Alex swung his sword and the snake died in a single stroke. Its head fell to one side while the rest of its body slumped on the dry desert sand to the other side.
Alex walked up to the snake’s head and checked it for a Sunheart. Sadly, the head didn’t have any. Sunhearts were supposed to be in a beast’s head, but just in case, he checked the rest of its body too.
It seemed the first monster he met after walking for half a day was not one that had a Sunheart. That was disappointing, but surely he would find more soon.
Alex pulled the beast core out of the snake’s corpse and placed all of its body in one place before making several cuts on it to let it leak all of the blood hidden within it.
Then, Alex sat next to it and absorbed the blood aura. Because it was only one beast and its blood wasn’t that much to begin with, there wasn’t much absorption to be done for Alex.
So, as soon as he was done with it, he left the corpse to be eaten by some other beasts and walked on.
The surrounding was the same, with desert expanse spreading in all directions. Dunes of orange sand were all that filled his vision with the sky shimmering in all directions.
His shadow even began flickering once, a phenomenon known as Shadow Dance. It was a rather important event in Alex’s eyes as it told him it was noon. It was difficult to perceive time in the desert when it was difficult to see where the sun was due to the shimmering sky hiding its spot.
Alex brought out the snake’s beast core, the only one he had for now as he had ended up using every other one. He brought out a Sunheart from the gift Tala had given him before leaving and placed them in an empty storage bag.
He needed to infect the beast core so he could cultivate after eating it.
“Other people must’ve been sent here as well. The Hell Emperor sure had been,” Alex thought. “But no one else has been able to leave this place. How did the Hell Emperor leave?”
Hell Emperor’s time was so long ago that his records were beginning to disappear from even the Immortal worlds. A place such as Hell where a person’s lifespan couldn’t be more than a few centuries wouldn’t have records from so long ago.
“The Hell Emperor had to be able to cultivate beyond what he had arrived with to be able to leave, right?” Alex thought. “Did he find something else to cultivate with, or could he make use of Sunhearts as well?”
Alex became quite curious. What did it take for someone to just leave this place?
Could artifacts or talismans help you get out of this world? Alex didn’t see that being possible, or else this wouldn’t be a place where they would send him.
‘There isn’t enough Qi to leave this world,’ Alex thought.
But then, there were decaying Sunhearts. Sunhearts were naturally quite potent, so if Alex were to get a rather strong one that was decaying, could he use a formation or script to leave this place?
A part of him felt that it was possible and even wanted to believe that was how the Hell Emperor had left. However, the other part of him knew that it wouldn’t be so easy.
If it was so easy, then he could just gather up a bunch of sources of Qi and fly out of this…
Alex’s thoughts came to a sudden halt.
He looked up suddenly, staring at the shimmering sky. Then, he felt at his waist where the Sunheart lay next to the beast core. That was a source of Qi for him.
If he gathered a few more, he would have a lot.
“Wait…” Alex thought. “I can just leave, can’t I?”
He felt stupid at not having realized this sooner. He could easily get out of Hell, and at the very least see if he was in some spatial pocket or something.
“I will need a lot of Sunhearts and beast cores to be able to leave, and I will need shade against the sun, so I might have to break into my seal first,” Alex told himself. “But I can leave.”
Alex immediately flew up.
He had been walking in order to find more beasts along the way and cultivate from their blood and hopefully find a Sunheart through it, but he could have always flown.
Now, he flew straight toward the shimmering sky.
Alex was surprised how high the shimmering was. From the bottom, it looked so much closer. As he flew, he looked all around him to see into the distance.
Sadly, there was a layer of haze everywhere that made everything look as though he was surrounded by an ocean. The dunes looked like waves.
Alex thought he could see a city in the distance, but he wouldn’t know until he went there. He decided to check it after he was done with this test first.
Alex needed to see where Hell was. Was it a different world from where the rest of the realms were? Was it just a spatial pocket? Or was there some other reason he had no idea about?
The shimmering sky seemed to get closer finally, and Alex could see things more clearly. When he saw what the shimmering sky really was, his eyes widened in shock.
Space fractured before him in many instances, like a shattered mirror where each piece showed an individual image. The walls of the fractures gave off silver light, the light that was the shimmer.
Alex watched in shock as reality itself seemed to flicker before him. The spatial fractures weren’t stable either, constantly changing shapes and sizes.
The pure Space aura that Alex got through these fractures was even more powerful than what he got through the Voidgates since it wasn’t contaminated by Time aura.
Alex gulped as he realized why they called this the Prison Walls. There was no way any regular person could leave this world if they had to go through this.