"I have to find a landmark, one thing that's present on the map," William knew this map was showing just the big landmarks. It was a map of the grand forest, and there were many unmistakable landmarks all over it.
Things like huge mountains, a series of hills, massive rivers, big lakes, and even huge swamps were present all over the map.
William tried to recall anything remarkable from his past hectic run in the past days, yet he failed to spot any.
All he could recall were an endless ocean of trees, insignificant hills and rivers. And that made him inwardly sigh.
During all this time, he was totally focused on fighting against the monsters and keeping his life intact. "I have to roam around then, try to find something that can help…"
He went out there, gathered the materials he scattered and buried last night and cancelled the two arrays. He was prepared to leave this place, and so leaving behind these materials was a waste.
Then he looked around, picked a gigantic tree that was almost half a kilometre away, and started walking towards it.
"It's weirdly quiet!" The first thing he noticed was the strange silence that prevailed all around the forest. It looked as if the forest was preparing for something big, and that made him quite vigilant.
He didn't spot a single monster since entering into his hiding spot last night. He thought it was all thanks to his arrays' magic, but now he felt like the entire forest was void of monsters.
"I must be overthinking things," he shook his head, mistaking all this for his deep thoughts about his team and the ten scrolls.
He reached the tree without meeting a single monster at all. He climbed the tree in extreme care, fearing the presence of any hidden monster inside the thick branches of this gigantic canopy.
But until he reached the very top, he never met anything at all. He stood over a thick branch that was enough to make up five of his body, looking at the world around. The sun was still high in the sky, illuminating the world. And with the high altitude of this tree that exceeded fifty metres, he could see for a far distance.
"A big white mountain, with a red peak, and long and irregular green lines on its body… It's that mountain drawn on the map."
His eyes shone the moment he noticed this mountain. It was at least fifty kilometres away, as he just spotted its peak shrouded in the middle of a thin layer of clouds, with a faint shadow of its massive body at the far horizon.
"It may be further away than that," he tried to estimate how far that mountain was. Then he used the sun to determine the direction of that mountain. "It's in the southwest… Ok!"
Once he spotted the right direction and distance of that mountain, William took out the map again and started to examine it.
"Wow! I crossed close to three hundred kilometres in the past few days!" When William placed his current location on the map, he was surprised to see how far away he drifted from his initial and intended course.
Before leaving the defensive array back then, he made sure to mark out their next line of travel. And right now, he was at least one hundred and sixty kilometres away from the meeting area he decided before with his team.
In front of his eyes, he imagined the path he treaded during the past hectic nights.
"I went directly to the heart of the deep parts of the forest…" He initially planned to avoid that area, take a long detour around. But seeing himself on the other side of such a dangerous region made him find no other explanation for all this.
"Even if I tried to go all this distance back, it's not going to work," he was lost in deep thoughts, looking at the map in a frown, "there is another one hundred kilometres left before arriving at the Scorching Lands area. I have two options now…"
William thought about these two options for the next three hours. The first option he got was to go back, cross the distance between him and the place where he should meet up with his team, and hope they'd stick at that place all this time without moving around.
He knew the chance of his team standing their place motionless for days was close to none. They got Ibra, a few silver members, in addition to the leader quality gifted spirit masters like Sara, Berry, Lang, and Peter.
William didn't think the team would commit such a newbie mistake and stick around, waiting for him for all these days.
Not to mention he had to go directly through the dangerous deep part of the forest, or else he'd waste more days to circle away from it.
And so, he got the other option that he decided to take.
"I will go directly towards the Scorching Lands then," he decided to go to their destination, and wait for his team out there.
At first, he was sickly worried over his team, questioning the decision. But after walking in the forest for roughly a day, crossing lots of zones during the night, he couldn't help but drop all this worry and focus on something else.
"Where the heck did all the monsters go?!!" He was shocked when he noticed that monsters were absent from the places he passed through all day long.
At first, he thought it was out of his imagination. And then when he walked for a few hours without meeting a single monster, his thoughts about this drifted towards a side effect of the huge battles he and Sith's team experienced before. But soon enough he started to have his own doubts.
No matter how he looked at it, the absence of the monsters from the forest wasn't a normal sign at all.
"These annoying dudes won't go missing for no reason," William muttered to himself, "it must be something big, something related perhaps to what drove the scary monsters away from the heart of the forest in the first place."
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