Diana
“Why are you running?!”
The final battle of the tournament was taking place in an arena as well, but one much, much larger, several dozen kilometers in diameter, with a ceiling at least a few kilometers high.
Their opponent was a humanoid alien with gray skin, six arms, and insectoid features—a race Mila called a Vilorax—and she seemed to be a psychic mage of some kind, with what Diana was pretty sure were three peak grade metal element Laws.
As soon as the round started, Mila disappeared and Diana grabbed hold of Nitya and Irena to begin fleeing after they released the plague, and the Vilorax woman chased them by effectively surfing on a large three meter flying sword.
Then Mila, who’d been hiding using her stealth skill, activated a D rank talisman and a destructive flame emanated from her position, hitting their opponent from several kilometers away, and they won.
Congratulations!
Trial Tower Tournament Round XII is over.
You are the top ranked cultivator of the Trial Tower
Reward: Total Accumulated Trial Points X 2
Total Accumulated Trial Points: 6,843,344,226,191,081,472
Diana then got one more message.
Congratulations!
Your rank in the F rank Trial Tower is 1.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Nitya said as all four of them rose from the floor of Aalam’s crafting hall and the invisible mana swirling around each of their bodies began to fade. “I didn’t expect to survive the finals, but that idiot just ran right into your trap.”
“There was a bit more to it than that,” Irena refuted, but not at all strongly. “Mila did have to predict she’d chase us.”
“The Trial Tower doesn’t seem designed to be fair,” Aalam said as he used Telekinesis to start the process of dismantling the twelve three meter high pillars arranged in a dodecagon around the crafting hall, each emanating the power of one of the twelve elements. “Most cultivators are never able to raise their Luck outside of breaking through to a new stage of Laws and the Trial Tower seems to be affected by the Luck stat far more than even the tutorials.”
“It’s a system designed to be exploited by the already rich to gain resources for their juniors.” Mila stretched slightly, a movement almost any heterosexual male would be distracted by, but Epecteos, who was sitting in the corner, was almost unconscious from helping run the Twelve Element Stationary Enhancement Formation over the last month and Aalam wasn’t paying attention. “We just exploited it better because Nana Xara sacrificed the potential for massive A rank wealth so we could get F rank resources.
“Remember everyone that this wasn’t done on our own merit, but because we have a backer who has invested all her accumulated wealth into raising us.
“That said.” Mila turned to look at Diana, a look of excitement on her face. “What did we get? I don’t have the authority to see the Trial Tower rewards list without your permission.”
Diana also quickly took a look, opening up the description of the most expensive resource on the list first, something called a Stone of Primal Beginning, but almost immediately she was distracted by the psychic sound of Nana Xara screaming in her mind. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“Explain please,” Diana sent.
“A Stone of Primal Beginning is an extremely, extremely rare F rank resource, even rarer than the Primal Code Soul Washing Dew, and its usage requirements are almost as difficult.” Nana Xara sounded incredibly excited as she spoke rapidly. “But you meet them, so it won’t absorb your soul if you use it.”
“Absorb my what?” Diana turned to look at Mila. “Apparently the Stone of Primal Beginning might absorb my soul.”
“No it won’t.” Nana Xara’s voice had a hint of annoyance mixed in with her excitement. “I said it won’t absorb your soul.”
“Which implies it is dangerous and absorbs souls. That’s terrifying.”
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Diana felt Mila strengthen the connection between them. “It would probably be good if you explained, Nana Xara. I imagine you’re getting excited again and not doing that properly. What is a Stone of Primal Beginning?”
“Alright.” Nana Xara seemed to deliberately slow down her words, but the end result was her speaking at a normal speed. “The dimension we live in is called the Prime Material Universe. It’s the oldest and largest of all the known universes of the many dimensions known to cultivators, so old that there are records from quintillions of years in the past of the universe already being at least quintillions of years old. No one alive, except for maybe some of the oldest gods, know how it started.
“And, before you bring it up, that big bang theory people on Earth came up with was just a misunderstanding from viewing magical phenomenon through a purely non-magical lens.
“Other universes we know about, however, including other material universes, have known beginnings. And a Stone of Primal Beginning is a type of crystalized mana created during the formation of a material universe. But there is usually only enough material to make four or five Stones of Primal Beginning per material universe, and there are probably only a few dozen material universes young enough that their Stones of Primal Beginning wouldn’t have had their energy fade after many, many trillions of years.”
Diana felt herself getting slightly lost by the enormity of this information, but she was pretty sure Nana Xara was about to get to the practical uses of the stone, so she didn’t let her mind wander.
“A Stone of Primal Beginning has multiple uses. It can be used as a power source for high grade artifacts. It can act as a very, very high end dao guide holding all the Laws present in the universe which birthed it in a raw state without affecting a cultivator’s path due to the breadth of Laws it contains, though only up to the Law Pupa stage due to the full Laws of the universe not having been born by the time of its formation. And it can be implanted into the soul of a cultivator who hasn’t yet reached C rank to slowly torture the cultivator by extracting and absorbing the power of the cultivator’s soul into its raw components.
“This, however, is only for cultivators who can’t absorb the power of the Stone of Primal Beginning themselves.
“What are these requirements you want to know? Well, first is the ability to absorb 20,736 units of Soul boosting energy at F rank over the span of a year, something your Nascent Energy Converter ability makes possible. Second is having perfectly balanced base stats, something your Chaos Human race has allowed you to already achieve by maximizing your stats. And third is having a cultivation speed fast enough to get rid of the incredibly toxic impurities the process of absorbing the Stone of Primal Beginning will generate, something that is almost impossible for F ranks.
“Even with your bloodline boosting your cultivation speed by 500% and the best external formations for boosting cultivation speed available for F ranks, you still might die from the process, but not if you first use the Stone of Primal Beginning as a dao guide to help raise your Laws to the Law Pupa stage and raise your Yin Yang Cosmology to level 9. Having six Law Pupae will also have some impressive side effects for when you use the energy of the Stone of Primal Beginning and the other resources you’ve prepared to advance your race.”
“Wait,” Mila interjected into the conversation before Diana could ask any questions, Nana Xara obviously having been giving the explanation to her as well, “if it is a dao guide which won’t cause problems, might it not be better to delay Diana’s advancement to E rank and use it to help raise many more talented humans on Earth?”
“I wouldn’t advise it.” Nana Xara had calmed down after her initial excitement and seemed back to her normal cheerful self. “In fact, I wouldn’t recommend for anyone other than Diana, Aalam, and maybe Epecteos to look at it for more than a few hours.
“It wouldn’t cause any intrinsic problems, but relying on an external source to break into the Law Pupa stage for one’s Laws isn’t something I would normally recommend. It makes the process too easy and takes away from a valuable experience which would help the cultivator more easily raise their Laws later.
“Aalam is different. He’s going down the path of understanding an entire material universe with his Laws, so studying the Stone of Primal Beginning and seeing which Laws a universe forms first would actually be extremely beneficial to him.
“But for people like you, Isaiah, or anyone else from Earth, it would be much better for your future Law advancement speed to use the benefit of Earth undergoing its integration, having the same Law exposure as a B rank world, to help with your Law advancement than relying on studying a Stone of Primal Beginning. In the long run, it would serve you much better.”
Mila audibly sighed. Then she summoned the Twin Dragons out from her spatial storage ring and transformed them into their earring form on her ears before summoning out her Yin Striker sniper rifle as well. “It seems in the near future I’ll be falling far behind when it comes to Laws, so I’m going to go kill the four remaining major problem makers on Earth and practice my Law of The Reaper.”
Diana could feel Mila soul shackle herself to greatly reduce her stats, making what she was about to do, go kill the heads of four underground factions trying to undermine Diana’s rule, much, much harder. Then she headed to the teleportation platform and teleported away.
At the same time, though, Aalam came over with an excited look on his face and Diana realized Mila had already told him about the Stone of Primal Beginning or, more likely, Mila’d been sharing the conversation with him the entire time. And he probably also wanted her to buy him the full 16 levels of the Twelve Element Primal Code offered by the System in the Trial Tower store, as the copy Mila’d gotten from the Violet Mountain Sect only had the first 12 levels.
Before dealing with her little brother, however, Diana turned to Nitya and Irena and reached out both her hands. In her left appeared a roughly 30 cm tall jar with what looked like a contained cyclone inside while in her right appeared a branch with four apple-like fruits on it. One was covered in a small layer of fire, one seemed almost soaked, one had six different cycles of air swirling around it, and the last looked like it had been squished and somehow crystalized.
These were the two best race enhancing resources available for her two helpers, both far more powerful than they’d normally be able to absorb, but, when they took them, she also handed them two Highgenion Flowers as well, having purchased three more from the Trial Tower’s rewards.
Then, temporarily stopping Aalam with a few words, she began spending all her trial points on everything Nana Xara recommended, making full use of the time she had to buy things before the second place trial taker could start buying as well.
This included the orb holding the Twelve Element Primal Code Aalam wanted, a formation which would drastically increase cultivation speed, and her favorite purchase, a type of artifact called a Book of Languages. It cost several hundred trillion trial points but, with its help, both she and Mila would be able to much more easily advance their Omniglot Reader racial abilities, a process which would otherwise have taken at least hundreds of years.