Silver Palm Isle.
As the Leviathan successfully forced a small gap on the door, which was only visible to itself, the onlooking wizards all saw a door-shaped shade materializing beside the monster.
To them, this meant that the rumor regarding a hidden dimension was true.
While carefully gazing at the unlatched entrance, they also felt the deathly air that escaped from it.
Neither Flunza nor Basket Witch did anything yet, for they knew the door was only in its initial state and wasn’t truly opened yet. They would patiently wait for the right time to go in.
However, not all wizards were as wise as them.
A man who was overconfident in his form-shifting spell waved his wand, and his whole body shrank in size until he became a mosquito. He wished to slip past the Leviathan and enter the door when no one was there to stop him.
He managed to arrive at the door. And this was when he realized that the shade of the door wasn’t real. He couldn’t touch it.
Disappointed, he turned away to head back.
But his reckless action had its consequence—Leviathan knew he was there.
Even though the Leviathan was usually regarded as a “stupid” monster, as a predator, it still knew how to sniff out potential threats around it.
It didn’t do anything to the trespassing wizard because it didn’t feel any danger coming from the weak creature. But it DID know that there were people watching.
And that strange voice that spoke to it... that must be one of the spectators, and a very powerful one, since they could command the sea at free will.
Immediately, the Leviathan stayed highly alerted when it realized that there might be more of these powerful humans lurking nearby.
At the same time, everyone easily noticed that the Leviathan was no longer prying the door as vigorously as before. Instead, the monster had slowed down its actions as if trying to remain stealth.
It was obvious that the Leviathan’s “change of plan” was caused by the careless wizard earlier, and everyone could see it. Even so, no one would step up and blame that wizard. In fact, they watched him do his thing without interfering just because they wanted to see the result.
“No matter. As long as we can see the entrance, we don’t need the Leviathan’s help. The door will fall apart on its own soon.”
The speaker was Flunza, who just came out of hiding and was now standing on top of Brigitte the stingray. Or rather, it wasn’t Flunza’s true body that showed up, but a human shape made out of water.
Even so, the aura he released was enough to scare off ordinary wizards.
“Sir, you mean the door will break on its own... hmm?” Sliv appeared beside Flunza’s avatar.
“Right. The door is destined to open itself in due time, while Leviathan only hastened it.”
“I see.” Sliv nodded. “For us, the faster it opens, the better. We don’t want too many uninvited wanderers to affect our plan.”
“Heh. Wanderers, huh? Suppose they get inside the secret dimension, without prophecy to help them, they won’t know what or where to look. And did you sense the stillness inside the door? Whatever lifeforms that lived there must be long gone, which meant that what we’re looking for is still there. And only WE know its location.”
...
Unknown to them, there was a “wanderer” roaming inside the secret dimension right at this moment.
Angor was still waiting for his chance to get away.
Truth was, the door would have been fully opened by the Leviathan if the “mosquito wizard” had not interrupted it. Thanks to the delay, Angor avoided the terrible fate of being discovered by all the wizards. However, he had no idea about what happened just now.
As soon as he saw the Leviathan’s eyeball leaving the door, he bolted out of the fissure together with Toby.
He thought about using gravity power to reach the cliff cave in an instant, but the aura pressure on the surface made this impossible.
Thankfully, the Leviathan’s aura only suppressed lifeforms but not common objects. Angor simply took out his Gondola and boosted it to its full speed.
He hadn’t moved very far when he felt the door, as well as the space around it, shaking again.
The Leviathan was coming back. He knew it.
He couldn’t possibly head back underground again, so he had no choice but to keep moving forward, while rapidly putting a lot of illusion nodes around Gondola to cover the boat behind a thick layer of dark mist.
“You can’t see me... you can’t see me!”
At first, the Leviathan failed to notice the puff of black mist moving through the air since there were many dust clouds floating about after the earthquake.
Yet it didn’t take long for the monster to notice that something was off. The mist was escaping in a straight line instead of floating randomly, and there was energy coming from its location.
The Leviathan didn’t know what it was, but something told it that the dark area behind the door was the reason why it was bound here, and the only thing that might be “alive” was probably the true culprit.
It felt its rage quickly building up again despite all the onlookers around.
It released a maddened bellow and concentrated its aura to a single point, then directed it at the flying mist.
The mist began to lose altitude helplessly.
Inside the mist illusion, Angor felt all of his body parts burning under the pressure. This felt even worse compared to Isabella’s might.
But he knew he made it to the exit.
Gondola wasn’t falling because of Leviathan’s stare—he intentionally controlled the boat to move lower just to fool the Leviathan that he was hurt so that the monster wouldn’t follow up with more attacks.
As soon as Gondola reached the ground, he put it inside his bracelet.
Thanks to his steering, he landed right beside the cliff cave in which the teleportation array was at.
The cliff was in a bad shape after the earthquake earlier. Lucky for him, the cave was fine apart from several fallen stones.
He couldn’t control his body properly now, so he had to rely on his Night Skipper boots, which almost dragged him toward the depth of the cave while sliding on the ground.
He was more than glad to see that the wall at the end of the cave was intact.
“Thank the gods!”
He usually didn’t believe in gods and fate, but he wouldn’t be stingy with such words now. If things had gone wrong, he wouldn’t have reached here.
While still bearing the searing pain in his body, he chanted Spirit Mantra and ejected his soul.
The magic array in front of him was glowing just fine.
It seemed he didn’t need the blood of Lucas’ children to re-activate the two-way magic array. Slotting a magic crystal at the center of it was all he needed to get back to Sherry Patio.
When the vortex-like portal came out spinning on the wall, he dived inside without hesitating.
Meanwhile, the Leviathan sensed its target being carried away and disappearing in an unknown direction.
Infuriated, it slammed its entire body at the door, causing the space around the dark island to go irregular, which would prevent teleportations and plane passageways from working.
But it was too late.