Persephone

As they walked through the forest, Elizabeth could feel her cultivation reaching a bottleneck.

In the evening she tried to break through but was unsuccessful.

For what felt like a month, her existence consisted of eating, sleeping, and purifying demons, skeleton soldiers, miasma, and now undead beast.

She missed her children. She had never been alone for this long. She was thankful for Chrysanthemum, but she wanted to be around her family. And most of all she wanted to see the sun and feel the wind again!

Yet, she knew self-improvement was best for her and her family.

The tall trees did an excellent job at hiding any undead monsters, and the vast forest made it easy to get lost.

Without a guide, Elizabeth was sure she would have been stuck in the forest for all eternity.

Yet, now the exit was in sight. On a hill outside the forest, Elizabeth saw two huge doors. The doors looked to be the same height as the Gates of Gadreel that Will had built, but they were less ostentatious.

Chrysanthemum and Elizabeth slowly moved forward, as they kept a watchful eye out for creatures.

It didn't take long for them to notice two yellows eyes staring at them up ahead. A dire wolf crept out from behind a tree.

The wolf's side had a gaping hole, where the stomach used to be. Around the hole were claw and bite marks. It looked like another animal had made a meal out of the wolf.

"There more," Chrysanthemum whispered as four more wolves joined the first.

"We're surrounded," Elizabeth said frightened. She had yet to learn any AOE light spells. She did her best to learn [Holy Aura] and [Sanctuary] but she was still missing something.

"I'll do my best to hold them off and you purify them," Chrysanthemum said extending her arms outward to make sipping tree branches.

Like a circus performer, Chrysanthemum cracked her arms to scare the wolves, while Elizabeth began purifying the two wolves charging at her.

Elizabeth stretched her arms out wide as she did her best two dodge the wolves while purifying them.

The benefit of purification magic was that it not only dealt damage to evil-aligned creatures but also stunned them in place for a short while. That meant as long as Elizabeth was purifying the wolves, they grew weaker and slower, while she stayed the same.

After Elizabeth finished off the first two wolves, things became more manageable. Chrysanthemum would systematically pass one wolf off her Elizabeth at a time. Until all the wolves were dead.

Elizabeth followed Chrysanthemum along a lightly trodden trail, which was generally straight but had a few sharp twists and turns.

Elizabeth did her best to remember the route, in case she had to run away. But it was useless. There were no landmarks to help her remember what she passed.

At first, she thought about marking trees, but Chrysanthemum refused Elizabeth to scare her friends and neighbors. Imagine a Dyad asking to scare x's on every human she passed.

Without that option, Elizabeth's only recourse was to trust Chrysanthemum.

As they walked closer to the exit doors, they confronted more undead dire beasts. They waded through an undead bear, more wolves, undead scavenger birds, and undead rabbits.

Each animal presented their problems. The dire bear was the hardest to fight. Elizabeth used all her mana to purify the bear and collapsed with mana exhaustion. Never before had Elizabeth used all her mana, and she prayed that would never happen again.

Waiting for her mana to recover, scared Elizabeth half to death. She kept worrying that an animal would attack her when she had no mana and was completely defenseless.

Thankfully, that didn't happen. Bears, even undead ones, were quite territorial. After killing the bear, they were able to Rest In Peace for a long while.

The scavenger birds were difficult animals to attack because they were very agile. The birds' dive-bomb Elizabeth and Chrysanthemum. They'd peck off Chrysanthemum's leaves and tried to break twigs off her breaches.

Purifying agile creatures like birds and rabbits proved to be a big weakness for Elizabeth. If Elizabeth could see her agile stat, she wept in embarrassment.

Eventually, Chrysanthemum was able to get ahold of the birds and rabbits to constrict them long enough for Elizabeth to purify them.

After purifying the rabbit, Elizabeth finally saw a clearing up ahead. Elizabeth was ecstatic to finally make her way out of the forest dungeon, as she secretly called it.

Just ahead of the clearing there was one last monster blocking their path and it presented Elizabeth with a moral problem.

The moral problem, the monster was alive, and Elizabeth had never killed anything. Light mages swore an oath, similar to the Hippocratic Oath, to respect life and their patients.

Moreover, according to her academy instructors, light mages who committed murder could lose their powers.

Purifying undead creatures were considered to save souls from damnation. But to kill was to harm, and light mages swore to do no harm.

Elizabeth and Hippocratic Oath faced off against a transparent blue hemisphere the size of a large beach ball that jiggled as it moved.

"Watch out! It may look harmless, but slimes can consume all living things. They are truly horrific monsters," Chrysanthemum warned.

"I can't kill it. I can't kill living beings!" Elizabeth nervously said.

"I can't kill it either, it would just eat my branches. How can we kill something neither of us can kill?" Chrysanthemum asked.

Elizabeth quizzically looked at the creature. The outside looked like was protected with a thin but sturdy membrane and the inside was filled with some sort of jelly-like fluid aside from a single core the size of a baseball. The core lazily swam around as the main body slowly shuffled toward the women.

Inside the slime was a dead deer fawn. To Elizabeth, it looked like they interrupted the slimes dinner. The slime must have napped the fawn as it was eating just outside the forest.

"What's the plan?" Chrysanthemum asked worriedly.

"Let me try something," Elizabeth saw curiously.

While technically she couldn't harm the slime, maybe she could heal the fawn inside the slime.

Elizabeth cast [Heal], and the suffocating fawn began to kick and buck trying to get out.

The slime stopped approaching and looked down in surprise at the energetic fawn trying to escape.

With the slime preoccupied, Chrysanthemum and Elizabeth circled the slime, out of its tentacle reach.

Elizabeth watched as the wiggling fawn managed to kick its head out of the slime.

The slime and fawn were locked in a battle. With Elizabeth healing the slimes and decomposing stomach acid, the fawn was able to struggle.

With a lucky kick to the slime's core, the fawn was able to stun the slime. Yet that only aggregated the slime more.

Finally, outside the forest, Elizabeth stopped her healing magic to watch the blue blob angrily consume the fawn and jump away deep into the forest.

"We made it!" Chrysanthemum exclaimed in victory.

Elizabeth looked around at the grassy plain before them. There were no impediments and enemies, yet something felt off. It felt too easy. Nothing had been easy this whole journey.

Raising her guard, Elizabeth followed Chrysanthemum to the doors.

When they were close to the doors, Elizabeth could hear someone singing a beautiful melancholic song. The singer sang of missing her mother, family, and fields of flowers.

The one reminded Elizabeth of stormy spring days when she was forced to stay indoors due to the torrential weather. The song brought tears to her eyes, as she and her children would play games as they wait for the rain clouds to blow away.

There was not a day that went by when Elizabeth did not think about her family. She wondered how her children were doing and if Will had already returned.

She refused to think negative thoughts, she never wondered if Will was alive or whether she made it out of the Necropolis alive.

When they walked up to the patio doors, Chrysanthemum knocked three times.

The doors cracked open, and giantess open the door. Elizabeth could see her alabaster legs, but the rest of the woman was out of her view.

"Chrysanthemum did you bring her to me?" the giantess asked.

"Yes, my lady," the Dyad bowed low.

"Where is she, hurry bring her inside before Hades finds out," the giantess said motioning quickly.

Inside Elizabeth saw a palatial room. It looked like her room, only giant-sized.

"Wait just a moment," the giantess said covering herself in a golden glow and shrinking down to human-sized.

"There that's better, now we can talk eye to eye. Welcome, Lady Elizabeth vont Ballard. I am the Goddess Persephone, but you can just call me Persephone," the goddess said introducing herself.

Persephone was 169 meters tall, with auburn hair, green eyes, and a voluptuous body. She was the epitome of beauty, with radiant alabaster skin.

Elizabeth had never seen such a beautiful woman, and she found it hard to look away.

"It is my life's achievement to meet a goddess," Elizabeth kowtowed.