While Lothur continued his underground adventure, Elke was at this very moment moving toward other areas of the Secret Realm, finally in search of him and Viktoria.
After spending much of the first 30 hours inside the Secret Realm collecting and absorbing resources, this woman had raised her level.
She was currently at level 15 in soul cultivation and level 13 in body cultivation, having achieved a similar power to those stronger people who had entered the Secret Realm the day before.
Having achieved her initial goal in advancing levels, Elke was running around the dangerous Secret Realm, searching for traces of her companions.
She knew how the Secret Realm worked. It sent people to places where their strengths would be similar to the challenges in their paths. But from that place, any of them could go either towards weaker areas to hide or towards stronger ones to look for more significant advances.
She was sure that Viktoria and Lothur were in stronger areas than her own, so she began to travel the path to where the stronger beasts were after her advances.
She had no way to track Lothur and Viktoria within the Secret Realm directly, but by following the path of the stronger ones, she knew she could get close to them.
With that, she was already fighting the native beings of this place on her way, but whenever possible avoiding them.
There were beasts within the Secret Realm that were similar to those in Linn Province, but there were those beings from outside this area that would not be found even in all of Leopoldine.
After all, this place had been created long ago when what would become the empire was a cluster of independent territories.
Supposedly, the powerful remnants of a powerful demon's passage from this world were sealed in this place, but part of the beings there were the ones who kept the seal working.
They would mercilessly kill anyone who approached the sensitive areas where some of the remnants of the Morning Star generals were.
So some of the creatures in this place were quite aggressive, and avoiding them might be one of the best strategies for these youngsters in the Secret Realm.
As someone who knew a little bit about this, Elke was trying to avoid trouble on her way, not lusting after everything that existed in this place, as some more greedy people would do.
'I have to find Lothur and Viktoria soon... Only then can we benefit together!' Elke pondered, feeling many auras filled with darkness in the surroundings, guarding precious things and death.
...
In another part of the Secret Realm...
Viktoria was at this instant running away from a set of spectres after picking up a Gold-grade weapon she had just found near some remains.
After placing that item in her spatial ring, this woman saw half a dozen spectres appear in her surroundings and promptly started running.
She didn't want to deal with these hard-to-fight creatures, so she was doing her best to escape them.
But as she did so, she became increasingly stressed about the situation. 'What's wrong with them? Why do they keep chasing me? Don't spectres have quite limited areas of action? How can they go so far?'
As she wondered, those creatures flew after her, launching mental attacks, intent on knocking Viktoria out and possessing her body.
That was more than she could handle alone, so this brown-haired woman struggled to run through that forested area where many other dangerous creatures were nearby.
In the middle of Viktoria's escape attempt, she suddenly stepped on a spot where she thought there was ground but found herself falling towards the bottom of a hidden hole.
When this happened, she paled at the thought that she had fallen into a death trap, feeling her body falling for several meters.
However, as she screamed from the fright, Viktoria realized that there was no trap, only a hole that led underground in that area.
She then used her techniques to stop her fall, creating an ice spear and then ramming it into the horizontal walls of that hole.
After this quick movement, Viktoria slid down that wall until she reached the bottom of the hole, a different place than one would expect to find when falling down a well.
There was a well-built floor, similar to the sidewalks of Peters City. At the same time, the side walls had torches illuminating the surroundings.
In this place, a large statue stood in one of the corners of this square underground area, from which there were four corridors on each side of this area.
This statue seemed to represent a human, but the sensation it gave was not familiar for humans but for demons.
Seeing this, Viktoria was a little distracted, immediately associating it with Morning Star and its tribe members who lived in the Peters City area in the remote past.
ραпdα- n૦νe|`c,0m But amid her thoughts, she heard a voice. "What a coincidence... You're here too, huh?"
Viktoria turned around and saw a beautiful woman at the same level as her, with long white hair and fair skin. "Larissa! What are you doing here?"
"Tsk! I ask you the same thing! I was walking down one of these corridors... I just didn't expect to find you here."
Viktoria finally looked at the corridors on the opposite side of that demonic statue, noticing the paths of that place.
But in doing so, she finally realized that the spectres from earlier were no longer after her.
"I was running away from a group of spectres when I fell into this hole." She pointed to the hole above the central part of that square area. "Anyway... Do you know what this place is about? There is no record of it in my family."
Those young people who returned from Secret Realms described what they saw and found in such places, helping their families understand what an alternative space like this was like.
Because of this, some families even had maps of the Secret Realm, even though the founder of Peters City and his men had not previously mapped that area.
But due to the small amount of time that the Secret Realm was open and the number of powerful beings in this place, it was quite complicated to compile much information about it.
Many who discovered places like that died or kept information about those areas only for their families. So Viktoria had no idea what that was all about.
"I don't know either," Larissa commented, looking at the statue of that place. "But I do know that other places like this, with demonic statues, are ancient demon dens.
In the old days, the Peters City area was dominated by a powerful demon. So as a headquarters, such an area had all kinds of structures related to the home of these creatures, including underground escape tunnels and secret chambers."
The battle that led to Morning Star's death had not destroyed the grounds of the former demon headquarters. It had ruined the most exposed structures, which had turned into a giant forest after so long. But the underground of this area was almost completely intact!
The founder of Peters City had had no interest in destroying these structures and had simply sealed this entire area within his Secret Realm, preserving these structures from the Morning Star tribe.
Viktoria knew a little about that and looked thoughtfully at her rival. "Larissa, I know we're not friends. But how about we temporarily ally ourselves? We can explore this place together until we get out of here."
"Oh? You would do that with the person who took away your sister's chance to come here?" That white-haired beauty asked.
"Sigh... Maybe that was for the best. With Anna's pregnancy, it was better for her to stay in Peters City.
Anyway, do you want to ally with me or not?"
"Hmm, let's do it once before our history at the academy ends."
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