A cold wind whistled through the withered trees, bringing with it the smell of decay and death. The dark soil was filled with white bones, and the distant sky looked as if it were spewing flames, illuminating everything in a blood-red color. The vast uninhabited land was so eerie that it seemed like another world.
"What the hell is this place?"
Jared frowned as he gazed around at the skeletons and the swords stuck in them.
"Did it teleport us to hell?"
"No, it can't be, Brother Jared. Even if you are an Aria Envoy, there is no way to open the door to the Necromunda world ..."
Tawana explained in a panicked voice, completely oblivious to the fact that Jared was joking. Caroline, on the other hand, closed her eyes, and after a long time, with a slight movement of her expression, turned to look at the two men.
(There are no living creatures other than us in the area I can detect.)
"... This is a trial?"
Jared flicked his wrist, a precursor to action. But the vague uneasiness in his gut didn't go away. Something had gone wrong, something wasn't right. But he couldn't put his finger on it, and that made Jared feel bad. His instincts weren't perfect, and he'd never won a lottery ticket, but unfortunately, they were always perfect when it came to danger, and this was no exception.
（Tawana, what should we do next?)
In such a situation, one can only rely on the wisdom of the natives. But Tawana was also frowning, as if she were no different from them.
"I, I don't know ... Sister Caroline, I don't know why this is happening, what exactly is this place? I don't know ..."
"Doesn't it seem strange?"
Hearing this, Jared suddenly spoke up. And Tawana and Caroline looked at him, obviously puzzled.
（Strange? Well, the whole thing was weird to begin with.)
"And we have overlooked one of the most important details ..."
Jared pointed to himself.
"We don't have a target..."
"Target ...?"
"No one has told us what we should do or how to complete the test. Is it possible that this so-called test is to throw us into a place where turtles don't even lay eggs, and then test us on how to survive? What's the difference between that and a survival challenge?"
(That's right, and I don't sense any signs of life activity within my maximum range of perception, which is very unusual. I think we need to be ready for it.)
Because of the heavy dark clouds that covered the sky, the world was almost nightfall. So Caroline had already closed the umbrella in her hand, of course, although she didn't know what kind of material this umbrella was made of, but it did seem to be unique in terms of waterproof and UV protection. But now Jared can not have the heart to open these jokes, he once again surveyed the location of his own people, just in the center of a forest clearing. The entire forest seemed to have withered, pale to almost green tree trunks are everywhere after the corrosion of the traces left, suddenly look as if a human face as scary. Caroline leaned in close to Jared and took his arm.
"I say, Missy, are you at it again?"
(... What can be done about it, what you're not used to is what you're not used to.)
Caroline responded helplessly, looking around nervously. The occasional rustling of a few yellow leaves from the ground by the whirlwind made her nervous. Tawana was holding onto Caroline's other arm, obviously terrified. She didn't understand why she was in such a place. So she tried to calm herself down, and then made a few quick gestures while whispering incantations, hoping that the spirit of magic would tell her some predictable facts. This was the least of Tawana's spells, the "Confirmation Spell", which focused on communicating with the ubiquitous magical spirits in order to gain some knowledge of the place and its characteristics. Tawana had never succeeded in using this spell, and as of now, it was still a failure. For her who had not yet been able to feel the spirit of magic, it was too foolish to hope to get a response from the spirit of magic, so in the end Tawana had wasted a lot of energy, but she had achieved nothing at all.
"Well?"
Jared asked indifferently, as he gazed around. Tawana, on the other hand, shook her head apologetically, not daring to speak.
"Then let me try."
Jared raised his right hand. He twitched his fingers a few times, then winked at Caroline, who immediately took hold of his left hand, and then Jared looked ahead intently and snapped his fingers in the usual way.
The landscape suddenly changed.
In just a moment, Tavana was surprised to realize that the three of them were in the depths of an eerie, dense forest, surrounded by darkness. Dead bushes crisscrossed the landscape, obscuring everything. Tawana looked around uneasily, as if something was watching them from the hidden darkness. And then, with another movement from Jared, the landscape changed again. The dry riverbed, the withered shrubs, the ghastly white bones, even though the scenery turned back and forth several times, apart from these, the people still found nothing. Jared nodded to Caroline, who released her grip on his right hand, and the next moment Jared sat down as if he had run out of energy. The scenery around him returned to its original form.
"Nothing?"
(Nothing.)
Caroline gently shook her head in response to Jared's inquiry. Tawana, on the other hand, looked at Jared timidly and whispered.
"Brother Jared, was that ... magic you just did?"
"No."
Jared shook his head, while wiping the beads of sweat from his forehead with the handkerchief Caroline handed him.
"It's my power."
Jared's ability is "light manipulation", and naturally, the emphasis is on the word "manipulation". The so-called "manipulation" is the ability to move, eliminate, copy, and transform all kinds of things at one's disposal. In fact, all visible objects in the world are constructed from the "value" of light. What color, what angle, what size, everything is revealed by the light itself without reservation. What Jared was doing was simply feeling and calculating the "value" of the light shaping the distant environment, and overlaying it onto their current environment to recreate the distant image. To put it in a simple way, if Jared and the others are in a place where the light value of location A is made up of 10X3, and the light structure value of the distant location B is 7X5, then Jared just needs to "modify" the light value of the location where he is to 7X5, and then he will naturally be able to get information about the environment of that area. The information will be obtained by "modifying" the light value of his location to 7X5.
It's simple to say, but in reality it's very difficult to implement. After all, the amount of information in the light structure was far greater than what the human brain could process, any centimeter of light coverage contained a large amount of information elements. Even with his innate talent and Caroline's assistance, Jared was only able to reproduce a small area in the distance.
"Phew ..."
After patting his heated forehead to make sure that the information that was close to useless was forgotten, Jared immediately jumped up and moved around a few times before suggesting.
"Anyway, there's no use staying here, let's walk around and have a look around."
(... Then, over there.)
Caroline suddenly turned and pointed in the direction of an already dry riverbed.
(I just sensed that someone stepped into my sensory range, and there seems to be a fight going on.)
By the time Jared and the others arrived at the scene of the incident, the battle was winding down.
"What the hell is this?"
Looking at the grotesque animal mixed with white bones and rotting flesh, the size of a raging bull, Jared quickly let out an exclamation of surprise. The creature looked extremely violent, and its body was covered in a structure of rotting flesh and bone. At the moment, it was raising its hind legs and waving two thick arms almost as long as its body. The reason why the creature's belly was exposed was because, in its belly, there was an even bigger and tougher mouth. While waving its thick arms, the mouth of its abdomen also bit a warrior's long sword that had originally rushed in between one and the other, and then the warrior didn't have the time to draw back, the monster's thick palm slapped his head, just like slapping a mosquito as easy as that. White, muddy mucus and a lucky to escape the attack of pulverization of the eye hanging in its giant claws, looks very disgusting.
"Yikes!!!"
Seeing this scene, Tawana couldn't bear to cover her eyes, while Jared glanced at Caroline, who immediately understood and blocked in front of Tawana. Jared then stretched out his right hand and turned it around and the black double-edged sword appeared in his palm. Jared then took two steps back and weighed the sword in his hand, then he held it in his backhand and threw it at his target.
In the moment it left his hand, the black double blades turned into a perfect whirlwind weapon, it was almost silent, but exceptionally fast flying towards the monster. But out of Jared's surprise, the monster actually turned around, as if it had sensed his attack, and at the same time reached out its hand, trying to grab the green double blades that had already circled in the air and flew in front of its eyes. But its grasp was empty, because the double-edged sword circled perfectly in the air for a week, and then returned to the user's hand with great precision. The creature raised its claws in anger and attempted to attack Jared - only its upper body leaned forward, while its lower body remained motionless. Rotten, foul-smelling blood spurted out of it like an open-air fountain. Clearly, Jared's blades had done enough damage to completely disable the ugly creature.
"It's still not an aesthetically pleasing design."
After retrieving Qingkong, Jared slowly walked over to the monster's corpse, frowning as he observed it. But to his surprise, he realized that the creature's flesh had already decayed, and even the part of the body where the heart was supposed to grow was empty. So he turned around and started looking for the survivors.
Then Jared found his target.