Chapter 5: Spores
Welcome to the product 'Continent of Strife' from the 'Moldavia United Grand Trust'. Confirming psychic terminal ID: 2379, user name: Priest·Omni. Internal test player tag confirmed. Beginning mental guidance.
No abnormal magical fluctuations detected. No abnormal mental deviation values detected. Beginning deep mental link.
Mental link stabilizing... Mental link stabilization complete. Player's real-world strength level: Mid-Gold Rank. Maximum tolerable accelerated time speed: 64 times.
Want to experience the rise and fall of civilizations? Want to understand... the meaning of life?
Yes / No
In the southern district of Moldavia Territory, inside a small standalone villa, Priest was staying in his own room. He sat on the bed, rubbing his chin with a puzzled expression, staring at the 'Yes/No' button in his mind.
"I feel like this choice has some deeper meaning..."
"Priest, what are you doing?"
Just as Priest was muttering to himself, on the other side, Su Er, who was using magic to hold a watering can and watering various magical plants and ordinary potted plants in the house, happened to pass by Priest's room. The ghostly elf girl poked her head through the wall with some confusion and asked, "Coming home to sleep in the afternoon? Did you get too tired from sparring on the arena?"
Before her death, Su Er was a 200-year-old elf (a lady's age is a secret), with strength at Silver High-rank. After becoming a ghost, she could directly touch elemental forces, enhancing her magical control.
As for the arena she mentioned, it was a famous public dueling platform in the eastern outer district. Students from Winterfell Academy often rented it to settle personal grudges or hold matches. Naturally, some mercenaries also went there during their leisure time to keep their skills sharp, lest they grow rusty from long idleness. Priest was a regular there.
"No, it's something else. Su Er, go ahead and keep busy. And next time, don't just walk through walls—I need some privacy too."
"Bleh bleh bleh~"
Hearing Priest's reply, the elf girl stuck out her tongue and made a funny face before slowly pulling her head back into the wall. After this interruption, Priest finally made up his mind. He shrugged and muttered to himself, "Forget it. Judging by the look of things, this is probably some new thing the teacher cooked up recently. It shouldn't be harmful."
After discovering this novel item in the psychic terminal at the card tavern, Priest had immediately decided to go home and thoroughly study what this 'full-immersion game' called 'Continent of Strife' really was. After going through a bunch of tedious mental checks, he finally qualified to enter the internal test.
He had plenty of time anyway, so he might as well give it a try. If it wasn't fun, he could just stop playing.
Thinking this, Priest decisively clicked 'Yes' in the mental space.
But the moment Priest's mind touched the 'Yes' button, he felt an immensely powerful force crossing the Magic Net, completely enveloping his consciousness.
Then, darkness descended. All colors in the psychic terminal space faded, leaving only a blood-red icon floating in the void. A shattered longsword and a magic wand crossed in front of a broken shield. Metal chains kept turning, igniting a black flame that burned like sin itself.
A deep male voice, one Priest was extremely familiar with, echoed in his ears.
"Welcome to the Continent of Strife."
As soon as the words fell, an ultra-powerful hypnotic array from an unnamed mental overlord activated, and Priest fell cleanly into 'deep immersion' mode.
...
When Priest woke up and realized he had entered the so-called deep immersion mode and started the game, the darkness around him had vanished. What surrounded him now was a vast blue ocean.
Above the sea, the sun blazed like fire. There were no clouds in the sky, no islands or waves on the water. He could easily see the horizon... and a silver menu floating before him.
Before starting the game, please set up your character.
Since he often browsed forums and shopped on the Magic Net through his psychic terminal, Priest was no stranger to menus and character customization. 'Just a face sculpt, right? Who uses their real face for transactions on the Magic Net?' And this game called 'Continent of Strife' actually offered a face-sculpting feature!
This immediately gave Priest a good impression of the game before he even started playing. After admiring the ocean scenery for a while, he decided to make his avatar handsome this time, so his sister and Su Er would stop teasing him about looking like a Chaos Monster that made people lose their appetite.
But a few seconds later, Priest frowned and growled, "What the hell is this?"
Was this supposed to be character customization?!
He could see that the screen before him didn't have the usual virtual character models found on forums and trading sites. In fact, there was almost nothing on it—just a tiny speck, so small that if you didn't look closely, you wouldn't even see it.
No matter how much Priest zoomed in, he could only see a tiny dot, along with some of its minute, complex structures. If it were an ordinary person, they'd be completely baffled. But because his team included an alchemist who was quite passionate about biology, Priest could barely recognize that this dot wasn't just a simple point—it was, in a sense, a 'cell.'
And the so-called character customization was nothing more than determining what type of cell this was.
"Carbon-based... Amino-based... Silicon-based... Huh, there are subcategories? Plant-like and biological, and a mix of both?"
Frowning, Priest scrolled through the menu. He suddenly found this kind of setup quite interesting, especially since the young warrior noticed that the structures and descriptions of these 'cells' seemed to have substance, as if they had actually existed. "Wait, there are even elemental lifeforms? Natural runic aggregates of fire elements, and psionic wave entanglement bodies?!"
Seeing this, Priest was greatly surprised. Because he had once studied under Count Radcliffe, he knew that elemental beings, like humans and elves, had their own structures—they weren't just simple balls of energy with souls. The structures called 'natural runic aggregates' and 'psionic wave entanglement bodies' were analogous to the cells of flesh-and-blood life, the most basic life structures of elemental and psionic beings.
Being able to choose so many types of 'cells' immediately piqued Priest's curiosity. With his extensive experience exploring numerous other worlds, he could tell that these structures weren't made up—they were all real. So even though Priest still had no idea how to actually play 'Continent of Strife,' he began to feel a sense of anticipation. "In that case, I'll pick the one I'm most familiar with... the 'cell' of a flesh-and-blood lifeform."
After clicking confirm, there were still options for choosing appearance, setting innate abilities, selecting a starting location, and difficulty. But Priest, now quite curious about the game's content, had lost the patience to go through each one. He decisively clicked 'All Random' and then selected 'Start Game' on the silver menu.
Setup complete. Beginning randomization... Randomization complete: Carbon-based lifeform, continental world adaptation, innate ability 'Elemental Affinity', dungeon difficulty 'Medium'.
Random race name 'Element-Affinity Cell Body'. Beginning newbie dungeon loading...
After selecting start, Priest immediately fell back into that strange darkness. In the darkness, the originally minuscule 'cell' began to gradually grow larger, larger, and then, it swallowed Priest whole. With a leap, it plunged into the sea.
Just before the 'cell' completely engulfed Priest, he caught a final flashing line of text on the silver menu.
Phase One: Spores