First of all, a few masters started to vanish without any warning. It happened sporadically at first, and everyone thought they just got to a place away from the reach of the Message Paper coverage, or perhaps they stumbled upon sealing arrays or something.
But soon enough, more masters started to send distressing messages, speaking about weird stuff before losing contact with them.
Once William got the news, he instantly called off all the scout activities. He then shared the news with every one of the various forces, and they all agreed to wait before all the sides got cleared.
Then they'd all move together, closing the net, and exploring what was going on inside that area.
William waited for another day for the hills to get removed. The moment the last hill fell, and even before the dark master armies would be pushed back deep into the region, something grand happened.
It first started with the change in the sky colour. Instead of being pure and cloudless, it started to grow pink in colour. That wasn't all, as with such changes in the sky, a weird buzzing sound erupted, one that was at a low volume at first before turning loud over time.
"This colour… This buzzing noise… Don't tell me it's an auditory illusion!" William sniffed something out of these two clues. But before he'd warn anyone, he found himself standing alone in the middle of a weird place.
"It's indeed an auditory illusion… What a troublesome trap this is!" William realised that the real trap wasn't laid on the hills, but on the regions outside them.
It seemed like the trigger for this grand formation was in the hills. Once taken down, everything would go down with them.
*Roar!*
Before he'd thought about anything, about the grade and type of this illusion, or how he'd crush it and get freed, he heard a very loud noise filled with tons of roars coming from all over the place.
The world he was in was filled with black fog. But once these roars appeared, the fog dissipated fast, revealing more of the terrain around.
He was standing on top of a black hill, with an open vast land around, barren looking one, with churned ground that was filled with holes, bones, and even thin tongues of grey gas rising up from many spots in the region.
It looked like he appeared in an ancient battlefield, one that wasn't welcoming any life. But what puzzled him was the weird roars he heard and kept hearing.
"This… This isn't an illusion, it's a hallucination!" William suddenly jumped to such a scary conclusion, realising that this was more severe than what he initially thought.
Illusions might seem like hallucinations, but there was a big difference between the two. Illusions would leave anyone entrapped motionless inside, without getting any connection with the outer world. He'd be living in a dream world, one that would try to manipulate and affect his will and spirit, trying to kill him by pushing him into despair.
But hallucinations were much crueller than that. Once falling under one, the person wouldn't get separated from the outer world. These roars weren't real, but William knew he'd feel attacks landing on his body, triggering his desire to defend his life.
So, he'd subconsciously react, fighting and releasing his deadliest attacks. Then shadows would appear like the ones he once experienced in the black fox trial.
These shadows were real, but they wouldn't be monsters. Instead, they'd be the masters he was walking with in such a grand army.
Hallucinations were really brutal. They'd use any enemy's strength and numbers against themselves, letting them fight each other, kill one another, without even the need to lift a finger or do anything for the one who casted such a formation.
"There is still time…" William knew if he fell into a small formation with few masters, then the hallucinations would appear in a short time. But such a grand formation was something that worked on the entire lot of city masters, covering an area of hundreds of kilometres or even more.
So, it was expected it'd take longer to show its full terror.
"Auditory hallucinations are really hard to defend against, but they have a single common weakness… All hallucinations share that weakness… It seems it's time for me to take that leap…"
William knew the sole weakness in any hallucination formation was that it worked over the current level of power of the targets it affected.
It might seem weird and funny, but the right method to break free from such scary formation wasn't by fighting or running away, wasn't by using any treasure or anything, but by simply training.
Rising one's spirit power by just one point was enough to negate the effects of this formation. However, to any spirit master this was something that'd take long hours, days, even weeks or months for the much stronger masters.
People like Zin might even spend an entire year to raise a single spirit power point. And that was why getting to the very top, exceeding the limit of this tiny world, was always a hard task to do.
This wasn't just the limitations of the tiny world, but also thanks to the Holy Triad effects of any master. Once reaching such a high stage, if one didn't have enough spirit purity level, the right technique to get him through the shackles of the dark gold grade, then no one would be able to get past that point.
It was all connected. And the most tricking part about it was that it would never appear as a problem before hitting the high stages of the dark gold grade.
Not to mention such common knowledge wasn't known in this world yet.
Unlike other masters, William could do it simply on the spot. He took out one of the many dark gold cores he gained before, stained it with his blood, before starting to devour it.
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