Chapter 148 (2/2)

It didn’t take long for Rachel to arrive at the area she had been imprisoned in, but when she got there, a frown appeared on her face. Jade was gone, and there wasn’t a single trace of her. It was as if the false immortal had never existed in the first place. A dark expression appeared on Rachel’s face. She hadn’t expected her target to run so fast. With her arrogant attitude, it would’ve made sense for Jade to stay underneath the waterfall for the next four years until the Snow Fire Lightning Fruit ripened. Rachel’s eyes narrowed. Luckily, she knew the empire’s false immortal’s goal. Even if Jade escaped now, as long as Rachel showed up at the fruit’s location, she’d definitely get her revenge. In the meantime, she’d focus on finding the fruit’s location and getting even stronger. The gap between the two false immortals’ strength was huge, but that didn’t mean she shouldn’t attempt to close it.

***

Azalea walked into Grandpa Vremya’s room, expecting him to still be inside his cauldron. He had been inside of it every day for the past year. However, today, the giant metal cauldron was nowhere to be found, and Grandpa Vremya was sitting at his desk, stacks upon stacks of paper laid out in front of him. A pen was floating in front of him, scribbling down a dense forest of ink atop the page closest to Grandpa Vremya’s leg. Not wanting to disturb him, Azalea kept her mouth shut; however, she couldn’t do anything about her curiosity. She approached Grandpa Vremya from the side and took a peek at the pages; they were filled to the brim with mathematical symbols. There were so many symbols that it almost looked like writing rather than math formulas. It pained her to admit it, but other than the few numbers that would crop up here and there, Azalea had no idea what anything on the pages meant.

“What are you doing?”

“I finished honing my body,” Grandpa Vremya said. “Now, I’m preparing myself for the tribulation of the mind.”

“Does this help?” Azalea asked, raising an eyebrow. “Who am I kidding? Of course, it does. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be doing it.”

“Exactly,” Grandpa Vremya said. “I explained it to you earlier this year. The body needs to be strong enough to withstand a dimensional distortion, and the mind needs to be sharp enough to adapt to the logic of a higher realm. Luckily, mathematics exists. Even though we’re in a lower dimension, with mathematics, we can accurately explore higher dimensions.” He gestured towards the stack of papers on the desk. “This here represents how my heart would beat in the eight thousand eight hundred eighty-eighth dimension.”

Azalea frowned. “Do I have to learn this to pass the tribulation of the mind?”

“No,” Grandpa Vremya said. “But it’ll help. If you can master the math behind it, the tribulation of the mind will be easy to pass. If not, you aren’t guaranteed to fail, but you’ll certainly suffer during the process.”

Azalea placed an interspatial ring down onto the desk, the reason she had entered the room in the first place. The ring was filled to the brim with titan flesh. As soon as the ring hit the table, four feathery and scaled heads popped out from underneath the desk. “Dinner?”

“Dinner,” Azalea said, nodding at the phoegons. She glanced once more at the stack of papers before shaking her head. Math wasn’t one of her strong suits, and her tribulation of the mind was so far away. Why should she worry about it at all?