Chapter 381: Chapter 381
After we all confirmed the way that rewards worked for the hero trials, Felix had asked us to wait until he ran some tests on what rewards we could get. After several minutes of questioning the AI, he confirmed a few things.
First, he confirmed that we couldn’t just ask for a small sun or star core, or anything of the sort. The rewards menu treated any variation of a sun as a ‘banned item’ and stated that we weren’t allowed to build them or request them as rewards. Furthermore, there was a warning… which, contrary to its original purpose, gave me hope when Felix shared it with us.
Warning about Unauthorized Item Construction
Any attempt to construct unauthorized items such as a ‘sun’ or any form of natural starlight (focus HERE for more details on what does or does not qualify as a sun) is banned. This is in order to maintain the proper continuation of this world’s historical and social atmosphere. The Garden world is created to embody certain aspects, and interfering with the laws of physics or the way the four essences operate could dismantle the entire world if something were to go wrong.
Violation of this ban will result in a report being sent to @*#$&#$, with further punishments incurred and afflicted upon the penalized parties upon return to the Market. In severe cases, #*$&#@ may also be notified to dispense on-the-spot removal of any banned items.
The warning itself wasn’t good - after all, it meant that the creators of this dimension were explicitly aware of the danger a transmigrator COULD pose to the artificial setup of this world, and they had some kind of countermeasure in place.
However, contained with the warning message were multiple error messages as well. The error messages made the four of us think that the System was supposed to have some sort of countermeasure in place - but that countermeasure might not be in effect right now. Plenty of things had been lost when the Market was destroyed, and it would make perfect sense for their ‘countermeasure’ system to have also been weakened during the collapse of the Market. In particular, the warning message said that if we violated the ban, a report would be sent to someone.
Since there weren’t a whole lot of people left in the Market, that meant that we basically had free reign to do whatever we wanted. A system of punishing people who tried to change the status quo had clearly existed at one point, but it had equally obviously collapsed. That was great news. I hadn’t thought much about it before, but if this dimension had some sort of trap hidden for people who tried to change it too much, and we had fallen afoul of it, that would have been catastrophic. I was still a novice at dimensional terraforming and complicated alteration essence usage - there were probably all sorts of ways this could have gone wrong, but it seemed like we had dodged them by virtue of corporate laziness.
It was also obvious that we probably would have gotten this warning if we had gotten close to our objective of creating an artificial sun. I just hoped that the System didn’t constantly spam us with warning messages when we were on the verge of success - I certainly wouldn’t want constant error messages clogging up my vision as I tried to work on a delicate object that even I barely understood.
said Felix. should still keep an eye on things as we work. I suspect we’re probably safe, but we need to be wary of a careless mistake, or it could send us tumbling into the abyss. I don’t know how we could take precautions though… so just do your best, Miria. If the dimension has some sort of countermeasure for us changing too much, and we get killed by it, don’t beat yourself up. We’re trying our best, and sometimes that doesn’t work out. but it’s not your fault if things go wrong.>
I hesitated for a moment, before I nodded. I said.
said Felix. out without letting dimensional laws in. I think some kind of spatial pocket makes the most sense for solving this problem. I can get that from my trial reward - we obviously need it, and it would fit well with my interests.>
I felt my heart grow a bit warmer. I was glad that my friends thought so highly of my artificial sun plan.
into the sun. If we don’t have that, the sun will eventually collapse into itself - after all, we’re creating an artificial, pocket-sized sun, not a real sun. I just checked, and there is a reward we can get that solves this problem. It’s a type of object called a ‘dimensional wire.’ In essence, it allows for a very short-range teleport of essence from one spot to another, while teleporting ONLY essence - no dimensional laws pass through the wire, meaning there won’t be anything to destabilize the sun. That’s important, because this thing is probably gonna be fragile - especially at first.>
said Felix. get sunlight everywhere it needs to go. That is going to be much harder, if the sun is trapped inside of a spatial pocket - so Anise, this is where your reward comes in.
I asked, a moment later. I could already figure out what Felix would ask me to acquire.
said Felix. can grow, as long as people feed it more essence. It’ll take a while before we hit the point where it’s a net positive amount of essence, but we should get there sooner or later. We have very long lifespans in this dimension, so we have time to make this work.>
said Felix. seem like a plan where you benefit the most, but really, it’s just the most reasonable way to accomplish our goals.>
I said, and repressed the urge to sigh.
“How big of a boost to my alteration stat can I get if I focus every single part of the trial on that?” I asked out loud.
Projected Rewards Notification
The Hero’s Trial is separated into three stages, each of which has a separate reward. (If a reward is particularly valuable, it might require multiple stages in order to acquire).
What Grade is your current attunement stat?
Projected final Alteration stat, by stage of the trial:
(Some Variance can occur based on trial performance. Theoretically, an absolute maximum of grade 20 is possible, but highly implausible. A final result of Grade 18-19 is most likely, assuming all three stages of the trial are passed.
Going from Grade 8 to Grade 19??? How powerful were the rewards for this trial?
I suddenly had a better idea just how powerful the rewards for previous heroes were. None of us had a perfect idea how much we improved from one Grade to another, but we were pretty sure it was some sort of compounding equation - before grade 10, at least, every single grade seemed to increase a stat by 50%. This number seemed to slowly ‘decay’ after Grade 10, meaning it wouldn’t be quite as absurd of a boost… but even so, I was probably going to boost my essence pool by nearly two orders of magnitude if I passed all three stages of the trial. Right now, Elder Veridian estimated that I had something like 5-10% of her essence pool. After this trial, I might have two or three times her essence pool. It was such a massive change that I couldn’t help but feel excited.
A moment later, I forced myself to calm down. All of this was dependent on me passing the trial. That wasn’t guaranteed. I needed to focus.
Asked Felix. Sallia and Anise sent messages confirming they were okay with it one final time, and I winced. The trust of my friends felt very heavy… but if they trusted me that much, I didn’t want to let them down.
Activation of Trial Confirmed. Good luck, hero!