Money Is Hard to Come by

'This is kind of broken.' I thought as I hacked down the last magic circle. It only took a couple seconds for me to destroy all the magic circles. I wielded my spear in the right and the sword in the left. It was much more efficient that way.

It was kind of like dancing because all I did was swing the two weapons around in the air. Cutting up a magic circle was the same as cutting nothing.

Throwing both the spear and sword back in my inventory, Merlin appeared before me.

"What is your name?" He said.

Now that I thought of it, I didn't properly introduce myself, did I?

"Daniel. Now let me leave." I said, with my hand pushing up my hair. There was quite a lot of sweat on my forehead. Even though using that technique was easy, it looks like it still puts stress on my body.

"Daniel... Since you have cleared my dungeon, I will keep my end of the deal." As he said that, he threw a green ball at me.

I tried catching the ball, but it went directly through me. I turned around, and the ball was nowhere in sight.

"What was that?" I asked.

"My Eye of Formations. It should be bound to your soul now." He said.

'Eye of Formations? Were you missing a pair of eyes because that green ball was clearly not an eye.'

"So what does it do?" I asked, keeping my retort to myself.

"You will find out soon enough once you begin the path of a Formation Master. A minute has already passed since you cleared the last trial so this dimension will crumble. I will send you off now." Saying that, he flicked my head with his pointer finger.

...

'Did he send me to the afterlife... So dizzy.' I thought as I opened my eyes.

"Are you finally awake?"

Strange. I don't recall making a leaf pillow as comfortable as this.

I nodded my head up and made eye contact with a barren valley along with a pair of eyes.

It was slightly perked outwards, not exactly as big as one of my friend's man boobs on Earth. Well, her time will come...

'Amitabha, this one has sinned.' I prayed, realizing what I had just done. Even though I wasn't affiliated with Buddhism in any way, Amitabha was the first deity I thought to pray to.

"Rachel?" I asked myself. Her short brown hair was all messy, as if she just woke up.

She only smiled to my questioning gaze. I don't know if it was just me, but I felt a slight chill in the air for some odd reason.

Getting up, I looked around, confirming that this was the exact place where I had been at when the rock activated. After appreciating the surrounding nature, I looked at where I was before and tried my best to avoid direct eye contact with Rachel. I didn't know why I didn't look her in the eye; you could say it was an instinctive feeling.

'Was my head resting on her lap?' I thought, staring at the fair skin of her thighs. I felt the aura surrounding Rachel suddenly diminish.

After staring at her thighs for a couple seconds lost in thought, I noticed that I was staring too much so I jerked my head upward meeting her gaze. The moment I did that, the instinctive feeling of wanting to look elsewhere struck me again. Her eyes were as intimidating as a certain princess I met at the Magic Tournament.

'Why did she suddenly become so menacing? No way, it couldn't be... Did she think I was a pervert who was ogling her thighs?' The idea struck me like a fine bolt of thunder.

As a girl who was most likely experiencing puberty and all that, she must be extremely sensitive of her body image. Or she was on her menstrual per—nope, that is not my right to assume that.

The awkward staring contest was paused with a loud cracking noise stealing our attention at that moment. Amitabha must have answered my prayer. I should really consider becoming a Buddhist monk now; but does Buddhism even exist in this world?

We looked at the place the cracking noise came from. It was the formation rock, but it seemed bigger than before.

The cracking became more consistent and soon, it crumbled into pieces revealing a ring.

"Storage ring." Rachel said, while moving her eyes back at me.

Now that I thought of it, Merlin said something about giving me his possessions. I grabbed the ring and examined it.

It was black with no actual decorations. The good thing was that it was polished very well, and even though it was encased in that rock for who knows how long, it still gave a nice luster.

"How do I use it?" I asked Rachel.

"I don't know."

"Then how do you know it's a storage ring?"

"The master of the Wizard's Tower had one. Maybe try to wear it." She said, while pointing at the fourth finger on her left hand.

Ignoring her, I turned my attention back to the ring. Instead of wearing it like she suggested, I tried infusing it with my mana just like how I activated the rock.

After depleting about half of my total mana, I felt my consciousness splitting: one part of it was the same, while the other was wandering in a black space. There were many miscellaneous objects ranging from weapons to books.

I touched a wizard hat that floated next to me and it disappeared from the black space and reappeared in my hand. So that was how I brought items out, but how do I put them back?

I experimented with the ring for a good amount of time, trying a lot of stupid things like snapping my fingers and shouting abra cadabra but none of them worked. Rachel seemed to watch my actions with glee.

It kept going on until I tried pressing the ring on the hat while infusing my mana into the ring. The hat went back into the black space and to my surprise, the mana I infused into the ring came back to me as if telling me it had its fill.

After sifting through all the items, I had to say that Merlin had an extensive collection of pretty much everything. But the one thing that was most needed was not here. It was ironic how the one thing Merlin did not have was money. If we had money, we might have been able to get home when we reached a nearby village or town or whatever. With that said, we didn't need to rely on those makeshift tools anymore.