It didn't take long for the system to bring Shen to the next stage. He found himself in a vast grassland with nothing in sight as far as the eyes could see.
Tutorial - 5th Stage
As the Multiverse Alliance kept fighting the Void and understanding it better, we comprehended something:
Willpower is required to fight it.
Only Concepts can affect the Void, but we require willpower to resist its psychological attacks.
The psychological infection caused by Void Spawn is instantaneous, impossible to protect against, and can take anyone. You can only withstand it, not shut it down. If you succumb to the call of the Void, you'll attack others who succumbed nearby until only one remains. The survivor will turn into a Void Spawn themselves.
The only way to resist the infection is through willpower. Your willpower can be affected by your mental state, which in turn can be affected by substance abuse, emotions, and morale. Keep that in mind.
The Guardian System can determine your willpower. However, multiple studies and experiments have shown that displaying the willpower stat paradoxically negatively affects one's willpower. Your willpower is part of your magic stat if you have it unlocked, but you cannot find its value in any way.
While you're in the presence of Void Spawn, your willpower cannot recover. Extended exposure will eat you away.
And yet, all Guardians must be strong enough to withstand such a situation.
Humanity has one advantage: you can pull back after succumbing to the Void. Not after you start turning, but any time before. Only twelve other races in the Multiverse Alliance can do so.
Pulling back is usually achieved with the help of someone nearby. Therefore, those who came as a group will have a significant advantage in this stage.
Suddenly, thin blue beams came from the skies. They created a circle fifteen-yard wide, with Shen in the center.
Tutorial - 5th Stage
You must survive for one week under constant Void Spawn influence to pass this stage.
Void Spawn cannot invade the area surrounded by blue beams. You'll be safe there except:
1. If someone in your group turns into a Void Spawn;
2. During the middle boss.
If someone in a group turns, the turned one will be eliminated from the tutorial, but the Void Spawn it turned into will remain. Survivors can kill the Void Spawn and continue in the tutorial.
There will be increasing numbers of Void Spawn as the week progresses.
The system will destroy Void Spawn that grow too powerful.
Five black bolts hit the grassland outside his circle a few moments later. Each one revealed black and white humanoid Void Spawn. Other than the different colors, they looked identical.
"Identify."
| VOID HATCHLING (G ⁓ F) | ??? / ???
| VOID HATCHLING (G ⁓ F) | ??? / ???
| VOID SEEDLING (G ⁓ E) — ??? / ???
| VOID SCOUT (F ⁓ D) | ??? / ???
| VOID SCOUT (F ⁓ D) | ??? / ???
They shouldn't be too strong. Shen wondered—
Before he could conclude his thoughts, one of the Scouts simply disappeared from where it had been standing and reappeared right outside the circle. It became a strange paper-thin creature and tried to go through the opening between beams.
The moment it "touched" the air between two beams, it turned into smoke.
Shen was flabbergasted. That had not been an E-rank Scout. He was glad to be protected in there.
Anyway, this stage was about resisting the alien thoughts in his mind. They repeated how the Void was fantastic and how he should join it.
Shen sat in the middle of the "cage" and meditated.
It would be a long week.
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Alicia was terrified.
She knew her fear would negatively affect her performance, but she couldn't help herself. One week with those things in her mind was just too much. She didn't trust herself to do it.
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'Maybe I should just join the Void already and be done with it,' she thought.
"No!" she yelled. "No! I'll not fail here! I will not!"
She crouched in the middle of the beams, her hands over her ears, and swung back and forth.
"I can do it," she told herself. "I can do it," she kept repeating.
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"Make a circle looking to each other," Sandra ordered, and her team obeyed. "Give your hands to the ones beside you. Come on, don't be shy; we're not children. If you feel you're losing it, focus on the warmth of your colleague's hands. Focus on being human. Focus on us."
She had absolutely no idea if that would work, but it should at least give them some sense of control, contributing to increasing their willpower.
"Let's exchange stories," she continued. "Don't let yourself get locked inside your mind with just those shitty thoughts. Focus on us," she repeated.
"Elam, you start," Evelyn said. "Tell us about that time you drank piss by mistake."
There was a chorus of "yuck" around the team. Sandra nodded to Evelyn. That had been a good one.
They couldn't see Elam's face—
"Lower your hood," Sandra said, then unlocked her hands from the people beside her to remove her helmet. "Let's see each other's humanity."
"Really?" he asked. "I have this mysterious thing going here."
"Really," she insisted.
He sighed and lowered it, revealing a thin, tall nerd, complete with overgrown black hair, braces, and thick glasses. He had a moldy whiteness from someone who didn't let the sun touch them more than once every few years.
"That's not what I imagined," Linda commented, sounding disappointed.
"See?" Elam complained.
Sandra ignored the complaint. "All hoods are down, and helmets are off? Good. Back to giving hands, people. Elam, speak."
He sighed, then started telling the stupid little tale of when a former friend swapped his soda for piss.
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Time passed very, very slowly. Shen kept meditating, which was tough to do with the invading thoughts, but not impossible.
The Void Spawn kept increasing in numbers. Where once there had been five, now dozens stood. It was the third day, and Shen eagerly awaited the middle boss.
At long last, it came.
Tutorial - 5th Stage - Middle Boss
When fighting Void Spawn, you must always care for what will happen next. Will you have somewhere safe to return to, or will you have to continue suffering their psychological infection?
If the latter is true, you must defeat them quickly and with as little willpower expenditure as possible. There's no need to spend willpower at all to damage Void Spawn, but some waste is inevitable at your level of control.
Kill the Void Scout.
Once again, you can only blame your bad luck if it's at the D-rank or reaches it during your fight.
There was no room for error anymore. In the first stage, they could die to the middle boss. In the second, they could not fight a middle boss at all. In the third, you were forced to fight but didn't get expelled if you lost.
From the fourth stage onward, you either passed the test or were expelled.
When the black bolt hit the area inside the cage, Shen rushed at it with Combat, Boundless, Sharp, and Zephyr Qi already filling his body, spear, and around his body. When the Void Scout manifested, he swung with all his technique and power against its legs, then arms, then head. The creature came as slow and dumb as the one he had defeated in the previous stage, maybe even more.
Shen did quick work of the Scout's torso and achieved swift victory.
From what he could tell, he hadn't wasted any willpower at all.
| Void Scout (E ⁓ D) | 403,974 → 404,974 AP
He went back to the middle of the cage, sat down, and tried to meditate.
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"Stupid, stupid, stupid," Alicia repeated to herself.
She was kneeling on the ground, her head to her front, lightly hitting the ground in a constant rhythm. Her hands were intertwined behind her head.
"I should've brought a team. I should be with a team. Any team. Anything is better than this. Anything. Anything." She kept hitting her head against the ground.
'Joining the Void would be just perfect,' she thought. 'Much better. The only way out.'
"No! I'll pass! I will pass this stage!" she yelled.
She saw something blue on the corner of her eye and raised her head to read the message about the middle boss. Black lightning hit the ground, and a new Scout appeared.
Alicia screamed. She screamed with all her fear, anguish, and frustration. She screamed and delivered fireball after fireball against the Void Spawn.
"Dieeee!" she yelled and kept throwing fireballs even after the monster turned into smoke. "I will survive!" She stood up and yelled defiantly to the heavens. "I will!"
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Elam was the first to go.
Group advantage her ass. Evelyn should've imagined that the jokes thrown at the boy after sharing stories would affect his willpower. They kept demeaning him, and since the distraction and laughs helped keep the Void thoughts away from the others, neither she nor Sandra had interfered.
No one had imagined his mysterious character persona had been actually important to him or how terrible he felt for being made fun of like that.
When he succumbed to the infection, he turned into a Void Spawn so fast they couldn't even try to do something. They killed the Void Spawn quickly enough, but morale collapsed after that.
One of the four F-ranks almost turned next, but they pulled him by hugging him and telling him to resist. It was Linda, probably guilt-ridden by being the one who humiliated Elam the most, who ended up turning second. They also hugged her, but it wasn't enough.
Being in a group might allow one to pull back, but social interactions could be a dangerous poison. The system should've warned about that. Well, it had, kind of, but only indirectly.
'It's obvious the system doesn't care about us,' she thought. 'It hates us. The Multiverse Alliance just wants to use us. But the Void, the Void will embrace us. Forever. Eternal bliss and release. I just have to accept its marvelous and unique gift.'
Evelyn clenched Sandra and Lucius' hands. She was human, and she liked it. She loved existing, and she wanted to return to her loving family. Screw the Void.
"Are you alright?" Sandra asked softly.
"No," Evelyn replied truthfully. "I'm feeling guilty for Elam, and mad on the system, and tired."
"I'm here for you," her best friend replied. "We'll win together. Believe in yourself; I know I do. Think of our goal. We can't fail here."
"No, we can't, can we?" Evelyn whispered.
She wasn't so arrogant to believe the world depended on her. But she knew enough about the people in power to know that once enough people had power, every single good initiative would matter. If she fell here, it would mean the fall of uncountable others because she wouldn't be strong enough to protect them.
Each second was agonizing, but she eventually accepted that being in a group was better. Lucius almost turned, but they pulled him back too. And then they helped many others pull back, some more than once, Evelyn included.
On the third day, they had still lost only two people.
When the middle boss came, they killed it quickly. Then they returned to the agony of waiting and helping each other.
"Only three and a half days to go," she whispered to herself.
"We got this, people!" Sandra said like a damn coach, and Evelyn was grateful for it. She really needed that extra energy right now.
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Hundreds of Void Spawn surrounded the cage, and Shen was no longer trying to meditate.
Instead, he found freedom in his martial arts. Training his moves with the utmost focus was the only way to distract himself from his thoughts.
Ironically, it was when he emptied his mind of anything but the motions of his body and spear that he found release from the Void.
Shen moved his spear in an arc, jumped, and brought it down on the ground. It stopped within millimeters from reaching the earth, but it cut a blade of grass on the way.
He twisted his body, his spear held with one arm, and jumped again. His body became perfectly horizontal in the air, just as his spear was. He rotated two times before landing.
He then moved his spear in an arc from down upward. When it was on the height of his chest, he thrust dozens of times against the air in quick succession.
They were simple moves, but they allowed him to almost forget the alien thoughts in his mind.
And at last, seven days had passed.
It was time for the final boss.