“What the hell are these things?” Dante said, sighing as he wiggled his toes. He had accidentally pulled off his sock when he ripped his shoe off. “It melted a leather shoe in seconds, Laurelai. I don’t think acids that strong exist.”

Dante couldn’t wait to get the hell out of the cavern. He had been jumping at any random noise, almost expecting another hawk to dive bomb him and tear his throat out. It also didn’t help that he was utterly exhausted. He must not have slept for long because his mind and body both ached and throbbed with pain.

Laurelai stifled her laughter. At least, she attempted to hold it in. It took her three or four times to stop, only to let out a breathless chuckle when she finally managed to say more than two words.

“Anything is possible, my young friend,” Laurelai said, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “This type of snail is commonly found in places like these. They hang around and wait until a creature wanders over, gets caught in an illusion of their own making, and then-.”

“They melt the creature and eat it?”

“What? No, of course not. Most creatures that approach in hopes of taking or using the Dream Well get trapped in an illusion, which expends their soul force and makes their mind enter into a… hyperactive state, so to speak. The daydream snails, which is their official name, come out of hiding and consume the creature’s soul force and feed on its mind until one of two things happen.”

“Let me guess. The creature dies, or it wakes up and leaves?”

Laurelai nodded her head. “Exactly. They wait until the creature dies before eating its corpse, or they slither over the creature and give it a good cleaning before it wakes up and leaves. They get a snack in the form of mental energy, or if they’re lucky, they get a whole beast to eat.”

“Wait, they clean the creature without melting it? How?”

Dante looked at the creature as it slurped up his shoe puddle. It was too big to fit in his palm, and its shell was a dreamy purple colour. The flesh of its body was a deeper, slightly transparent purple, but the spiral of the snail’s shell was brighter than the rest of it, almost like a gradient that ended in neon purple.

Other than the strange colour, it looked exactly like a snail.

“They have a very special acid made out of liquid from the Dream Well. It melts anything without life energy running through it, and that means clothing, dirt, and so on. But the most important part you must remember is that this trial was designed for you. To fix your flaws. Almost like the system brought you here because you would benefit from something in this cavern…”

Laurelai stared into his eyes, leaning forward as she gestured to the snail and the Dream Well repeatedly. The daydream snail had finished its meal and was already sliding back to the Dream Well, but it didn’t eat everything. There was now a puddle of slimy, transparent liquid where the melted shoe had fallen, and it glistened in the light of the crystals.

Dante would have to be as stupid as she thought he was to miss an obvious hint like that, but he still had no idea what he was supposed to do. Drink the liquid? Apply it like a moisturiser? With nothing else to go on, he crouched down beside the puddle and looked to Laurelai for answers.

“You know,” Laurelai said, almost wistfully. “There are a whole bunch of strange things that can happen when you mix two similar substances.”

Dante nodded and walked over to the Dream Well. He held his breath and quickly scooped up a handful, stopping to appreciate how deep the well was. He couldn’t even see the bottom, but the low light of the cavern definitely helped. After speed walking back to the puddle of slime, he dumped a handful of the Dream Well water into it.

The concoction didn’t change, so with a nod of Laurelai’s head, he went back two more times until something happened. The transparent puddle was now cycling between every colour he could imagine, almost like it was copying the crystals dotted around the cavern. Then, when it cycled through them all, it gained the texture of velvet and shifted into a glowing purple that reminded him of an amethyst.

“So, what was that all about?” Dante asked, turning to look at a relieved Laurelai. “Why couldn’t you just tell me what to do rather than talking in that roundabout manner?”

Laurelai hovered over the magical puddle he had concocted before landing beside it. “There are rules in place. One of the most obvious is that I can’t directly interfere with your tutorial, making it impossible for me to help you fight any creature that attacks you. In the same vein, I can’t tell you certain things or else the tutorial will lose its purpose. You’re here to learn how to stand on your own feet, but if I order you to do this and that, you’ll be like a child who won’t learn a thing. Indirect hints are the best I can do, sorry.”

“Thank you for the effort. I know that you don’t have to go to such efforts, so just know that I really do appreciate it. I would be so lost without you.”

Dante sighed, feeling the tension on his shoulders more than ever. His odds of survival were so low already. If Laurelai decided to cut her losses here and abandon him, he would definitely die. Maybe the hawks would eat him, or perhaps he would starve to death. Either or, he wouldn’t last a week here without her help.

“Anyway,” Laurelai muttered, a slight blush rising on her cheeks, “you should finish off the introduction before you drink your elixir. Just say ‘Quest’ out loud, or will the quest menu to appear.”

Dante willed the screen to appear, silently hoping there was an alternative to sucking up the slimy floor puddle.

Quests

The First Step [0/10]: Reach level 10 and pick a class (Energy Circulation Manual tailored to your energy pathways).

Unique Quests

Survivalist: Escape from the Blood Cavern and complete the first phase of the tutorial (1x G-grade equipment, 10x G-Grade Essence Crystals).

Truth Seeker: Investigate the ritual and discover its true purpose (1x G-grade Mapping Extension).

Dante had a good guess of what the Quest menu would entail, and it seemed he wasn’t too far off. If he was to give it a new name, he would call it a task list. It detailed what the system wanted him to do and the potential rewards for their satisfactory completion.

Although he didn’t know what an Essence Crystal was or the precise details around a Mapping Extension, he understood that they were helpful, and if not, then that meant they were worth money… or coins?

He assumed that the standard currency might change, but he didn’t actually know what it would become. Something to find out later, then. He needed to finish up now and get moving.

“Okay, so now what?” Dante said, crouching down beside the puddle. It smelled of lavender and looked like velvet. He wanted to touch it, but the knowledge that it came from a snail kept his hand in check. “I just rub this gunk onto my skin or…”

“You have to drink it.”

Dante winced, his stomach churning at the thought of drinking something off the ground, but he eventually nodded. “I’ll… try my best. But maybe you could tell me what the potion does, as well as your advice on how I should escape?”

“Tell me what your quests say, and I’ll think of something. There are usually some nice high-level goodies in trials like these.”

Dante nodded and read out all of his quests to her, including the rewards.

“Okay, this is good,” She muttered, nodding her head as she bit her lip in thought. “When I was searching for you, I found multiple exists.”

Dante lit up, but her expression doused his enthusiasm like a bucket of cold water on a sleeping person’s head.

“There’s a problem. All of them are off the ground, the shortest being five times higher than you are tall.”

“What? How am I going to escape then?”

“It’s simple. I don’t know what this elixir will do, but I have my guesses. And if you look straight up, you’ll see a shadow in the churning mists. That’s where the ‘ritual’ is taking place, and from what I know, there should be some extra goodies up there as well.”

“Wait,” Dante muttered, connecting a few dots. “To escape, I have to raise myself up tens of metres, and if I want the treasures in the mist, I’ll have to raise myself hundreds of metres. Is this a way for the system to push me forward? I do a bad job and just barely escape, but if I excel, I can take some extra treasures to boost my growth.”

“Maybe you aren’t as dull as I thought you were. Take a sip of the floor potion and we’ll start your training by learning the most basic use of soul force.”

With a shuddering breath, Dante got down onto his hands and knees.

***

Dante was initially convinced by Laurelai’s enthusiasm, but as the days wore on, he only became more annoyed by her overbearing demeanour. If he messed up the exercise she set up for him, she would punish him like an abusive parent. And if he stopped to take a rest, she would berate him, calling him all sorts of names under her breath.

He was trying. He really was, but she didn’t see it that way.

“Ow,” Dante grunted, holding his arm as a pink welt began to grow there. “I get that you-.”

But he was cut short as a rock bounced off the top of his head, making him bite his tongue. He groaned as he leaned forward from his cross-legged position, holding his head now rather than his arm. A slight breeze ruffled his clothes as the ball of soul force above his head disappeared, but he ignored it as the throbbing from his skull overwhelmed his senses.

“Focus!” Laurelai scolded, swinging the oversized reed in her hand. “Do you think your enemies are just going to stand there and let you gather your soul force? Blood essence is the easiest to use, which means you can take the most abuse without losing control. Astral energy is harder to control, but soul force is the hardest. Lose control for a second and you’ll get blown up by your own technique. You need to keep your energy steady and under complete control even if your arm is cut off. “

Dante lifted his head up just enough to glare at her.

“Oh, what? You disagree? You think your future enemies will take a limb and say, ‘alright, I win! I’m going to go home now’. No chance of that happening, mate. They will take your arm, then when your technique falters as you cry out in pain like a blathering idiot, they will take your head. And that’s if you’re lucky. Imagine you take the easy road and eventually have a family, only to watch as a group of warriors have their way with your wife and daughter as you watch?”

Dante took a deep breath at the horrifying images. He wanted to get stronger, but that was all talk. It was much more difficult to achieve greatness than it was to say claim you were going to. The strain was weighing on him, and the constant lack of sleep made everything twice as hard. But he knew, deep down, that this was the path he had chosen.

“I get that,” Dante said through gritted teeth. “But I need to be learning how to levitate, not how to levitate while you beat me with a reed. If you relax for the rest of the week, I might be able to form the technique before we run out of time.”

Laurelai just ignored him and picked up the rock that had fallen onto his head, which by now had rolled a few metres to his left. She dragged it off the ground with a flutter of her wings, carried it through the air with obvious effort, then threateningly held it out of arms reach above his head. Not without a bit of pretend struggling to really sell the act, of course.

By now, Dante knew what he was meant to do as well as the consequences of not gathering himself quickly enough. So with a deep and measured breath, he focussed on the chaotically swirling mass of energy locked in his mind.

With a flex of his will, which was more of a lingering desire padded with a decent helping of his focus, Dante took hold of his soul force and began to extract a chunk from the space between his eyebrows. It was a bit of an ordeal since there was a sea of chaos inside his mind, but with the help of the floor potion, his soul force would lose more than half of its momentum.

Rather than a churning hurricane, it calmed into a manageable storm.

So with all the willpower he could muster, Dante began to gather his soul force outside his head and held it in a tight ball. It was a slow and strenuous technique used to build up energy outside the body, but even though it only became harder over time since he had to hold onto more and more power, it was the best and only technique available to him.

Once he received the energy circulation technique at level ten, he would be able to soothe and direct all of the energy in his head. The meditation itself would probably be quite dull, but he would do anything to-.

The ball of energy began to dissipate into the atmosphere, forcing Dante to refocus his mind. The loose cloud of soul force in front of his forehead snapped back into an uneven sphere, looking like a glass ball filled with a faint rainbow. Seeing that he was successful, Dante let out a sigh and continued to calmly draw out the energy from the space between his eyebrows.

The action itself kind of felt like he was physically pulling something out from between his eyebrows, which wasn’t overly comfortable. There was no pain, of course, but it didn’t make the process any less disturbing. His only consolation was that it felt like a weight was being slowly lifted from his head, giving him a small burst of relief.

Most Peak-Grade elites supposedly had above-average ability in many areas combined with exceptional talent in a single direction. Dante, on the other hand, was average in all categories except one. He simply had an enormous amount of soul force inside his head, so much so that it was technically well beyond what was possible.

Which sounded good on paper, but since he had middling talent in control and weak mental endurance, it meant that he could only use a fraction of his mental energy before his mind and body couldn’t take the strain. And if he was lucky, he could maybe control a percent of a percent of his soul force before his mind was overdrawn, forcing him to rest for a while.