We opened our eyes and found ourselves in another forest, but it was night time and this forest seemed more mystical than the forest on the 8th floor.
There were butterflies scattering glittering particles flying around us and luminescent plants lighting up the entire forest.
[Trial: Mysterious Egg
Objective: Nurture the egg in your inventory until it hatches
Difficulty: Easy
Rewards: ???
Punishment for Failure: Death]
Looking at the trial description, all I could do was laugh.
At first glance, this trial seemed immensely easier than the other trials, but this was just a facade.
Sure, you could just wait until the egg hatched, but the first challenge was surviving until that moment.
In this forest, there were many mythical creatures that were all ranked D and up, scattered around the whole thing. At this moment, a D ranked beast could easily kill a regular player by hitting them once.
The second reason why this trial was hard was due to the nurturing aspect of it. Sure, you could just wait until the egg hatches, but if you do, you'll just get a familiar animal that would probably be more of a hindrance than a help like a songbird. On the other hand, if you nurtured the egg by giving it rare materials to absorb which you could find in the forest, the egg would get a high chance of becoming a better familiar beast, but these materials were often in hard to access places protected by dangerous boss monsters.
And finally, the third reason this trial was anything but easy was because if you accidentally broke the egg or lost it, you would face the trial punishment, which was death.
And you might also be thinking, "Could a player that chose beastman sign a contract with their spirit animal and get an early advantage in the game?" but they actually couldn't because if they formed a contract with a baby familiar animal, then they would only get a minuscule increase in power, as the stronger their contracted animal, the stronger a beastman would become, so they couldn't take an advantage.
Also, beastmen couldn't form a contract with any of the mythical creatures in the forest as I had just programmed it so that all of the animals would refuse, again, so that no one race would get that much of an advantage until the end of the Tutorial Tower.
"Hey Shin, are we just gonna do nothing and wait until the egg hatches?"
"Hey brat, you think that that's all there is to this trial, you didn't question if there could be hidden trials that could be a part of the main trial? Are you dumb or something? To think that a trial in this tower was easy?"
"Ok ok, I get it, no need to get pissed off."
"Alright, so go climb that tree over there."
"Why the heck would I do that?"
"So we can figure out where we are, I mean, isn't that obvious."
"How in the world are we supposed to figure out where we are if we don't have a map or anything, wouldn't it just be counterproductive?"
"Sigh, and I had thought that you were the least bit smart."
"What do you meannnnnn?"
I smacked her in the head.
"You couldn't even deduce anything about me after spending 1 week with me already."
"At the most, you should have been able to figure out that I am somebody that is unseemly knowledgable about the tower. After all, I somehow brought you to Wukong's nest without even having to search for it. It was like I already knew exactly where it was."
"Huh, now that you bring it up, you do seem to know a little bit more than the average person about this tower."
I smacked her in the back of the head again.
"And that's why you're a dummy."
"So how do you know more about the tower than a normal person?"
"Now why the heck would I tell you that?"
"You expected me to not be curious after telling me that! What the fuck is wrong with you! Making a young maiden like me squirm due to her curiosity."
"It's not my problem." I said while shrugging my shoulders.
"Son of a bitch." She murmured under her breath.
I smacked in the back of the head for the third time.
"Hurry up and climb a tree."
'What is it with him and making me climb trees. Uggghh, this is so frustrating.'
When Hope had reached the top of the tree, I called up to her.
"Do you see a mountain range anywhere, it would just look like a dark blob in the distance."
"Yeah I see one that is that way." She said while pointing in a certain direction.
After setting our destination, we started running towards the mountains looming in the distance.
It only took us a few minutes to get there with our much higher than average stats.
Once we got to the base of the mountain, we started to climb it until we reached the peak.
"Ugh, Fuck!" Said Hope, tripping for the 5th time in the darkness. She then fell and rolled down a few meters.
"Fuck this fucking mountain, this fucking darkness, and fuck you Shin, for not telling me anything about why we're doing this and how you know to do this."
"Sigh, just shut the fuck up and follow me please." I said, speaking in a tired, tone. After all, who wouldn't get tired after hearing a squeaky voice complaining to them for the past hour.
"We're almost there so hold your shit together."
Reaching the top of the mountain, the first thing we noticed was a huge crack in the ground, running all the way to the peak adjacent to this mountain.
'That "thing" is almost in sight.' I thought, barely containing my excitement.
We ran along the crack for another 45 minutes, passing 3 more peaks until we reached the middle one in the mountain range, which was also the tallest one.
At a spot where the crack was barely big enough to fit a human I looked down into the swallowing abyss.
"We're here."
Curious as to why I was looking down the crack, Hope poked her head over the edge.
...
"Don't hate me for this."
...
"What do you meeeeeeahhhhhhhhhhhh."
I mercilessly pushed her over the edge.
"Hoooooo, haaaaaaaaa." I took a deep breath, and jumped, following right behind her.
'We'll be facing a much longer drop than the drop into Wukong's nest this time, I wonder how she'll fare.'
After 30 minutes of straight up falling, I calculated that it was about time to get ready.
"HEY HOPE, CAN YOU HEAR ME?" I shouted over the wind rushing through our ears.
"YEAH I CAN HERE YOU, WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?" (She was too tired and mentally traumatized to curse at Shin, so she reverted to her loyal "follow whatever Shin tells you" personality.)
"WE'RE ABOUT TO LAND IN WATER SO POINT YOUR LEGS, FEET AND HANDS DOWN, AND GLUE YOUR HANDS TO YOUR SIDES OR YOU'LL BREAK SOMETHING."
"ARE YOU SURE THE WATER'S DEEP ENOUGH?"
"I'M SURE, JUST FOLLOW MY INSTRUCTIONS.'
"OK!"
And in a few minutes, we hit the water, just like that. There was nothing special about it other that us just getting wet and having to hold our breath for a long time just to swim our way up, but that was easy due to our stamina stats.
"Gaaaaaasp, hoo, haa, hoo, haa." Gasping for her breath after coming out of the deep pool and breathing heavily, Hope collapsed beside me, onto the sandy bank in the complete darkness.
"Next time, hoo, haa, tell me, hoo haa, before, hoo haa, you, hoo haa, do some fucking shit, hoo haa, like that!" (She reverted back.)
"Yeah yeah, I'll do that." I said laughing, while not even bothering to hide my intentions that I was never going to do that. The big brother in me was just laughing at my ingenious prank on my "younger sibling".
After resting for a little bit, we continued.
"Here hold my hand or you'll get lost in the darkness."
After all, this was a special place where it was so dark that even my high perception stat was unable to "see" more than 2 meters in front of me, much less Hope being able to see in this darkness.
"Fuck you, I'm not holding your hand you pervert, sex predator."
"Sigh, I already told you I'm not interested in young girls that haven't even grown in that middle area. Also, you look way too much like my little sister when I last saw for me to take a liking to you in "that" way."
"You know that's a little creepy right?"
I decided not to give her the advantage by answering that question.
"Whatever, just hold my hand."
Even in the darkness, I could tell that Hope was blushing as she gingerly placed her on mine.
Grabbing her hand and quickly pulling her along, I used the crack's walls to navigate through.
"Oooof, ooof, ahhh, oof, oof." Hope started making weird sounds as I pulled her along.
"Slow the, oof, fuck down, oof, for gods sake!"
"Ohh, sorry for not noticing. I guess I was just too excited." Putting up an act, I scratched my head with my other hand and grinned sheepishly. Of course, I had also done this on purpose to tease her, as she could kind of see it with her perception.
'Why is it only until now that you notice that you've been slamming me against the walls due to your speed.' She screamed internally.
And then after a few minutes of walking, the walls started to get further apart until we reached an open room, hidden in this canyon.
Looking into the empty darkness, we could see a faint light shining in the middle of the "room".
Rushing over to the light source, we found two white, glowing flowers, wet from a dripping of water from a stalagmite above them.
'The Pure Yin/Yang flowers look so much more beautiful than what they looked like in game.'
The dim glow that the flowers gave off made the flowers seem mystical and the water dripping on them only made them more beautiful with each drop. They were like peerless white-haired twins that seemed like divine beings.
I then explained to her what we were about to do.
"You can decide how you want to do this but just don't get mad at me if you make the wrong decision."
"Each petal will give you 10 stat points randomly spread across each stat, so 10 petals means 100 stat points."
"But, you can also give the petals to your egg over there, which will give it a higher chance, depending on how much petals you give it, into hatching into a rare or even mythical creature like a dragon, unicorn, or phoenix. Also, keep in mind that we're also going to be looking for two other ingredients to give to the eggs."
"One last thing to keep in mind, adding all 3 ingredients together in their full affect will guarantee that the familiar animal or beast that comes out of that egg will be at least SSS++ ranked dragon level beast with a 10% chance of it becoming a SSS+++ ranked dragon level beast and a 1% chance of it becoming an EX ranked dragon level beast so choose what you will do wisely."
With that, I let my egg completely absorb the Pure Yin/Yang Flower without a second thought. After all, the beast that I could get would more than make up for the stat points that I missed, and I was already at an extremely high level and didn't need the stat points.
After thinking for a little bit, Hope did the same thing as me, probably trusting my knowledge that she at least knew was reliable, so that meant if I did something and she did the exact same thing, it would probably benefit her greatly in the future.
"Good choice... now let's move on to the next ingredient."
"Ugghh, can't we just rest a little, I mean just this once?"
"Nope." I said, smacking her in the back of the head.
"Fine, fine." she said, on the verge of breaking into tears after the emotional and physical trauma she had just been through.
"But wait a second... now that I think about it... HOW THE FUCK ARE WE GOING TO GET OUT OF HERE?"