In the frozen world, all the merfolks had stopped moving. From Elena's point of view, it looked as if the time had suddenly stopped flowing. In than frozen dimension, suddenly a figure of an old man appeared before Elena. He was wearing a worn out armour and had very exaggerated muscles. But from the vast amount of mana that this person was passively releasing, Elena judged that he was actually primarily a mage and not a warrior.

Escora had told Elena a little bit about all the elders of the giant race. So Elena was able to recognise him almost immediately. He was one of the senior elder and his name was Brant. Seeing him, Elena gave her a little teasing smile and respectfully greeted him.

Brant held his head and said -

"Miss Elena, you've passed my part of the trial with flying colours. So please take the ring or you will fail this trial. Please do not tease us old men like this again, it is not good for our health."

Hearing his complaints, Elena smiled again and said -

"I apologise for the trouble I have cost. But the main reason why I pulled this prank was because I want to ask elder Brant a question. From what I have witnessed so far, I have the feeling that the story of this city was very much rooted in reality. So I want to ask elder if my assumption is right or wrong ?"

Hearing Elena's question, the expression of the elder became a bit sad. Then after a large sigh he told Elena that this story and world that he had created in the dream realm was based on a real life experience that he had in the Valhalla.

The city of the merfolk was a real thing and the city lord was also a real person who was actually a good friend of his. This story had a positive and good ending in this dream but in the real life, that was not the case.

Brant had failed to detect this horrifying worm with his skills of that time and had not managed to save his good friend's daughter's life. When the worm had completely taken over her soul, only then he was able to find the anomaly. But by then, it was already too late.

Later on, he had to kill that little niece of his with his own hand to get rid of that worm. If not then in just a few years, that worm would have started laying egg and more people would have been harmed by it.

Brant had always considered himself an expert when it came to soul related task. But this incident had shown him that he was nothing special in this field. This was a thorn in his heart and even after thousands of years, he still had not managed to forget it. So in most of his trials, he would put the participants in his own position so that they could accomplish what he could not. He wanted to make sure, the person who was going to the Valhalla was good enough to not make the same mistake as him with their inflated confidence and ego.

After learning everything, Elena bowed to him and thanked him for sharing this with her. Brant told her that it was fine and that he also felt relieved to be able to discuss this matter with someone. Then he turned back the time in the dream realm and the city lord asked Elena what she wanted from the treasury again.

This time Elena did not played any more pranks and asked the city lord for the silver ring with the indigo gem. That was how she got the fourth ring in the trail. Now she needed to find only three more.

...

After leaving the underwater city of the merfolks, Elena continued travelling by walking on the surface of the sea. After some time, an island appeared before her. Seeing the island, Elena became extremely delighted. The reason for that was the extremely breathtaking beauty of this place.

The sky of the island was covered in pitch black thunder clouds. Bolts of purple lighting could be seen flashing every now and then. As for the island itself, it was covered in purple coloured rocks mixed with the regular black ones. Those purple rocks had absorbed the lightning element present all over the island and had mutated. That was not all. This island was also filed with trees that looked like cherry trees and were in full bloom. All of this combined created a breathtaking beauty that Elena thoroughly enjoyed.

She stepped foot on the island from one of the remote sides. There were no guards to stop her or to ask her questions. She could see a few guards petroling the sea but as their detection range was limited, Elena had no trouble avoiding them.

After stepping foot on the island, she started to explore it. There was a large mountain at the middle of the island and there were various houses built on the slopes of the mountain. This looked very dangerous as with so many lightning bolts hitting the mountain again and again, there was a high possibility of a mountain collapse happening. But it looked like most of the houses were quite old, so that had not happened for a long time for some reason.

There were some houses at the bottom of the mountain too but the number of houses here was very limited. For some reason, most of the houses were built at the dangerous slope and not on the safer plains. Elena was interested to know the reason behind this.

She had already seen that the people living in this island looked similar to humans but they were completely different from one. Elena was not aware of the exact name of their race but even with her limited skills, she could judged that they were all closer to beings like a lightning half spirit.

Elena soon found some regular person and introduced herself as a human. It looked like this island was very used to outsiders as a port city so she had no problems getting close to the people of this city.

From them Elena learnt that the people living here were from the Lightning Phantom Demon race. This was a special race that had an unique racial ability that allowed them to not only have high affinity for the lightning element but also to have powers to create powerful illusions from that lightning. This was actually one of the strongest races of the demons but were extremely rare.

That was because, the people of this race could only survive by living close to a thunder calling origin stone. Going outside the range of this stone would immediately make the inherent pink lightning inside their body to go berserk and they would immediately die.

Just like Elena did in the previous underwater city, she asked them if something bad or unusual was happening in the city recently. Hearing that question, the young man who was asked scratched his head a little and told Elena that the only unusual thing that he could think of was the rumours about a fox spirit appearing in some parts of the island. Some people were claiming that that they had seen it but they had no proof and the security of the island had also not managed to find any trace of the existence of any animal or spirit in the island that was not already known.

This matter was able to attract Elena's interest, so she decided to investigate it a little bit. If this was the mission that would allow her the get the next ring, then that would be awesome. But even if that was not the case, Elena would not mind it as long as this was fun for her.

Just like that, Elena started her hunt for the next ring on the island filled with thunder.

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