Whisker’s frantic words of doom scared Alex.

“What’s going on?” he asked, just as frantic. “Is everything alright? Is Pearl okay? Are the others okay?”

Whisker nodded. “Brother Pearl is okay, for now. But the others are in trouble. I don’t know what is happening, but if we don’t do something soon, they’ll slowly die.”

Alex sucked in a deep breath. “Is it urgent? Do they need my help right now?” he asked. He didn’t have a way to help them if that was the case.

“Not right now, but any time now,” Whisker said.

Alex calmed down. “Alright, take a break and explain to me what is happening. Explain everything from the start.”

Whisker took a deep breath and calmed down as he began explaining it all.

His explanation began from the day when Pearl was sent into the Demon realm. From Pearl, Whisker had learned that the Gods had gone against Alex. They could feel Alex’s situation somewhat with the bond between them, but then, even that bond had disappeared.

At that moment, neither Whisker nor Pearl knew whether Alex was alive or not.

The only reason they even believed he was alive was because they could feel themselves connected to him. There was just a sort of block between them.

They waited the first few days, hoping the block would go away, but it didn’t. The more days passed, the more they realized that things weren’t going to change anytime soon.

“We need to do things on our own,” Pearl had said. “I could do absolutely nothing against those Gods. I don’t want to be like that anymore. Whisker, we need to get stronger. We can’t keep being a burden upon Brother anymore.”

Whisker nodded. “I’ll grow stronger.”

Pearl left that day, roaming the space outside of the Demon realm, the vast emptiness that was Alex’s Soul Space. Because the Demon Realm was within a separate space, the light from inside of the space did not spill outside.

As a result, Pearl floated not just in endless emptiness, but also endless darkness.

One’s Soul Space wasn’t so simple as a spherical enclosure either. It was its own weird spatial construct where the space folded in on itself in such a way that one could keep traveling in one direction for all of eternity and they could do so without ever reaching the border of it.

In a way, there was no ‘center’ to a Soul Space. Every point was in the center, which made directions rather difficult without any notable marks.

Pearl only now realized just how terrible it was to be in this space without Alex there to help him navigate. Still, he couldn’t complain.

He had to help Alex.

As days passed by, Pearl understood the folding of space more and more. With the help of his Dao of Space on top of that, he could now reliably tell how far along he had come.

He found pills, artifacts, ingredients, and whatnot along the way. Once he knew he had more than enough, he made his way back to the Demon realm.

By that time, a few months had passed already.

Upon Pearl’s return, Pearl handed many things to Whisker, two of which included the pills he needed to break through into the Immortal Ascendant realm without Alex’s assistance, and the Battle Mimicry Artifact given to Alex by the War God.

The day Pearl returned, however, something happened.

The entire Soul Space shuddered a little before glowing brightly once and then disappearing.

Pearl did not know what had happened, and Whisker had no idea of knowing anything either. Nothing else happened at all after that, good or bad, so Pearl disappeared to go cultivate all by himself.

Below the Timeless Palace, where clone Alex and Emily lived, were the many rooms where time was sped up by a rate of 1 to 30. For every day that passed outside, 30 days passed inside of it.

There was the restriction to it, where the same room couldn’t be used consecutively, but there were enough rooms there that Pearl didn’t have to worry about that.

He simply walked out of the room a month later and walked over to another room.

While Pearl cultivated all on his own, Whisker remained outside, doing his own thing. He had to take care of everything after all, which included taking care of the two plants in the first and sixth mountains of the Demon realm.

Whisker fed it the vast amount of spirit water they had gathered back in the Twin Saber Sect’s ancestral realm, and focused on his own improvements. With the many ingredients, he practiced Alchemy on his own time.

He wanted to train with the battle artifact too, but there was no one around to do so.

The older Alex and Emily weren’t talented enough. He tried with the Saint beasts, but they were too weak to control many individuals at once, so Pearl had to find someone better still.

Alex had been the only one he could think of that was good enough, but thankfully, there was someone else in the Demon realm with some knowledge at controlling many things at the same time.

The Playground spirit was highly talented. While he wasn’t a spirit trained for battle, he was still used to it a little, and as an artifact spirit, he could learn as well.

So, Whisker began training with him.

While Whisker was immediately better against the spirit in terms of general battles, the spirit had more awareness of multiple things at once, which helped him fight with many individuals at once, each with unique sets of powers.

The number they started with was also quite enormous, so Whisker needed time to get used to so many things.

Some more time passed without Alex and time seemed to sprint by. Whisker took care of the Demon realm when he had to, and trained with alchemy or with the Battle Mimicry artifact.

Things were more or less normal for the next 50 years. But things changed when the sky within the Soul Space glowed brightly once again.