The group continued on their way, still filled with a sense of lingering dread from the sight of the Corpse Titan. Something that large should not have existed, but yet it lay there under the earth, proof of their fallacy. As a creature ascended the ranks, their natural limiter on body size increased, meaning that they could reach truly gigantic sizes without collapsing in on themselves, or at least crushing their bones underneath their weight. This took a great toll on their intelligence and overall combat efficacy however. A solar system sized beast could crush a planet in a heartbeat, but if an equally ranked monster that was the size of a normal person attacked it, it would be helpless. They were far more durable than smaller creatures, true, but they would still die eventually if enough damage was dealt. That was why no sapient monsters chose to go this route, unless they were already born into it and had mitigating circumstances that would allow them to grow to such colossal sizes.

As they traveled away from the shrine, they unwittingly left small pieces of their life force behind them. As it filtered down into the Corpse Titan, it came a little bit closer to awakening, with the memory of their life signatures within it. When it finally awoke, it would hunt them down.

A few minutes after leaving the shrine, Sam and the others were granted new quests by the System. Sam opened up the notification, and read through it, already knowing what it would be.

You have gained a new quest.

Rise of the Titans

Difficulty:S

The unprecedented surge of power created by the formation of multiple Daos on your planet within the first month of the initialization has created a Dao resonance of epic proportions. Figures from throughout your mythological systems have been brought to life, first among them being Gaea, the mother of the Earth. These beings will not suffer the lives of ants to exist on what they consider their planet, and they will attempt to eradicate you.

Ultimate Goal:Kill Gaea and her eleven children.

Current Goal:Gather power sufficient to kill an E Rank being.

Rewards:Survival

Sam closed the quest, with a question for Jeffrey.

“Jeffrey?”

“Yeah?”

“Is there ever an actual reward for quests beyond things like information or survival, or anything that is the natural result of completing the quest?” He asked.

“There should be. This quest promises me ten million credits if I complete it. Why, do you have something different?”

Suddenly conscious of the captains, who did not know about his antipathy with the System, Sam shook his head.

“No, I was just wondering why those showed up in the quest. We can talk about it later.”

Jeffrey nodded, and kept on walking, with Sam following behind. There was nothing much to do as they exited the summoning circle, save for watch out for the wheel construct and idly chatter with one another. Sam kept on learning new things about his companions, some of which were very surprising. Jeffrey of course by far eclipsed everyone else’s tales however, because of his vast experience, both on Earth and in the wider Multiverse.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Jeffrey had been very active on the world stage during the last hundred years, and many of humanity’s technological advancements were apparently due to him. He had not been solely responsible for any of it, but he had planted ideas in the minds of those who had eventually conceived them. It seemed like something that was extremely important, but Jefrey had neglected to tell anyone before. He had not considered any of it especially noteworthy.

“So that’s why such a large percentage of Earth’s inhabitants survived,” Jeffrey said, finishing up his story.

“Large? Billions of people died! What sort of numbers would you consider small?” Eduardo said.

“Well, without access to sufficiently advanced weaponry, I doubt that even a hundred thousand would have survived. You were in the perfect zone of being just below possessing high technology, but having enough to protect yourselves from the monsters. After all, there is no way that a level 1 human would have been able to defeat a higher leveled monster on their own.”

“Still, how did you manage all this? I thought that you were almost completely powerless here. Why has nobody ever heard of you?” Sam asked. It felt like a pertinent question.

Jeffrey smiled awkwardly.

“Alright, I might have exaggerated my importance a bit. All I really did was drop off a few prototypes at various research facilities across the world. A few mathematical papers here and there, some nuclear physics equations, maybe even a microchip. It all added up however. But enough about me. I want to hear about all of your experiences after the System came! How did you adapt to the new world?”

It was hard to top what Jeffrey had said, but Eduardo stepped into the interim to try.

“Alright. I’m sure that you all know about the Vatican, right? The tiny city in the center of Rome, home to the Pope and all of his retainers. Well, there are two sides to it. There is the public image, which is of the peaceful center of the church, and then the other half, which deals with eradicating evil. I belonged to that half,” Eduardo began, with a faraway look appearing on his face. “It was an interesting life. We were rarely called to action, mostly dealing with low level church ceremonies that revolved around the vanquishing of spirits, but occasionally we saw real action. I have been trying to reconcile what I saw for years now, and with the arrival of the System, I may have finally found peace with it. Before, I believed that the planet was plagued with sin, swimming in the horror of our past, but upon discovering that monsters were commonplace within the Multiverse, I had my answer. They had seemed to follow the conventions of our faith, responding negatively to crucifixes, salt, and all the other things thought to repel unholy things. However, none of the undead that I have seen since are affected at all by such measures. It is an interesting question, but one that is not really worth answering. What is in the past is done, and we should move on.”

“As a fellow member of the world of spiritualism, I must confess that I have experienced multiple supernatural visions before the System ever arrived,” Lao began. “And no, these were not hallucinations brought on by starving myself or by meditating for hours on end. These happened at random times of the day, always when I least expected them. They usually had the same premise, a feeling of unfathomable interconnectedness with a larger universe. I did not understand them until now. For some reason, I was having visions of the advent of the System.”

“Really? Perhaps aspects of the System were leaking into our universe for millennia, and it only came into full force now. Drips and drops of the Dao must have soaked into our universe, even if they were not accessible to us, they still created monsters and occurrences in the image, or perhaps as the root, of our mythologies and traditions,” Sam said, feeling a slight chill pass over him as he imagined the concept. The idea that everything in the universe was inevitably leading up to the arrival of the System was a terrifying thought, both from a spiritual and practical standpoint. He had heard about the idea of causality from his father, which was the idea that everything led to something else, in an endless line of dominos knocking each other over. Apparently it was a very real thing, and powerful cultivators were even able to manipulate it for their own ends. Perhaps the reality was not as extreme as some scientific studies that postulated that if one could have a snapshot of every particle in existence, then theoretically all of the future could be extrapolated from that. However there was still at least a degree of this present within the Multiverse.

Everyone else was stuck in their own inner worlds now, wondering about how much of their life was a lie. This allowed Sam to get a little bit of passive cultivation in, bringing him ever closer to reaching F Rank.