Chapter 318 315: Val’s conclusion

Marshall stood silently in front of the expedition party as he took in the scene of newcomers crowding the station.

‘There’s too many people at the station. Someone might take ill advantage of it to sneak inside the lower city.’

This thought crossed his mind after careful consideration.

If an average citizen of the kingdom were to sneak inside the lower city, it would not take long to find and deport them, but a normal person wouldn’t do something like this, to begin with.

Only a person or devil disguised as a person would have to reason to sneak inside.

Marshall had no intention of letting a devil with a tangible body sneak inside the lower city under his watch.

The potential danger it poses shouldn’t be ignored. After all, these types of devils were typically at or above the intermediate grade. They were really, ridiculously strong. A prime example of this would be Morthos.

Besides, the station was not designed to accommodate such a large gathering of people, and the situation needed to be handled swiftly.

“Take them inside.”

Subtly, he gave Ilyan a signal, a small nod that conveyed a world of meaning.

Ilyan, quick to catch on, returned the nod and took charge.

He began to lead the crowd inside the frontier, his actions calm and controlled, ensuring a smooth transition from the chaotic station to the orderly interior of the lower city.

One by one, the members of the expedition party returned home.

Val absentmindedly followed the group. Although his footsteps were in sync with theirs, his mind was far away.

Thousands of thoughts were swirling in his head. He was trying to unravel the unexpected and significant disparity between the time in the now-closed lesser dimension and the main world.

Just what caused it?

As he tried to make sense of it, he went over all the odd and extraordinary events that had transpired in the previous few days. The now-closed lesser dimension was an anomaly, a deadly and treacherous place that belied its classification. It was a domain where low-level bloodline users stood no chance on their own, and even a small group of such supernatural beings would be decimated.

Speaking from his personal experience, that’s just how dangerous it was.

There was also proof.

Many had ventured into the lesser dimension, but only a pitiful few had managed to return alive. The majority of the expedition met their demise within the mere three days it took Val to close the dimension from the inside.

What did this signify? It was a clear indication that the lesser dimension, despite its recent formation, was on the brink of evolving.

As he came to this point, Val’s instincts screamed at him, telling him that he had narrowly averted a catastrophe. If he had not acted in time, the dimension would have transformed into a higher dimension, bringing untold calamity.

Actually, Val was incredibly close to the truth, more than he realized.

In actuality, the dimension master had been planning ever since it was a dungeon boss. It had collected a vast amount of resources and information before it allowed the dungeon to evolve into a lesser dimension. It used the resources to quickly increase its strength to the peak of the intermediate level. And then it waited. It knew that the core of corruption grew by eating the world itself. And as it eats the world and its will, it would gain the energy to birth new monsters, expand its domain, and also give birth to heaven and earth treasure.

The very first such treasure would be enough to elevate it to the advanced-level.

Now the strength of the dimension master didn’t affect the dimension in any way beneficial for humans. Rather, it was the opposite. The stronger the dimension master, the stronger the lesser dimension. While the size and age of the dimension dictated its rank, the strength of the dimension master determined its true power within that rank!

In a lesser dimension, accessible only to low-level bloodline users and mid-rank wizards, an advanced-level dimension master was an insurmountable guardian. The gap between advanced-level beings and everyone below was vast and unbridgeable. Low-level bloodline users could band together to overcome intermediate-level adversaries, but advanced-level beings were in a league of their own. They experienced a qualitative change, whereas the lower levels underwent quantitative changes. A single punch from an advanced-level warrior could carry the force of a hundred, maybe even a thousand, lower-level bloodline users, obliterating anything in its path.

The dimension master was seeking to achieve the strongest level so that its dimension would become impossible to destroy.

That way, its dimension would grow and become a high-level dimension!

However, when the treasure appeared, Val came and killed it. Its army of Ashtines succeeded in retrieving the treasure for it, but it was no longer alive to enjoy it.

Its master plan was foiled and Val saved the world from having another higher dimension.

Val was extremely intelligent, but in the end, he was a human, not an omniscient all-knowing god.

He could not see the complete picture or grasp the full extent of what had transpired.

However, he did understand that the lesser dimension was on the verge of evolution, and had he and his allies not intervened within those crucial three days, it would have succeeded and they would have been doomed.

And this fact provided the answer to his initial question.

The time disparity of Higher dimension was uncategorized. There weren’t many higher dimensions. And out of the few that appeared, only one has been closed. And it was said the expedition lasted for 200 years in Eldrich, but for the expedition party that was inside the dungeon, only a few decades had gone by. By the time, they returned, their friends and families were already dead. Some of them lost the will to live and committed suicide. Those who preserved struggled at first but eventually settled into society.

‘In essence, the time disparity in a dimension on the cusp of evolving into a higher dimension, or in a higher dimension itself, is significantly greater than that in an Eldritch dimension. There is no other way to experience what we experienced. I should share this information with the spirit of the Arcane Library. When it’s confirmed in the future, I will be the first to benefit,’ Val thought.