Chapter 561: An Attempt at Reaching Domain-ification
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 561: An Attempt at Reaching Domain-ification
As the players' arrogant words echoed in everyone's ears, the students became even more determined to step forward and subdue them.
However, despite the distance being a mere dozen paces, countless cubes suddenly eroded the upper floors. These fluctuating cubes surged toward them like waves, forcibly pushing everyone back. Only those with exceptional agility and lightning-fast reflexes managed to leap atop the surging tide, using the momentum to charge toward the players.
"Dungeon Creator Authority authorized... It's here, hmph!" The leading player reached out, sliding two fingers through the air in front of him. Authority received!
At this moment, their confidence reached its absolute peak!
Facing the transcendents rushing toward them, the leading player simply extended a hand. A massive pixel block struck from the blind spot of his opponent's vision!
The impact of pure, sudden force sent the person flying instantly.
This bizarre, abrupt tactic caught them completely off guard.
By the time they reacted, they realized that everything around them was being swallowed and assimilated!
The orderly blocks flickered with the textures of the original floors and walls. As they rose and fell slightly, it felt as if the entire hotel had turned into a living, pulsating creature.
The resonance caused by the friction between pixels left them feeling flustered and irritable—it was the instinctive fear of facing the unknown!
At that moment, the erosion cores previously hidden within the hotel erupted with terrifying power. Countless tiny pixels spread outward along with that energy, eventually using the entire floor as a foundation to complete the lockdown of the hotel.
The erosion of transcendent power spread across multiple points in an instant. It wasn't just the hotel; even the road surfaces outside began to churn with eerie blocks.
Many guests who had left the hotel because of the earlier accidents were terrified by the sight and fled in a panic.
Before long, the entire hotel was shrouded in a force that seemed to draw a boundary, splitting the area into two different worlds.
Terrifying transcendent power soared into the sky.
This power, nearly invisible to ordinary people, formed a vortex in the heavens. People could only feel the atmosphere of the Magic City turn oppressive; even though it was high noon with the sun at its peak, the air felt suffocating.
Only ordinary people who had awakened Spirit Vision could vaguely see the abnormality in the sky. They tried to record it with their phones, only to find that the sky appeared perfectly normal on their screens.
"The dungeon has been generated. Now... none of you can escape! Hahahaha!"
Seeing the dungeon construction complete, the players no longer hid their wild ecstasy.
They had been suppressed for so long; now, it was finally their turn to enjoy themselves!
As players holding the Dungeon Creator Authority, this was their home turf!
But just as they were losing themselves in their triumph, the voice of the person in charge of the plan's command reached their ears.
As long as the high-level figures among the Game Architects hadn't spoken, they had to follow orders. They weren't just reckless players out for fun; they were Vanguard Pioneers who had broken into this new world to architect the game!
No matter how much their fun was spoiled, they had to execute the plan and the mission. They could curse the commander all they wanted—as long as they completed the task, the commander wouldn't care, provided they could actually win an argument against him.
The primary goal of this dungeon's descent was to create a home field for the players, and secondly, to harvest the game qualifications from the Children of Destiny!
The main purpose of this dungeon wasn't slaughter. Everyone here had value because... they were the challengers of this dungeon!
Here, the transcendents were the main force of dungeon challengers, the ordinary people were the bargaining chips, and the Children of Destiny were the "tool-men" to be continuously harvested.
Everything existed solely to reap game qualifications. Only at the very end, when no more qualifications could be squeezed out of them, would the final harvest take place.
Generally, after completing this wave of harvesting, the players could establish a dominant position in terms of Luck. At that point, players would be able to pour into this world in massive numbers to begin the full-scale harvest.
* * *
Meanwhile, the guests on other floors of the hotel were lost in a state of confusion and helplessness.
Having experienced several accidents in quick succession, they had actually become somewhat calmer. Perhaps because the previous incidents hadn't resulted in many casualties, they even felt a slight, false sense of "is that all?"
Only the stronger students sensed that something was wrong.
This time was completely different from what they had encountered before!
"Something's wrong!"
"What is it, Senior Sister?" Ninglan Qiuyue asked curiously, looking at her senior's solemn expression.
Ninglan Qiuyue had come to this auction with the Witch Secret Realm Club. The auction planned by the Jack-of-all-trades Club naturally wasn't represented by just one club from the Witch Academy; many other clubs were involved behind the scenes, and the Witch Secret Realm Club was one of them.
"We... seem to be trapped in the hotel," the senior sister said gravely as she walked to the window to look outside.
She rested her hand on the windowsill, and the spot she was leaning on was suddenly snapped off by her grip.
"Eh?"
"What happened?"
"This is..." She looked at the cube in her hand and then at the gap where the piece was missing. A chill ran down her spine as a certain possibility occurred to her. "I don't know... but I'm afraid this isn't the hotel we were in before."
She suddenly pushed the window. The glass, which should have shattered into irregular shards, broke into perfectly uniform, transparent cubes!
"I'm going to take a look!"
Without another word, an Alchemical Broom appeared in her hand. She stepped onto the broken windowsill and leapt out.
She needed to verify her hypothesis.
Were they truly trapped in an extra-dimensional space, much like how the Witch Academy existed in relation to the Magic City?
After a simple test, she found that all the rules of the surrounding environment seemed to have been rewritten. After mounting her broom, she took a moment to look at the cube she had snapped off earlier. She tried to crush it and succeeded, but seeing the pile of even smaller cubes in her hand only confirmed her suspicions.
Then, another piece of bad news arrived. She was flying fine in the air when she suddenly slammed into an invisible wall, unable to move forward an inch. No matter what she did, she couldn't move outward at all. Her heart sank to rock bottom. They were truly trapped, and in a different space entirely!
When she turned back to look at the hotel, her pupils shrank!
How was this still a hotel?
It was a building completely eroded by an unknown power!
At this moment, many others like her had broken through windows to check the situation. They were equally terrified by what they saw, but they couldn't escape even if they wanted to.
They could only watch helplessly as the mosaic-like substance continued to erode the "vision" they could see. The buildings outside the hotel were being gradually replaced, their details disappearing bit by bit. Eventually, the buildings turned into model-like cubes, replacing the shapes of the distant structures. Everything in the outside world bid farewell to their sight.
Now... everyone was completely trapped within the dungeon space!
In such a crisis, many instinctively tried to contact the outside world for help, but they found their phones had no signal. This was true for both ordinary phones and the special phones from the transcendent academies. No method could transmit even a shred of information to the outside. Even those who had mastered Teleportation Spells found they could not teleport out.
Only then did everyone realize how dire the situation had become.
Those who had been thinking the auction might still continue now only wanted to cry and go home, but no one responded to their pleas.
As time passed, they noticed the decorations inside the hotel were also losing their original shapes, with all creations becoming abstract.
Only the people remaining here were completely out of place with their surroundings.
Faced with such an anomaly, the senior students present did an excellent job of taking the lead. After calming down, they realized that while their environment had changed, it hadn't caused them any actual physical harm yet.
However, in the next moment, they would change their minds.
"Dungeon Challenger qualification being granted..."
A prompt echoed in everyone's ears.
"What on earth is going on?" Ninglan Qiuyue was stunned by this situation that exceeded her understanding.
"I don't know... let's take it one step at a time. With something this big happening, the teachers from the Academy definitely won't just ignore it," the senior sisters from the Witch Secret Realm Club could only offer this comfort for now.
They looked at the scene before them, composed entirely of pixel blocks. If no one told them, no one would be able to connect this place to a specific floor in the hotel.
Right then, the pixel block beneath Ninglan Qiuyue's feet suddenly loosened, and a pitch-black abyss swallowed the unprepared girl.
"Qiuyue!" Several senior sisters rushed forward, but they were a step too late.
Cubes rose from the cracked ground, blocking their reaching hands. Once Ninglan Qiuyue's figure had completely vanished, the crack in the floor sealed shut into a seamless plane!
"Watch out!"
the senior sister who was still trying to save Ninglan Qiuyue didn't notice the massive monster behind her. Only after someone desperately lunged at her to pull her aside did the monster's sharp claws rake across the floor, leaving a gash from which countless tiny pixels splattered.
"Th—thank you..."
"It's fine. Be careful; you won't be so lucky next time."
"I understand, but... what the hell are these things!"
Having narrowly dodged the fatal blow, the girls felt a surge of dread looking at the monster, but they quickly began to fight back.
Under the onslaught of their powerful spellbooks, the monsters could only die with regret, turning into pixel modules that fell to the ground and merged back into the blocks.
But these monsters weren't alone. They were born from the pixel blocks, one after another, in a never-ending stream that made everyone's skin crawl!
"Run! There are too many of them; we can't stay here and grind them down!"
"But Qiuyue..."
"I know, but staying here won't save her! We need to get to a safe place first and then find a way to rescue her."
* * *
At the same time.
After stepping into the void, Ninglan Qiuyue fell into another space within the dungeon.
It was a hard fall. She climbed up with difficulty, only to find that there was no one else around.
She tried calling out, but no one answered.
"Ninglan Qiuyue... you must be the Child of Destiny of this world, right?"
"Hmm? Who are you?" Ninglan Qiuyue turned to look at the figure who had spoken, her heart immediately on high alert. She didn't recognize the person, yet they knew her name.
"You can call me a Player. But for now... I am your executioner... until I've squeezed every last drop of value out of you! Until then, struggle to your heart's content! Because I! Shall take you to hell!"
* * *
In another space within the dungeon.
"Hmm? Why did the dungeon space change its look?"
I watched the changes in the surrounding environment, though it didn't really matter. Changing the style of a monotonous environment actually provided a bit of novelty.
Right now, I was immersed in testing my Basic Derived Spells. I had to admit, after this round of actual combat practice, many of my derived spells that were still just theoretical ideas had been improved.
However, the player who had locked me in here seemed to be on the verge of a breakdown.
He kept screaming that it was impossible—that I couldn't possibly cast spells at such high intensity without showing any signs of power depletion.
He even said some nonsense about how the environment in the dungeon space didn't allow for the recovery of transcendent power.
But the recovery from my tens of thousands of Mana Sources didn't rely on drawing from the environment at all. Combined with my Witch Physique's talent for self-generating mana, it would be quite difficult to actually run out.
"You freak... you must have other secrets on you! I'll dig every one of them out!"
"Stop talking nonsense. Hurry up and bring more monsters. Is this density all you've got? Who is this supposed to kill?" I said, completely indifferent to his words.
From the fact that he didn't dare to appear before me in his actual game body, I knew these players were nothing to fear. They were just using these monsters constructed from transcendent pixels to cause me trouble in different ways.
But soon, these troubles would become the inspiration for me to solve them, eventually feeding back into the derivation of my spells.
"You're so leisurely. Don't you care about the lives of the people outside?"
"The lives of the people outside? Oh... you mean you've made a move on them? What's your confidence based on? An ability similar to the one trapping me?" I asked nonchalantly.
"Of course. The entire hotel has fallen. You're a teacher at the Witch Academy, right? Are you just going to watch them die? Or are you simply incapable of saving them?"
"I am indeed a teacher, but I believe they are capable of handling you. I have confidence in them," I said dismissively, as if I truly were full of faith in them.
Truth be told, if they really encountered trouble they couldn't solve, they could always summon me. I had given out summoning business cards to quite a few people.
Moreover, if I wanted to leave, this dungeon constructed by the players couldn't stop me.
This confidence didn't come from the Reverse Summoning Spell; that was just a final insurance policy.
Did they really think I had no way out of this dungeon?
One must realize that I was still only using basic spells. Even setting spells aside, the prototype of my Heart State Domain from my Body Cultivation power system could similarly counter the dungeon.
Through constant probing, I had come to understand what a "Domain" actually was. It was a power of reconstruction based on an order mastered by oneself.
The Body Cultivation Heart State was an order derived from the power system mastered by a body cultivator, and the Outer Manifestation of State of Mind was a "method" by which this order rewrote reality.
Did they really think I had stayed here all this time just to test derived spells?
I was also trying to understand this so-called game dungeon.
Because I found that this dungeon shared similar properties with my Outer Manifestation of State of Mind—namely, the reshaping of the order of reality!
This provided immense reference value for my mastery over the prototype of the Heart State Body Cultivation Domain.
Both were transcendent orders derived from power systems built upon [Transcendent Knowledge]... This reminded me of what Teacher Ji Niang had told me about the "Domain-ification" of spellbooks...
[Transcendent Knowledge] could be crafted into Great Spellbooks. A Great Spellbook should be able to undergo "Domain-ification" just like a regular spellbook. However, the prototype domain I controlled wasn't purely built upon a single Great Spellbook, but rather used the Body Cultivation power system as its framework.
But none of that was the main point. Because while I was constantly deriving basic spells, I was also attempting to see if these basic spellbooks could similarly achieve... Domain-ification!
I had discovered that so-called Domain-ification seemed to have a significant connection to spell derivation. The derivation sequence of a Prototype Spell was very likely the key to a spellbook's Domain-ification...
Teacher Ji Niang once said that back then, I wasn't at a level where I could touch the layer of spellbook Domain-ification.
But now... that was no longer certain!