...…
*Ding*
System: Congratulations! You have successfully cleared the quest 'Challenge of the Earth Element'.
System: Your Guardian Reaper, Astaroth, was currently undergoing an evolution!
System: Congratulations! You are the first player to promote an elemental spirit into a Supreme Elemental!
As a reward, you will be receiving the Medal of Elements! Present this to the hall of Elementalists in the Awakened Continent in exchange for your desired item.
…
Shin read through the string of messages and could not help but slightly knit his brow when he read the final notification. It was saying that he was the first player to promote an elemental spirit into a Supreme Being, but he had never gotten a similar notification when he completed the quest related to the evolution of Blackie and Vladimir and got promoted to a Monarch Spirit.
This could only mean a few things.
First, it was possible that he was not the first player to promote those Elemental Spirits into a Monarch. From what he had heard from Hanzo and Solus, it was said that the Supremes and Monarchs of Elementals were somewhat different from each other even though they had similar levels of power.
But from what he could remember, Grimrace was definitely a Supreme Being in his current status, yet he also did not receive the notification at that time.
Then it could only be another explanation. Grimrace had not yet reached his full potential peak potential either. He most likely had yet to become a real Supreme Elemental and was still in the process of evolution.
Then it was the same for Blackie and Vladimir, who were also had not yet become a real Monarchs of their respective elements.
Hence, he had yet to receive the rewards for promoting them.
But there was still a possibility that there was another player out there who had managed to promote their Elemental Spirits into a real Monarch.
Shin thought that it was most likely though. At least that was what he believed.
But if there was really a person who progressed faster than him in regard to this matter, then it was most likely a player with a class closely related to Elementals.
Shin thought about Alice, who was known as Elemental Goddess Charlotte within the game, as this idea crossed his mind. He was suspecting that she might have promoted her Elemental Spirit Companions into a Monarch before him if there was indeed a person to overtake him in this matter.
Maybe he had to ask her about it when they met again. He could also use that opportunity to ask for her help regarding the way to discover and study innate attributes.
He was also considering asking Faker about it. However, after some consideration, he thought that it would be better to study such a method with Charlotte first before sharing it with the others.
After all, her class was a powerful Elementalist, which was closely related to Elementalism and Elemental Spirits.
If they managed to study and polish this method, then the help that they could provide to others would be much more bountiful.
But for now, threw these thoughts at the back of his mind temporarily since he did not have the time for it yet. He had to deal with his current business first before considering it again later. He could ask her about it once all members of the Empyrean Talons were gathered once again.
With that, Shin started organizing the items and equipment that he had gotten from the people of the Black Market while waiting for Astaroth to complete his evolution.
He was also checking his mailbox occasionally to see if there was an important matter he needed to attend. Fortunately, there was none, so he could focus on his own problems more.
Even Harmony had stopped contacting him after their last discussion. He was thinking that she might be busy organizing their forces outside the game, taking all the strategic territory within the outer region of the Starry Spears Mountain Forest.
It was in order to prepare themselves for the next war with the reinforcement of the Black Market. But at that time, the forces of the Hand of Midas would also arrive, so he did not have to concern himself about it.
He had also told her about another entrance toward this place, so there was nothing for him to worry about.
He could finally focus on his own business.
…
The evolution process of Astaroth was taking longer than he had expected. It was already an entire day within the game, yet the hybrid elemental spirit was still in the process of absorbing the Beast Cores of the three Overlord Rank Monsters.
It was at that moment that he realized that Astaroth was not exaggerating when he told Shin that those three beast cores were more than enough for his evolution.
Shin was already getting bored at that time. He was done organizing the items within his inventory ages ago and even finished evaluating his performance in earlier battles. He also meditated enough to regain his peak form, so he did not have anything to do at the moment.
Bored, he opened his virtual screen and logged in to the online forums of the game. He wanted to see how the players were reacting to the current update of the game and was quite curious about the other news with the community.
Sure enough, the top topics that the players were discussing were all about the Ascended Classes and Beings. For them, this was the most exciting part. A lot of people were hoping to get promoted from their respective tier 2 classes and reach tier 3 as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, they were quickly hit by reality and awakened from their dream.
Looking for the 'proof of qualification' was already hard enough as there were only a couple of them within the market and each one of them had sky-reaching prices. Only tycoons would be willing to spend on such items.
Buying the Proof of Qualification was just one matter. The other thing was the quest itself. It was so hard that those people who bought such an expensive item regretted their decisions quickly after.
The quest difficulty was so hard that even the Titled Rankers were struggling to clear it. Even the Godlike Players, who tried their luck, also failed to clear such difficulty.
Up until now, there was no news about any player who cleared these unreasonably difficult quests.
Forget about these Ascended Classes, even those players, who chose to follow the conventional path to reach the orthodox Tier 3 of regular classes, were having an even harder time.
No, even that might be an understatement. It could be said that the quest for these paths was much harder than attaining the Ascended Classes. It was practically impossible to complete according to the high-rank players who tried then, and some of them were also famous Godlike Players.
After seeing some of the leaked videos regarding those quests, the players quickly started filing a petition to the Gaming Company.
They were saying that those promotion quests were unreasonable and could be described as nothing but a living hell. They were saying that there was no player who would be able to clear them.
Complaints started to pile up from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands in just a few moments. Then it grew from hundreds of thousands to millions after just an hour. But the World Gaming organization seemed to turn a blind eye to this matter.
However, they indeed released a single phrase to respond to the players. They said that it was not their fault for the players to have the wrong approach when taking those promotion quests.
Other than that, the company did not release any more statements.
The average players could not do anything about it but continue their bitter complaints.
On the other hand, the huge guilds and powerful organizations started doing their respective research. From their perspective, the last statement that the World Gaming Organization released was a crucial clue that would lead them to the right answer on how to clear those unreasonably difficult quests.
As long as they found the right answer and cleared the mystery of these quests, then they would be ahead of everyone else when exploring the Awakened Continent.
Meanwhile, Shin and the others who were aware of certain matters had already figured out the answer to this problem.
"Tsk! Tsk! The Gaming Company sure is cunning," muttered Shin as he shook his head repeatedly.
From what he suspected, the answer to this issue was the special states that the World Gaming Organization had mentioned right before the long maintenance – with the Reality Manifestation and Hyperactive Immersion being two of them.
The players just forgot about them since they were too focused on the matter that they were currently seeing. They were too blinded by the promotion quests and rewards that came along with it.
At the same time, they were also too confined to the conventional approach regarding the game. They seemed to have forgotten that this game was too different from the rest that they had played before since it was closely approaching reality.
But there was also another problem with this. Very few people could enter either of those two states, which were the most talented people. If the company followed this path, then most of the mainstream players would be left behind, particularly the most average ones.
This would break the game's balance, quickly leading to their demise. They would suffer the same outcome as the other games if this was really the case.
With that in mind, Shin was suspecting that the World Gaming Organization had already found a way for the players to reach those states or at least the inferior versions of them.
This led to a single problem and that was finding these methods that would make the players enter those states even with their average talents.
"This is rather tricky, but I am sure that the answer is somewhere out there," muttered Shin as he thought hard about this matter.
It was not because he was facing similar problems as those players. After all, he could enter the state of Reality Manifestation whenever he wanted.
He was trying to find the answer to this problem because he was worried about the rest of the Empyrean Talons, who were slightly inferior to them when it came to this matter.
Thinking about that, he was suddenly reminded of the quests that he currently had. And when that thought crossed his mind, something clicked inside his head.
He then started grinning widely before muttering. "D*mn! This game company sure is sly. They are hiding the answer behind those quests."
With this line of thought, Shin thought that these developers had created a series of quests that targeted the completion of these unique states. It might not be as strong as the real Reality Manifestation and Hyperactive Immersion, or even the others that were still unknown, but he was expecting that it would have a similar effect.
The main issue now was how to find those quests. There were a lot of quests within the game, some were trivial while the others had a huge impact. There were also other types of quests that could be repeatedly cleared for basic rewards such as experience points and basic to rare materials. Players called such quests as Daily Quests or Errands.
Looking for the quests needed to unlock those special states was already troublesome enough, much less identifying them from the rest of the regular and trivial quests.
But with this, Shin could at least have a general direction on how he was going to help the rest of his companions. Hence, he added this to the list of must-do tasks that he had to complete.
He would investigate this later once he was done with his own quests.
While he was lost in his thoughts, a sudden explosion of powers suddenly erupted from the distance – in the location where Astaroth was currently located. And when he turned his head toward that direction, he could not help but smile.
Along with this, a sudden notification popped out in front of his eyes.
...
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