A year passed by….
There was a place in the outskirts of black and red smoke , here the smoke was thinner and one could see what was before them vaguely.
On these outskirts there was a big boulder and a stone golem was standing before it with a broken armor.
The armor was chipped in many places, the spikes on it have been disfigured and squashed in.
There was a big claw mark making five deep cuts, that has almost cut the upper part of the armor into two.
The golem was holding on to a big black blade, whose sharp edge had many chips and cracks .
After experiencing what he had experienced in the last few months, he thought he would never make it out of that hell.
But with firm determination and lots of luck, he somehow made it out to this place.
This was the last place marked in the path shown by the map.
He looked around this boulder a few times and didn't find anything.
But he knew better than to trust his five senses or spiritual sense.
He had experienced too many painful events and close shaves with death, for trusting only his senses .
" The map clearly shows a circle around here and this boulder is the only thing around here.
I have even climbed up the boulder and there is nothing.
this doesn't seem to be an illusion and if it is, then it must be at the level of the defense mechanism of five element mountains.
Should I attack and see... no, It might attack back...
Maybe there is something that is needed to activate it... the scroll "
He took out the golden scroll with black substance covering it and all of a sudden as if reacting to the scroll the boulder started emitting blue colored light.
Blue colored symbols started appearing on the boulder and the boulder itself disappeared to be replaced by a platform with a circle and many symbols and writing on it.
There were 30 sockets inside the circle spread across different places.
" This is probably a teleportation array or something and the sockets are for the crystals to activate it.... I should activate it only as a last resort.
After traveling all this way I can feel the black and red smoke decreasing , sooner it might completely disappear and I would be out."
After examining the platform for some more time he left .
As he walked a certain distance from the platform the boulder reappeared in its place like an illusion.
He kept moving in the direction where the black and red smoke were thinner, but left certain marks on the way in case he had to retrace .
After travelling for a while finally he got out of the smoke.
When he first saw the outside world and the warm sunlight .
He could not hold himself back, he opened the golem suit and came out to kneel down and shed some tears of joy.
It was a big wild forest before him, but he didn't care.
After enjoying this feeling for some more time he came back to himself .
" I am finally out ,but I should not let my guard down ...."
He got into the golem suit and started exploring further.
After a while he had found a weird phenomena in the outskirts of the red and black smoke.
There were many animals migrating to this place...
Most of these monsters didn't care about Sam, unless he took the initiative to attack .
Sam also found that almost all of these animals were emitting a certain aura which he didn't recognize and almost all of them looked tired.
There was no vigor of a beast in their eyes.
....
The trees in the forest were humongous, it was almost dark inside these forests .
Soon he found more enemies, these were big lizard-like creatures that lived on these big trees.
The difficult thing about fighting them was their healing abilities .
He cut down the first lizard that jumped down on him into two.
But when he looked back he found that the upper body moved towards the lower body and joined together with it as if nothing happened.
He could not fully see the process as another lizard had already jumped at him, this time he cut it from the neck sending the head flying .
The result was satisfying as the lizard stayed dead, he went close to the head trying to find the core.
What he got was a white core but this one was much smaller in size compared to the cores of animals in the black and red smoke.
As he was thinking he heard a loud scream, he turned back to see the other lizard making weird sounds.
he had a bad premonition about this, so he moved fast and cut another head down.
But as he collected the core and was going to move , he heard rumbling coming from the side and as he looked to the place.
The sight he saw made him dumbstruck, hundreds of lizards were coming towards him like a beast horde and there were not only brown lizards like the one he killed, but bigger white lizards.