A Single Thread

Lucius could barely understand what had happened there, but he realized one thing. Whatever or whoever that person was, it was the most powerful being he had seen till now. If they could make notice him and make him stop like that, then they were quite certainly beyond his understanding.

Lucius's travel continued as he saw more worlds. Now he had reached a world that was perhaps the most familiar to him. It looked exactly like what hell did. Lucius did not know if this was the main dimension of hell or one of the thousand minor ones.

But looking at the demons and rivers of lava that flowed, he was pretty sure it was hell. He could recognize each and every demon that he saw there. From the lowly Imp demons to Cerberus all the way to large flame demons that were made out of solid flames.

Lucius saw the mountains in which the stronger demons lived in. They would eat and kill the smaller demons while procreating with the ones that they found attractive. He kept on looking and eventually found a demon that looked the most different from the others.

It was much smaller than the others, being the size of a normal human adult, yet the power exuding from him was much greater than any other. Lucius could tell that this was no common demon, but rather a demon lord. The demon lord looked down at the demons below that were coming towards his territory and opened his wings.

He flew above them and dropped what looked like concentrated orbs of demonic energy. They worked like bombs and decimated the army of demons. This was a true demonic war.

Lucius couldn't help but compare it with the Magic and Powers that they used in the Barrom Clan and found them to be inferior.

Perhaps only the higher ups of the Barrom clan could wield a power like this. Lucius went on to see countless more demons and saw how their world worked. He learned more in a few hours than he did in his entire life researching them.

He even discovered that a lot of theories that they had in the world of Revelia were false and some were partially incorrect.

Lucius spent quite a while in this dimension before moving towards another one. At this point, he had lost count and didn't know how many hundred dimensions had passed by.

More time passed by as he suddenly felt the threads that were attached to him breaking.

~Snap~

~Snap~

~Snap~

One by one they would break until only one single thread was left. Seeing that the influence of the other threads was no longer there, this thread started pulling him towards a new dimension. Perhaps it was because the power of this thread was the weakest that it only acted now, or maybe it was just a random chance.

But this time Lucius felt that he was getting much more close to the dimension than he had thought. Unlike before, when he just passed by them, he was directly heading into one. The world kept expanding in front of his eyes and before he could even react he was sent forward and crashed into something.

Yet no noise, as such was made as Lucius was but merely an incorporeal soul… or so he thought until the pain hit him.

"Ugh!…" Lucius groaned and felt pain all over his body.

'A body? What am I thinking… I don't have a body anymore…' Lucius thought to himself.

~Swish~

'Huh, what was that I heard… WAIT! HEARD?' Lucius realized.

It was as if something had flown over him very fast. He tried to see if he could control his eyes and felt that he did have eyes, actual physical eyes. Lucius used all his strength he could gather and opened his eyes.

"A spear…?" Lucius muttered soundlessly.

The moment he had opened his eyes, a saw a spear flying over his head. It was as if the spear was moving at a very slow speed, but Lucius could tell that it was merely an illusion due to his sense working extremely fast.

~Drip~

As the spear passed over his head, he could see something dropping from its blade. It was crimson red in color and dripped onto his forehead and his mouth, which he had unconsciously opened. He closed his eyes after that as he felt it as hard as lifting a mountain to keep them open.

But when his vision darkened, another one of his senses returned. He felt the warm and iron like taste of the blood on his tongue. It was the blood that had dropped into his mouth.

Because of this incident though, he realized that only a couple of his senses could work at the same time. His sense touch was active all the time and along with that, he could use one other sense. At first, he used his vision and then his sense of taste.

'Seems like I need to choose one to use. Vision seems too hard and taste is useless. That leaves me smell and hearing.' Lucius thought.

Even his thinking seemed to have gotten much slower than before when he was just a soul. It was as if he was wading through thick mud and his thoughts would be weighed down by them. Lucius was now starting to miss the instantaneous thoughts he had as a soul.

He first tried to use a sense which seemed to be the easier one to use, his sense of smell. It took him a couple of attempts before he was successfully able to activate it.

'Sulfur? No… gunpowder. Blood… that's definitely blood. Smoke from burning wood? No, it's mixed with something… something more pungent. And what's this… barbecued meat?' Lucius tried to identify the mixture of smells that were currently roiling in his nose.

It seemed to be a tough challenge for his mind to separate them into individual scents and identify them, but eventually, he was able to do it. There was smoke from burning gunpowder and wood. A blood scent that came from corpses and an aroma that could only be described as barbecued meat.

Combining these different smells, Lucius figured out that the place that he was currently in was quite possibly a battlefield. And seeing the strong smell of gunpowder, he could tell that it was an old and obsolete formula.

'Let's try the sense of hearing now, shall we.' Lucius thought to himself, manually directing his thoughts in the right direction.