[Chain mission: The tragedy of Yeselvia.]
[Mission part 2: Rescue Marcel Salts.]
[Mission rank: F]
[Mission rewards: 100 gold, +500 exp, unlock part 3 of the chain mission.]
[Mission completed]
[Claim rewards?]
[Yes/No]
Although the mission rewards were nothing compared to what he had received after completing the special mission, Kyle still claimed it.
While he was still thinking about what to do with these rewards, a loud voice interrupted his thought process.
"Whaaattt! You have achieved transcendence. Ha-ha I am so blessed to have you as my daughter. Hahaha!" Marcel Salts was so happy that he almost jumped up in joy, forgetting that he only had one leg now. After struggling to balance himself, he finally sat back down with his daughter's support.
Kyle's wagon and The Salts' carriage were moving side-by-side with only half a metre distance between them, so he was naturally able to hear their conversation with ease.
"You know about transcendence?" Kyle asked Marcel while looking at him. This person gave him a completely different vibe from any other inhabitants that he had seen till now. He was very decisive and cut his own leg to get away from the corpse when it lifted him to absorb mana from his body, and on top of that he seemed to know about many things that normal people didn't know. It was no wonder that he was leading the delegation which went to Yeselvia.
Kyle had overheard what the man told his daughter about his experience and had a rough understanding of the entire situation.
Somehow, the corpse had managed to appear on the first floor and was the mysterious meteorite that had disappeared mid-air. When it first reached the ground, it used some skill to suck every living creature that wasn't an ascender or a vegetation towards itself. It carried all of them to a cool, damp underground cave.
Kyle inferred that this corpse must be running low on mana, so it decided to absorb mana directly from the inhabitants and the beasts in the nearby area. Having no intellectual capabilities, it could only sense mana, but wasn't able to infer that the mana from the bodies of these creatures was poisonous to it.
When it first absorbed the mana from a human, its mana got corrupted and the remaining mana in its body also burned away. The corpse could not experience pain, but it could feel its mana depleting, so it fanatically absorbed mana from the creatures that it had collected. The more it absorbed, the more it suffered from mana corruption. Thus, the mild mana corruption became a severe debuff to the corpse.
When Marcel Salts, who was also dragged away by the skill executed by the corpse saw what happened to the first inhabitant that the corpse absorbed, he felt a chill running down his spine and immediately cut off his leg when the corpse lifted him by his leg. He supported himself with the wall of the cave and limped away in a random cavern, only to reach a dead end where he dressed up his wound with a makeshift bandage, but passed out due to excessive blood loss. This was also the place where Kyle found him.
When Kyle thought of this, he was reminded once again that this was not a game. The games had back stories for missions but they couldn't be as detailed as this one.
What Kyle didn't know was that a single skill of his had changed the fate of this entire world. If the corpse hadn't sensed Kyle using mana while executing 'wink leap' to overtake the guard at that time, it wouldn't have appeared before Kyle and the special mission wouldn't have been generated. The corpse would then have continued to absorb mana from the inhabitants and beasts and with no one capable of stopping it, it would eventually absorb away all the inhabitants and beasts of Yeselvia, which was the theme of Kyle's chain mission. Also, under some special circumstances, the corpse was totally capable of absorbing away the entirety of the world's creatures, leading to the destruction of this world which was the theme of Kyle's special mission.
Kyle's thoughts were interrupted by Marcel Salts.
"Oh, Mr. Kyle. My daughter told me everything. I am very grateful to you for your help. Here, take this. This is what my daughter promised you. As for your question, yes I know about transcendence. My uncle was a transcendent, although he didn't go any higher than the sixth floor, he was the celebrated hero of our entire kingdom and world when he returned."
"Everything that I have is inherited from him and I even got a very important post in the royal court because of him. He was my idol when I was young, but I wasn't able to achieve Transcendence. But now, Reiler has achieved it. I can't tell you how happy I am after hearing that my daughter has done so." Marcel Salts said while taking out a pouch containing hundred gold coins from his spatial storage ring.
[+500 exp]
[Third part of chain mission: Tragedy of Yeselvia unlocked.]
As soon as the notification appeared before Kyle, he heard another voice.
"Umm...Kyle. My dad told me that there were many other people similar to him who..." Kyle immediately stopped Reiler before she could introduce the third part of the chain mission.
"No!" Kyle said without even thinking.
"Didn't I already tell you that you can't breathe a word of what happened here to anyone else? Remember that we can't give people any chance to even doubt that we have something to do with anything that happened today. If we go back right now, aren't we announcing it to everyone in this world that we know what happened there?"
"I wouldn't be surprised if every ascender in this world begins to target us if they as much as doubt that we have something to do with what happened today. Being an ascender myself, I can confidently tell you that everything I said is no exaggeration."
Reiler's face paled.
"Is it really that serious?" She asked in a hushed voice.
"Think of it this way, if all the inhabitants knew that you would achieve Transcendence just by coming here to save your father, what do you think is more likely, them helping you in your endeavour or them using every trick in their arsenal they just to snatch away this opportunity from you?" Kyle asked, but didn't bother to hear Reiler's answer.
Anyone smart enough could tell which situation was more likely to happen.
Marcel Salts, who was sitting beside Reiler and listening to her conversation with Kyle widened his eyes. True enough, Kyle was right.
"Reiler, he is right. You must never tell anyone what happened today or how you achieved Transcendence. Just say that it happened while you were sleeping and you don't know the process." He said while patting his daughter's head lightly.
"Yes, and with the fact that your family line has had a transcendent before, people are more inclined to think that it has something to do with your family genes." Kyle added.
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'That was tiring.' Kyle thought while lying in his bed. He had returned back to Aseles city, returned the wagon after paying its rent and then immediately returned back to Earth. After eating a take-out and bathing, Kyle immediately walked to his bed.
This mission lasted For nearly four days, and most of his time was spent travelling from Aseles to the city where all that happened and back. Kyle, who hadn't slept for a second in these four days felt all the accumulated drowsiness hit him at once as soon as he laid on his bed and fell asleep in just a few seconds.
------------
While Kyle was sleeping peacefully, the world wasn't as peaceful.
Kyle woke up after sleeping for several hours and the first thing that he did after waking up was to sync his wrist-band and read the latest news about the keywords Ascension Temple and first floor.
There were more than hundred hotly discussed topics on the forums, but two topics that had been staying on top of the searches were humanity reaching a new stage in the Ascension Temple and the matter regarding the first floor of the Ascension Temple.
Kyle looked at the latest news about the first floor. After he left for the mission two days ago, the bidding war between the guilds had reached a new all time high. When he last saw this feed which was two days ago, 'Sagittarius' which was the official youth division of the fourth ranked continental guild had shown some interest in the latest mission and increased the bid to ten times what the state level guilds offered.
But after half a day, even the Continental level guilds had joined the bidding let alone their youth divisions. Around the time when Kyle had finished his special mission, the price was twenty times the initial.
The aftermath of his battle were found and reported on the forum around this time with photographs. Everyone was stunned by the scope of the battle. It was only now that Kyle came to know the actual length of the ravines created by the corpse. They were actually several miles long.
Kyle felt a chill in his back when he saw the photographs which showed the ravines extending for several miles from high up in the air. Kyle suddenly felt grateful to the fog. If he had known the actual scope of the destruction caused by one attack of the corpse, Kyle was sure that he would have lost all his courage and never tried again after he was killed for the first time, or maybe not...
But that didn't change the fact that he was grateful for the presence of fog and that he didn't have time to see the ravines when the fog was steadily receding.
As soon as the photographs were released, ascenders swarmed the battle- scene to find out more clues, while the highest bid for the mission increased at an unimaginable rate.
This matter further escalated when someone spotted an ascender from a higher floor beyond the tenth floor accompanying a youngster in the region one day after the battle scene was discovered.
Ever since the system interface was discovered, all ascenders could clearly see the basic information about other ascenders, inhabitants or beasts that were within ten levels higher than them. Beyond that, some stats would be shown as question-marks (?).
After reading the complete thread and making sure that there was no mention of him and the special mission or some silhouettes that escaped the battle-scene in a few popular articles and threads, Kyle sighed in relief and switched his attention to the second article.
Something in this article caught his attention. A special word....Monarch.