Chapter 440 - 439: Fire Seed Ranking

Chapter 440: Chapter 439: Fire Seed Ranking

As night fell, Seraphina Sinclair freshened up and lay down on her bed, opening her personal panel.

[Name]: Seraphina Sinclair

[Zone]: Dolorum Zone 444

[Intelligence]: 39

[Strength]: 39

[Constitution]: 40

[Speed]: 39

[Evaluation]: When the limits of the flesh begin to blur and balance across four dimensions becomes the norm, you stand among the clouds, looked upon with awe by mortals. But a deeper darkness lurks in the heart of the black mist, and the gazes of ancient existences are piercing the fog, landing upon you.

Seraphina Sinclair compared her new stats with her previous ones for a moment.

Her Intelligence had increased by two points, and her Strength and Speed had each gone up by one. But her Constitution... it had shot up by a full five points!

Now, her Constitution had surpassed all her other stats!

Gray had really given her a huge gift. He was truly her best subordinate.

More importantly, her Constitution had now broken the forty-point threshold.

What did forty points of Constitution even feel like?

Seraphina Sinclair tried clenching her fist. She could feel the power surging beneath her skin.

It wasn’t the kind of power that required conscious control. It was something more constant, more profound—as if every cell in her body had eaten a full meal and was now lazily digesting.

She rolled over, sat up, and stretched her shoulders.

Today, she had eaten six boxes of steamed cucumber and venison stew, killed dozens of monsters, fed the Sunflower eight pools of slime, and even found time to check on Luna Jacobs’s progress.

Yet now, as night fell, she felt no fatigue at all.

Back when she had just entered The Black Mist World, this level of activity would have left her bedridden for three days.

"Forty points of Constitution is already this effective?" Seraphina Sinclair muttered to herself. ’What about fifty points? Or sixty? What about a hundred?’

She couldn’t imagine it.

But that was fine. She would find out sooner or later.

Speaking of Luna Jacobs, though... Seraphina Sinclair sighed. The blueprint improvements that were supposed to be finished today were being delayed again.

But Luna Jacobs had been very clear. It wasn’t a delay caused by laziness or some unavoidable circumstance. Rather, she had discovered another potential area for improvement, and the increased workload meant she would have to pull an all-nighter.

Although Seraphina Sinclair wasn’t an Engraving Master, she had learned a great deal about them from Luna Jacobs over the past couple of days and had a decent understanding of the profession.

The more improvements made, the higher the grade of the finished blueprint.

Therefore, Seraphina Sinclair wasn’t just okay with the delay; she was actually pleased to hear about it.

With that in mind, Seraphina Sinclair returned to the mobile cabin to take a look.

Luna Jacobs was still hunched over, holding the Polishing Knife, poking and tapping at a palm-sized metal plate.

Her movements were light and slow, each one performed with extreme care.

Seraphina Sinclair walked over and stood behind her, watching for a moment.

"How much longer will it take?"

Luna Jacobs didn’t even look up. "Hard to say. Could be an hour, could be a full day. But it will definitely be done tomorrow."

Seraphina Sinclair said nothing, simply standing to the side and watching in silence.

Seeming a bit uneasy under her gaze, Luna Jacobs finally looked up and rubbed her eyes. "This point of improvement is more complex than I thought. It’s a domino effect; changing this one part means I have to adjust several previous sections."

Seraphina Sinclair nodded and didn’t press further.

She didn’t understand engraving, but she understood the process of creation.

She recognized the state Luna Jacobs was in.

’It’s like back in school when some students were in the final stages of writing their theses. All they could see were the thousands of words on the page, and nothing else mattered.’

Seraphina Sinclair offered a few words of encouragement before lying back down on her bed.

’There’s nothing I can do, after all. It’s not like I can help.’

As for Chrona, her friend request was accepted later that evening.

The Moonlight Jellyfish’s Blessing had once again guided Seraphina Sinclair to the right choice. If it weren’t for the rune she had sent, Chrona would have surely died.

In their private messages, Chrona thanked her profusely.

Seraphina Sinclair, however, remained impassive. It was a pre-arranged deal, after all. There was no need for such excessive gratitude.

The only downside was that this incident had cost her all the Black Fog Coins she had just scammed off Pretty Guardian.

The next morning, just as Seraphina Sinclair was thinking her days would continue to pass in boredom, a system announcement appeared.

It was a long-winded wall of text, but Seraphina Sinclair scanned through it and only retained two key points.

First, new leaderboards were being published. Just like last time, there were rewards to be claimed.

Second, these new leaderboards would include a "Kindling Ranking" for each Zone!

Beyond that, there was a bombshell: there were now only one thousand Zones in the entire world. The so-called elimination of the bottom one thousand players actually meant eliminating the last-place player from *each* Zone.

Seraphina Sinclair, who had been lounging on her bed, shot upright.

That made a huge difference.

If it were a global ranking, the unlucky ones would likely be the nobodies who were both weak and unlucky.

The weak would stay weak, and the strong would stay strong. The final thousand names would have been decided from the very start.

But this way...

Each Zone would independently eliminate its last-place player.

That meant that even if you were mediocre, as long as you were lucky enough to be assigned to a less competitive Zone, or were even just a tiny bit stronger than everyone else there, you could survive.

Conversely, even if you were powerful, you could still get eliminated if you were stuck in a Zone filled with monsters.

Seraphina Sinclair thought about her own Zone, 444.

The number was inauspicious, but she had no idea what kind of people were in her Zone.

She opened the Zone channel to take a look.

The chat was scrolling by at a breakneck pace, filled with discussions about the new announcement.

"HOLY SHIT, HOLY SHIT, HOLY SHIT! The last-place player in each Zone???"

"You scared me to death! I thought we’d have to compete with all of humanity. We nobodies could have just laid down and died."

"What are you so happy about? Last place is still last place! How do you know *you’re* not the one at the bottom of our Zone?"

"...Could you try not to jinx me?"

"I was just talking! Don’t take it seriously, don’t take it seriously."

"Anyway, what’s our Zone like? Has anyone done a deep dive?"

"A deep dive? Into what? The Zones just merged yesterday. I don’t even know how many big shots we have."

"I took a look at the leaderboards. Looks like our Zone has a few killers."

"Killers? How good are they?"

"Look for yourself! Blacktiger Ford is in our Zone! All of his own ratings are Triple S, there’s another with a Double S, and a bunch of other S-Class people."

"We’re screwed! The competition is going to be insane. I never even saw a Double S in my old Zone, let alone a Triple S!"

Reading this, Seraphina Sinclair’s finger twitched. She first opened the general leaderboards.

Unsurprisingly, she was in first place. Just as the chatters had said, all her ratings were Triple S. The Evaluation text had changed, but it was in the same old style—nothing new.

Seraphina Sinclair scrolled down a few names. They were all unfamiliar IDs.

Night Owl was the SS-level survivor, while the others—Thundercloud and Whitephantom—were S-Class.