Chapter 233

Something pulls me and water slides over my skin as I think of opening my eyes. But the sense that every cubic inch of my body has been through a meat grinder before being superglued back together is overwhelming.

I look at the Life stores and I slightly thicken up the stream, surprised at the dip. Over 30 thousand points spent in a single sitting, which is a decent chunk of my own stores.

Settling at around 5 Life a second, I try to perfuse it throughout my body, in every nook and cranny to recover from what I just did as the pressure all around is rapidly fading. After taking care of my slow recovery, I move through my memory palace trying to piece everything back together going back and forth to witness everything that happened.

The pressure, the strange disintegration of my craft and the fact I even survived which even with all the advances of the system should have been impossible.

I let the world around me draw down back to just healing myself and I don’t even try to see my rewards. With a parachute attached and the seeds in the inner world taking care of carrying me to the surface, I start to meditate.

It seems like a minute later and I’m flying through the air tied to an air balloon, though I know that it has to be longer. Without even moving a muscle, I hurdle out of the water like a dolphin at high speed spinning before splashing down like a heavy and limp rag doll.

The perfect blue sky of the afternoon doesn’t hide the sun, after quite a while in darkness and I just sit there floating in a random direction on the ocean.

Few others in the inner world could just lay back while protected by their armor, after all: metal wasn’t made to float. And ee Leather would usually be accompanied by a weapon and a few solid plates. I let out a few good chortles and as the salty air fills my lungs, I cough out blood. But that is progress which after a few minutes is nearly over as I come back to myself.

The plans for my future assert themselves so I take to the sky and finally get a glimpse of my new title.

Marianna Trench.

Time since integration: 11d 2h 13m 5 sec

Time to descent: 53m 26s

Depth: 25.102 km

First to dive in the Marianna Trench.

Your reward has exceeded all the available Aether stores for this location’s rewards.

Title: Depths of the ocean, Marianna trench

You are the first to have reached all the way to the depths of the Marianna trench.

+2% to all stats. (x100% x3.00)

+3% to growth in physical training. (x100% x3.00)

+1.5% to one class special effect (x100% x3.00)

I reach within my inner world and start to look at the one thing I can’t touch, watching the Aether construct that the system has added.

This is quite different than most other and now I had come across something I didn’t even think existed in my wildest dreams. A way to increase the ease with which I increase my stats. So this much really should be one of the older rewards from the system that nobody managed to corrupt to a meaningful degree.

But as I stare at it something overcomes me. With just my gaze the Aether and the very system constructs feel more at home than I expected.

Everything I’m draws to my soul and then it clicks.

That is my Aether.

It used the very hints of Aether that I gifted out and returned it to me and that… was on a whole different dimension.

It is only a hint of my resource mixed in, but I can feel the clear Aether just barely coated in my imprint that made its way from the depths.

Something tells me that I took from the system before it could Atunned it to me is more valuable than I was expecting.

I look at the larger pool of unblemished Aether in my soul and the second seed that I added along with the sense of depth and reflection that comes from it. It wasn’t a waste by any stretch of the imagination, but I should be even more selective in how I use it because it feels exceedingly useful.

I think about the last line of rewards, a second chance of increasing one class's special effects.

Should I use it now or would it be better to wait for something really powerful that is only a single percent or even a fraction of a percent and splurge on that?

Is there even anything of the sort available?

My mind whirls with the possibilities, but I leave it for later.

Even though this was triple the ‘normal’ first title for reaching the bottom, I am still short of Everest in total from 6 total percent to 10 percent. Still, it is immensely powerful and I had both and a many more in my future. There is a good chance that I used up most of Everest’s Aether stores and I had pretty much proof that I scraped the bottom of the barrel for this.

I can only hope that ‘resetting’ after other people arrive on Earth takes Aether into account otherwise, I will have to find a huge source of Aether and somehow I doubt it would be simple.

As that thought rises in my mind, the limitations that Pando had been under and the danger he was exposed by ‘stealing’ the free floating Aether in the air over vast swaths of territory are no longer in place. He could probably share some of that with Everest and eventually even the Mariana Trench.

Though as I taste the Aether in the air I’m reminded, that it isn’t pure Aether, but it’s clear enough. Could they make good use of that quality of Aether?

Accelerating to the edge of my capabilities and nearly overstraining my soul, I slowly gain altitude, but then I realize that the most tiresome action isn’t to speed up, but to climb.

For longer trips at really high speeds, it didn’t make sense to try and avoid higher altitudes, even discounting the tremendous thrust power, water and mana being wasted constantly fighting air resistance. But for anything slower than 2 kilometers a second the optimum height didn’t reach the 10-kilometer mark.

I start and stop a few times trying to get my Wonders of the world counter to 100%, and though it is challenging I leave a little cushion for other activities and getting a few regional titles besides just visiting places like Stonehenge and the pyramids.

Exploration, Wonders of the world: 35%

…

Exploration, Wonders of the world: 61%

…

Exploration, Wonders of the world: 82%

With each step towards this last achievement, I realize how unlikely it would be for someone, no… for ANYONE to get it.

I move from place to place with precise directions at incredibly high speeds that couldn’t be surpassed by anyone without really advanced runic designs.

And I felt that even the first people from smaller planets who didn’t manage to extend their stay in the instance simply wouldn’t be getting all these rewards.

Atop the list of problems came of transportation. Even if by sheer miracle someone from an advanced race managed to get a hypersonic plane that can take off vertically and learned enough about magic in the very first month to instantly place runes all around it and protect it from system interference after restoring any damage made during the planetary transformation wouldn’t be enough. Then they would have to deal with higher gravity, which is not trivial and I was only doing it because of the cheat like abilities of the inner world.

A sequence of concatenated if statements that all needed to be true for anyone to get several first achievements. And after all that, everyone else would have to forgo those achievements. If one person had access to tech and skills like that, their whole race would be in a similar position, so they would be competing against themselves.

And all of that was just thinking about the easier titles to acquire. Getting every single first title of the list of the wonders of the world should be ‘technically’ impossible while following the rules. When people return at the end of the first month, amidst millions, maybe billions of people, at least one person would reach one of these wonders first even if by happenstance. After all somebody would be a minute's walk away if they didn’t plop back from the instance standing in the very ground, and that would invalidate the ‘run’ altogether.

And as the percentage ticks upward nearing 100 percent after I have gone through Machu Picchu, the Pyramids and Stonehenge I start to get anxious.

Yes, I had a whole month to get everything in place and find every significant place, but even with the thousands of Avatars I send out ahead all over Earth and my capability of pulling on information about a place from a distance, there was a needle in the haystack and was fresh out of magnets.

Most of the time I could guess how meaningful each location was just from a minute connection to it and by the time I reach 90 percent completion, I’m absolutely certain that I will be short three percent.

So every day hundreds of seeds fly out in every direction following the directions of the people in the inner world. My desire to be back in the US with Pando before the end of the month, to help complete the preparations sounds less and less likely.

Sure the main wonders all had nice bonuses and in the end, the 14 titles give me nice bonuses, but I wanted to eat my cake and still have it.

I mentally add the newest additions since the Marianna trench.

+11% to growth skill in your highest leveled one.

+17% to all stats

+0.5% to one class special effect

+21% sense of direction while exploring

Mountains are 3% easier to Climb.

Trying to find the plat place I even sent a few dozen avatars to Antarctica, even though there shouldn’t be anything meaningful there, beyond a few explored places.

There could be an alien artifact somewhere…. but probably not. My book was pretty insistent that nobody could leave the system territory, and only recently had we reached anywhere near enough Aether or whatever to sustain a system user.

After going to the last place and officially hitting 97%, I stop in South America with only 2 days left. Plenty of time to return, but only if the actual place ends up being nearby. Still, I reach for a hundred, a thousand different places letting the lack of strain on my soul heal me. I think of moving closer to the US, but while I’m moving I can’t get any real updates on the places that my proto avatars land on and if I had to return to South America I would get pissed at how much time I would have wasted going back and forth.

And so the day passes and soon I’m eating through nearly all the remaining hours. I keep cranking out ideas and looking over the vast swathes of land that Pando covered including the nearly fully formed villages half wishing I was there, but I chose another path. Making more avatars would serve no purpose given I probably already had way more than I would need for now and it wasn’t like I could make a hundred an hour. They still took effort and concentration to make, even if some of that was alleviated by their small size.

Even if I could snap a million of them into existence I didn’t have the time to cut more pieces of my inner world along with all the paraphernalia needed for them to move around at any reasonable speed.

It was already quite lucky that I managed to repurpose other projects into this form for this many.

As they and in place after place, I try to extract their significance, and most are ‘recognized’ by the system, but they are all crumbs and temptations trying to distract me from my goal. Like a toast crumble or a tiny shard of sweet candy instead of holding out for the 7 course meal that I had worked hard for.

Then I feel it deep in my bones, not just the significance of the last place I landed, but that taken up to eleven as the weight of all the others landings completes the set and I chortle finally realizing why this place was so low on my list.

It is the Chicxulub crater, which had been the beginning of the end for the dinosaurs as the impact created thick clouds of water, dirt and ice.

Instantly I run the math in my head and with a pulse so that every moving flying craft will maintain their current speed to avoid even the mildest strain on my soul and then I take off at full blast through the sky.

Until I reach some 500 meters a second, my acceleration would have outright killed any normal human and I reach it in less than 2 seconds. Up to around a kilometer per second takes me longer, but I still accelerate at a similar rate as astronauts, at some 30 meters a second.

Then that slows closer to what you experience in a car, goes past what a carrousel at a tenth of its normal speed produces until even with my prodigious perception I can no longer feel the acceleration.

The vibrations of the thrusters fighting gravity and the high speed air are still there, but under that, the few millimeters of speed I gain every second are imperceptible.

I adjust and readjust the timing as the minutes pass and I get a better idea of how fast I will complete the trip. I want to get there before the end of the month. It might not make a difference, but at least in theory, someone else would have the chance to do the same as me and if I could allow that, it would be the icing on the cake.

Compression heating warms the outside of my flying bicycle, even at the sky high altitude, I’m sustaining. I only fail to see the faint burnishing of my flying bicycle because of the thin skin layer of shielding around it. Still, a beautiful plasma trails the sky for anyone on the ground to see. And a trail quite a bit brighter than my previous trips given that I push faster at a lower altitude, eeking out every single advantage that I could to shave off even a single minute.

Then with a sharp corner that introduces a lot less strain on me than changing my speed upwards, I break at full speed stopping and halting all my momentum as fast as possible. I reach the closest thing to a suicide burn, which I supported much better than any acceleration.

In a thousandth of the time, it took me to accelerate, I grind to a halt. And like I was changing all my exhausted muscles in a narrow exercise to another position, I breathe new life. Then I drop to the ground, putting the craft back in the inner world and bleeding off the last vestiges of my momentum by rolling.

The salty air breeze hits my nostrils, as I came down just a few kilometers off the epicenter of the giant crater. As close to it as I could get without going into the ocean. A place that was so large that I couldn’t even see the edges at some 90 kilometers in radius. I spread my will through the Pando’s roots, on my home planet. I feel the entire place in a very limited way and I can tell that it has changed nearly nothing. The same distances, the same shape, even the same vegetation.

The system left it just as it had been before it arrived, unlike most other places this large. Even small chains of mountains grew and expanded with new peaks.

This place is one of the rare exceptions.

I simply stand there in wait knowing that any other action would be futile. There is something in the air, my arrival doesn’t prompt any action.

Just as I start to reorganize my mind and wonder if I made a mistake and should have headed to the center of the crater in the ocean floor, the system’s attention almost reluctantly, with a languid and sloppy wave of Aether, washes over me. And the impressions I get completely blow my mind.

This can’t be a dead creature.