Pangula Highlands

Pangula Highlands.

The brief connection with his true self's will had lasted only a moment. By the time Reilo awoke, several days had passed.

During that time, his avatar had been almost completely defenseless.

It was not difficult to understand the price he had spoken of.

The moment Reilo opened his eyes, the scene before him left him stunned. Far away, at the center of the thunderclouds, the earth shook. Then a terrifying arc of lightning, several meters across, tore through the sky, nearly splitting the Thundercloud Vortex in two before striking the ground!

Amid a deafening roar, a colossal creature was fleeing from that direction.

While Reilo was communicating with his true self, three things had happened in the Pangula Highlands.

The first.

The legend of the Pangula Guardian Beast was no mere myth.

With a rumbling quake, the crust of the earth trembled and rocks shook loose as a giant turtle, thousands of meters long, slowly crawled out from the ground beneath the dark thunderstorm.

Strangely, its shell seemed to exert an astonishing pull on the lightning. The liquid lightning in the sky curved subtly as it slid toward the turtle's enormous yellow shell.

Then something wondrous happened. The lightning did not explode. Instead, the turtle absorbed it.

As it savored a meal it had not enjoyed in ages, the giant turtle seemed to sense something unusual.

"Could that be the aura of an ancient demon? Hmm... and some of the God of Barbarians' aura, too!"

The turtle's enormous, upright pupils, each more than ten meters tall, slowly gazed into the distance.

A journey that would have been long for a lesser creature was nothing to it. Far away, it could see a group of worms doing everything they could to build an altar.

After a brief