"Where did the space stones go? They were in a cylinder. Did I drop it? I must've dropped it when that man killed me twice," Ning thought. He had been so in the moment with his fight against the man with horns and furry arms that he didn't even realize that he wasn't holding onto the cylinder full of space stones.
'Dammit, that's my one way back,' Ning thought. 'I need to go find it.'
However, Ning didn't immediately teleport back. He was still afraid of getting attacked by the man there, so he teleported over to his metal bead and only then teleported back.
He arrived on the battlefield again and looked around. The war continued to rage, but Ning ignored it. He only wanted to find his space stones.
"Where is it?" he asked the system just before he found it himself. A woman had found the cylinder and looked at it with evident greed in her eyes.
Ning slowly flew close to her to grab the cylinder himself when he heard her say something that surprised him quite a bit.
"Hehe! So many space stones. I'm going to be rich."
Ning paused. 'Wait, they know about space stones? So this world has space stones?' he wondered.
The woman who got it immediately flew away before Ning could do anything, but he didn't feel like he needed to do anything.
'System, does this world have Space stones?' he asked.
<Yes.>
Ning smiled. 'So I don't need to get that back, right?' he thought. 'No I should take it away just in case I can't find anything.'
Ning teleported himself inside the cylinder full of space stones. The woman noticed the change immediately, but before she could do anything, Ning teleported away with the entire cylinder, arriving back in the desert he had been to just before.
He got back into his body and looked at the cylinder. Fortunately, he hadn't lost any space stones.
"Alright, that's good," Ning thought and finally looked at his surrounding. He was currently next to a giant rock-filled region of a desert with the solid ground around him. He looked around and didn't find anything worth noticing.
Finally, he called out Saphandra.
"Are we here?" she asked excitedly.
"This time, yes," Ning said.
"How long have we been here?" she asked.
"Uh… 5 minutes maybe," Ning said. "I died twice though, and nearly lost the space stone, so it was a long 5 minutes."
"Oh, what happened?" she asked.
Ning explained the situation which Saphandra listened to curiously. "Qi huh? I remember fighting a few people who used that energy," she said. "They were one of the annoying ones to deal with, but fortunately that lion was there to take care of it all."
"Anyway, I need to learn more about this world," Ning said. "System, give me the information I need."
<Understood>
Ning was immediately parted with knowledge of the current world he was in, and he couldn't help but be shocked as a result.
"What the hell?" he thought.
"What? What's wrong?" Saphandra asked.
Ning explained to her the situation of this universe and she too was surprised.
This universe had a single sun, a massive one, and nothing else that was a source of light. There was also a moon far away, equally enormous, that could be called a planet by itself based on its size.
However, the people in this universe saw it as the 'moon' as it reflected light at the night, so it had become a moon.
Aside from there, quite a few different individual worlds with humans in here, and none of the world was actually a planet.
They were just planet-sized, or even larger pieces of land, but they weren't round. They were instead just randomly shaped rocks, and only the flat side of the rock had an atmosphere with people living on it.
And they all revolved around the same single sun.
Ning had never seen something like this. 'Maybe that's just how this universe functions?' he thought.
He also learned about the war that was happening concurrently around the many different lands, and he found the root cause to be simply racism.
"Well, I don't have to worry about that. It's not my problem," Ning thought.
The world he was staying in was one without any humans at all. It was a world that was filled with beasts of all kinds.
They were ferocious beasts without minds and fought each other for the resources to keep themselves alive. The resources were always the other beasts.
Since ancient times, the beasts here had survived by killing each other and then eating them.
'No Qi, huh?' Ning thought. He desperately wanted to start his cultivation journey once again since his body actually wasn't that strong in this world apparently.
'Well, it's not like I have no way to improve it quickly,' he thought. He looked up at the sun and remembered the 500 thousand years he had to spend in this universe.
Aside from that, with the presence of Qi, he had many cultivation techniques he could use to strengthen his body itself.
"I will have to hide this then," he thought and found a place where he could stash his space stones. There was space stone in this world, so he might not actually need them, but he did keep it just in case.
The woman did make it sound like the Space stones were rare stuff.
After stashing them, Ning let Saphandra back into her spirit space and flew up to the sky, going towards the sun.
As he flew, he realized just how far the sun of this world actually was. It was billions of kilometers away and the only reason why the sunlight and heat even reached the other lands was because of its massive size which was easily hundreds of thousands of times the size of an average star in the other world.
Once Ning reached there, he started taking in the radiation from the sun, slowly improving his body even more than before.
He planned on doing it until he was stronger than the man that had killed him twice.
