Chapter 465 Year 1052: July-August
Each floor of the Tower of Trials felt like a totally different world, with a completely different ecosystem.
There were all sorts of monsters and creatures within, from the basic slimes, goblins and orcs, to giant trolls, Blade wraiths, Ogres and so on.
However, for the first ten floors of the tower, these monsters were all weak monsters below Level 100 so it was relatively easy for the party to clear them.
Just that the sheer amount of monsters present made the process time-consuming, especially given that they were supposed to clear anywhere between 1 and 10 chambers on each floor.
After floor 10, there was a Boss monster they had to defeat before moving on to the next floor.
But since said Boss monster was only Level 100, it was something that the party with an average level of 270 could basically one-shot with no problems.
Then, they moved to floors 11-20, where they fought monsters that were around levels 100-200.
After defeating the boss of floor 20, they entered floor 21, where Superior Stage Master Level monsters above level 200 began showing up.
Naturally, the number of monsters reduced considerably the higher up they went, as facing 5000 level 200 monsters with just eight of them was crazy.
At that point, it would not be a trial anymore, and it’d just be the Tower trying to kill them.
One thing that Evan later found out from the ETOD, was that although the Tower of Trials was on the Cloud Piercing Isle of the Divider Ocean, it was not really within that space.ππ³π΅xt.πΈππ
Basically, the area where the tower was and the main material world of Aidos overlapped spatial coordinates, hence it appeared as if they were in the exact same spot. However, there were an extra set of co-ordinates that the area around the tower had so although it was possible to interfere in the main world of Aidos from the tower’s space, the reverse was not the case.
As such, no monsters or entities of Aidos who were not proficient in high-level spatial and dimensional manipulation could physically interact with the tower, except Evan and his companions.
Evan’s little knowledge of space and dimensions allowed him to instantly infer exactly what kind of space the tower was in, but for the sake of his sanity, he decided not to dwell on it too much.
In other news, his Irregular title was increasing in ‘proficiency’, slowly reaching the state where it would not just be a ceremonial title.
As Artemisia had said, she took monsters from other worlds and put them in the tower, monsters over level 200 who had developed consciousness/sentience, some of which, found Evan and his party’s strength to not conform to the norm.
Since his title required him to prove himself ‘to not conform to that which has been established, both to the people of Aidos and those of other worlds’; his actions were in line with that and were increasing his title’s proficiency.
Anyway, the first 10-12 floors were a ‘warm up’ of sorts for the party, and they only started gaining experience from floors 13 and above.
Due to the Level Disparity, the magic particles, energy, soul power etc. that would have turned into their ‘experience’ was simply reabsorbed by the tower and used to either power up some other functions or ‘recreate’ monsters somewhere else.
Their level-ups resumed when they started battling monsters more than half their levels.
After reaching Floor 21 of the Tower in their first run, the party decided to take a break and return to the Oak Avenue Manor, having spent two weeks in the tower on the first 20 Floors.
Date of Occurrence: Year 1052, July 31.
There was a little bit of an issue with the Emperor and the Duke since Evan had ‘vanished’ for fourteen days and no one had any concrete knowledge of his whereabouts.
Since Evan’s ‘Hero’ status had been revealed to the world, he had definitely become a target for nefarious forces besides the Demonic Hand who had various reasons for not wanting Heroes to exist in the current Aidos.
As such, they felt that the boy needed more protection/monitoring wherever he was going but the feeling of having his movements monitored was not something Evan appreciated at all, leading to an argument with the Emperor that left a few palace officials in shock.
For Evan, he knew fully well that ‘protecting’ him was not the only reason why the Emperor wanted to attach a guard detail to him and that was one of the reasons he did not want that.
There was also the fact that the party’s movements were irregular, so to say, and were definitely not the kind to carry out with a huge guard detail of multiple grandmaster-level knights.
However, for some reason Evan did not know, the Emperor let go of the matter after a talk with Laurene and Eliza, leaving the boy very confused as he had no idea what on Aidos they had told the man.
Nevertheless, since there was no one bugging him anymore, Evan started his ‘Side Quest Run’, cross-checking with the Archives to see if there were any discrepancies in his memories.
Once he confirmed nothing was wrong, he wrote down the details of some of the side quests that could be triggered at this point in time and gave them to his party members, telling them to do those quests which would end up rewarding them with certain artifacts or chances to gain new skills and magic.
For Greed, Evan made a special list, giving the high-demon the quests that gave the player in Aidos Online, the highest number of monetary rewards.
Eliza had a few sub-quests that helped support type characters in the game, Pride had ones geared towards Damage Dealers, while the spirits split up among the four of them.
Amy with Pride, Kayla with Evan, Kuro with Eliza, and surprisingly, Milena volunteered to go with Greed.
Like so, the party split up temporarily to go on these quests, with some of them requiring Evan and Pride to travel to other nations on the Alpha continent.
Date of Occurrence: Year 1052, August 2.
They also took on official Adventurer’s Guild quests, easily completing and slightly exceeding the required quest quota for the next adventurer rank.
For their main branch, they chose the Capital City’s Adventurers’ Guild, the largest guild in the GWE with a guild building larger than some lower nobles’ mansions.
Since they frequented the guild very often, they became very familiar with a lot of the adventurers there.
Especially Greed, who Evan could not comprehend how the high demon seemed to be accepted everywhere he went, regardless of the group of people he mingled with, regardless of their race, type, or gender.
His social skills and charisma levels were off the charts, and he was very good at making use of them, so much that even though his ‘Greed’ was known to all, people found it hard to hate the guy.
Always making bets with adventurers and mercenaries, regarding treasures, artifacts, special weapons and the like, accumulating riches for himself.
At one point in time, he had become an urban legend in the Adventurer’s guild and it almost became a rite of passing for Adventurers new to the capital or newly promoted A rankers to be swindled by Greed at least once.
Still, Greed made sure the people who he had ‘won’ things from, were able to somehow recover their losses in a short amount of time without losing what he had gotten from them.
This usually ended with most of them coming back to challenge him to various other bets either to salvage their pride or erase the shame of their previous losses.
Unfortunately for them, Greed was someone who hardly lost his bets so things never ended well for those kinds.
When Evan, who had become chummy with lots of the A and S rank adventurers was told this when he was chilling with them after returning from a week-long quest, the young hero was left dumbfounded.
As for the other Deadly Sin Sibling, she was the same as usual.
It had become common knowledge that Pride and Greed were siblings and as friendly as Greed was with his surroundings, people understood that his elder sister was the exact opposite.
The people that usually related with Pride were usually either the serious kind who didn’t like to beat around the bush when talking or the ones who shared her love of books.
She even ‘befriended’ a few lower ranked adventurers who were bookworms like her, and had become something of a VIP customer for a lot of publishing companies in Gerfast.
Even though the S and SS rankers were far more powerful than the current Pride, a lot of them held some certain level of respect for the woman.
No one tried to mess with her.
You could say she also had high Charisma, in a way that made people admire her from a distance rather than want to get close to her as they did with Greed.