Passing an unforgettable night, fortunately without interruptions, Rune woke up as if he was in a nightmare or a horror movie.
Complete nothingness, lifeless rocks drifting about, some emitting light, some the definition of lifeless.
If he had woken up without a 275 meters radius perception sphere allowing him to know he was safe and alone, that would have been the creepiest waking of his life.
There was no morning routine to do, he wasn’t cold, hungry, or thirsty, he was sustaining himself completely on energy, which, with his body’s current expenditure rate, was effectively infinite.
He also wasn’t missing entertainment that much. Progressing on his path was what his mind used to keep itself occupied and satisfied. And it worked.
As usual, after sleeping, the insights he never knew he had or forgot came back and he immediately returned to the state of preparing for battle.
‘So many things to test, and my notes never diminish, only increase.’
With so much to do, he wasn’t traveling at random, he was seeking monsters and anomalies.
Before sleeping, Rune had evacuated more than 10 kilometers away from the nest he used for his adventure training. Returning there, he saw a squad of snakes patrolling, they were his first prey.
As a warm-up exercise, he decided to give everything he had in one strike.
He had already prepared a defense of 275 armor, his energy compression fundamental having attained 55% efficiency recently. Fighting with death being a possible issue really had this effect of quickening his progress in energy compression. Really.
As the staple method to amplify one’s offensive, reinforcement had a pretty confusing efficiency if seen from the point of view of a beginner. It was at the same time the purest support spell and the most belligerent offensive method.
If you were really bad at using and transmitting your strength, 500 energy would only lead to damages slightly higher than that of a normal strike.
On the board, the fact that every point of energy used for a reinforcement translated to an increase of 0.1% of your base strength stat was proved by many.
It was also proved by the martial supreme dojo that reinforcement had no efficiency rating, it was a 0.1% increase per point of energy for everyone. Period.
For Rune, there was no limit to any fundamentals, be they the physical one, the energy ones, or the spiritual ones, there was only practice. Those who complained about a somewhat tough roadblock only needed to fight more and it would disappear naturally.
100% efficiency was seen as an ultimate threshold for those of the energy path, but maybe it was only a tenth of what was needed to become a tier 2, nobody knew and the ether wiki remained mute about it.
Preparing for the ultimate dive, he was going to use 50 energy to create an immovable platform and then the remaining 450 energy to reinforce his jump. He was planning on becoming a shooting star. Or a cannonball.
‘Cannonball!’
Executing his plan, he started by creating a solid energy platform below him after rotating for his head-feet alignment to be aligned with his target.
With the rest of his energy, he pumped it all in a reinforcement, he then bent his knees before propelling himself.
The platform cracked from the counterforce necessary for all the strength transmitted to accelerate Rune’s body.
Immediately after jumping, he used his familiar momentum manipulation technique to rush precisely in the same direction as his target, the strongest-looking snake monster.
With a speed that Rune estimated to be… More than 200 meters per second? He collided one second after entering their perception sphere.
The result was as he had expected, he aimed to attain a certain damage ceiling, the ceiling where he would take damage from his own attack, and he succeeded.
His own energy armor took dozens of damages, and when Rune kept insisting, he straightly passed through all he had to pass through.
It was the monster that was too weak to accommodate his wish, as after transmitting more than half of the available power of his cannonball charge strike, he passed “through” his target.
No shockwave could contribute to the violence of the scene, but the corpse of the monster exploding could convey enough about the force contained in Rune’s all-out strike.
And just like that, a new adventure period began with a clear-cut goal: Clearing the nest of the snake-like monsters.
He had already started to impact the nest population during his previous period, so monster after monster, in only a single week, only monster cores remained.
When he approached the nest, however, he was a bit surprised.
This nest seemed very different from those he previously encountered, like the whale nest and the head nest, his sphere transmitted a sort of carpet covered in needles. Yellow needles.
‘Grass?’
Being so near to the nest however, he was mindlessly assaulted by all the remaining monsters, prompting him to stop thinking about the peculiar things he had seen.
He had so much to try and so many experiments to do anyway.
‘Wake up ultimate move number 2, normal punch and kick combo!’
Diving right into a group of 7 monsters, he couldn’t in good conscience use his energy for anything other than evading and protecting himself.
For this fight, he was confronting himself with the problem of sustainability. He was going to keep his energy and never use it offensively, he wanted to diminish the probability of each strike leaving a mark on his armor or health.
And to make his idea a reality, Rune had a strange idea on how to balance his survivability-focused style.
With no one holding him back and the certainty of being able to flee, he daringly didn’t apply his energy armor equally. He left his right arm and left leg without armor.
The way he accomplished that was by blocking the intended way the energy armor spell matrix dispersed the energy armor. It had been a really savage way to achieve his goal but… It worked.
He had of course tried to control his armor directly to make it retract from someplace, but it hadn’t worked.
He had then tried to adjust the spell matrix directly… But it also ended up in failures.
He just wasn’t experienced in spell matrix creation and modification. At all.
As for his test idea, now if he wanted, he could use health as a shield and put to use all his health regeneration, that had until now only started being used when his first armor layer broke, and energy regeneration, to never back down from a long fight.
Theoretically, with health possessing the cohesion stat to take more damage than its energy counterpart, him now being able to use the two intermittently at will should greatly help his sustainability.
With a new resource to take notice of however… His fighting instinct became a bit strained as when a snake attempted to bite him now…
Rune had to judge whether he would counter with his normal strength stat, evade with pure momentum, how much damage he would take blocking it with purely his health, with his energy armor, or how much energy was needed to evade using a platform…
At the same time, he had to keep an eye on surrounding monsters and plan his future 2 to 3 moves in a logical action chain.
Confronted with the real situation of the bite, he ultimately decided to use his health as a shield and used his uncovered arm and leg to block the strike, then followed with his remaining armored limb striking with a normal punch and kick combo to eject himself out from the proximity of the snake’s mouth.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
After ejection, he used a compressed energy platform and a normal jump to go back and start pummeling the snake.
For Rune, every normal punch he delivered, every damage he evaded, every second of regeneration he gained… It all represented what he wanted his fighting style to look like in the future.
It was very immature, but he wanted all the good things.
He had only recently started to compromise on powerful reinforced attacks when massive opportunities arose as it involved too much energy expenditure and affected his sustainability.
Optimization and refinement, he loved doing that.
Before long, with a health balance and energy balance still in the positive, meaning he didn’t lose more than he regenerated over 1 minute, he slew his target snake and restarted his fight like it had just started.
But something was really distracting him, the nest.
The more he approached, the more he had to focus on slaying the remaining monsters, but the nest was disturbing and attraction-grabbing.
His perception sphere allowed him to see things that he shouldn’t find here.
The color sense in his sphere was always activated, and it similarly sent him a return that he couldn’t really believe.
Doing his best to ignore the situation, he battled with renewed vigor as he genuinely wanted to see the nest and touch it.
Ten snakes, twenty snakes… Punch after punch…
He didn’t want to retreat, even though his health balance was down to 50 per minute in the negative and his energy balance was completely in the red, at 160 energy lost per minute.
Rune wanted to be able to come back from a situation like this, in the camp he hadn't been the only who tried to, but the only realistic way was by stalling. Only this way could you recover to full health and energy.
And stalling implied retreat, a strategic retreat maybe, but for Rune to recover his lost health and lost energy, he wanted to still be fighting, still be in perfect control of his body, never missing an opportunity to strike with a regular kick.
Eventually, his fighting style was really starting to take form as he succeeded. When he had no energy anymore but 4 snakes remained, Rune was sure he had won.
Even if one of the remaining snakes knew how to use boosted momentum, Rune would just tank everything like the juggernaut he could be.
Wanting to see the nest, he was a little rushed and committed some mistakes, but his mastery of close combat allowed his combos of normal strikes to kill a snake in 6 to 7 minutes, eroding their health balance without stopping till death ensued.
And finally, the last snake stopped moving amidst the disintegrating corpses of its companions.
He had won against an entire nest alone.
…
Landing on the nest, Rune felt trepidations all over his body.
This nest was different.
With his sphere and color sense activated, an endless dead grassy plain opened on and on. He could even see the remains of a tree fallen on the ground, a very lush tree.
‘What…’
The grass was frozen in time, if a breeze were to blow, Rune could imagine the plain coming alive with the characteristic sound of rustling grass and wind infiltrating his ears.
‘Is…’
An entire island, the captured and fixed moment of a thriving life.
‘This…’
The whole nest was like a piece of the Universe Dimension ripped off.
At this instant, Rune felt his mind being struck by a flash of lucidity.
He remembered some pieces, connected some others, made some come back from the abyss of long-term memory…
‘Anomalies coming from other dimensions… The gravity being fatal to living beings… The Ether Wiki having an answer for everything as time passes… The Ether Law… A defective law… The announcements…’
‘So that’s why the IGS is so proactive, that’s why the education reform was so actively pushed, that’s why the Adventurer’s Society is given so much power that it could declare a vendetta against the IGS by itself…’
The lucidity in his mind illuminated and linked what was happening. Incredulity wanted to mark what he thought of as irrelevant, but he didn’t dare dismiss what he came up with as a conspiracy, everything was too perfect. It made too much sense.
‘The Universe dimension didn’t awaken... Assimilated? Reconnected? Yeah, reconnected. A link then? The ether density? Both? And the information board extends to tier 1 dimensions… The IGS probably theorized or confirmed the truth that it was all natural and that nothing can stop it from happening…’
‘But then… Other dimensions? We're not the first? Or is it all natural?’
Wondering why the IGS would hide the truth he had come up with, Rune knew he only touched the most superficial layer of what the future reserved for the Universe Dimension.
‘I should talk about it with Utopia, as a Rululu, if he wasn’t in then he should be able to connect the other pieces I missed.’
…
[Rune: Report of the day, today is very heavy. After waking up I continued on my solo adventure and decided to clear the snake-like monster nest. My experiment about sustainability-focused fighting style is bearing very sweet fruits. I cleared 24 snakes in what I think is an hour or two. I also need Utopia to read my next message and see if I’m a conspiracy theorist.]
After sending his report, he started to write a very long message which he couldn’t help but rectify a few times as he thought things over as he wrote them.
[Rune: I’ll first make a point of my current situation.
The snake monster nest turns out to be a ripped piece from a dimension supporting life, a grassy plain, maybe a piece of forest. I’m sure if I searched carefully I would be able to find rain marks, and this is where my theory begins.
On the premise that the Ether Wiki can’t lie, where does all its knowledge come from? I linked this fact with the nest I have before my eyes, other dimensions!
And from this simple fact, I made a simple hypothesis linking all sorts of hints: The Ether Law which communicated with us from the start is obviously not the defective one which has birthed our mess of a dimension, it’s the true one that found a way to finally reach out to us.
As for the way it reached out, it’s obviously the increasing ether density of our Universe Dimension. The most probable is that a feeble link has been established, not enough to use it for teleportation, but enough for it to start repairing our messed up dimension.
And now, pursuing the knowledge bank which can be accessed via the ether wiki… Isn’t the answer contained in the description of the information board? It said that tier 1 dimensions are connected to the information board! So the source of all our knowledge? Merely snippets from a possible endless archive that has existed for longer than I can possibly imagine.
I couldn’t think about why the Ether Law would have gone to such great length though, but then I was reminded of the “critically defective” evaluation we received, and everything became clear.
The whole timeline we’ve been following is inevitably leading to an expansion of the information board, and this expansion will inevitably connect us to other tier 1 dimensions. And what are tier 1 dimensions if not defective dimensions that have been through what we are living now?
And so the cycle is formed.
We’re not the first dimension where the Ether Law became a reality, and I indubitably think that the conclusion of the ether density increasing is the opening of… You know? The multiverse?
And what makes me bring it up to you guys? I’m 100% sure that the IGS proactivity proves that maybe the biggest brains of trillions of trillions of individuals came to the same conclusion as me, making the IGS feel the urgency.
This is the limit of my human brain though. I need a true and noble rululu to take over and link the remaining pieces to prove if I’m just being a lunatic or if I had a flash of genius. Headquarter over.]
Even after posting his massive message, Rune had to wait 5 minutes before the first answer came.
[Arik: I’ll wait for Utopia, but maybe as a rululu, he already deduced something like that and was kindly asked to not broadcast them. I'm proud to be friends with a fine conspiracy theorist such as you.]
[Gar: Yeah, only a rululu brain can correctly write your theory. I understood the majority but some of what you said doesn't make sense. The information board becoming powerful enough to link to all other tier 1 dimensions? That’s very far-fetched, no harm meant.]
[Rune: No harm done.]
[Nelo: What would it mean for the future? I didn’t really give a try at comprehending the consequences of Rune’s conspiracy theory.]
[Adreana: The point is that maybe tier 99 entities exist and that further dimensions that aren’t connected to only our Universe will be opened? Something like that? So encountering maybe 10 billion years old supreme golden age civilizations is a possibility.]
[Utopia: I’ll try and compare it to what I learned until now, but true or false, tier 2 is confirmed to exist by the Ether Wiki, so training your fundamentals is still mandatory. Later fellow heroes and conspirationists.]
[Arik: The brain has started to process, do you think when a rululu thinks hard it consumes energy? To make up for what their big brain needs?]
[Rune: 100% its upkeep is multiplied by 10, otherwise what? Other species apart from the Rululus are useless ones intellectually speaking? Like it’s possible.]
[Nelo: Your sarcasm broke my forum window.]
[Gar: Mine too.]
‘Ah~ Now my theory is in good hands, and to celebrate! Let me find cute little rare resources!’
Scanning the nest took a good 10 minutes, and surprisingly, he truly did find rare resources, he even found two.
In one time he had advanced an event objective to 20% completion, a reward for his adventure with his life on the line.
Absorbing them he opened his gathering log and his status.
Absorbed ‘Rare tier 1 momentum crystal’, gained 1 200 000 EP
Absorbed ‘Rare tier 1 health crystal’, gained 2 500 000 EP
‘And that’s just normal rare resources?’
Surprised by his gains, Rune wasn’t disappointed. 370 tier 1 stat points worth of EP, at the price of 2 weeks of sieging a nest, that was a killer exchange in his book.
As for his status window, it was as he expected.
Avatar (Integrated) (Basic Rank) (Tier 1)
EP: 5 273 540
Stats Total: 5 000
Health: 500
Health Regeneration: 500
Strength: 500
Cohesion: 500
Energy: 500
Energy Regeneration: 500
Purity: 500
Affinity: 500
Momentum: 500
Perception: 500
Sometimes Rune decided to absorb some monster cores. It wasn’t his objective, but they happened to be there, so he absorbed them in passing.
By not searching to acquire EP, he had reached 5% of the maximum storage capability, which was amazing.
‘I’m done here, 2 weeks to raze a nest, with 8 nests to clean... So around 4 months if I’m alone? Less if I have big progress or encounter a group to clean a nest with.’
Rune could think as much as he wanted, it wouldn’t replace actual progress and training, so once he finished summarizing his gain in his information board’s notes, he followed his instinct and decided on a random direction before using his energy to launch the galaxy wings spell.
Everything had only just begun.