Passing an unforgettable night, fortunately without interruptions, Rune woke up like he was in a nightmare or a horror movie.

Complete nothingness, lifeless rocks drifting about, some emitting light, some the definition of lifeless.

If he had woken up without a 275 meters radius sphere to make sure he was safe and alone, that would be the creepiest wake-up of his life.

There was no morning routine to do, he wasn’t cold, hungry, or thirsty, he sustained himself completely on energy, which, at his current expenditure, was infinite.

He also wasn’t missing entertainment that much, progressing on his path was what his mind used to keep occupied and satisfied.

As usual, after sleeping, the insights he forgot came back and he immediately returned to the state of preparing for battle.

‘So many things to test, and my notes never diminish, only increase.’

With so much to do, he wasn’t traveling at random, he was seeking opponents and opportunities.

Before sleeping, Rune evacuated more than 10 kilometers away from the nest he used for his adventure training.

Returning there he saw a squad of snakes patrolling, they were his first prey.

As a warm-up exercise, he decided to give everything he had in one stroke.

He already prepared a defense of 275 armor, having attained 55% efficiency recently, fighting with death being a possible issue really had this effect of quickening his progress in energy compression. Really.

As the staple method to amplify one’s offensive, reinforcement had an efficiency pretty confusing, but in fact, it was at the same time the purest support spell and the most belligerent offensive method.

If you were really bad at transmitting your strength, 500 energy would only lead to the damage of a normal strike.

On the board, the fact that every point of energy you used for a reinforcement translated to an increase of 0.1% of your strength had been proved by many.

It was also proved by the martial supreme dojo that reinforcement had no efficiency rating, it was a 0.1% increase per point of energy for everyone.

He also heard rumors about being able to strike at a much superior strength than your stat should allow, but it asked for extremely stringent conditions, artificial gravity momentum, full force transmission, perfect impact form, perfect method, for Rune it was bullsh*t made by the pure theorist camp.

For him, there was no limit to any mastery, be it physical, energy, or spiritual, only practice, those who complained about a somewhat tough roadblock only needed to fight more and it would disappear.

100% efficiency was seen as an ultimate threshold for those of the energy path, but maybe it was only a tenth of what was needed to become a tier 2, nobody knew.

Rune was preparing the ultimate dive, he was going to use 50 energy to create an immovable platform and then the remaining 450 energy to reinforce his jump, he would become a shooting star.

Executing his plan, he created a solid energy platform, and with the rest of his energy, he pumped it all in a reinforcement, he then bent his knees before propelling himself.

His platform cracked from the counterforce necessary for all the strength transmitted to accelerate Rune’s body.

Immediately after jumping, he directed his momentum in the same direction as his target, the strongest-looking snake monster.

With a speed that Rune estimated to be… More than 200 meters per second, he collided one second after entering their perception sphere.

The result was as expected, he aimed to attain a certain damage ceiling, the ceiling where he would take damage from his own attack, and he succeeded.

His own energy armor took dozens of damages, and when Rune kept insisting, he passed through all he had to pass through.

It was the monster that was too weak to accommodate his wish, as after relaying more than half of the available power of his strike, he passed “through” the monster.

No shockwave could contribute to the violence of the scene, but the corpse of the monster exploding could convey enough about the force contained in Rune’s all-out strike.

And so Rune began a new adventure period, the goal, clearing the nest of the snake-like monsters.

He already started to impact the nest population during his previous period, so monster after monster, in only a single week, only the monster’s cores remained.

When he approached the nest, however, he was a bit surprised.

This nest seemed very different from those he previously encountered, like the whale nest and the head nest, his sphere transmitted a sort of carpet covered in needles, yellow needles.

‘Grass?’

Being so near to it, he was assaulted by all the remaining monsters, prompting him to stop thinking about the peculiar nest.

He had so much to try and so many experiments to do.

‘Wake up ultimate move number 2, normal punch and kick combo!’

Diving right into a group of 7 monsters, he couldn’t in good conscience use his energy for anything other than evading and protecting himself.

For this fight, he was confronting himself with the problem of sustainability, he was going to keep his energy and never use it offensively, he wanted to diminish the probability of each strike leaving a mark on his energy or health.

For this reason, he didn’t apply his energy armor equally, he left his right arm and left leg without armor. The way he did it was by blocking the intended way the spell matrix dispersed the energy armor. It was really a savage way to achieve it but…

He tried to control his armor directly to make it retract from someplace and also adjust the spell matrix directly but everything ended up in failures, he wasn’t experienced in spell matrix creation and modification. At all.

Now if he wanted, he could use health as a shield and put to use all his health regeneration and energy regeneration to never back down from a long fight.

At least theoretically, health had the cohesion stat to take more damage than its energy counterpart, so it should greatly help his sustainability.

As a snake attempted to bite him, Rune had to judge whether he could counter with his normal strength stat, evade with pure momentum, how much damage he would take blocking it with purely his health, with his energy armor, or how much energy was needed to evade using a platform.

While at the same time keeping an eye on surrounding monsters and planning his future 2 to 3 moves in a logical action chain.

Confronted with this bite, he decided to use his health as a shield and used his uncovered arm and leg to block the strike, then followed with his remaining limb striking with a normal punch and kick combo to eject himself out from the proximity of the snake mouth.

After ejection, he used a compressed energy platform and a normal jump to go back and start pummeling the snake.

For Rune, every normal punch he delivered, every damage he evaded, every second he gained represented what he wanted his fighting style to look like in the future.

It was very immature but he wanted all the good things, he only started to compromise on powerful reinforced attacks as it involved too much energy use.

Optimization and refinement, before long, with a health balance and energy balance still in the positive, meaning he didn’t lose more than he regenerated over 1 minute, he slew his target snake and he restarted his fight like it had just started.

But something was really distracting him, the nest.

The more he approached, the more he had to focus on slaying the remaining monsters, but the nest was disturbing.

His perception sphere allowed him to see things that he shouldn’t find here.

The color sense in his sphere was always activated, and it similarly sent him a return that he couldn’t really believe.

Doing his best to ignore the situation, he battled with renewed vigor as he genuinely wanted to see the nest and touch it.

Ten snakes, twenty snakes, punch after punch.

He didn’t want to retreat, even though his health balance was down by 50 per minute in the negative and his energy balance was completely in the red, at 90 energy lost per minute.

But he still wanted to be able to come back from a situation like this, in the camp they also tried to, but the only realistic way was by stalling, just this way could you recover to full health and energy.

And stalling implied retreat, a strategic retreat maybe, but for Rune to recover his lost health and lost energy, he wanted to still be fighting, still be in perfect control of his body, never missing an opportunity to strike with a regular kick.

When he had no energy anymore but 4 snakes remained, Rune was sure he had won.

Even if one of the remaining snakes knew how to use boosted momentum, Rune would just tank everything like a champion.

Wanting to go see the nest, he was a little rushed and committed some mistakes, but his mastery of close combat allowed his combos of normal strikes to kill a snake in 2 to 3 minutes, eroding their health balance without stopping till death ensued.

Until finally, the last snake stopped moving amidst the disintegrating corpses of its companions, he won.

…

Landing on the nest, Rune felt trepidations all over his body.

This nest was different.

With his sphere and color sense activated, an endless dead grassy plain opened on and on. He could even see the remains of a tree fallen on the ground, a very lush tree.

‘What…’

The grass was frozen in time, if a breeze were to blow, Rune could imagine the plain coming alive with the characteristic sound of rustling grass and wind infiltrating his ears.

‘Is…’

An entire island, the captured and fixed moment of a thriving life.

‘This…’

The whole nest was like a piece of the Universe dimension ripped off.

At this instant, Rune felt his mind being struck by a flash of lucidity.

He remembered some pieces, connected some others, made some come back from the abyss of long-term memory.

‘Anomalies coming from other dimensions? Gravity fatal to living beings? Ether Wiki having an answer for everything as time passes?’

‘The Global System Law? The announcements?’

‘That’s why the IGS is so proactive, that’s why the education reform was so actively pushed, that’s why the Adventurer’s Society is given so much power that it could declare war against the IGS by itself…’

The lucidity in his mind illuminated and linked what was happening, incredulity wanted to mark what he thought of as irrelevant, but he didn’t dare dismiss it as a conspiracy, everything was too perfect, it made too much sense.

‘The Universe dimension didn’t awaken... Assimilated? A link?... Not the Ether Law, the IGS confirmed the truth that it was all natural and that nothing can stop it from happening.’

‘Other dimensions then... We're not the first? Or is it all natural?’

Wondering why the IGS would hide the truth, Rune knew he only touched the most superficial layer of what the future reserved for the universe dimension.

‘I should talk about it with Utopia, as a Rululu, if he wasn’t in then he should be able to connect the other pieces I missed.’

…

[Rune: Report of the day, today is very heavy. After waking up I continued on my solo adventure and decided to clear the snake monster's nest. My experiment about sustainability-focused fighting style is bearing fruits, I cleared 24 snakes in what I think is an hour or two. I also need Utopia to read my next message and see if I’m a conspirator.]

[Rune: I’ll first make a point of my current situation.

The snake’s nest turns out to be a ripped piece from a dimension supporting life, a grassy plain, maybe a piece of forest. I’m sure if I searched carefully I should be able to find rain marks or earthworm tunnels, and this is where my theory begins.

First is the Global System Law and the announcements made “public” by the Compensation Law, the major opinion is that it’s the Ether Law who makes them, and as a “something” and not a “someone”, no lies can be present in all those announcements, only omissions.

Then add to that the existence of the Information Board, the Ether Wiki, status, and every other functionality of the global system, and a minor conclusion is that the Ether Law is a support that allows the global system to be birthed.

Till now it’s very normal, right? I only summarized what I used to come up with in the next part.

Now, the crunchy part, on the premise that Ether Wiki can’t lie, where does all its knowledge come from? So I linked it with the nest I have before my eyes, other dimensions!

We’re already linked to one dimension that gives our “defective law” the power to usher in a new era. Increasing ether density, new dimensions opening, all of this was already there before, but it was just invisible for us.

Everyone here probably agrees that we’re not the first dimension where the global system became a reality, and maybe it’s pure folly to even consider that the Ether Law and the Global System Law can be separated, but it’s also a fact that Ether Wiki can lie by omission.

So I think, and in my mind, it all makes sense, that from the start, the moment we received the evaluation of ‘critically defective', the criteria used were from the true Ether Law, the Ether Law of this dimension that reached out to us.

And what makes me bring it up to you guys? I’m 100% sure that the IGS proactivity proves that maybe the biggest brains of billions of billions of individuals came to the same conclusion as me, making the IGS feel the urgency.

This is the limit of my human brain, I need a true and noble rululu to take over and link the remaining pieces to prove if I’m just being a lunatic or I had a flash of genius. Headquarter over]

Even after posting his massive message, Rune had to wait 5 minutes before the first answer came.

[Arik: I’ll wait for Utopia, but maybe as a rululu, he already received true info and was kindly asked to not broadcast them, I’m proud to be friend with a fine conspirator such as you]

[Gar: Yeah, only a rululu brain can correctly write your theory. I understood the majority but some of what you said doesn't make sense. The Compensation Law for example was integrated into the global system, so it would mean that every Universe or even every dimension gives birth to a unique global system and compensation? And after the Ether Law becomes powerful enough to link to “this” dimension, then they all connect to each other? That’s very far-fetched, no harm meant]

[Nelo: What would it mean for the future? I didn’t really give a try at comprehending the consequences of Rune’s conspiracy theory]

[Adreana: The point is that maybe tier 666 exists and that further dimensions that aren’t connected to only our universe will be opened? Something like that? So encountering maybe 10 billion years old supreme golden age civilizations will be a possibility]

[Utopia: I’ll try and compare it to what I learned till now, but true or false, tier 2 is confirmed to exist by the Ether Wiki, so training is still mandatory. Later fellow heroes and conspirationists]

[Arik: The brain has started to process, do you think when a rululu thinks hard it consumes energy? To make up for what their big brain needs?]

[Rune: 100% its upkeep is multiplied by 10, otherwise what? Other species apart from the Rululus are useless ones? Like it’s possible]

[Nelo: Your sarcasm broke my forum window]

[Gar: Mine too]

Now that his theory was in good hand he could search the nest for rare resources.

Scanning it took a good half an hour, and he truly did find rare resources, he even found two, in one time he advanced an event objective to 20% completion, a reward for his adventure with his life on the line.

Absorbing them he opened his gathering log and his status.

Absorbed ‘Rare tier 1 momentum crystal’, gained 1 200 000 EP

Absorbed ‘Rare tier 1 health crystal’, gained 2 500 000 EP

‘And that’s just normal rare resources?’ They were his first and they didn’t disappoint, 370 stat points worth of EP, at the price of 2 weeks of sieging a nest, that was a killer exchange.

As for his status window, it was as expected.

Avatar (Basic Rank) (Tier 1)

EP: 5 273 540

Stats Total: 5 000

Health: 500

Health Regeneration: 500

Strength: 500

Cohesion: 500

Energy: 500

Energy Regeneration: 500

Purity: 500

Affinity: 500

Momentum: 500

Perception: 500

Sometimes Rune absorbed some monster cores, it wasn’t his objective but they happened to be there, so he absorbed them in passing.

By not searching to acquire EP, he reached 5% of the maximum storage capability, which was amazing.

‘I’m done here, 2 weeks to raze a nest, with 8 nests to clean... So around 4 months if I’m alone, less if I have big progress or encountered a group to clean a nest with.’

Rune could think as much as he wanted, it wouldn’t replace actual progress and training, so he followed his instinct and decided on a random direction before using his energy to launch the galaxy wings spell, full speed ahead.