When he couldn’t figure it out, he sighed and said, "I wonder if Greg went through something like this."
As he thought of the performance of Greg’s shares, his eyes lit up, and he said to himself, "Let me check to see if the value of his shares has fallen since he got demoted. If his value fell, then it is highly likely that the position of captain has a lot to do with the rise and fall of the value of shares."
With that in mind, he quickly went to search for Greg’s portfolio. As it turned out, Greg’s shares were truly falling in value.
What he saw was that people were selling Greg’s shares en masse. It was a mass exodus of those who had faith in his future. This led to the value of his shares falling rapidly.
This sight made him laugh again and say, "Serves him right."
But as amused as he was and as much as he wanted more bad luck to befall Greg, he couldn’t guess what was currently happening to Greg.
Greg had successfully escaped from Earthly Battlefield E6-137. He took the train out and alighted on the other side of the world barrier. From there, he boarded an airship leaving the edge of the Central Domain.
Greg stood on the deck and looked at the world barrier with a complicated gaze. He was looking specifically in the direction of Earthly Battlefield E6-137, a battlefield for which he has mixed feelings.
As he looked at the small world that he had spent the last 9 years in, he said to himself, "It was my refuge and also my prison. I hated and also loved it. But now, I can’t have it regardless of what I think of it."
He didn’t have to stay in Earthly Battlefield E6-137 for so long because he had earned enough merit points to buy a Level 4 Dao Status.
Of course, he wasn’t wasting his time fighting on the battlefield for long either. He was fighting to earn the merit points that he needed to acquire the secret method for upgrading his Core Metac from rank 3 to rank 4.
However, the main reason he had stayed in Earthly Battlefield E6-137 for so long was that he didn’t want to leave it. If he had wanted the secret recipe for the rank 4 Floating Furnace Metac that badly, he could have gotten it from a cultivator, not the sect.
But he didn’t go asking someone for the method to advance his Core Metac with the Floating Furnace Life Ability to rank 4 because, as dangerous as fighting on the battlefield for merit points was, it was much safer than revealing to anyone what his Life Ability was.
So it was the inherent safety that Earthly Battlefield E6-137 granted that he stayed for so long. This is why he was always telling people that he didn’t need to be in Earthly Battlefield E6-137, risking his life with them. His stay there was by choice, and he was quite pompous about it.
Unfortunately for him, he didn’t realize the value of what he had until he lost it. It was now that he didn’t have that option anymore that he felt the loss of his safe refuge.
As he was reminiscing about the past, someone beside him said to him, "It is beautiful, isn’t it?"
Even before looking, he felt the scorching heat. The heat was so great that he felt as if he was about to lose a layer of skin.
This was even though his body had been refined into a metal. So if his body were normal flesh and blood, he would surely be dead by now.
This realization rushed through his mind like lightning. When it flashed and exploded into understanding, his body seized.
He wanted to look, but his body refused to move. His heart was beating like it wanted to jump out of his chest, and he was screaming inwardly, but his body still refused to move.
He was seized by great fear while the heat from an unknown source continued to roast him. This continued to be the case for 4 minutes.
By then, his clothes had caught fire and burned away from his body. So he was now completely naked as the day he was born.
After this ordeal, he had also gone through the five stages of grief from denial to acceptance. It was a gruesome experience that he would have wished only his enemies get to experience.
After he accepted his situation, the fear receded like a tide. Without fear to hold him down, he was finally able to move. So he turned sideways to look at the person who spoke to him.
What he saw was a woman with long red hair that reached her feet. She was small for a woman and looked more like a teenager. He saw that she was barefoot, and her face was innocent and cute, too, so one could easily mistake her for a lost child.
She was also stark naked. Her bare body was exposed to the world, and he could see that her body was a wondrous sight to behold.
But there was no way that he could mistake her for a lost child or have lustful thoughts for her body because she had a glowing mark on her forehead.
He couldn’t tell what the glowing mark was because it was too bright for his eyes. Just looking at the star made his eyes and head hurt, so he looked away from it after glancing at it once.
What he had seen and experienced was enough to tell him the identity of this woman. But if that wasn’t enough, there was also a ball of fire floating beside her head.
This ball of fire was the source of the heat that had been scorching him all along. When he laid eyes on it, all hope drained out of his face. This was because this ball of fire looked like the harbinger of death to him.