Chapter 125: Breakthrough
Ayla turned her golden pupils back toward the two remaining figures standing frozen in the heavy downpour.
The green reptile-man and the purple-feathered girl were still completely locked in the state of absolute, hollow indifference that she had pulled from the mechanical turtle.
The five-foot-deep muddy water rippled against their thighs, but they did not even blink as the cold drops hit their faces. They looked exactly like abandoned store mannequins left out in a storm.
"They look so stupid like this," Ayla muttered to herself, her blue jelly body bobbling slightly on the surface of the swamp water. "They wanted to form teams so badly, but their whole squad vanished in a single minute."
"Well, you cannot blame them for being weak," Nexus’s voice echoed inside her mind link, sounding deeply entertained by the visual. "Your combination function completely bypasses standard physical parameters. Unless someone possesses a specialized soul-shielding trait or a massive mental defense barrier, their cognitive brain pathways will always collapse under that amount of conflicting data. So, what are you going to do with these two leftover ingredients?"
"I am going to finish my breakfast," Ayla answered flatly.
She did not feel a single drop of pity or hesitation. In her mind, these infinite race geniuses were just stepping stones and resource points meant to fuel her own growth.
She rolled forward through the rippling water, closing the small distance between her and the frozen students.
Ayla did not even need to use her advanced physical traits like Steel Claw Transformation to end their trial. She simply focused her Twin Lens of the Weaver onto their helpless soul containers one last time.
"Combination," she commanded silently.
She took the lingering emptiness inside their heads and forcefully jammed it together with a sudden, massive surge of absolute, panicked terror.
The immediate conceptual collision hit their mental structures like a heavy iron sledgehammer. The reptile-man’s jaw snapped shut with a loud click as his yellow eyes instantly rolled backward into his scaled skull.
Beside him, the purple-feathered girl let out a short, choked gasp before her entire body began to shiver violently.
Both of them fell into immediate, uncontrollable muscular seizures, splashing the murky green water into the air as they collapsed sideways into the swamp basin.
Their hearts stopped beating within a fraction of a second from the pure neurological short-circuit.
Two bright blue pillars of system light instantly shot down from the gray stormy sky, enveloping their twitching bodies.
Within a brief moment, the lights faded and the two squad leaders vanished completely from the Drowned Valley Sector, their souls being forcefully ejected back to their comfortable residential suites with their score counters reset to absolute zero.
"Two freshman participants eliminated. Zero points awarded to them," the automated system notification chimed softly over Ayla’s interface, followed immediately by another dinging sound. "Twenty survival points collected for direct elimination."
Ayla bobbled her translucent blue body in complete satisfaction. Combined with the one hundred points she had just harvested from the Gold-ranked Iron Shell Turtle, her current score was sitting at a comfortable one hundred and twenty points.
It was only the first morning of the week-long trial, and she was already climbing high up on the local sub-division scoreboard.
But the real focus for Ayla was not the leaderboard points. It was her own internal evolution.
The massive, glowing energy that she had swallowed from the turtle boss was currently dissolving inside her.
Ayla floated calmly near a rusted metal pillar, letting her mind sink deep into her internal metal core.
The high-tier energy from the Gold-ranked simulation beast was reacting with the raw power of the smaller silver crocodile cores she had eaten earlier.
Her Apocalypse Silver Metal Core began to spin at an incredible speed, glowing with a brilliant, blinding silver light beneath her translucent blue surface.
However, as the energy saturated her foundation, a sudden wave of heavy, crushing friction vibrated through her fluid mass.
Her core began to shake violently, coughing out wild sparks of unrefined silver mana that caused the three feet of water around her to boil instantly.
"Nexus," Ayla communicated, her mental voice carrying a tight strain as her jelly form flattened against a concrete block. "The energy is too heavy. It is trying to expand, but it feels like it is hitting a hard stone wall. Why is it not breaking through?"
"Ah, I see what is happening," Nexus responded, her playful tone vanishing as she quickly analyzed Ayla’s shifting status bars. "The quality of your core is far too high for these basic simulation monsters. The core of that mechanical turtle is made from artificial system data, not true cosmic essence. It has enough raw volume to completely fill your silver foundation to its absolute limit, but it lacks the real conceptual weight needed to forcefully shatter the bottleneck to the Gold rank."
"Then what do I do?" Ayla demanded, her golden eyes flashing with irritation as the expanding silver mana continued to put an intense, bloating pressure on her internal parameters.
"Do not panic, little monster. I already prepared for this exact bottleneck scenario," Nexus chuckled softly, a brilliant flash of golden light suddenly manifesting directly inside Ayla’s private storage space.
Floating within her inventory screen was a massive, majestic energy core that was easily the size of a human elephant. It spun with a dense, terrifyingly complex energy pattern that radiated a faint purple fog.
It was the exact Apocalypse-ranked Gold Core that Nexus had forcefully harvested from the World Devouring Serpent, Xuan Tun, after ripping open the sky with her celestial golden hands.
"I cannot give you standard academy cheats, but this belongs to me," Nexus whispered conspiratorially. "This is a genuine, higher-plane entity’s core. Swallowing this is the only way your unique framework can gather enough true world authority to break through to gold. Pull it out and consume it right now."
Ayla did not hesitate for a single microsecond. She opened her fluid blue mass wide, creating a large vortex that pulled the massive elephant-sized Apocalypse core straight out of her inventory and into her center.
The moment her fluids wrapped around the serpent’s core, an explosive, earth-shattering wave of pure cosmic energy detonated inside her biological framework.
The difference between the fake simulation energy and this true higher-plane essence was like night and day. The thick, purple-tinted gold mana from Xuan Tun instantly crushed the silver bottleneck, forcefully ripping her internal pathways open to accommodate a much higher tier of existence.
Boom.
A heavy, invisible shockwave blasted outward from Ayla’s coordinates, blowing the five-foot-deep swamp water back by dozens of meters and exposing the muddy floorboards beneath the rusted pillars.
Her internal core completely changed color, transforming from a bright silver into a solid, flawless sphere of dense, polished gold.
However, the evolution was not over. Because the energy from the Apocalypse-ranked Gold Core was so incredibly vast and wild, Ayla’s newly formed gold core began to flicker unstable colors, vibrating with a dangerous intensity that threatened to tear her fluid mass apart from the inside out.
"The breakthrough was successful, but your new core is completely unstable!" Nexus warned loudly through the link, her digital voice flashing with an immediate red alert.
"The energy from the World Devouring Serpent is trying to break free from your layout! You need more solid, local simulation cores immediately to act as a stabilizing anchor and saturate the empty gaps in your new golden foundation! If you do not feed it more cores right now, your new rank will collapse!"
Ayla’s golden-ringed pupils expanded with a wild, desperate hunger as she felt the unstable golden mana ripping through her jelly form. She did not want to lose her hard-earned power.
"Where are the monsters?" Ayla hissed, her body rippling with a terrifying, bloodthirsty aura.
"Two kilometers to your left!" Nexus answered instantly, a green navigation arrow flashing over her eye. "A massive vanguard group of forty rival students from the third sub-division is currently cornering a huge pack of thirty Silver-ranked swamp panthers! Go there and eat everything to stabilize your core!"
Ayla did not waste a single second to reply. She dropped her newly evolved, chaotic Gold-ranked body into the murky water and activated her Gale Acceleration trait to its absolute maximum limit.
Her fluid blue form became a devastating, high-speed projectile, slicing through the five-foot-deep water with such extreme velocity that it created a massive, roaring trench in the swamp behind her.
She didn’t care about stealth or camouflage anymore. The sheer pressure of her unstable gold core was causing the falling rain to vaporize into thick white steam before it could even touch her surface.
Within less than a minute, she crossed the two-kilometer distance and reached the edge of a massive, half-submerged plaza filled with ruined metallic skyscrapers.
The scene ahead was complete chaos. A large, coordinated unit of forty humanoid students from the third sub-division had formed a tight, defensive circle.
They were using heavy iron shields, glowing magic staves, and long spears to systematically slaughter a massive pack of giant black panthers that were leaping out from the metallic tree roots.
"Hold the line!" a tall student with silver hair shouted from the center of the student formation, waving a glowing sword.
"The panthers are almost finished! Keep your defensive arrays locked down and we will sweep all the silver points in this sector!"
"We have already harvested twelve cores!" another student laughed excitedly, packing the glowing silver stones into his leather satchel. "This drop zone is a gold mine!"
They were completely immersed in their own victory, totally unaware that a terrifying prehistoric predator had just entered their coordinates.
Suddenly, a massive, deafening hiss echoed across the flooded plaza as Ayla’s blue form burst out from the trees.
She did not give the students or the monsters any time to react to her sudden arrival. Her golden eyes burned with a manic, unadulterated hunger.
She locked her Twin Lens of the Weaver onto the entire crowd—including the forty students and the twenty remaining swamp panthers—at the exact same moment.
"Combination," Ayla commanded, her resonant mental voice booming like thunder inside every single brain across the plaza.
She forcefully injected the absolute pinnacle of her new invention, jamming the concepts of hysterical, screaming joy and deep, suicidal despair directly into sixty different soul containers simultaneously.
The sheer scale of the mental attack was completely monstrous. The forty elite geniuses and the twenty wild panthers didn’t even have time to let out a single cry of confusion.
The extreme, clashing emotional data packets violently and completely short-circuited their cognitive nervous systems within a millisecond.
Their weapons clattered uselessly into the five-foot-deep water. The silver-haired leader’s eyes instantly rolled into the back of his skull as his body fell into a violent, uncontrollable muscular seizure.
Beside him, the giant black panthers collapsed sideways into the mud, their paws twitching wildly as their hearts stopped beating from the sheer neurological overload.
Within a fraction of a second, the entire forty-man alliance and their prey were completely wiped out, turning the busy battlefield into a silent, floating graveyard of twitching bodies.
Bright blue pillars of system light shot down from the gray sky, instantly enveloping the forty seizing students and ejecting them back to their residential rooms with their scores reset to absolute zero.
Ayla did not care about the disappearing students. She rolled forward across the rippling water like a massive wave, extending dozens of sharp blue fluid tendrils from her mass.
She forcefully pierced through the chests of the thirty dead swamp panthers and grabbed the twelve harvested cores from the leader’s dropped satchel, pulling all forty-two silver simulation cores directly into her center at the exact same time.
As her body digested the massive mountain of silver cores, the raw, stable system data smoothly flooded into her flickering golden foundation.
The empty gaps inside her rank parameters were rapidly filled and saturated by the local world code, acting as a perfect anchor that completely locked down the wild, purple energy of the World Devouring Serpent.
Within a few moments, the violent vibrations inside her body stopped completely. Her new core settled into a perfectly stable, silent, and flawless sphere of pure, majestic gold.
"Forty-two silver points collected. Forty student participants eliminated," the automated system voice announced loudly over her interface, updating her total survival score to a massive one hundred and eighty-two points within the first few hours of the exam.
Ayla bobbled her newly stabilized, Gold-ranked blue body in satisfaction, ignoring the carnage she created and not knowing the waves she’s creating in the professors outside the stimulation.
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