Chapter 56: Epic-rank Dimension
With the tournament over, Aidan got the ownership of the Epic-rank Terrorized Dimension.
Aidan wasn’t in a hurry to purify the core of this dimension.
If he did that, and the dimension failed to become permamant, he would lose it.
But if he left it without purifying it for long, then Terroreign would completely currupt it.
Fortunately, this one appeared recently, and it still had four days before it would fully corrupt.
That was more than time for Aidan to complete his tasks.
After entering the dimension, and having Tom and Jovac put a tough lock on it so that none may enter without his permission, Aidan started adventuring.
This dimension was at least half the size of Earth.
There were plenty of regions and millions of Epic-rank Monsters.
[Player Aidan, here’s a tip. If you want to turn a terrorized dimension permanent upon its purification with increased chance, than you have to keep its eidos alive. Eidos is targetted by Terroreign, which allows it to corrupt everything born and developed within a dimension. Purification only involves its core, which is basically the engine of a dimension. The one that runs the engine is Eidos.]
’Oh? How do I do that?’
[To keep Eidos alive, you have to let your conciousness travel in its space, and remove corruption of Terroreign from it using your arsenal of powers. This process will wear down Eidos, but it will still wear it down less than it does when purifying its core.]
[Do that after breaking through to Epic-rank. I will instruct you.]
’Great.’
...
Aidan rolled his shoulders and looked out over his brand-new world.
Half the size of Earth, packed wall to wall with Epic-rank monsters. From the ridge where he stood, he could count three separate herds grazing across the valleys, each one worth a small fortune in cores.
’A whole pantry with my name on the deed.’ He grinned. ’I could get used to owning things.’
He gathered the crew and started handing out jobs.
"Jovan." He tipped his head at the melancholic man drifting beside him. "Take a lap. I want to know if there’s a single Spirit Vein anywhere in here worth mining."
"A lap." Jovan looked at the horizon that curved away for thousands of kilometers. "Of a world half the size of a planet."
"You’re fast. And you’re free labor."
"I am a Divine-rank senior."
"Free Divine-rank labor. Even better."
[Arthur: Hahaha!]
[Tom: He’s got you there, old man.]
[Jovan: ...Yes, Master.]
Jovan sighed like a man asked to move house, then melted into the wind and was gone.
Aidan turned to Solenne next.
She was already staring around the new world with wide eyes, a whole strange sky she had never once seen from inside a pocket dimension.
"You’re not stuck in Tom’s pocket anymore," Aidan said. "Go stretch your legs."
"...Really?" Solenne blinked.
"Really. This place is one big buffet. Tom and Arthur will sniff out the richest spots for you." He nodded at the two of them. "You hunt, you eat, you train, and you drag yourself up to SSS-rank. That’s your job."
Her new face lit up with something close to joy. "I will not waste it."
"Didn’t think you would."
Tom flopped dramatically across her shoulder. "So I’m the babysitter now. Wonderful. Do you know how many resource nodes I can smell right now? Dozens. And I have to walk her to every single one."
"Float. You float everywhere."
"That makes it worse. It’s effortless and I still resent it."
Arthur puffed up, delighted. "I will find the best ones, Master. And if any monster is rude, I eat it."
"You eat the rude ones, sure." Aidan patted his snout. "Look after her, buddy."
"Roar!"
The three of them peeled off toward the deep valleys, Solenne moving light on her feet, Arthur circling overhead, Tom complaining the entire way.
That left Aidan alone with a world full of loot and nobody to split it with.
"Finally." He cracked his neck. "The fun part."
...
Aidan spent the next hours doing what he did best.
He dropped into the first herd like a stone into a pond. A bull-shaped monster with obsidian plating swung at him, and he answered with a single charged strike that dropped it before it finished the swing. Core out, plates stripped, next.
He did not bother making it flashy. There was no crowd here, nobody to fool, no rank to hide. Out here he could just work.
Some he cracked open with a compact burst. Some he pinned with electromagnetism and cored while they were still trying to move. One enormous six-legged thing tried to flatten him, so he simply stepped onto its skull, walked up its spine, and took the core out from behind.
He worked through the valley like a man clearing his plate.
By the second herd he had a rhythm going, and by the third he had stopped counting. Cores went into his inventory in glittering heaps. Bones, hides, fangs, the dense Epic-rank organs the exchanges paid Spirit Stones for, all of it sorted and stored in his Inventory.
Somewhere around the four-hundredth kill, his stomach growled louder than anything he had killed.
"Yeah, yeah." He took out the stored food made by Jiran, seared them with a lazy thread of lightning, and ate while standing over the corpse.
’But this is giving me less and less energy. I need cooked Epic-rank meat.’
...
Jovan came back near evening, folding out of the air with his usual funeral-tired expression.
"I looked," he said. "Everywhere. Rivers, mountains, the deep caverns, the dead zones near the corruption."
"And?"
"Nothing. Not one Spirit Vein in the whole place." He shrugged. "It has monsters and meat and stone. No spirit stones sleeping in the ground."
"Huh." Aidan wiped his hands and thought about it for all of two seconds. "Fine. No shortcut, then. We do it the boring way."
"Which is?"
"I go outside and sell the mountain of cores and body parts I just farmed." He grinned. "Same result. Just with extra walking and haggling."
