Ding, unsuccessful purchase, you do not have enough points.

Avery was rudely awakened from his blissful daydream by the system's loud notification.

Confused as to why he would suddenly be lacking points, especially with the incredible number of high level runes he had drawn for his ascension. He opened the system to check what was happening, and immediately found the issue.

He had been automatically buying time warps at a consistent rate, as he had been doing for years. He was so used to doing it that he no longer needed to think about it, and would trust his instincts to keep him alive even when falling into enlightenment for a very long period of time.

The problem was that he was no longer a mortal, but had officially become an immortal, and as the cost of time warps were calculated according to his cultivation level, they had gotten absurdly expensive. To be precise, they now cost more than five hundred trillion points each. Obviously, his savings ran out rather quickly.

He supposed he just had to thank his lucky star that time warps were extremely ineffective against the Tao’s power, and he had not been able to buy enough of them to rewind back to before his ascension.

Since he was scrolling the menu, he decided to check the purchase logs, and calculate how long it had taken for him to become immortal.

He glanced at the numbers with a nonchalant attitude, emblematic of his self satisfied mood as a new celestial being, but that facade dropped as soon as the result of his mental arithmetic came out.

He was nearing his eighth thousandth birthday. He had not wandered the abyss for a few decades, not a few centuries, but a few millenniums. Somehow, years had turned into decades, and decades into centuries, and he had been alone for thousands of years.

If he remembered correctly, human civilization on earth was only about 6000 years old. How was it even remotely possible for him to be older than that? It had taken the Sil’piceus civilization less than two thousands years to approach Godhood, and he had take four time as long to become immortal, even when being able to enter enlightenment traces at will. Was he really so unsuited for cultivation?

Ultimately, his old age mattered little. The past was the past, and he had a bright future ahead of him. Why cry about bygone pain when an eternity of happiness was at hand?

Determined not to let small things like the inexorable march of time ruin the celebration of his ascension, Avery decided it was time to leave this godforsaken place behind. With a single flap of his newly acquired symbolic wings, he took off to the skies, to infinity and beyond.

As he rose to the heavens, he got his first good view of his prison, and the enormity of his situation fully sunk in.

His initial theory had been correct, and he had been living in between the scales of a gargantuan creature, but it seemed he had grossly underestimated the size of the beast.

Even with the help of propulsion runes, it still took Avery multiple days of top speed flight through this silent purgatory to gain enough elevation to be able to see the creature in its entirety.

It was a giant black dragon, its serpentine body curled up upon itself, hiding most of its massive form. Lacking precise measurement, Avery could only claim the guess it was probably bigger than the entire solar-system.

It was hard to imagine how much power that massive body must hold, but it was clear it was unable to use any of it. Just like Avery had been held captive by its presence, so too was the dragon a prisoner, tied down by an uncountable number of chains made out of black and red fire.

The great beast's jailer was an illusory black lotus, sitting upon its head as a crown, its thirty six petals digging into the majestic dragon's flesh, pinning him to the ground.

Avery felt an uncontrollable urge to fly to the black lotus, to investigate what it was, but he restrained himself. It was clear that even as an immortal, he was far from qualified to remain in this area. This dragon’s den was simply too terrifying, and it was not something a new celestial being could explore. Even now, he still had no idea where the omnidirectional ambient light came from, nor could he explain any of what was happening here.

Turning away, Avery set forth on a journey to rejoin civilization. He had no idea where he was, nor where he should go, but using his old powers as a seer, he was able to see his karmic entanglements and use them as a compass.

He had interacted with very few people in this world, so he had only three causal relationships deep enough to provide a direction. He could not tell to whom they belonged, but one of them was pointing directly downwards, towards the black dragon.

Their relationship was very profound, but the most vexing thing was while their karma and merits mostly cancel out, the Heavens ultimately deemed him to be in karmic debt towards the beast. While it was true that the dragon power had been trying to kill him for millennia, Avery had used its body as the earth he stood upon, and the paper he inscribed upon.

He was unable to determine the nature of his two other causal relationships, and comparing them to the one he had with the dragon was like comparing the thickness of a hair to a towering tree, but they would still be enough to guide him. Since they both pointed to roughly the same direction, leading him far away beyond the horizon, he just chose the deepest one and followed it.

The flight to freedom was slow, and more than a week passed without anything happening, but he did not mind that. Flying did not cost him much, allowing him to continue his exploration of the Tao while on the move.

It was a month later that Avery stopped dead in the air, inches away from a translucent membrane that covered the sky. It was only now that he realized that the “dragons den” he had lived in for thousands of years was not a giant cavern, or a magical house, but a small world. He had left the prehistoric world a long time ago, and now it was finally time to come back.

Walking slightly forward was all it took, and Avery effortlessly crossed the dragon den's world border.

Finally, he was free.

END OF VOLUME TWO