I'm not fighting those!” Timothy excimed, and then he pushed his friends towards the portal.

  This was not the time to make a stand, even if they could kill these things. They'd rather not waste a half hour here, sidering that their efforts ba Valporovus might go in vain after every tick passed here, in this universe!

  Timothy was the st to jump into the portal, but before he leaped through, he took a couple of seds to unleash tens of Nerve Splitter shots against the tipedes! He hardly believed that this ability worked against them, but he was hoping that it would at least slow them down, because he didn't want them crossing through the portal as well.

  Without wasting another sed, he thehrough the portal, a his team oher side. It would appear that they’ve been waiting for him for five minutes now, they were worried sick.

  Tim avoided speaking to them for a moment, and focused on closing the portal instead. The portal's activity was a subject of his say-so, he felt that in his blood, and for that matter, he tried to the best of his abilities to close the portal.

  Closing it wasn’t easy. He assumed that he had to summon some kind of ability first, but that was not the case, there was nothing to summon!

  After about a minute, he eventually walked closer to the portal, and almost instinctively, he reached his arms out, and then quite literally grabbed the portal from its bottom left, and tore it out of pce as if it age of a book! The portal closed in respo dissipated on his hands, and this left the entire group of people behind him speechless, because they never witnessed such a dispy of power before!

  Now, he didn’t have the slightest clue of how to summon the portal again, but that roblem for another day. It was good enough that those beetles, tipedes, and any remained in Purpureus Mundi! The team could now cim credit for the tter.