"Oh, just four hundred points? And a simple pay instead of a burn thod?!!" John’s eyebrows shot up.
He recalled his stats from the first ti he held this parchnt. Back then, his total ntal Points had hovered around a agre one hundred and fifty. By comparing the two requirents, a new realisation about the system’s logic dawned on him.
"So, when I don’t have enough ntal Points to satisfy a requirent, the system offers the burning thod as a high-risk alternative?"
He was mostly talking to himself, but the system, ever-present and literal, took it as a direct inquiry.
[Ding! That is indeed true! As your ntal Points have increased significantly through level-ups, you now satisfy the flat fee requirent for absorbing this map, bypassing the need for a volatile ntal Burn!]
[Ding! Inquiry Fee: 10 ntal Points are deducted for information clarification!]
"Sure, you won’t miss a single chance to skim a little off the top for yourself, will you?" John rolled his eyes. He turned his gaze toward the nearby outposts where the quiet forms of his friends lay inside.
"Tell then, since you’re in a talkative mood, for how much longer will they keep sleeping? It has been many hours already since I extracted those essences!"
[Ding! Recovery Ti Calculation: Subjects will remain in a restorative coma for exactly one hour for every single SCT Essence code extracted from their bodies!]
"What?!!" John’s jaw nearly dropped as he did the ntal math. "That ans... The Bulltors will be out after twenty hours. But my friends... Ricky and Cissel will be down for over thirty hours, and Elena? Elena had sixty! She’s going to sleep for two days!"
John had assud they just needed a long nap to shake off the ntal trauma. The reality was far more grim.
"I can’t leave them out here in these scattered outposts," he realised, looking at the horizon. He knew he only had a few hours of light left before the cold and darkness of the night befell the plains. "I’ll need to gather everyone and get a fire going for the upcoming night."
His plan for the evening solidified: finish the map upgrade, transport everyone back to the reinforced safety of the main base, set up a massive central campfire, and then, if he had any energy left, go out to harvest the yellow cores still lying on the battlefield, or start clearing the fog out of the base.
"Absorb the map," he commanded, laying his hand flat on the parchnt. "Update my map!"
[Ding! 400 ntal Points are deducted!]
[Ding! Data integration in progress. The rge will last for exactly one hour!]
[Ding! A Recomndation: Using your Ping Route ability during this integration period is highly recomnded!]
"Highly recomnded? Which usually ans it’s the only way to get the good version of the rge. Fine," John shrugged, knowing he had no other choice but to comply. "Ping Route!"
[Ding! Activating Ping Route with the cost: 1,000 ntal Points to run for the duration of the one-hour rge option is available!]
[Ding! Do you accept? Y/N?]
"Sure, why not just take all my ntal Points while you’re at it?" John shook his head helplessly. At this point, the numbers felt like Monopoly money. "Just do it. Give the full, updated map. I want to see every blade of grass in this trial pocket."
He could easily tell the system was being opportunistic, draining his reserves while he was rich with nta Points. Yet, he truly didn’t care. Between the high ntal Points he had and the millions of dead monsters still littering the field, he had a virtually limitless supply of ntal Points waiting to be absorbed.
As he had an hour while the map integration processed, John decided to move all of his friends back inside the safety of the base walls.
He couldn’t physically carry the giant, heavy Bulltors, their massive fras were simply too much for even his enhanced strength to haul across the terrain, so he decided to consolidate the campfire behind the northern walls of the base, where the giants already lay in their comas.
Once he had successfully moved his friends into the sheltered area of the base, John took out two of the activated yellow cores he had harvested from the elite monsters before.
His plan was simple: use their latent energy to spark a sustainable campfire to ward off the rapidly approaching nocturnal chill. He knew they were better than the Fog Seeker cores, so he expected the fire to emit more heat and light for a longer period.
*Fwoosh!*
Yet, the mont the two yellow cores touched each other, a violent eruption of energy occurred. It wasn’t like the flickering fire that erged from the low-level Fog Seeker cores. This fla was a fierce, vibrant golden-yellow, and it expanded outward to cover a ten-ter radius in a single, heart-stopping breath!
Being the one holding the cores when the reaction triggered, John was nearly caught in the blast. He let the cores loose and dashed away, his reflexes fueled by a spike of adrenaline.
He was only half a beat faster than the expanding wall of heat and fire, yet even that distance was enough for him to feel the raw, destructive power humming within the golden light.
"This fire... It’s not so brutal to be considered a grenade, but it still holds a significant amount of power within to be used for campfire!" John muttered, watching the golden fire dance and rage wildly.
It looked as if a massive heap of seasoned wood had been engulfed in flas, not being emitted by two cores. This discovery made John imdiately reconsider his tactical plans.
Even if these weren’t as explosive as the high-tier Wrathers cores, not quite enough to craft a specialised grenade, this sustained, violent combustion could be an incredible asset when fighting large swarms of monsters or enemies.
"The purple grenades are very explosive, but we have a limited amount of them," he said, his gaze drifting beyond the base walls to the millions of corpses littering the battlefield. "But this core... It can be used more freely in any fight!"
John was still feeling the sting of overusing his precious purple grenades during the final waves of the yellow monster tide. He made a ntal note to demonstrate this effect to his friends as soon as they woke up; he knew instinctively that Elena, with a fondness for grenades, and Cissel, with her love for deadly items, would be the most excited of all.
After that initial, near-miss experint, John stopped using the yellow cores for simple fire-starting. He returned to the standard Fog Seeker cores for the campfire, then took a systematic stroll around the base.
He began testing the yellow cores’ interaction with the purple fog that now covered the world and his base, watching closely to see how many were required to effectively neutralise the encroaching fog.
"Ten cores. Not bad," he calculated. That was the number needed to clear an entire area of the lingering purple fog. He began a routine: throwing ten cores at a ti into a specific spot, running around the base and through the internal defensive maze, clearing the entire zone for nearly an hour.
Just as he finished the periter sweep, the system forced him to stop with the high-priority notification he had been anticipating.
[Ding! Your map update and data integration are completed!]
"At last!" John stopped dead in his tracks. Without a single mont of hesitation, he opened his map, and the breath caught in his throat as he saw the transformation.
Previously, the map had been a chaotic ss of red dots over a black void, no terrain, no defensive layouts, and no ability to zoom. It was a blind man’s guide. But now, the interface was a masterpiece of topographical data. It wasn’t just red anymore; the map was alive with a spectrum of colours: red, white, and even green.
"The red dots must be my primary enemies, the Hiveminds," he observed. The red dots were heavily concentrated in the southeastern territory adjacent to his own. As for the Bulltors, their markers appeared in a neutral white.
"It seems that since I already have a group of them by my side, the system considers the race neutral for now. The sa goes for the Krogers in the most southeastern territory. As for green..."
He spotted a large cluster of green dots in the far southwestern territory, and a theory imdiately ford in his mind. He tested the map’s new zooming function, scrolling down until he reached a resolution of roughly one hundred ters from the ground. There, amid the rugged terrain, he spotted them: humans.
"I’ll need to spend the whole night inspecting the entire map," he muttered in a deep, serious tone. He watched the green icons pulse on the screen. "Luckily, everyone is sleeping, so I won’t be disturbed while I plan our next move."
Once the map was fully synchronised, John finished clearing the last pockets of fog from the base. He returned to his friends’ side just as the soul-chilling cold and darkness of the night descended over the pocket trial.
He spent the next twelve hours in a state of hyper-focus, exploring the map in great detail. He zood in on every spot, every base, and every resource along the river course.
He watched the movent patterns of the other races, assessing the overall geopolitical situation and slowly grasping what the four races had experienced during their weeks in the trial.
"This... This is bad news," John whispered as the first light of the next day began to touch the horizon. After twelve hours without a second of sleep or rest, he finally closed the map interface. He sucked in a sharp, cold breath of morning air and looked around at his still-unconscious friends and Bulltors.
"It seems we’ll need to move the mont they wake up. If we delay any more, winning this trial will be much harder than I ever imagined."
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