After what felt like an eternity of pain, he finally managed to gather his senses and lifted himself with difficulty from the ground. His eyes were red from the mult.i.tude of veins that had busted due to overexerting himself. His throat was sore from screaming on top of his lung several times. He started to calmly look around, looking out for the vortex that would take him away from the world of the trial by fire. But after a few seconds, a worried look appeared on his eyes as he began turning left and right in search of the vortex.Then his eyes crossed the skeleton boss"s corpse for a split second, before continuing to look around the plaza. "Maybe I need to go to the zone where I sp.a.w.ned.", as he decided that nothing was happening in the plaza. He turned around and began leaving, but as he stepped a few feet away from the corpse, he felt change happen behind him. He swiftly turned around and was shocked as he noticed that the corpse had disappeared entirely. In its stead was a soft round pearl that quietly hovered a few inches above the ground. Fell quickly saw that it was a pill. It was spotless from any imperfection and was glossy black like the corpse of the skeleton. As he approached the object, Fell noticed a few runic marks that produced a soft light that shined the s.p.a.ce surrounding the pill.
His weary eyes looked at the object with curiosity, and as he stepped forward with the intent to grab the pill, it flew toward him. He didn"t have the time to bat an eyelid before the round black pill instantly crossed the s.p.a.ce and reappeared right in front of the middle of Fell"s eyebrow. "This movement!?" he explained before the pill connected with his head, and he was stopped from finishing his train of thought. The moment he saw s.p.a.ce fluctuate when the pill crossed the distance between them, he was immediately reminded of the way the skeleton boss did the same. But he didn"t even have the time to think about it now as his brain had black outed. The pill dissolved the moment it contacted his skull, and he began falling toward the ground.
A vortex seamlessly appeared under him; Fell disappeared from the world of the trial by fire. His body hit the floor tile of a fighting platform; he was transported back to his mountain peak, where he laid unconscious while absorbing the pill"s content. The pill wasn"t filled with medicinal energy, nor was it beneficial for his avatar, and as this was a game where there existed equality between the base strength of all avatars. It wasn"t surprising that the creator had made it like it, or else all concept of fairness would disappear, and the game"s focus would no longer be on techniques and skills.
The mysterious pill he had acquired after defeating the skeleton boss was the reward that was given to the player who would manage to complete the trial by fire. A reward that could raise cities, and cause greed in the heart of the most righteous man. A mysterious technique that could teach one laws that governed the universe, and in the case of Fell, the mysterious pill he acquired was related to the spatial technique the black skeleton used. Currently, he couldn"t act nor move as ma.s.sive changes were happening in his mind. Incredible complex contents were being shoved inside of his mind in one go, and although it was similar to the way he had learned his cultivation technique. This time, the content was thousands of times more complex and abstruse.
But that didn"t mean that he could immediately use the technique as it first needed to be trained. And as a mysterious technique that dabbled with the law of s.p.a.ce, it wouldn"t be easy even to attain the first rank. When crossing that vortex to enter the trial by fire, he would have never dared to believe that his gain would be ma.s.sive. In his mind, just crossing swords against the skeleton boss was a reward in itself. It gave him the opportunity to fight an opponent so strong that his mind began confusing the game with real life. Those were the kind of experiences he was looking for when looking for a way to train himself, and when he had dealt the finishing blow, he had already felt that it was the ultimate reward he would hope for. Ironically, now he couldn"t even feel joy from receiving the game"s gift and found himself unable to even think due to the ma.s.s information transfer.
"He did make it through!?" a loud voice resounded through the empty valley before it disappeared. The AI that delved in the thousands upon thousands of mountain peaks that made the tutorial ground couldn"t help but be shaken by that. He knew why the youth in front of him laid still on the floor, as he had already seen occur on rare occasions.
The AI was as old as the game itself, and wasn"t just taking care of one mountain peak but had divided itself into thousands of ent.i.ties to help the players. Its existence was similar to a tree that extended all over the world of the tutorial"s second phase, with each root leading to a mountain peak where it would attach part of itself. Thus, being the existence that had seen the most users in , the mountain knew the importance of his success in the trial by fire.
"How many made it through during their placement matches!?" the mountain thought as its memory reversed through time. It thought about the thousands of geniuses that entered the trial by fire; most of them left it with extreme satisfaction as they valued experience more than anything. But only dozens of individuals left the training ground unconscious, and as someone who was part of the system itself, it could detect the flow of data that traveled through the virtual world.