“Senior brother, can we at least get off the ground?”

“No, you can’t and if you ask me again, I’m going to deck you in the nose.”

Zhang Dong shook his fist at Huo Qiang who was forced to kneel down on the ground before him. To the left of the muscular man was an older gentleman that was doing the same. His face already had a fist imprint on it that he was rubbing.

“How could you hit your dear and only grandfather?”

“Keep talking like that and I won’t have any grandfathers left.”

“So cruel…”

Zhang Jin moved his face to the side to face Huo Qiang. He covered his mouth to send a message to his partner in crime that Zhang Dong was able to quickly intercept.

‘I think Dong’er is a little mad, let’s give him some time to relax, just follow my lead.’

‘I’ll leave it to you elder.’

“Dong’er it’s…ack.”

“I heard all of that, you two idiots. Instead of trying to fool me, how about you explain how you ended up here? Where are the others? Where are the Golden Palace and the other sect members?”

His fists rained down on their heads before they could try to bullshit their way through all of it. He continued to berate the two until they gave in, their heads began to spin around from the impacts. Zhang Dong's fists were quite heavy, even when he was pulling his punches they went through even the best defenses.

“We… we don’t really know…”

“You don’t know?”

“Yes, we just ended up here and decided to take a little break in our journey.”

“A little break? Wait, how about you go back… what journey?”

Zhang Jin gave out a sigh before finally deciding to give his grandson the whole timetable of what had happened.

“At first the whole palace and all of us together were swallowed by that strange monster fish. We could see you being swallowed by the darkness while the others made it back inside.”

He nodded while listening, this was the start of his own trek through the frozen wasteland. Zhang Jin on the other hand and the others were all transported to another location. It was a stark contrast to the one that he ended up as it was even hotter there than in this tropical environment.

“We ended up in a place mostly filled with lava, only thanks to the Golden Palace’s flight capability were we able to remain unharmed. Liena wanted to form a group to search for you but we couldn’t allow this.”

“Ah yes, if I’m gone the palace will switch to the next in the command line.”

“Yes, and she also is aware of some secrets that I’m not aware of because of a certain Patriarch never disclosing them…”

Zhang Dong could see his grandfather squinting in his direction. This was true as he had shown Liena all the secret rooms and granted access to the hidden command station only he had access to. Zhang Jin would be able to command the ship but some functions would be unavailable to him. Liena would actually be able to activate the teleportation feature back outside, that is if something here wasn’t blocking it.

It was possible that it was due to them being inside of a living being and not at a location. It was constantly moving throughout the highly pressured waters. It was also filled with pocket dimensions, maybe even the system had trouble locking onto the coordinates in a situation like this.

“Maybe if a certain old man could be trusted to not engage in lewd acts with the enemy, then he would have told him everything… but that’s not important now, what happened next? So you arrived at a lava location and then?”

Zhang Jin put his head down in shame after hearing Zhang Dong’s rebuttal. He at least was sure that his wife wouldn’t have fallen into a strange trap like this. Perhaps they were sure that the aphrodisiacs wouldn’t affect them but the danger wasn’t zero. If his grandfather was given all the secrets and then controlled then it would be quite a problem for everyone. Without him around his Golden Palace could have been turned into a grand weapon against his own people.

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“Yes, the golden palace should still be at that location at least it still was when we activated the trap…”

“A trap?”

“We decided to form a search party to look for you Dong’er, Huo Qiang here who is well versed in the Dao of fire was the perfect choice for it.”

“Yeah, but why did they let you go outside too?”

It made sense for Huo Qiang to go outside, his Ifrit Soul Beast was capable of controlling flames and so was its master. Moving through a lava-filled environment with people from the Huo clan side of the sect was a good idea.

“We couldn’t let the Huo clan go alone, we needed to send a force capable of contending with many other issues.”

“That makes sense… so why did they let you come with them?”

“What is that supposed to mean? I am one of the most experienced experts in the entire sect!”

“I guess you are…I keep forgetting each time you pull a stunt like this…”

Perhaps Zhang Dong was a little biased against his grandfather who seemed to only think with his lower half. He was still a nascent soul master with over two hundred years of experience. There were a lot of things that he knew and was a capable general of his own accord. Having him along in the search party wasn’t a bad choice.

He was the Patriarch that towered over everyone from his own sect. His perception of them was a bit more realistic so he forgot that others were considered masters. In the eyes of his sect members, a person like Zhang Jin was not a useless pervert but a legendary figure. Huo Qiang wasn’t a brainless musclebound idiot but an honorable warrior at the forefront of the empire. Some even considered him to be in the top ten of the strongest people in the whole empire.

There was a moment when he started feeling that he was perhaps too harsh on the two yet after seeing Huo Qiang dozing off during Zhang Jin’s tale, he went back to his old preconceived notions of these two. Finally, he started getting to the important part where they were transported to this place.

“So you were fighting some volcanic creatures and activated some type of teleportation formation which split you all up into smaller groups?”

“That’s correct, it hasn’t been that long since we arrived here so we decided to take a little break before moving along…”

“By little break you mean?”

“Yes…”

“Hm…”

The story was over and he could kind of fill in the blanks by himself. After getting here and encountering the natives they forgot about their mission. It was more likely that all of the two were actually affected by the alluring forms of the mermaids to some extent. Perhaps if there was someone like Zhang Zhi with them the story would have ended up differently.

“But you’re fine so now we just need to find the way back to the palace! Or perhaps you could create a teleportation formation to send us back!”

“I can’t do that, these pocket dimensions are strange, I can’t pinpoint the location of the Golden Palace but we could try finding some of the people that came together with your group but remember not to fly too high up…”

“We shouldn’t fly?”

Zhang Dong nodded and after giving a smack to the back of Qiang’s head he explained everything that happened to him. Soon the group of three nascent soul masters was going through the deserted encampment that looked like a resort. Without the mermaids being here to look over their shoulders they were free to investigate the place in peace.

“So it’s possible for those lovely creatures to turn into ugly monstrosities?”

“Yes, there might be some type of trigger that changes the environment and it would be better if we first found the others, have you been able to detect them?’

“No… I wasn’t able to sense any of the juniors that came with us, nor the other masters, perhaps they have been transported to another of these ‘pocket dimensions’ you speak of Dong’er.”

“That could be the case but I hope it’s not.”

It took him multiple days to just get past the first frozen area. If there were multiple pocket dimensions inside this anglerfish then it would be a difficult task to go through them. Even for masters like them, it was disorienting. Normally they had Zhang Dong and his system to ask for help but it was being blocked.

The current function that was somewhat helpful was that he could still map out the entire place and this included the underground tunnels that these mermaids went through. However, this wasn’t all. After getting back with this two some of the old faction-based perks were back to working but to a limited degree.

“I and the elder have been here for two days but we were unable to discover any of our brothers even after arriving at this place.”

Huo Qiang was finally allowed to get up as the three needed to think about a new plan. The quickest but the most dangerous way of escaping would be to split up. Thankfully, his system was now picking up these two back on his faction screen. It seemed that if they were this close that it could recalibrate their positions again.

‘Bob, does this mean that there are no other of my faction members here or that I need to get closer to them for them to be registered in the faction window?’

‘There are several unknown errors plaguing the system, an answer can not be given.’

‘I see…’

It was possible that he only needed to be in the same pocket dimension as his faction members for it to work. Yet considering that he wasn’t able to see Huo Qiang and Zhang Jin there before he got closer then it was possible that more people were somewhere here. Normally he would be against splitting up but this was not a good time to take things slowly. They needed to get back to their main force and either escape the belly of this beast or find a way to conquer it.

“Fine then, I’ll head into those tunnels and you two examine the surroundings from outside, we will meet back at this location in two days…”

The three masters nodded at each other and now that they could communicate via Zhang Dong’s system the danger was lowered. All of them jumped in different directions and resumed their search for their lost sect brothers and sisters.