**Chapter 36: The Will of the World**
It happened at noon.
Kai was in the C-rank dungeon's third layer, twin blades sheathed, deliberately unarmed, walking toward a creature he'd flagged through Soul Umbral Sense as something with actual teeth — when the world stopped being the world he'd known for six weeks.
Every shadow in the dungeon went still at once.
Not dark. Still. The shadow network — his network, the medium his bloodline lived in — froze mid-motion the way a held breath froze, and into that stillness something arrived that had never been there before.
A panel.
Not his System's panel. Not the familiar blue interface that had opened in an alley six weeks ago and changed everything. This one was vast — gold-edged, ancient in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with scale, and it did not appear only in his vision.
He felt it appear in everyone's.
Through Soul Umbral Sense, across the three hundred meters of his resting Domain and beyond it into ranges his Domain shouldn't have reached, he felt every Mana signature in Neo-Eden go rigid at the exact same instant. Millions of people. Awakeners mid-fight. Cultivators mid-meditation. Children at academy ceremonies. All of them receiving the same thing he was receiving, all at once, regardless of rank or location or whether they'd ever touched a beast core in their life.
He stopped walking.
A resounding ding was heard it was like something rang a gigantic bell in your ears
**[Ding]**
**[SYSTEM-WIDE NOTIFICATION — ISSUED BY THE WILL OF THE WORLD]**
**To all Awakened, Cultivators, and bearers of latent aptitude on this world:**
**Five hundred years ago, this world was first introduced to mana evolving all life on the planet but then the first dungeon gate opened and out of the dungeons came beasts that only knows one command "KILL", You were told this was a natural phenomenon. It was not.**
**This world has been selected by a higher existence to evolve since the number of intelligent life forms had been met, to evolve this world. The world would undergo a trial. The dungeons, the gates, the beasts within them — all of it is the Trial's mechanism. Every "Talent" awakened, every "cultivation realm" achieved, has been measured, recorded, and scored from the moment the first gate opened.**
**Trial Requirement: The complete eradication of all beast-classified entities native to or spawned by the dungeon system, across every environment of this world, including those not yet discovered.**
**Time Remaining: 730 days.**
**Failure Condition: If the requirement is not met within the allotted time, this world will be culled.**
**Success Condition: Upon verified completion, this world will be elevated. Surviving inhabitants will gain access to interact with civilizations beyond this world that have completed their own Trials.**
**Reward — to be allocated upon successful completion, determined by individual contribution and the Will's assessment:**
**— Talent Elevation: Permanent removal of an individual's Talent potential ceiling.**
**— Existence Elevation: Acceleration beyond standard realm progression into higher orders of being.**
**— Primordial Awakening: For those in whom it sleeps, the original human bloodline — predating this era's diluted lineages — may be restored in full.**
**This message will not repeat. Act accordingly.**
**The Trial continues.**
**And Good luck**
---
The panel held in front of him for a few more seconds.
Before it dissolved — not closing, dispersing, the way smoke dispersed rather than the way a door shut.
Kai stood very still in the dungeon's third layer with the creature he'd been hunting forgotten entirely.
*Five hundred years,* he thought. *Every dungeon. Every gate. Every beast core anyone has ever harvested.*
*Scored.*
He thought about the realm structure he'd been climbing through with such care — Mortal Realm, Spirit Realm, the layers and the breakthroughs and the doubling. He'd assumed it was simply how this world's power worked, an organic system that had always existed.
It hadn't been organic.
It had been *graded.*
He thought about his own System — the blue interface, the Creation Authority, unranked and personal and entirely separate from anything he'd just read. He opened it deliberately, checking.
**[Creation Authority — Unranked]**
**[Host: Kai Voss]**
**[No anomalies detected in Will of the World communication. Host classification: Outside Trial parameters.]**
He read that last line twice.
*Outside Trial parameters.*
His Creation System was telling him, in its own quiet way, that whatever the Will of the World was measuring across every Awakener and cultivator on the planet — it wasn't measuring him. Not the way it measured everyone else. He existed in the Trial's world, breathed its air, drew Mana from its ambient field.
But the System that scored the Trial didn't seem to know what to do with him.
He didn't know yet whether that was an advantage or a problem.
---
The dungeon around him had gone silent in a different way than usual.
Through Soul Umbral Sense he felt the checkpoint guards above ground — frozen, the same as everyone else, processing. He felt the C-rank creature he'd been hunting; it hadn't reacted to the notification at all, which told him something useful. Beasts weren't receiving this message. Only people.
*Of course they're not,* he thought. *They're the test material.*
He thought about the sea. About gates that could open anywhere — under platforms, under water, in places five centuries of dungeon-clearing guilds had never thought to look because nobody built checkpoints on the ocean floor.
If the Trial measured eradication of every beast-classified entity, and entire ecosystems had been spawning and culling each other in total isolation for five hundred years with nobody counting them—
He didn't finish the thought. He didn't have enough information yet to finish it responsibly.
He turned and walked out of the dungeon without finishing his hunt.
---
His chip buzzed before he reached the checkpoint.
Sera. The message was four words.
*Did you get that too.*
He read it walking.
*Everyone got it,* he sent back. *Where are you.*
*Sovereign Exchange. The building is in chaos. Three buyers from the auction are already here demanding to know if I knew.* He paused and sent back ** why would they think that are they retarded didn't they see that the message was from the will of this world** well to be fair he was a bit annoyed then another message came in from Sera ** how should I know people panic when things they don't understand happen to them, well that's by the way did you see the time limit?**
He thought about how to answer that honestly.
*Two years is a long time if you use it correctly,* he sent.
He looked up at Neo-Eden's tiers stacked above him, the platform's hum suddenly carrying a different weight than it had an hour ago — a city built on five centuries of a trial nobody knew they were taking, now staring at a deadline.
*Getting strong enough that the deadline doesn't matter,* he sent.
He pocketed the chip and kept walking.
Behind him, in the dungeon he'd just left, the gate pulsed faintly — the same as it always had, indifferent to the fact that the thing measuring it had just spoken for the first time in five hundred years.
Ahead of him, the entire continent was about to remember every old rivalry it had been nursing and discover, very quickly, whether it could afford to keep nursing them.
He thought about Lord Crest. About Elder Shen. About Madame Luo and Iron Commander Bask and every other name on Sera's winning bidder list — all of them reading the same panel right now, recalculating everything they'd fought over five days ago against a number that made fifty million crystals look very small.
*Two years,* he thought again, and this time let himself feel the actual size of it.
Then he started planning.
**To Be Continued…**