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"What a pity. A loss for precision, without question." With the experience from before, Nese immediately imitated Keir and continued the topic in as mysterious a manner as possible.

He could not stop for even a moment.

He ran like mad, circling around the massive tree trunk. He ran in the direction the angel had gone.

His heart hammered like a mallet.

Beyond the tree trunk was a damp slope.

At the top of the slope was an opening large enough for one person to pass through.

An exit leading outside.

A red backdrop shone through the opening, slowly unfolding before him.

The exit.

Nese kept muttering under his breath. He no longer knew what he was saying.

He was just making random sounds as he ran, trying not to fall. In any case, he had thrown in a whole series of polite phrases like "thank you," "wonderful," "it's an honor," and "good evening."

Perhaps it had been moved by his civility, or perhaps this forest, as ancient as hell itself, was truly in terrible condition today. Alexander Hanging Ghost did not make things difficult for him.

"So this is goodbye? You'd better understand what I mean," the forest merely said behind him.

Nese practically tumbled and crawled out of the opening.

Outside was the other side of that sparse woodland from before. A stretch of dark brown, fine-grained sand caught him.

Hell's Yan Feng was so welcoming and warm.

All at once, exhaustion flooded through his limbs like a tide. He felt unable to take another step.

He forced himself to slowly shuffle forward, his gaze sweeping back and forth. He spotted the angel, covered in crimson and bubbling with silvery foam, sprawled rigidly over a huge rock to his right, head down like a broken rag doll.

The magical seal on Keir's shoulder had become extremely thin. At some point, the threads of order energy had dwindled to only three. One looped around his head, one bound his waist, and the last maintained the outline of his legs.

Something beneath the magical seal on his shoulder was bulging and writhing desperately.

This was bad...

Nese had no time to feel any joy at escaping danger. He hurriedly dragged his heavy feet toward Keir.

Just one step—

Bang.

There was no actual bang. It was the sound in Nese's heart.

He watched the fragile magical seal tear apart like oil paper.

Sharp, glass-shard-like destructive energy swallowed Keir in an instant. It swelled rapidly like mold, then viciously stabbed inward toward the center. The black clouds of disorder in the surrounding environment also stirred like vultures scenting carrion, encircling him completely.

Nese watched helplessly as the thread of order around Keir's waist snapped with a pop. Its loose ends shriveled in the air, and the pure white figure was swallowed.

The smell of scorching and something cool slipped into his nose.

That was the scent of angel blood.

He jumped up—though, exhausted as he was, he only rose three inches—and lunged forward in an ugly posture, trying to cast a spell.

Bang!

A hulking body got there first, crashing into Keir, who looked like a lump of moldy white bread.

That thing let out a series of snuffling breaths.

Caught off guard, Nese was knocked onto the ground. He rolled four or five times before barely stopping, then hurriedly raised his head to look at the newcomer's back.

A huge dog with a powerful build, dripping emerald-green drool, with two holes for eyes and teeth larger than spindles.

"Goodbye..."

A hellhound.

It was his teacher's hellhound, Goodbye.

His teacher had come to help them.

Nese felt all the emotions he had been holding back surge into his mind. He was nearly at his limit.

Thank goodness. Thank goodness.

He pressed both hands to his face and rubbed hard, then quickly looked around for Ichaint.

The demon mentor had not appeared.

He was not here. Nese was already very familiar with Ichaint's energy. His teacher had not come. Calamity Stone Floating Island was most likely safe now; he had merely sent his hellhound to call them back.

That was good.

Unfortunately, they could not return under their own power now.

They were two squeezed-out lemons, not a drop left between them.

He had to let Goodbye return and notify his teacher...

Nese struggled to his feet and slowly approached the hellhound.

Then he heard a hair-raising sound of tearing and ravenous devouring.

At first, he thought Goodbye was merely helping eat away the miscellaneous energies from other domains that were constantly harming the angel—after all, he had once seen Goodbye eat the demonic flames off his own body from less than an inch away.

Crack!

Crack!

The two sounds made his heart tremble.

Nese clutched his collar with one hand so he could breathe properly and shuffled forward step by step. Then he saw—

First, he saw the hellhound's face. It was splattered with silver blood, with several long, white feathers stuck around its mouth.

Then his gaze dropped, and he saw Keir.

Actually, he saw only half of Keir.

Everything above the angel's waist had vanished. Uh, it had wings. Uh. Not anymore.

All kinds of chaotic energies lay scattered in a ring like fries around a steak.

Nese felt as though his legs had been glued to the ground. He could not move.

Crunch.

Crunch.

Goodbye looked utterly relaxed, but it moved swiftly.

It quickly tore off Keir's right leg, ripped it in half, and swallowed it. Then it did the same to the left leg, eating the rest of the angel as well.

It extended its barbed tongue and carefully licked every scrap of flesh from the ground.

Then the hellhound turned its head. The two hollows that served as eyes faced the sorcerer, and it bared its yellowed fangs.

Nese saw the beast's face suddenly appear right before him.

Goodbye had already kicked off with its hind legs and lunged at him.

His scream was trapped in his throat.

Calamity Stone Floating Island.

Ichaint's courtyard.

"I can't learn it, I can't learn it, I can't learn it, I can't learn it! It's boring, boring, boring, boring!" Xiqisi shook her wings, and all her blue-violet feathers had puffed up.

The flattened liquid in the pool trembled, splashing out two pitiful little droplets before returning to normal.

"Again." Ichaint folded his arms.

"It's already been twenty-nine times!"

Despite saying that, Xiqisi still raised her right claw unwillingly and drew the pattern in the air with great seriousness.

Ichaint watched her movements.

Her movements were actually quite standard already. They were almost no different from what Ichaint had taught her. The gestures required for the vision restoration spell allowed for a little error; it would only cause slight positional shifts.

But she truly had no talent in this area...

The energy of laws barely obeyed her at all. She could not produce it herself, nor did she understand how to convert it. Even replacing the pool with mercury, which was easier to manifest images in, had been useless.

Ichaint felt that Xiqisi could give up on this route.

Later, it would be better to simply have her lead the way and search for the Chaos Child in person.

The Joyful Saintess fussed around for a while. The result only confirmed Ichaint's view again. The gleaming silver surface showed no change at all.

"That's enough."

"No! One more time!"

She rubbed her two claws together fiercely in an overly forceful gesture. At last, a blurry image appeared in the pool.

A dot.

Then it rapidly enlarged, revealing a head, a tail, four paws, and a belly. It looked like an animal seen from below.

"Heh!" Xiqisi's joy lasted less than a tenth of a second.

Ichaint shook his head.

The hellhound fell from the sky and smashed through the surface of the mercury pool.