Over fifty monstrous rabbits were trying to overwhelm Shen. Some of them had been frozen midair, and when things resumed, they kept their trajectory.

Shen's spearhead cut two of them like the useless Shadows they were.

| Evolved Horned Rabbit (F) | 41,562 → 41,572 AP

| Evolved Horned Rabbit (F) | 41,572 → 41,582 AP

He had planned on cutting three of them in a single swipe though. The F- resistance they now had didn't make them much harder to kill, but enough to make killing them less of a breeze. On the bright side, they now gave 10 AP.

Shen turned in time to avoid three new attacks while swinging his spear. He dodged one of them by a hair's breadth and killed another rabbit.

Usually, the fight would keep going like that, but now his footwork had improved.

He flowed in between and around the rabbits. Most of them didn't even have the time to react, and those who did failed miserably to hit him. While moving, his spear found flesh and delivered death.

Shen wasn't much faster than before, but the improved movement art was just enough to more than make up for the rabbits' evolution.

He felt like a wind of death blowing away his enemies into motes of light.

He made sure not to kill every rabbit though. About three went Alicia's direction, and she managed to still kill them in a single fireball each.

Shen let out a slight smile at that. It was much more efficient killing one of them for 10 AP than ten for that same amount. Even her growth speed would increase, and he would then need to worry less about her. He was confident of killing any F-rank Shadow, no matter their stats.

All in all, he was finding the midstage changes just perfect.

He idly considered how that tutorial seemed to walk a fine line between a trial and a tutorial, most times focusing more on one rather than the other. Now he was definitely on the tutorial part.

Shen and Alicia killed their enemies, then rested, talked about the Eternal Empire, and killed more enemies.

Life was easy.

A young woman rushed desperately out of the border of a forest into the endless plains. She was quickly followed by a man, then two people, then numerous others until thirty-seven were running away.

A horde of F-rank rabbits—that now looked like hellspawn—followed but blessedly seemed to lose interest only a few hundred yards away from the forest.

There were three huge fortresses of stone and metal at a distance, but no enemy was visible. The people threw themselves to the ground to rest.

At last, they were safe.

"This place is hell," Charles said. "Pure hell." He was short, with black eyes and long black hair held in a ponytail. He wore leather armor like everyone in the group and wielded sword and shield, the most accessible weapons for newbies.

"It is, isn't it?" Mark agreed. He was the only still standing, brows furrowed. "Something isn't right."

He had gotten almost a hundred people working together under his rule, which fit his expectations of this stage. However, the sudden increase in difficulty had been unexpected.

Oh, he had expected something to happen, just not that. Thirty days was too long. Giving people that long to amass AP was too easy, so the system was upping the stakes. It didn't shorten the period because it wanted them to acknowledge their limits and because the elites were still supposed to be nourished.

The only issue was that the difficulty spike was too big. He had lost over sixty percent of his fighting force right after over two hundred rabbits turned into monsters. If he was faring that bad, how terrible would others' situations be?

In the end, he had miscalculated badly, and the system had told him why in the message titled Race to the Top:

This wasn't a tutorial for rabble; this was a tutorial for elites. Mark didn't know why the rest was there though. That actually bordered on a scam by the Multiverse Alliance.

There was something more going on that he couldn't quite put his finger on.

Either way, he hadn't been part of the top 1%, only the top 10%. His plans for Feng Shen were falling apart.

Mark...

Mark had to face his own mediocrity, and it hurt.

"In the end, I'm just a nobody with a broken dream no one cares about, ain't I?" he said. "I suppose it's now time for someone to offer me a quick way to power that will leave me a broken shell of my former self. Or current self, I guess."

Nothing happened.

This, he was realizing, wasn't his story. He wasn't even a support character. He had had the opportunity, and arguably the skills, to make it work but had failed.

He had lacked luck.

The system had said it too. Luck was a factor in the Multiverse Alliance's victory. Some extra luck in landing in a better place, and Mark might've been in the top 1% achievers. Or maybe extra luck to not having met anyone and thus having focused on himself all the time rather than waste time with experiments. He hadn't, and now he paid the price.

'Don't cry, Mimi,' he could almost hear his older sister say on her deathbed. He had been eight, and she, a then bald thirteen-year-old bookaholic with terminal cancer. 'I was fated to be just a minor character in your story. Minor characters don't matter. Live long and strong, a glorious protagonist life. Don't let yourself down for me.'

Mark had wanted to prove to her how wrong she was. How she mattered the most. The supporting cast was the most important because they changed fate itself, just like she had changed his perceptions of the world.

Yet here he was.

Something broke inside him right then.

'They don't care,' a whisper that was his voice yet wasn't said in his mind. 'Kill them all. Erase them. Feed them to the Void.'

Mark looked at Charles. The boy wasn't even looking his way. A quick strike to his neck...

...and Mark himself would die because that's how the tutorial worked.

"Fuck this shit," he said, looking around.

As expected, coming their way at a distance, he saw a humanoid form made of smooth black liquid. It had no features at all and seemed to distort light as it got to it.

"Identify," he said, and the system gave him bold red letters in a tooltip for the first time.

| VOID SEEDLING (G ~ E) — ??? / ???

"Guys!" he roared. Some snapped their heads to him. Others were lost looking at their companions with a strange look in their eyes. "Void Spawn! Run!"

The damn thing was coming straight from the plains. They would need to go back to the forest, but it was better than dealing with an enemy that could affect their damn minds.

About half the people stood up and ran with him. He didn't rush but kept a good pace to keep looking back. The people who had stayed behind started killing each other and dying themselves in the process.

Only one remained, breathing hard. Charles. The Void Spawn approached, and the guy fell to his knees, holding his head with both hands, looking up and screaming in terrible anguish.

The damn monster passed by him without even looking in his direction or touching him. Yet, that seemed to be enough. White liquid poured from Charles's orifices, covering him whole, consuming his equipment, then turning him into a white clone of the other thing.

It stood up and walked behind its creator.

'I should become One with them...' the invading thought started, but Mark just turned back and kept running.

How he dearly missed the rabbits!

'The Seedling has been released,' Stage Overseer Si'shi'sha'ma'pi'ka'mi'aah'ta said straight to the Universe's Integration Headquarters.

The idea of experimenting with a Void Spawn in the tutorial had come from the Dreamer, and only the swamp gods knew how many favors they had called and strings they had pulled to be allowed that. However, not even the Dreamer could stop the chain of command from overseeing the procedure directly. If a single soul was lost to the Void in the experiment, the Dreamer's head would roll, no matter their backing. Feeding a non-Condemned to the Void was treason, no way around it.

'Understood,' HQ replied. 'Proceed.'

She did. Three of her ninety-six heads were monitoring the Void Spawn and nothing else.

'First interaction successful,' she said after a while. 'We recovered the human soul before it was consumed. No taint was detected in the soul or witnesses. I recommend immediate termination of the procedure.'

'Noted,' they replied but didn't order her to stop it.

The Stage Overseer had expected that answer, and to be honest, she wanted to see the entire experiment to the end too. However, she knew better than to say it. Even if it succeeded, she would gain next to nothing as the mere operator who happened to be around for it. On the other hand, if it failed, she would fall with the Dreamer unless she had recorded her misgivings.

Recovering a soul while the body was consumed would've been impossible just a few hundred years ago, but the technology was evolving. Today, they achieved success, albeit a small one. The theory was already there, even if it had never been proved in a controlled environment until today for lack of people willing to risk dying for treason. The issue with even this victory was that it couldn't be reproduced in a world being invaded. The Void affected the Guardian System's connections to a world unless it hosted a System Node—and the ones who did had strong enough Guardians to not need the system to protect people's souls.

This experiment had two goals, finding a way around the connection issue and preventing those who came in contact with the Void from getting tainted. The latter was the reason the Dreamer was involved, as far as Si'shi'sha'ma'pi'ka'mi'aah'ta knew. If the Alliance found a way to have their Guardians remain taint-free after continuous exposure to the Void, it would revolutionize war as they knew it. The Dreamer's status would soar to the heavens, as his main weakness would be significantly diminished.

'Interaction with Shadows within expected parameters,' she said, watching another window where rabbits just dissipated when they got close enough to the Void Spawn.

The Guardian System made and supported Shadows, and a weak connection made them cease to be. In a world being invaded by uncountable Void Spawn, proximity wouldn't even be a factor as the entire system would be having trouble affecting things. That was the main reason they needed Guardians or at least Incarnations; only they could resist the Void.

She kept working, but it was one of her heads watching over the rest of the stage that made her surprised. A talent misevaluation had been given not to one but three people. That would've left a demerit in her file if it wasn't for the Void-touched boy. As it was, she still needed to report it.

She used her mana to connect to another branch of the Integration HQ.

'Reporting Guardian System talent evaluation issues,' she said. 'Three subjects— Correct that. Four— Dry swamp, five subjects involved, and increasing.'

'Acknowledged. Reevaluation team dispatched,' HQ replied and terminated the connection.

That head nodded and took the matter out of her mind to focus on other issues.

"Son of a goblin," Liya muttered. For the first time in a few dozen years, the drow was put out of her calm enough to miss a hammer strike on a blade she was forging.

A system message was floating in front of her.

REEVALUATION COMMITTEE'S SUMMONING

Your charge, Feng Shen, human, Earthen, has been marked for talent reevaluation in a Pioneer Tutorial.

You're summoned to oversee the procedures and answer questions.

The Alliance's rules for message titles were simple. Standard titles were for most messages. Uppercased titles were for stuff you had to pay attention to unless you were in the middle of something, like forging equipment. Uppercased yellow titles were for things you had to deal with immediately on the risk of punishment. And finally, uppercased red titles meant the Void was involved, and thus only idiots would ignore it.

The message's title was yellow.

That wasn't the only issue with the damn thing though. Feng Shen was not her charge. She had accepted to take him in as a mere student in the future. Uk'Gaar had obviously pushed the issue onto her when the summoning came to him. That should be impossible—unless you were a Rising Star, of course.

If she survived the damn investigation, she would get a price in blood for this.

"Accept," she said at once, knowing better than to mess with a yellow message.