Chapter 227: Welcome To My Backyard!
The early morning sun failed to pierce the dense, unnatural gloom hovering over the northern fringe of the academy grounds.
Standing before the thirty students of the Elite Class, Instructor Varien looked less like an academic mentor and more like an executioner reviewing condemned prisoners.
His grey uniform bore the three golden stripes of a Gold-ranked combat instructor, sharp and pristine, yet his sharp, eagle-like eyes flicked over them with cold, calculated disappointment.
"Yesterday, two of our supposed brightest lights managed to set a historical precedent," Varien began, his voice cutting through the damp air like a whip.
He didn’t name names, but his gaze lingered heavily on Creed, whose forehead was bound tight in a navy-blue headband, before drifting lazily to Nicholas Grey.
"Eliminated from a planetary survival simulation in under an hour. A remarkable achievement in incompetence."
A chorus of stifled snickers rose from the ranks. Damien Blackthorne smirked, his arms crossed over a broad chest, his dark eyes brimming with open mockery.
Creed didn’t flinch. His expression was a slate of pure stone.
"Today, we strip away your delusions," Varien continued smoothly, stepping to the edge of a massive, sheer precipice.
The students moved forward to look down. A collective breath hitched.
Beneath them lay the Gravity Basin of the Lake of Mirrors. It was an immense, inverted crater descending hundreds of meters into jagged, obsidian terraces.
The basin’s base was a churned swamp of dense, mud-slicked mineral slag, surrounded by violently churning gravity currents that visibly bent the light. Ringing the rim above were thirty towering, automated gate-arches humming with defensive runes.
"The rules of this morning’s session are simple," Varien said, pulling a sleek, matte-black collar from his dimensional ring. "You will descend to the floor of the basin. Before you step onto the mud, you will clasp an Aegis-Null Collar around your neck."
He held up the band. It pulsed with a dull, anti-magic gray.
"These collars deploy a continuous suppression field directly into your meridian pathways. Zero Force discharge. Zero Natal Aura reinforcement. Zero Will projection. No bloodline awakenings, no elemental manipulation, and absolutely no summoning."
Varien’s lips curled into a razor-thin smile as murmurs of horror rippled across the prodigies.
"Worse yet, the collars are loaded with kinetic gravitational accumulators. The moment you begin your ascent toward the rim, the collar will register your upward displacement.
At the base, it weighs a modest twenty kilograms. Every ten meters you climb, the localized gravity field within the collar will double its load. By the final ascent, you will be hauling the equivalent of a collapsed iron pillar on your clavicles."
"Instructor," Damien Blackthorne called out, his jaw clenched. "Without Aura to reinforce our bone density, that kind of weight will snap weak collarbones!"
"Then crawl on your bellies like worms so the weight distributes, Blackthorne," Varien snapped back, his voice dropping into cold thunder.
"You call yourselves the elite? True warriors do not collapse when their energy dries up. Erling Sander conquered the world using the limits of the human frame. If your bones shatter, the medical golems will sweep your fragments into a bucket."
Varien raised a single finger, his eyes flashing with a sudden, predatory glint.
"However, I believe in proper incentive. The temporary Class Captain seat was awarded based on entrance exams. Today, we decide it through pure grit.
The first student to drag themselves out of the basin and cross the rim gate becomes the permanent Class Captain of the Elite Class."
Creed’s ears twitched.
"And," Varien added, dropping the real bombshell, "I will personally requisition a continuous twenty-four-hour cultivation block inside the Tier 1 Path Resonator under my personal instructor clearance."
The basin rim went dead silent.
Creed’s heart slammed against his ribs like a sledgehammer. ’Twenty-four uninterrupted hours in the Path Resonator? Under a Gold instructor’s clearance?’
His mind raced with savage clarity. Nicholas had said Marcus Delacroix’s petty after-hours badge was valuable because it granted covert access to study the anchor and accelerate path progression.
But an official, Gold-tier clearance from Varien?
That wasn’t just a skeleton key—it was an absolute pass to bypass all security, accelerate his comprehended Paths, and refine an embryonic Art without a single soul questioning his presence!
Beside him, Nicholas’s gray eyes contracted into needlepoints. Across the line, Emerald’s posture shifted, her fingers subtly twitching. Damien Blackthorne was practically trembling with raw ambition.
Every single genius had smelled blood in the water.
"Form ranks," Varien commanded. "Collars on."
Creed picked up the heavy band. The cold metal snapped shut around his throat with an audible click.
Instantly, a sickening, suffocating sensation invaded his torso. It felt as if thick, freezing lead had been injected directly into his veins.
His Silver-stage Fundamental Sources—Force and Aura—were seized by invisible iron vices and violently dragged down into total dormancy. The vibrant spark of his Silver Spear Spirit was forcefully dampened behind an impenetrable wall.
He was cut off from the supernatural world.
Beside him, several noble scions immediately staggered.
One boy nearly vomited into the grass as the sudden absence of internal Aura caused his equilibrium to violently destabilize.
Damien stumbled, catching himself with a curse, looking horrified at how frail his limbs suddenly felt without the roaring energy of his bloodline.
Creed, however, simply took a slow, deep breath through his nose.
His legs didn’t shake.
Long before he had awakened an SSS-rank talent, long before he had Formed his Force Core or condensed Natal Aura, he had survived the ruthless gutters of Section 7.
He had hauled salvage through scrap-storms, survived beatings from debt-collectors, and swung a cheap iron spear until his calluses ripped off.
He rolled his shoulders. His neck muscles flexed against the cold band.
’No magic? No summons? Just meat, bone, and technique?’
Under the shadow of his black headband, Creed’s lips curved into a sharp, blood-chilling grin.
’Welcome to my backyard, you spoiled bastards.’
"Descend!" Varien roared.
The thirty students plummeted down the spiraling cargo ramps, reaching the sunken arena within minutes. The ground was horrific—a thick, clinging slurry of black mineral mud mixed with jagged crushed obsidian that sucked at their boots like wet cement.
Ahead of them lay a five-hundred-meter expanse of pure quagmire, followed by a sheer, two-hundred-meter vertical cliff face carved with brutal overhangs, loose scree, and zero handholds.
A mechanical horn blared across the canyon.
BZZZZZZT!
"Move!"
The scramble was immediate and savage.
Damien Blackthorne, relying on the sheer size of his genetic heritage, charged forward like an unguided battering ram.
Even stripped of his bloodline fire, his frame was massive—nearly two meters tall with dense, heavily conditioned muscle. He plowed through the mud, his heavy combat boots spraying black filth as he seized an early lead.
Right behind him, moving with shocking, terrifying grace, was Emerald. Even without energy, her balance was supernatural.
She didn’t fight the mud; she skimmed it. Her steps were light, landing on the balls of her feet, using the floating obsidian debris as tiny stepping stones, completely bypassing the suction.
Nicholas Grey was third. The silver-haired prodigy was a terrifying sight without his magic. He had shed his arrogant, mocking demeanor entirely.
His eyes were cold, scanning the mud ahead with surgical calculation, taking the exact paths Damien had already cleared to save his own stamina.
Creed was in the middle of the pack.
The collar around his neck gave its first low hum, settling its initial twenty-kilogram load onto his shoulders. To an ordinary human, twenty kilograms while sprinting through deep mud was exhausting. But Creed’s physical training was not ordinary.
Through the system, his brutal tribulation survivals and his advancement to the Silver stage, his baseline physical attributes—unassisted by active energy—had reached the terrifying standard of a Peak Stage 5 Physique.
His muscle fibers were compressed like woven carbon cables, his bone density surpassed tempered steel, and his lung capacity was monstrous.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Creed didn’t sprint recklessly. He leaned forward, locking his core, breathing in a steady four-beat cadence he had learned from the Old Monk’s grueling physical drills.
He drove his knees high, snapping his feet out of the mud before the suction could anchor him.
Within two hundred meters, the pretenders began to break.
"I can’t... I can’t lift my legs!" a noble youth wailed, collapsing onto his stomach in the mire, completely pinned by his own exhaustion and the collar’s creeping weight.
Others tried to crawl, their hands shredded by the sharp obsidian shards hidden in the silt.
Creed blew past them without looking down.
At the three-hundred-meter mark, he caught up to the leaders.
Damien was breathing heavily, his broad back drenched in sweat. Hearing the rapid, heavy footsteps behind him, Damien glanced back, his eyes widening in pure disbelief as he saw Creed gliding through the muck with an iron spear casually gripped in his right hand.
"How are you carrying that?!" Damien snarled through gritted teeth. Most students had discarded their weapons at the starting line to shave off grams!
"A spearman without his spear is just a target, Blackthorne," Creed replied casually, his voice infuriatingly steady.
Creed dug his toes in and surged forward, overtaking Damien as they reached the base of the massive ascent cliff.
The moment their boots left the mud and stepped onto the first stone ledge of the vertical wall, the collars let out an ominous, synchronized mechanical chime.
CLINK.
Forty kilograms.
Boom!