‘578 per second, I can go deeper with that.'

After doing his daily first moving monolith training, Rune was still regenerating his armor and energy pool.

If at the start, killing a monolith monster was nightmare difficulty, now, it was bugged difficulty.

The difference between young tier 4 and experienced tier 4 represented the reason hidden behind this increased difficulty, between 2 000 armor damage per offensive and the current 4 000, there was obviously and necessarily something in-between.

As a result of this increase, from the erosion rate of 400 armor per second and onward, he considered every moving monolith as a training center, nothing less, nothing more.

Intense but short was something he liked.

His human physiology caused a massive overflow of adrenaline that possibly affected training awareness, or that was what came out from the latest studies he read during his rare breaks where he used the ether tower connection to go on the special news site.

After so many sessions of training though, Rune lost a little of the danger sense and emergency reactions of having half of his armor destroyed in 5 seconds, he even considered it somewhat normal when his opponent was a middle or possibly late tier 4 monster.

Fighting was an opportunity, not the goal, and having traveled 9 000 kilometers, he could say one thing, the white zone was flat.

Not flat as in, no variation of topography, there were still some very slight slopes, it was flat as an environment. Nothing ever changed, the radiation, the thing causing the permanent erosion reduced every semblance of variation to nothing was always here.

There were only 3 species, the moving monolith one adapting to the hunter snake one, and a bunch of pigs who were aimless wanderers of the white zone. That’s all this zone had to offer.

From the guide, this type of zone could symbolize 2 things.

One, that the source of the anomaly was at least tier 6, only a tier 6 anomaly could reduce biodiversity and environment to nothing but a stale version of nothing, the other…

The other was a disaster, not something like an earthquake, a maelstrom, or a storm, those were too kind compared to true Endless natural ether disasters, what Rune had in mind was something like the birth of a new region or the erasure of one.

The medium of transmission used by the radiation was the ether density, after all, so making this link a plausible theory was fine in his book, not like he would be able to confirm it in the short term.

Probably not long-term too.

‘Just considering that by becoming tier 4 I could double my energy regeneration and cohesion stat from 5 000 to 10 000 is enough to tell me that my chance of reaching the tier 5 zone is less than zero percent, it’s minus 100%.’

However, the current situation of leisurely advancing and using every training center he encountered was, in fact, pretty enjoyable and satisfying.

Was his ether pocket dimension filling itself? No.

Was he perpetually pioneering new territory? Yes.

Was he doing his best? Yes.

Was his past self a better person than the current him? No.

Was he ever going to actively train his spirit masteries? Hell No.

Did he have centuries, close to a millennium, left to live? Yes.

Doing leisure things like firing thousands of energy worth of fireworks and having fun manipulating energy to do anything he liked was his hobby.

And just as he fired another firework, one he worked on for 5 minutes, precisely engineering its inside to cause a fairy dust effect which could maybe one day pierce through the neon whiteness of this place, his armor suddenly received a hit.

He didn’t passively cancel strike momentum just for this reason.

The hunter snakes.

“Oh, snaky snaky! Bad snake! Forcing me to visit your training center isn’t very charming,” Rune lazily awoke from his passive mind state and entered the training mind state immediately.

He was used to that, he had nothing to counter their stealth.

He was just someone living in a different temporality, not someone on the unbending path or specialized in stealth detection with specialized masteries.

The fight was lost before it even began, but it didn’t reduce the fun derived from it.

His slowed-down temporality allowed him to react when his armor suddenly received another hit and grab the invisible foe, which he then punched and burst with all he had. Just not with energy-based damage, his energy was reserved to flee when he got beaten down.

“Got you, every time you strike me my masteries becomes stronger so in exchange for also allowing you to train your ambush build, let me train my simple body control one!”

Another knee and elbow sandwich strike made the invisible snake react with the much more fatal bite move.

From his armor, Rune felt 2 pointed objects were applying massive force with another smoother counter-force on the other side to stop him from escaping. A regular snake bite shape.

“Oh oh oh, so cute! So your head is just there right?”

This time Rune didn’t even need to add energy to his 2 moving platforms, the snake would keep him close, so he punched with all his strength again and again.

A punch followed by a smooth kick and then another kick, it didn’t release so Rune continued, double punch and punch-kick combo. By the time he did that, the battle consumed more than 50 000 armor in total, and it wasn’t even a minute long.

This was pure bullying.

His current defensive compressed energy efficiency was 682%, from a tier 3 perspective it was approaching the late level, but against a middle or late tier 4 monster specialized in damage dealing? It just ignored all this, every second it inflicted 4 000 armor worth of damage from its bite pressure.

The perpetual and continuous strikes to its head finally showed some sort of effect as its bite pressure started to lessen a bit, instinct telling it that the head was suffering from some mild concussion.

But as soon as it happened, the snake’s bite increased again, “Ah yes! Thank you for using your boosted regeneration! If you were like the last one and stubbornly kept biting it’d be much more difficult!”

Suddenly, Rune filled his reinforcement shape with 2 000 energy, a very sizable amount compared to what he still had.

And punched the snake’s head.

This move transmitted the equivalent of 43 200 strength to the snake’s head, immediately causing another mild, or even more serious, concussion and dizzying it enough for it to release him.

The moment he was released, Rune ran away like a scared rabbit and even used his energy to reinforce his speed by some percent.

His current efficiency using pure strength was at 276% of his maximum, so his every punch basically had the equivalent of 18 800 strength if executed perfectly.

And with a reinforcement of 2 000 energy, which was enhanced by his current reinforcement efficiency of 144%, it ended up adding 488% of his base strength of 5 000, adding another 24 400 strength to the equation.

Such a strike was something that would inflict more than 6 000 health damage to an unprepared peak tier 3, cohesion stat included. And for the snake, it should have been something around 2 000 or 3 000 depending on its cohesion, so it was no surprise it retreated seconds after the punch hit.

That was the strength of the supreme offensive way of the Ether law.

The only problem with this offensive path was that the more strength you created, the stronger the task of delivering everything was, so against those, the best way to survive in a worst-case scenario was to orient your body in direction of the open sky and pray that your opponent didn’t prepare himself to make you stay here.

Rune then ran away in direction of the linearly increasing erosion for 10 minutes without leaving anything to chance and stopped to recover only after that.

One minute later, he was ready for another bout if he was pursued, but in the end, it didn’t come to be and he just continued.

An hour later, he arrived at a training center specialized in the way of future Nelo, compared to all the others it was the most fun training center for him.

Why?

“Pity! Pity! Master, stop it! Mercy! Hahaha! Mercy!” Because it was the most impressive and mind-boggling one.

Once he entered the 200 meters range, it was like his armor melted.

This training center even had the luxury to pay for the lighting element, so bullets, lasers, orbs, odd-shapes, mini lightning, in 10 seconds his whole 39 000 armor disappeared, and if he kept at it, 10 seconds later his energy pool would also disappear.

So he used this occasion to train his acting skill, the more miserable he acted the more he laughed at this second most powerful way the Ether law gave to inflict damage.

“No master! I can’t go on anymore! Ahhhh! I’m dying…”

15 seconds passed and he for sure wasn’t going to extend his stay, short but intense was the exact definition of this grand manipulation training center.

The fine manipulation training centers were more for decision-making training and instinctual reactions, as for the snake hunter ambush training centers, they were here to always have his attention on the outside and be ready anytime.

Having retreated to the sky more than 2 kilometers high, he departed again.

“Ouuuh, I’m satisfied…”

Thinking about what he was living, Rune was happy that a zone with so much pedagogy existed. Compared to the worst zones and regions ever found, and from which tales of their extreme condition beyond anything even tier 7 monsters could survive were told on the board, this was a kind and generous anomalous zone.

“Only missing some music, such a shame this generation of connected lenses cannot stock one or have the updated software and hardware…”

With all the time he spent listening to the harmonious vibrations from the moving monoliths, Rune considered himself an expert at moving monolith echolocation sound waves.

After months of listening to them, however, he was a little fed up, and it became like a plane's reactor sound, it could be enjoyed for what it was, but too much was just too much.

If there was a chorus accompanying the sound waves he would maybe revise his judgment, but this wasn’t the case.

“Ooooh…” A yawn escaped Rune's mouth, his spirit was signaling him it needed some resting time, and having just escaped the last training center, Rune judged the current situation auspicious for such an activity.

(I yawned 3 times writing this sentence what the crazy penguin)

Adapting to his changed mind, he changed direction by turning a little left, and some minutes later he let himself fall, landing near the straight cliff.

Approaching it, even more, he created a fancy foamy energy mattress and laid down on it, it wasn’t exactly a flatbed but more like a slightly raised one to let him admire the view of nothingness and white-white with more white.

From the start of his journey, this cliff was always here, guiding him and never letting him lose his way.

“Don’t know what’s down there but even after tens of thousands of kilometers it never changed… Maybe it leads directly to the underground region? I wonder if the IGS changed their plan of digging a hole to access them… This cliff is maybe the right way to go there...”

The ground, the depth, the sky, left, right, front, behind, the Endless was endless, no matter the direction.

Millions of kilometers down were the underground regions, and even some microcosms were completely isolated from civilizations, but it was the same for the sky, the aerial regions.

Though onboard there was some proof that once you dug deep enough, you ended up at another aerial region, and then once you fell enough, you stumbled upon another continental and oceanic world.

In the two directions, different factors were affected, the underground had regions that changed temperature, pressure, and other rocky properties like fluidity and solidity, while the aerial regions had the region with the most warped distance and the most brutal environmental disruptors.

The ground was judged to have the most diversities but reading some of the cartographer’s tales about the deep or the high, the Endless was endless in all meanings.

Falling asleep with a smile on his face, Rune couldn’t think of a problem in his current life and his future, he was a pioneer and he had centuries to live, it was all he needed.

…

‘The breeze stopped?’

Something changed.

Rune was used to 4 things in the white zone, the permanent erosion, the near-permanent harmonious sound waves, the light breeze coming from the front, and the ambush from the hunter snakes.

When one of them vanished, he realized it in minutes if he wasn’t in a good mood and seconds if all the stars were aligned.

His sphere didn’t send anything alarming, but months of living here didn’t mean he knew the place like his backyard, so the thing to do was to find a monster and judge its attitude.

Using his energy to reinforce his speed, Rune accelerated to 500 meters per second.

His body control masteries allowed him to go at 450 meters per second now, with a permanent reinforcement that would eventually empty his energy pool, he pushed his speed to 500 meters per second.

Such a speed was of course because he needed to make sure the breeze stopping wasn’t an announcing event or the preamble to something larger.

Half an hour later of running towards the closest source of sounds, Rune perceived a moving monolith.

It wasn’t moving.

Even after approaching it and entering within 200 meters, it didn’t react, so he entered its 100 meters range, and only then it attacked with hundreds of watery energy filaments, causing Rune to retreat.

“Ok, dear guide, time to shine,” opening the IGS guide, he searched for the section about anomalous zone events.

Reading between the lines, he actualized his knowledge about them.

[If the zone is completely permeated by the anomaly, then an event permeating everything should have happened. Logic can explain everything so take notice of a possible periodic event, the behavior of native monsters can also give away the inner-working of the event.

If you are near the zone exit then retreat to it to take the least chance, if you are deep into the zone then you should try your best to prepare yourself, do not take drastic action like burying yourself, the best answer would be to purge your current build to take a defensive or adaptive one]

This was the most fitting paragraph he found, and he already read it prior to this moment, but he never thought the event would happen now, he had no way to know it would happen within his short year of expedition…

‘The most probable is just an inhumanly big wave of radiation, filling all the ether in the air with another dose of more radiation, or maybe to refill the used one? Is it even decreasing with time? My build is already defensive and I only have this one…’

He only needed some seconds to realize his next logical and optimized course of action.

‘Well…’

‘Looks like I need to run.’

With this conclusion, Rune decided to run back towards the south, and at maximum speed, so full permanent reinforcement of 83 energy per second.

Distances were warped but ultimately, even if you needed to run 10 kilometers to advance 1 meter, it’d still be progressing.

‘As long as I sustain this speed I can decrease the erosion by 1 armor per second every 2 hours, with the current 532 eroded armor per second I need to go back by 232 erosion points, so… 464 hours… Divided by 24…’

‘19 days…’

Rune made a funny face at that, he had to hope the preamble was long and boring…

Long and boring was fine, totally fine…

…

11 days or a week and a half later full of nothing and immobile moving monoliths that weren’t moving anymore everywhere he passed, Rune encountered a bunch of young naive people.

The patroller team was led by Lounae.

‘Didn’t they realize that the permanent breeze stopped?’

When he saw them they also saw him, and his approach prompted them to wait for him.

Lounae was currently fighting a monolith by herself, as usual, she seemed even more overbearing than before as she was currently pummeling a monolith while she was riding it from above.

“Yo Rune you back? Is there something special that brought you back?”

One of the regulars talked to him, they already traveled for more than a month together so they were as close to friends as it was possible to be between a patroller and an adventurer.

“Didn’t you guys realize that the breeze vanished a week and a half ago? I don’t want to be an alarmist but for me, it’s clearly the sign that a periodic anomalous event is coming… The moving monoliths aren’t even moving anymore…”

Rune was so bad at transmitting his emotion that he just told the fact directly, he was retreating in all cases.

Acting surprised by something, the regulars felt their surroundings, “Oh! That’s true there’s no more breeze! So that’s why the monolith stopped moving, ohhh,” another one acted like it was surprising but nothing more.

“So you’re going to retreat right? I don’t want to have to tell the IGS I retreated by myself and let you all die behind,” happy with the current development, Rune pushed, better safe than sorry was his current motto.

“Well, better wait for Lounae to come back, she’s already finished so convince her, I don’t really think it should be that dangerous, right guys? Hehe!”

“If it’s just a massive wave of erosion then we only need to survive the collision and that would be a tale worthy of passing on! Hahaha!”

“Ok, I’ll just register this sentence as your epitaph then, no problem,” anyway it wasn’t them he had to convince, it was the approaching Lounae.

Coming back unscathed from the fight like a champion, the young rululu had a presence, not unlike a predator, her uniform and size in stark contrast only brought some sort of weirdness to her.

“Ya, hello Rune, so what's that about? Want me to contact the network to ask for their guidance so that you don’t have to convince me?” A slight smile was on her face as she asked that.

“If punching your face is enough to convince you then I can use 5 minutes to convince you that not retreating puts your life in needless danger, I’m leaving in 10 minutes top, so you guys act like testosterone teenagers or what?” He immediately replied.

As she kept looking at him, her smile didn’t change but the intent behind it changed, Rune knew she wanted to pummel him now.

‘Maybe she really is a teenage girl… A testosterone-boosted teenage girl.’

Knowing her, she only wanted him to enter into a brawl where she could punch him till his armor and all his energy pool was gone.

“Ok, 5 minutes ok? Then we retreat and go to the border, I’m not saying we should escape, just that I want to fight what’s coming with the zone border just behind me just in case…”

…

The moment he said that he punched Lounae in the face as he received a kick to his side.