"Alright old man, I'm sure you have a bird's eye view of the Epistemic Tower Inner World, right?"

The old man snorted, 'I already allowed you to cheat by not removing the fog barrier, are you trying to get me to help you cheat again?'

"Exactly." Dyon responded without hesitation. How could a mere fog barrier be the equivalent of his life? If he wasn't strong enough, he would have died to that clone!

'I'm truly limited in helping you here. At most, I can let you know the locations of people. If I told you about treasures and the like, it would be more than bending the rules, it would be breaking them, so I'd get punished.'

"Fine, fine. That's all I wanted anyway. Are my wives in the tower currently?"

Dyon was currently walking up a winding set of stairs that seemed completely out of place in this tower. Why wouldn't this place have teleportation arrays from floor to floor? How ridiculous.

'Madeleine and Clara are within their respective universes still, but Alexandria is in the tower, although she's behind the fog barrier put up for the Kitsune-Shruti universe considering Saru hasn't completed her trials yet.'

Dyon almost pouted hearing this, but then he remembered that the old man could communicate with him, so why not communicate with RI?

'I've already promised to tell Alexandria when you came out. She's on her way already. Considering she's currently an Empress, she can easily let you in and out of the fog barrier at her leisure since you only need to be a Duke to do so.'

Dyon smiled lightly, "That's good. What about Saru? Which trial is she in now?"

'She's currently in the third, going through the 11th wave right now. She'll still need quite a few more years to finish completely.'

"I see Let me know when she comes out, I have to thank her."

'Do I look like your errand boy?!'

Dyon only laughed, not responding as he sprung out of a door of light.

...

Dyon looked around, standing on what looked like a teleportation formation, with an appalled look on his face.

In every direction, for hundreds of miles, there stood ruins of various buildings and pavilions. Martial World level weeds that could only be described as what a vegetation python would look like, wrapped around everything. It was as though he had stepped into some odd video game world that made certain to hit all the stereotypes of an abandoned city.

"Old man, what the hell is this? Are you trying to cheat me again?" Dyon had been partially excited just to see what he'd have to work with in his quadrant's corner. After all, the prosperity of a quadrant and its universes was usually reflected in its Corner. As the former number one quadrant, although Dyon didn't expect too much, he at least expected something better than this.

Although the Corner seemed like an insignificant hub, merely used to teleport various individuals to and from a particular quadrant, Dyon had already grasped its importance. If it wasn't important, what would be the point of the fog protection? There was a reason the barrier appeared whenever it was time for a Corner or quadrant to choose its new key wielder. If this was just any old place, what would it need protection for?

But, looking at this place now, it looked even worse than the Celestial Deer Sect ruins in Dyon's spatial ring. To put that into perspective, an entire war was fought in Celestial Deer Sect territory! So, what the hell happened here? It can't be that it was just neglect. Right?

'There's no mistake, this is indeed the Celestial Deer Corner. The ranking of a quadrant decides the amount of protection the inner world gives to it. Since you dropped to the 100th spot for so long, you obviously lost that protection and the various types of bad energy began to permeate the air here. Such energy is quite delicious to those Serpent Vines you see wiggling around here.

'You're quite lucky. Because you Demon Generals passed through here already, the Serpent Vines are much more docile now. Be thankful.'

"Is this some sort of joke? I don't know what rankings we have now, but I'm sure it's much higher than 100 by now."

'True. You're about 51st right now. But, that level isn't enough to undo thousands of years of damage so quickly. After growing so large, these Serpent Vines have grown quite immune to purity forms of energy. Some of the stronger ones have even learned to cultivate with it. You've got a lot of cleaning to do.' The chuckle of the old man grated Dyon's ear drums, as though he was trying to make sure Dyon knew he wouldn't be helping at all.

"You're such an old codger. You actually wanted to lower the barrier while our base was in this state? Were you trying to see us get overrun?"

'It would have been much more entertaining that way, yes.'

Dyon sighed, bursting with speed as he did his best to nimbly avoid the vines that were constantly trying to strangle him. Luckily, the vines didn't seem to be of the same mind, and thus couldn't work together. If they could, Dyon would be screwed.

Serpent Vines, especially ones that have had so long to grow like these ones, have the ability to grow to the peak levels of cultivation, something rare for sentient plants. At the moment, even the lowest level vine here had already cultivated to the peak essence gathering levels, while there were quite a few at the saint level. It would truly be too troublesome to deal with them all.

The worst part was that the inner world of the Epistemic Tower was massive. Unlike the planets in the real world, or Dyon's artificially enlarged home planet, this inner world wasn't met by the constraints of physics. This meant that each floor was, easily, millions of miles across.

Much of that space was taken up by the secrets in the central areas of the inner world, but another significant portion was made up of just the 100 individual Corners.

Essentially, this meant that for Dyon to clear his Corner entirely, he had to deal with about millions of square feet of area. Just thinking about it was giving him a headache.

In terms of man power, aside from himself, he had barely 4000 people. About a 1000 from the Daiyu, 3000 from his Demon Generals, then there were his friends and wives. Dealing with this with just this number of people, while other Corners had access to millions, sounded like nothing more than a fool's dream.

At the moment, the old man was dying of laughter. 'Maybe I should tell him that you can teleport around the Corners with ease. You don't have to run to the barrier, idiot.'

But, he let Dyon struggle from a few more dozen minutes before he let him know. Of course, that let to a round of curses by Dyon, which only made the old man laugh more.

Dyon was more angry because he felt like he should have known that. With such a large inner world, yet people interact so easily, of course there were teleportation formations everywhere. In fact, they were so protected that the Serpent Vines didn't dare touch them either.

Also, as the key wielder, Dyon could control who could and couldn't use these formations as well. Everything was a win-win, aside from the wasted time, of course.

Exasperated, Dyon stepped onto the teleportation portal, thinking about how in the hell he was going to fix up such a large space.