Alex had been in Hell for 50 years, so about 50 years should have passed in every other world as well.
Which meant, he hadn’t seen his family in nearly 200 years now.
The realization of just how long it had been troubled him. How were they doing right now? Were they okay? Had they really made it to the Sky God’s Palace by now?
He wanted to believe so. No, he had to believe it.
He couldn’t let his own pessimism drag him down in a situation like this. “No, everything is okay. They are fine. I just have to quickly leave this place.”
Since Inner Hell had Qi, he could maybe establish a teleportation formation of sorts to leave if there truly was Immortal Qi in the cities. He looked up at the prison wall then.
“But will this thing let me leave?” he thought. It wasn’t called a Prison Wall for no reason.
“I’ll find out when I find out.”
With the decision made, Alex chose a random direction and began walking.
He walked in the hot sun with his sword in his hand, expecting a beast to jump at him at any time. He constantly trained his Sword Intent as well, slowly improving his Sword Intent so it reached the same level as his regular Intent.
Since his Intent had improved over the course of the past 50 years, improving his Sword Intent wouldn’t take that long. He had already started that task while in the prison, but without any actual opponent to fight, he could only improve at a snail’s pace.
Now that he was out in the desert, he decided to improve as best as he could.
However, even after walking for hours, he could not find any beasts at all.
His first thought was that Death had come through here, but upon closer inspection, he saw no beast corpses at all.
‘Wait, did all the beasts in this region die in that place?’ he wondered. If the smell of blood traveled through the desert, it could have dragged all of the beasts to that one spot.
That could be how there had been so many tens of thousands of beasts in that one spot.
‘It has been months,’ he thought. ‘How much longer before the other beasts fill up this spot?’
The sand around him was a constant orange, no longer containing the shade of yellow that the outer regions did. And the hot sun made him almost think he was walking through a place that had fresh lava running next to him.
He found a place where he brought out his two beast corpses and cut them apart to take out just the meat. He left the remaining carcass there and continued along in his journey, eating some chunks of meat once in a while.
Alex wasn’t sure if he could use his Yang to turn the meat into Qi or not. From what he believed, burning away the meat with his Yang would burn away whatever it was in the meat that improved their Body Cultivation.
So, Alex had to eat it and let it fill his stomach.
On top of that, just in case any of its properties were damaged by cooking the meat, he chose to eat it raw.
The taste of the meat, left out in the desert heat for multiple days, was far from desirable. But Alex stuck through it nonetheless, eating every piece he could.
It didn’t take long for his belly to fill up, at which point all he could do was wait for the energy to be absorbed before he used his Yang Qi to burn everything else inside of him.
It wasn’t until night fell that the first beast came out of the ground, a muscular frog with horns coming out of its head.
He didn’t even question the frog’s existence in the desert since he had seen all sorts of beasts outside of their habitat live in the desert. In fact, the frog was a relatively normal one.
There had been weirder beasts.
The frog was strong, much stronger than any of the beasts Alex had fought before. Alex attempted to fight it with just his sword and Sword Intent, which ended up dragging the battle for much longer than he had intended to.
With each swing he made, he could feel himself improving against the beast. Its tough hide was slowly showing marks of damage and soon it started bleeding as well.
After what felt like nearly 15 minutes, the frog finally died.
The sun had long since set at this point, with no light coming through the horizon. Alex cut into the dead frog and pulled out its beast core. He searched for its Sunheart, but there wasn’t any at all.
The ones with Sunhearts had already gone deep underground as night fell.
Alex butchered the dead frog until he got all of the meat and spent a moment in the sand absorbing its blood aura. The aura was nowhere near close to being enough to make the slightest improvement, but he had to continue doing it as it would add up sooner or later.
After he was done with everything, Alex continued on.
It appeared that he had walked far enough out of the place where Death had massacred all the beasts that more and more were starting to pop up.
He fought through the beasts, using only his sword to fight them. His Body Cultivation was so much weaker than the beasts’ that it wasn’t much of a factor in the battle at all.
Alex honed his sword, making his Intent stronger and stronger. Throughout the night, he managed to kill at least 2 dozen beasts, and that was because he took his time with it.
When the sun came up, the beasts were no longer anywhere to be seen.
Around the same time, Alex sensed the infected beast core in his storage bag and saw that the Sunheart had fully infused into the core.
So, he found a relatively quiet and shaded region before sitting down to begin his cultivation.