Chapter 119: Familiar?
Chapter 119: Familiar?
Several hours passed, and Uhtred found himself in an entirely different region of the desert. This place had more hard-packed ground and far less loose sand, though there were no highlands or rocky hills like the place he had been with his crew at the start of the trial.
He had managed to find a relatively safe spot, a small depression in the earth where he could stay for a while and cultivate, trying his best to replenish his dry essence reserves.
He had finally gotten his hands on some essence cores. Whether they were beast cores, ancient variant cores, or even modern human cores, Uhtred did not know and could not care less at this point. The sheer struggle he had gone through just to obtain them had been insane.
At first he had tried to follow his original plan of hunting beasts, but he had severely underestimated how much harder that would be without any cosmic essence in his body.
Of course, his physical stats and attributes at Level 23 were strong enough to overwhelm practically anything below Level 15 without needing cosmic essence. The real problem was actually finding and engaging the beasts.
He had spotted some from a distance, but catching them proved so difficult that after several failed attempts, Uhtred gave up entirely.
There was no way he could capture these creatures by running around on foot. The region here was completely different, and so were the beasts. Instead of jackals, spiders, and sand serpents, what dominated this area were kangaroos.
Yes, muscular, seven-foot-tall kangaroos.
Their bodies leaked cosmic essence just like humans did, and they did not seem to have any special technique to stem the loss.
However, their evolution path had solved the issue in another way. Their bodies focused on pure physical enhancement and strength.
Whatever little cosmic essence they gained from the environment or from cores they claimed, they immediately used to cultivate and strengthen their muscles and physical attributes. For the rest of the time, they moved around with practically no cosmic essence in their cores.
Uhtred had not cared about that detail at the time. He had simply chased after them anyway, even though the cosmic essence inside their cores was negligible, if it existed at all.
The large kangaroos had been incredibly wily. They led him on at a pace that always kept them just out of reach, making him believe he might catch them.
It was only after several more exhausting attempts that Uhtred realized they were intentionally wearing him out. He stopped completely, paused to reorient himself, and reassessed the situation. Chasing these animals was a dead end. He needed alternatives.
It was then that the obvious struck him, nearly making him facepalm. He was sitting on a huge wealth of merits, yet here he was hunting wild beasts blindly instead of using what the System had already provided.
There was a trial exchange, was there not?
He quickly opened the trial exchange panel, and sure enough, several individuals within the trial grounds were already offering essence cores in exchange for merits.
Without hesitation, Uhtred purchased what he could find, though he was well aware that the prices listed were just extremely exorbitant, with some prices reaching more than a hundred merits for one single core!
Even back on the main continent, when he had bought essence cores with multiversal tokens, the cost had never been this high.
The most he had ever spent on a single core was twenty multiversal tokens, and that had been a rare healing-attuned one for Diya. Cultivating a healing-attuned ascender was expensive. And even then, he had still offset some of the cost by trading in cores from beasts he hunted in Zone 1.
Here in the trial grounds, even the most useless essence cores started at no less than ten merit points, with the most expensive reaching several hundreds.
Still, Uhtred paid the price. Beggars could not be choosers. He needed the cores far more than he needed to hoard merits. After all, he had just spent 135,000 merits on bounties. What was another thousand to replenish his essence core?
He started with small purchases at first. Most of the sellers were ancient variants, and he did not want to draw their attention with a sudden bulk buy.
Once he saw that nothing bad happened, he made a bigger move and purchased fifty essence cores at once.
Thirty of the cores were below Level 10. Ten were between Level 10 and 12. Eight were between Level 13 and 14. And only two sat right at Level 15. The whole transaction cost him about a thousand merits in total, bringing his balance down to 87,980.
The moment he completed the bulk purchase, however, he realized he should have been more cautious. The ancient variants immediately noticed the massive drain on the market and pulled all their listings at once. That left Uhtred with only the human offerings, which were mostly worthless Level 5 cores.
Uhtred did not mind the variants’ reaction, however. He had bought more than enough for the meantime, enough to at least bring his inner reserves up to a significant level.
Right now, he had just finished cultivating, successfully topping up his reserves by more than half. It still wasn’t enough to fill his entire essence core fully, but that was just how crazy things got the higher one climbed up in levels. This was already good enough.
Unlike other ascenders who, in a similar situation, would have only been able to cultivate using the specific essence cores that were similar in nature to their attunements, Uhtred had practically used every single core available from what he had bought.
Of course, he was still very mindful that he was being watched by multiversal entities on his stream the whole time. He had only cultivated with cores that aligned with the attunements he had already displayed.
Out of the fifty essence cores he had bought, Uhtred had only cultivated with thirty. He left the others untouched, those too far outside what he had shown so far.
Many were earth-attuned, which worked fine. Some were fire, which he could pass off as part of his thermal magic. Others leaned toward water or cold essence, which also fit the opposite side of his thermal abilities.
The rest, like air magic that he had never displayed or other hyper-specific affinities, he left alone to avoid suspicion. He stored them safely in his spatial storage. They could still serve as raw fuel for his cosmic essence core later if things grew desperate.
He had just begun to rise to his feet, thinking about his next move and how to gather more information on the trial’s true objective, when he picked up movement at the edge of his vision.
He looked to his right. In the shadows of the near-moonless night, distinct silhouettes were heading slowly in his direction.
Uhtred’s body immediately began cycling cosmic essence, preparing for battle. But as the figures drew nearer, he became puzzled.
Their details began to resolve more clearly under the faint light, and he could already tell that they were not ancient variants at all, but rather humans like him.
It was two people, a man and a woman, both walking with their arms raised high in the air in a gesture of surrender. They had weapons in their hands, but they held them in a completely submissive posture, as if to show that they meant absolutely no harm.
They approached Uhtred with shaky eyes, looking at him as if he were some terrifying, unpredictable beast.
Uhtred remained exactly where he stood, trying to understand what was happening. His eyes were continuously scanning the surrounding desert as they drew near, wondering whether this was some sort of elaborate trap for a sudden ambush.
He eventually spotted another figure standing far in the distance behind them near the horizon, and his eyes narrowed.
Is this some sort of trap after all?
Before he could dwell on the thought, a surprised and somewhat disappointed female voice cut through the cold air. It was the woman walking in surrender beside the young man.
"I knew you wouldn’t recognize me, but a part of me still hoped you would," she said, a trace of wistfulness in her tone.
Uhtred’s eyes snapped to her face. As he studied her features more carefully, he realized she was actually familiar...