Infinite Realm

[[ System notification ;

You have died. ]]

Sato's consciousness appeared in a white empty room as the system notification woke him up from his 'sleep'.

'Where am I?' Sato questioned himself before realizing what had occurred just recently.

"Ah. I died." Sato said nonchalantly.

Normally, most players would be annoyed at their death as that would mean that they would lose a lot of Experience points and in the situation of this Main trial, the penalties of death were even worse. After all, death meant an automatic failure. But Sato didn't seem to have any signs of anxiety, nervousness or regret.

'The second sector's guardian is way too strong. If not for the item I got after defeating the Blood king, I would have died back then and this would have all been over.' Sato sighed.

Right after he had defeated the Blood king, Sato was rewarded with quite a few items. Sadly, as he had decided back before with Saimon, he could only receive them once the trial was over. However, 2 of those rewards were quite special and so, could be gotten ahead of time. One of them was the map that leads to the second sector's boss room while also having routes to different treasure areas in the second sector. As for the other one, it was a one-time revival token that was only usable in the [Labyrinth of Helios]. 

According to the rules of the Main Trials, death in any challenge represented failure. However, due to the intense difficulty of the [Labyrinth of Helios]'s challenge, a high-level figure of the Caventry, who also happened to have been a previous leader of the race, had made a few amendments to the trials. Apart from implementing the use of rating points, a special revival token was produced and hidden within the labyrinth, that would give one a chance to succeed.

The revival tokens could preserve one's life in the trials and make it so that death in the labyrinth doesn't necessarily mean the end of the Main Trials for a participant as through the aid of a mysterious power, the participant would be brought back to life elsewhere. Of course, there was no such thing as a free meal. 

For one to gain a revival token, they had to beat a guardian of a sector. However, there were 5 tokens; 3 could be gained from defeating the 3 guardians of the 3 different sectors while the other 2 were scattered throughout the labyrinth. 

It should be known that the [Labyrinth of Helios] was divided into 3 sectors and each sector was extremely big. It took Sato a whole 20 hours just to find the first sector's boss room and this was because his luck was a bit higher than average. Some of the more unlucky participants of this challenge in the past had spent the full 36 hours but still found no clue of the existence of a boss room, and this was only one sector. From this, the size of the entire labyrinth could be estimated and in the entire labyrinth, 2 revival tokens were spread apart. In other words, unless one had a stroke of really good luck, they would be unable to find these revival tokens.

Immediately upon death, the revival tokens would activate and preserve the soul of the owner, sending them to a safe environment.

Atrit's attack was so powerful that Sato's physical body in the game was destroyed upon contact. His 'soul' however, was preserved by the revival token but as his body had been destroyed, the system notification had sent him a death notification. Of course, thanks to the special effects of the revival token, Sato's death was different from normal so he didn't lose any Experience points. Even if he did though, Sato wouldn't be worried as he had a feeling that with each monster he killed, he received an equivalent amount of Experience points, just that he wouldn't get them now; only when the Main Trials were over would he be able to do so.

'So where am I? This place doesn't look like the labyrinth.' 

Sato inspected the empty white room but in reality, there was nothing to inspect. The entire place was empty.

'Is this the revival zone?'

After players died, there would be a delay of 30 minutes or so before they could resuscitate. During this time, their 'souls' would be elsewhere, awaiting the time of return. Since he had yet to die in IR, Sato had never been to the revival zone so he didn't know how it looked like.

'No. This doesn't seem like it.' Sato thought, before recalling that he had seen a system notification beneath the first one. Opening his system interface, Sato spotted the notification and opened it.

[[ System notification :

Revival token has been used.

User has been withdrawn from the challenge location and would wait within the [White empty room] till the challenge timer runs down. ]]

'So I have to wait till the remaining time is up? And what's with the lacking name? [White empty room]?' Sato sighed.

The revival tokens could be said to be an amazing artifact as they could preserve one's life from true death. However, to limit the abilities of the token, it was made so that if anyone were to activate it and use it to preserve their lives, they would be withdrawn from the challenge to the white empty room but still retain their current ratings. This was to prevent participants from easily passing the trials with the aid of the Revival tokens. The token's function was only to prevent the death of one and not to help them clear the challenge.

Since he had nowhere to go, for now, Sato decided to log out of the game as the remaining time on his counter was a bit above 6 hours. This was the same as 3 hours in reality. There was quite a lot of time left so Sato decided to spend it offline.. He wanted to see how far the others had gone and also check up on the current state of Black Grill's cave and the 3 novice towns.