...

???

Alexander opened his eyes and felt different but familiar, already knowing where he was, "Urgh, again. I need a damn break."

It was the seventh night in a row that he had a test, which was getting annoying. Sleeping became a chore, and while he would wake up rested, he still felt the strain from the day before as from the skill test.

However, there were tricks to release the tension. One was to nap during the day, which Alexander did regularly since skill tests wouldn't activate then, which he couldn't comprehend as to why. Furthermore, if it got too much, as it was weeks ago when he had ten or more consecutive nights of skill tests, he failed them on purpose. With this, he would have a break for a week.

Regardless, it felt too foreign this time, and as he looked around, he gasped, as it was far from the usual setting he was used to, 'What the...?'

Alexander was inside a royal court, one he knew from paintings but with a cyber-dystopian flavor on top. Everything in the hall was made of aluminum and steel, highly polished, sparkling under the futuristic chandelier's fluorescent light. Colorful but bleak, where the greyish-white of plastic met rainbow-colored painting on metals. Cables connected this whole place, which had a plastic-like wrapping. They ran through the entire hall, coiling around the numerous rectangular columns. At the same time, bulky monitors hung over the throne, building a single picture through them, which showed a mechanical crown.

'This is crazy...' After his panic gradually subsided as it was an unknown environment, excitement slowly replaced his mind, '...I will rob this fucking place clean.'

During his tests, Alexander often felt like he was in a surreal but familiar space, with elements of Earth mixed in. He realized he could use these to his advantage.

As an example of this, were the skills he obtained which were unrelated to the tests. As long as he succeeded, he could take it with him back. Then there were objects, like the fountain pen he copied from a test he was once in. He didn't know why the test places had such items, but he attributed it to the fact that they somehow scraped out his memories and put those inside these environments.

Even though he was a CE in his previous life, it didn't mean he knew how to build everything from scratch since his specialization concentrated more on specific applications than theory. Now, he saw a shortcut to all his worries around him- a treasure trove.

However, his thoughts were quickly interrupted by a sound that reverberated through the hall, coming from the direction of the throne. When he turned around, it started to rattle, making mechanical noises he hadn't heard for over a decade.

The throne suddenly stopped shaking, and smoke emerged from its sides. Spotlights shone from above, illuminating the seat. A hole slowly opened up, separating the plates that made up the seat. Mechanisms pulled apart the plates entirely, revealing a hole. Trumpets began to play, with their sound digitized and distorted, while the monitors displayed their animations in 8-bit graphics. From beneath the throne emerged something he could only describe as a robot, slowly rotating as it arose.

The music stopped, followed by a mechanical and badly digitized 8-bit voice suddenly echoing around him, "Hello, my young friend. No need to fea..." He interrupted it, being very excited, "Oh shit, I think I saw you in a movie."

Before, Alexander was the upper half of a bulky robot-like machine, assumably welded to the throne, with his appearance being the same as in movies from the 60s. It had a tape recorder for a mouth, two camera lenses for eyes, two antennas on its head, multiple colorful buttons on its chest, and its arms were rippled plastic tubes with claws for fingers, all in a typical rectangular fashion.

"I don't know what you mean, but I wanted to transmit my greetings to you for reaching this Tier Test."

All the amazement was suddenly gone as he thought he didn't hear right, 'Tier Test, which skill reached level 100?!'

However, before he could further consider which skill he had leveled up enough, he was interrupted by a rough and feminine voice, "Hoh! I didn't know I already got my [Law] skill to level 100!"

Alexander looked to the side, seeing a dwarf. She wore what he would describe as a posh suit with overly expensive accessories embellishing her. Looking at himself, he was also wearing a suit, but it seemed very modern, as if it was from Earth, with nothing special to it.

Regardless of their fashion choices, he wanted to greet whoever it was first. There was some rat in his last Tier Test, and who knew if he would meet them again in other tests? He wanted to avoid making more enemies because he already had someone who wasn't too fond of him.

However, Alexander wasn't the best regarding manners, "What's up, Dopey?"

The dwarf turned around and glared at him with hate. She touched the ring on her finger, moving it slightly, and smirked at him, "A beast-kin? Didn't know you learned reading in your tribes..." Her smile became more provoking. "...or that you had a judiciary at all."

Alexander raised an eyebrow, not believing that he got insulted in his tests, "Tribes? Listen here, you shoveler..."

The dwarf suddenly became angry, sounding as condescending as she could, "Shut up, you animal. Didn't your Master show their slaves how to act in front of others?"

She scrutinized Alexander thoughtfully, "Who is your owner anyway? You are as young as some of my sex slaves, and I can't believe that you were able to join a Tier Test."

Alexander, without any reservations, conjured an enormous fireball over his head while his killing intent leaked out, "Animal? Sex slaves? Oy, you getting over your head, you little shit."

The dwarf pushed her energy out in panic, which made Alexander only smirk, as it was not even close to what he would consider a threat, 'I can't believe what kind of people are in my fucking tests.'

While skill tests had weird sapient toys and other miscellaneous living-breathing copyright infringements, this one felt too real and irked him extremely. If anything she said was even close to reality, it would mean that Alexander's over-rationalized mindset needed a slight directional change.

Alexander always thought that the propaganda his family told him about the so-called First Servants, which were made out of humans, dwarves, gnomes, and high-elves, was exaggerated. In his mind, there was no way that they were as brutal and unhinged as described, but seeing the dwarf spout such things made him realize that there was a massive kernel of truth.

Why did he think so? Slavery, for all purposes, became economically highly unproductive under more substantial capitalistic structures, and he felt that others would know this, too, and at least work toward a solution that would bring prosperity to everyone. Little to say, this dwarf was apparently of another opinion.

A booming, mechanically digitized voice resounded as they readied themselves to fight, "Silence! I will not tolerate any altercations in this Tier Test!"

Alexander disintegrated his spell and slowly turned his head towards the robot on the throne, from which an oppressing aura came. However, as he disintegrated his spell, he felt something interesting from the robot and threw his mana toward it.

Shortly after, he smiled nastily, 'I see...'

The robot spoke, "I will now reiterate..." The dwarf interrupted him, exasperated, "Hoy! Guide, why don't you kick this dirty animal not out? There isn't a way in hell that this flee-lazed fur bag has that high of a level! They can't even read!"

The robot suddenly increased its aura, which felt like being put into a press, making the dwarf kneel, but Alexander could endure it. Nonetheless, the sight of the dwarf on the ground, clenching her teeth, made Alexander quite joyful, 'I can't believe that the people in my Tier Test are all crazy... I would rather have the crazy nice ones like the rat.'

However, he also remembered that a wolf-kin girl in his skill test was hostile to him, making him rethink if Tier Tests were really much worse, 'Never mind...' Ignoring his stupid imaginary friends, Alexander glared at the robot with a sparkle in his eyes, as he saw something much more intriguing.

Stolen story; please report.

The robot suddenly sounded enraged, lacing his digitized voice with rumbling background noise and a high-pitched ping in the end, "Silence! Since you are operating like children, I will forfeit the interesting test and give you just a question, which you will answer to the best of your capacities!"

Out of nowhere, a digital screen appeared before them with an old-school keyboard attached to it, 'Interesting.'

"Initiate! You have two hours!" A question and an overlay akin to a simple text document almost immediately appeared on his screen, surprising him.

Interestingly, he only now noticed that Teach wasn't here since it became somewhat silent. He was taking a test for the first time without her, and because the whole environment was so vastly different, he didn't notice it at first.

However, he ignored everything. Teach wasn't here? Who cares? What was the question about? Fuck it. He would throw the test for one simple reason, which he was sensing now, 'Oho, you have quite a complicated inner life.'

Alexander used a tiny sliver of his mana to feel out the robot from the inside. As with mana items, he needed to extrapolate information by mapping it out and concluding inductively. Since he wasn't immediately pressed to the ground or asked to stop, he would continue and get as much information as possible from that treasure trove.

From the side, he heard the dwarf already typing away and concentrating on the question, which, when he glanced at the digitized monitor floating in the air, had something to do with law theory. On the monitors, over the throne, he also saw a time counter, ticking down and showing that he had less than two hours left, 'More than enough time to raid this tin can.'

Alexander looked as if he was concentrating on the test, but he was actually typing nonsensical words to act it out as if he cared while his mana moved inside the robot in patterns he had trained for years. The little sliver, which cost him 1/20 of an MP, was moving in ways one would describe as nonsensical, but it was a style he developed after hacking dozens of mana artifacts.

How he made his mana move was precise, logical, and swift. Yet, his movements were also spontaneous, as he would start an area only to stop it suddenly, move to another, and do it recursively while trying to map the robot out fully.

While he was inside the robot, his instincts warned him, for some reason, that he should be cautious and as elusive as possible. From fighting, he knew he should always listen to them, as they were basically like an additional sense, which saved him many times.

However, it felt weird. Why? It was too easy, 'What the fuck is going on?'

The robot had no protection, and the metal shell was barely repulsive or absorbent toward mana. Thus, he could map out the general layout in minutes without many problems. For some reason, Alexander imagined much more pushback, but nothing happened.

When he finished and imagined the three-dimensional map he created of the inside of the robot, he started to digest the whole layout and found something incredible, 'Now, what do we have here.'

His mana swirled along the cables, filled with mana, toward what he assumed was the motherboard. It was an enormous inverted cube, taking up a good chunk of the space here, with slits on the side and glowing with mana. Without reservations, he entered the cube carefully, sensing all components immediately.

Inside, he found the architecture, with all the components that fascinated him—chips, modules, and other unknown elements he needed to identify. However, as he swirled around all the technology he wanted to just take back with him, he wondered if any electricity was involved or if mana was the sole energy source for this whole thing.

Imprisoned in his old Earthly mindset, Alexander never considered mana an energy source other than for fueling his spells. He always only wondered if efficient objects with mana, like mana stones, could boil water and produce steam to transform it into other energy forms.

Humanity's energy transformation, as crude as it sounds, always came down to how efficiently one could boil water. Yet, here, it seemed that mana could be directly used as an energy source without any weird transformations.

His assumptions were confirmed when he finally found the source to which all the cables were plugged: a mana gem. All his thoughts now went in one direction: Should he crack open the robot and research it?

Alexander shook those dangerous thoughts away and kept going. Even though it was a glimpse into the future, it was too risky to attack the robot directly. While Teach' was somewhat passive in her ways, even getting herself killed sometimes by accident, he wouldn't know how this guy reacted when he suddenly created a screwdriver and tried to pry it open.

As such, he was looking for something different, something specific, something he was an expert in but couldn't find the corresponding skill even after years, 'Come on baby, give it to me.'

Alexander focused his [Mana Sense] and, upon floating around, noticed something he had previously overlooked. This caused him confusion as he struggled to identify it since it looked like nothing more than a dense accumulation of mana coming from the numerous finely welded-in pathways and slightly loose cables that went through this place. Upon closer inspection, he sensed a space in between all of this.

'What is this?!'

His mana moved slowly around it while coming closer. After some maneuvering around to avoid touching anything, he saw a metallic casing, into which he twirled inside through a tiny entrance point by making his mana sliver even thinner, elongating it.

Upon entering, he became euphoric. It was not what he was looking for, but something which indicated it could be there. His mana moved around inside the casing, almost what felt like millimeters (1 mm ~ 1/25 inch) away from a rectangularly flat object beaming with mana.

Alexander pushed his [Mana Sense] to the extreme, slowly feeling the strain. As he did, he could see how the mana moved distinctively from the rectangular object to and fro the pathways through specific connection points.

It was fast, insanely so, but also simple. The mana always cut for what felt like a moment, only to move another particle, and when the process was over, it stopped for a much longer timeframe, 'Morse code? No... it's...' He tried to find a pattern, and after going through multiple ideas, only one thing was left, 'It's fucking binary?!'

After taking a deep breath, he heightened his concentration by staying still and forcing his senses to find any pattern, trying to determine if it was genuinely binary.

01000001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110011 01100101 01110010 01101001 01101111 01110101 01110011 00111111 00100000 01010111 01101000 01101111 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01110100 01110010 01100001 01101110 01110011 01101100 01100001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101001 01110100 00111111 00100000 01001001 01100110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110111 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100110 01101001 01110010 01110011 01110100 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00101100 00100000 01110111 01110010 01101001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101 00101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01001001 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01110011 01110111 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100001 01101110 01111001 00100000 01110001 01110101 01100101 01110011 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110111 01100001 01101110 01110100 00101100 00100000 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01101110 01101100 01111001 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101001 01110110 01100001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01100001 01100010 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01111001 00101110

After multiple failures, he finally patterned it out and confirmed, to his surprise, an 8-bit system. It was an exciting find, which, wouldn't he feel so stressed because of the time counter, he would love to contemplate about. As such, he released the tension in his mind, as he couldn't hold it for too long and started feeling dizzy. He needed a minute to relax, and only then could he continue.

However, what he found made him euphoric. Even though it was considerably slower than those on Earth, it should be a CPU- the pattern that imitated an 8-bit binary code, the pathways, and other apparent indications around him. Everything clicked into place. Sadly, he didn't know what the binary code meant, which he patterned out.

'I can't fucking believe it. It's truly a treasure trove.'

If this was indeed the CPU, it meant that the robot was processing data. At first, he just wanted to observe and study it as long as possible, but now his goal changed radically. When the robot had something like a CPU, there was a chance it had a hard drive with data he could access.

His mana carefully pressed itself out of the module that held the CPU, and he started to track all the pathways connected to the CPU. Some led him to what he guessed were sensory modules as they followed outside the inverted cube, and others toward modules connected to the limbs if he went by his mapping.

After looking for some time, he found multiple pathways parallel to each other as they extended from the CPU. As he followed them toward what he guessed was under the robot and inside the throne, he reluctantly left the cube, assuming its hard drive could be there.

At first, he wanted to locate the RAM on the robot, as he believed it should have it like a regular PC on the mainboard, close to the CPU. RAM was used to store data temporarily from the hard drive. However, he couldn't find any indication that the robot had any.

Regardless, as he followed the pathways through weird nooks and crannies, he suddenly entered a distorted space. He couldn't distinguish what was up and down anymore. Only through his experience in cracking collars, finding weaknesses in mana items, and simply training his mana skills under ridiculous circumstances did he not hurl immediately as his sense of balance was assaulted.

Alexander tried to orient himself, but he was somewhere he hadn't been before, so he flew basically blind, only concentrating on the pathways, which were his only reference. If he tried to sense everything around him, creating a new map, he became overwhelmed, as his directional sense became challenged. His new inferred map became less Euclidean and more like an MC Escher painting, which made no sense.

However, he never felt more excited and motivated, 'Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?'

For a long time, Alexander felt as if computers wouldn't be a thing hundreds of years in the future and only if everything went as perfectly as possible. Yet, he had a first glimpse into computational power run with mana as an energy source, and funnily enough, it was inside the Tier Test for [Law].

The longer he looked around, the more pressure he felt from the ticking timer and the occasional comments from the dwarf, which, while only white noise at this point, nonetheless sometimes disturbed his concentration.

Yet, he found it, 'Heureka!'