Chapter 489
Chapter 489
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 489
Chapter Title: The Fastest Thing
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[Stamina is merely about enduring, and strength is merely about smashing. It's primitive, stubborn, and utterly foolish. But true power comes from speed. The sharpness to end everything before your opponent even perceives it, the fluidity to slip past any threat before it can touch you. All those miscellaneous powers of yours will mean nothing before my trial.]
The world turned into a lush forest.
Towering ancient trees packed the sky, dense and impenetrable.
Sunlight shattered through the leaves, casting golden flecks on the ground.
It was a scene of profound peace and beauty.
But Park Chan-woo sensed the lethal intent hidden within that tranquility.
A single leaf fluttered down from the sky.
Park Chan-woo looked up at the sky.
Hundreds of millions, billions of leaves filled the heavens, drifting down slowly like a languid dance, endless and unrelenting.
At first, it was manageable.
He heightened all his senses to their peak.
The trajectory of every falling leaf, the subtle flows of the wind—they all appeared with crystal clarity.
He slipped through the gaps between leaves with minimal movement, swimming through the voids.
His footsteps were silent on the earth, his body flowing like water, evading every obstacle with grace.
The downpour of leaves parted as if making way for him, brushing past his form by the barest margins.
But the trial wasn't that lenient.
Halfway through the forest, the change began.
The leaves, which had danced leisurely, suddenly became a ferocious storm.
"......!"
Their numbers multiplied exponentially.
The density was incomparable to before.
'No gaps.'
There were no spaces left between the leaves worth calling 'gaps' anymore.
How was he supposed to get through that?
But giving up wasn't an option.
His senses sharpened to their limit, his nerves taut like a string about to snap.
It was a desperate struggle, like rowing furiously against waves of inevitable fate.
As long as his calculations, predictions, and reflexes aligned perfectly, he held on.
But mistakes came without warning.
Swish.
A touch so light, so subtle.
One leaf grazed his shoulder.
No pain, no impact.
But in that instant, Park Chan-woo realized all his efforts had been for naught.
Whoosh!
The scenery warped amid a blaze of light.
When he opened his eyes again, he was back at the starting line.
The storm of leaves had vanished.
Park Chan-woo didn't respond.
He gritted his teeth and charged into the forest again.
Second attempt. He moved faster, more perfectly than before.
But the result was the same.
Before the torrent of leaves—like an impenetrable 'wall' beyond human reflexes—he failed once more.
The third, fourth attempts fared no better.
Park Chan-woo poured every technique and experience he had.
But the physical limits were clear.
No matter how much he'd transcended stamina and strength, this trial had nothing to do with them.
The leaves were weightless, and the trial reset on touch, rendering endless stamina meaningless.
'Time... is infinite.'
Back at the start once more, Park Chan-woo stared into the empty void.
The trial itself had no time limit.
He could challenge it endlessly, hundreds of times if needed.
'...But my time is finite.'
That was the trial's cruelest trap.
Torture by hope.
An uncrossable wall, with eternal chances to try.
The hourglass of his lifebound deadline ticked on relentlessly with every failure.
He no longer rushed blindly.
He sat on the cold ground, gazing up at the golden rain, and began analyzing.
'Strength.'
Park Chan-woo clenched his fist.
His transcended muscle power surged into his arm.
He slammed it into the ground, unleashing a massive shockwave.
Rumble!
The earth quaked, air tore with thunderous roar—but the falling leaves ignored the storm-like blast, fluttering down their fixed paths unaffected.
'Magic.'
He gathered faint mana at his fingertips, summoning wind.
But the wind merely brushed past the leaves, unable to alter their trajectories by even a millimeter.
'...The outcomes are predetermined.'
Park Chan-woo finally grasped the trial's essence.
Those leaves weren't natural.
They were part of the system—unaffected by wind or external forces, following perfectly fixed coordinates.
This was no reflex test; it was a massive algorithm in disguise.
There was only one solution.
'Find the safe zones.'
He changed his approach.
He began meticulously hunting for 'safe coordinates' where no leaves fell, one by one.
His movements were far slower than before, but flawless—no single failure.
In his mind, billions of leaves formed vast data, analyzed in real-time, mapping the safest path.
Thus, he surpassed his previous record, reaching the forest's depths, the exit in sight.
But there, he faced another wall of despair.
"......"
The final 100 meters.
No safe zones remained.
The leaves from the sky filled every space perfectly, without a single gap.
The algorithm declared that final stretch 'impassable' with absolute certainty.
Calculation couldn't overcome it.
Physically, logically—no way through this forest existed.
Park Chan-woo froze in place.
One more step meant failure.
Yet staying forever wasn't possible.
He returned to the start.
'What if the patterns aren't fixed?'
A new hypothesis flashed through his mind.
What if the trial generated new algorithms—and thus new leaf trajectories—each time a challenger entered?
Among countless possibilities, a 'lucky pattern' with a single flaw, a single path, might exist.
His challenges turned obsessive from then on.
Park Chan-woo feared no failure.
Returning to the start was no waste of time.
He treated the entire forest as a massive cipher, hurling himself at it repeatedly to crack the code.
Tenth attempt, twentieth...
Dozens, hundreds of failures piled up.
In his mind, every pattern of the forest built a massive database.
The bizarre trajectories without a breeze, subtle density shifts in certain sections—all cataloged.
But all that data pointed to one conclusion.
The last 10 meters were always perfect.
No exceptions, no lucky patterns.
As if the system itself declared, 'You cannot pass here.'
Suddenly, Park Chan-woo realized his foolishness.
He'd always relied on his greatest weapons: 'experience' and 'knowledge.'
Information and computation from countless regressions to find optimal solutions.
But the Tower's Masters had seen through that.
The trial of Strength wasn't about finding the heaviest weight.
It was a question of the weight of deprivation.
The trial of Stamina wasn't resisting aging, but accepting life's cycle—an enlightenment.
No trial could be solved with simple, intuitive methods.
All demanded a 'shift in perspective' from the challenger.
So, what was this trial truly asking?
Park Chan-woo gazed at the golden rain.
Until now, he'd seen the leaves as 'enemies,' 'obstacles.'
Threats blocking his path, trials hindering his advance.
So he'd tried piercing them, dodging, or analyzing patterns to conquer.
But the leaves weren't enemies.
They were merely part of a grand flow.
'Avoid.'
The word pierced his mind as he sat panting on the cold ground.
What if the trial's essence wasn't 'evasion'?
In countless regressions, he'd always 'resisted' fate.
Struggling to alter destined doom, to defy the grand flow.
His actions here were no different—an extension of that.
Fighting the unavoidable downpour with intellect and calculation to break through.
But the result was always failure.
Park Chan-woo closed his eyes.
He abandoned thoughts of dodging leaves. Even the will to move.
Still. Quietly, he began to 'feel.'
Not the motion of individual leaves, but the grand 'flow' that moved them all.
It was the wind.
The leaves didn't move themselves.
They merely danced along invisible wind paths, tracing fixed trajectories.
He recalled the 'no-mind, no-form' state from sword training.
True strength wasn't suppressing the foe, but reading their flow and turning it against them.
Then true agility was...
'Not just dodging fast.'
Park Chan-woo realized.
'It's becoming one with the flow.'
He stood.
But this time, he didn't run.
Eyes closed, he walked slowly into the forest.
He didn't 'avoid' the leaves.
He abandoned the will to avoid entirely.
He became one with them. Became a leaf. Breathed in harmony with the flow.
He shed the notion of enemy. Folded away the thought of struggle.
Honestly, it wasn't easy.
Struggle was his life. One of his core truths.
His existence had never known true peace.
Before regression, surviving the Abyss's hell meant fighting.
Against the tyranny of the powerful, monsters' threats, comrades' betrayals—he fought endlessly.
Even in defeat, losing everything, he refused fate, staking all on one final struggle to rewind time.
Life after regression was fiercer.
Shackled by minus levels, he battled every injustice dealt him.
System traps, creators' arrogance, the colossal wall of Dragon God Sepiro—he never ceased fighting.
'Without struggle, I can't survive.'
But now, he had to deny that truth himself.
Not fighting. Not resisting.
Simply accepting everything as it was, surrendering to the flow.
To him, it felt like the helplessness of death.
'Is this... the right path?'
Doubt reared its head.
What if he let go, only to wander this forest eternally?
Instinct screamed against this frail surrender.
Yet he silenced even that inner voice.
The prior two trials had taught him.
Ways he believed right could be the greatest pitfalls.
True growth sometimes began by discarding the most familiar self.
He chose to believe.
Not his instincts, but this newfound enlightenment.
Thus, he walked.
Thinking nothing more.
Becoming part of the forest, yielding to the wind's lead, dancing with the leaves.
Breathing with the wind, dancing with the leaves—like a forest spirit.
His very existence synchronized perfectly with this vast natural rhythm.
He himself had become the forest.
He'd envisioned agility as the art of moving most perfectly within the flow.
But Park Chan-woo transcended that, becoming the flow itself.
With eyes closed, Park Chan-woo reached the forest's end leisurely.
A translucent 'Stigma of Agility,' infused with the essence of wind, appeared and seeped into Park Chan-woo's chest.
Whoosh!
A storm of light enveloped his body once more.
When the light faded, a satisfied smile curved Park Chan-woo's lips.
Two trials remained.
As if responding to his thoughts, a new presence emerged where the Master of Agility had withdrawn.
The most ambiguous stat.
The trickiest to raise.
Yet utterly indispensable.
It was the Master of Intelligence.