Chapter 124: Erosion from the Abyss

A wish lost and regained should have been an unexpected joy, but with a 24-hour time limit attached, it became a burden for Wu Chang instead.

As someone suffering from decision paralysis, having more than three options was torture for him; this open-ended multiple-choice question made him scratch his head even more.

Compared to a wish, he would have preferred receiving a "choose one of three" reward after clearing an S-rank dungeon.

Not only did the reward come without defined parameters, but the difficulty of the wish was also incredibly vague.

What did "difficulty level cannot exceed the upper limit of a Wasteland Realm B-rank dungeon" mean? Did it refer to a B-rank dungeon for ordinary people, or a B-rank dungeon for him, Wu Chang? He had once obtained an S-rank item in the Moonlight Sanatorium; if he made a wish based on that upper limit, even a great miracle bringing him back to life would probably just result in him dying all over again.

Wu Chang had one advantage: he didn't struggle against himself. Since it was hard to choose, he simply wouldn't choose for now.

Besides the Miracle Stone, other rewards were waiting for him.

That was the Paladin's Bloodstained Last Words.

The Paladin's Bloodstained Last Words granted him an increase of 1 point in Vitality, 1 point in Willpower, and 2 points in Inspiration; furthermore, he had looted the Paladin's weapon—a two-handed long-handled warhammer.

"Item Name: Light of Firmness"

"Item Rank: B"

"Item Skill: Fearless"

"Skill Description: While equipped with Light of Firmness, Willpower increases by 30%, and resistance to mental-type abilities increases by 25%. When your Willpower exceeds 50 points, Light of Firmness will feel weightless."

"Item Skill: Firm Charge"

"Skill Description: Swing the warhammer to charge at the target, causing brief stun and massive Holy Light attribute damage; after launching the charge, all obstacles along the path are destroyed, with charge distance and damage influenced by Willpower attribute."

"Note: Cunning villain, I can let you run 39 meters first!"

Light of Firmness was a rare weapon specialized for Willpower; to unleash its full strength, one had to stack a high amount of Willpower.

However, in dungeons within the first layer of the Abyss, Willpower could rarely be converted into combat power in most situations.

To prevent Inspiration from going berserk, players usually added one point to Willpower every other level, with very few players willing to invest heavily in this attribute.

In the recommended strategies of many stat-building guides, the optimal build at character level 30 kept the Willpower attribute between 20 and 25.

Attribute points were extremely precious and difficult to reset and reallocate, meaning that once this weapon was used, there was no turning back; one could only go further and further down the path of stacking Willpower.

Even more absurdly, this Light of Firmness was nearly two meters long, with a hammer head as large as an 18-liter water barrel, made entirely of solid metal.

If one could not meet its Willpower requirement, even with arms capable of lifting a thousand jin, one could at best use this thing to smash walls; dreaming of using it as a weapon to launch a charge was pure fantasy.

For anyone else, this Light of Firmness would be a useless item—too difficult to use and hard to sell.

But for Wu Chang, it was like a pillow delivered just as he was nodding off.

Eileen specialized in Energy and Willpower stats and happened to lack a weapon; Light of Firmness could be said to be tailor-made for her.

Unfortunately, in Wu Chang's original plan, he had intended to find a banner or a longsword to serve as Eileen's weapon, after all, as a Saintess who had been burned by fire, wielding these two types of weapons might grant additional bonuses.

After accepting the rewards, Wu Chang followed Sword Star and the others to clean up the aftermath of the Erosion Dungeon's impact on Yifu City.

Due to Wu Chang and the others reacting promptly and resolving the situation quickly, the casualties caused by the Erosion Dungeon were not severe, and the Bureau completed the count soon after.

A total of 875 people perished in this Erosion Dungeon incident.

This number was so small that when reported to the Bureau's high command, those above thought they had omitted a zero.

Every time a B-rank dungeon went out of control, it could be called a major catastrophe; even with the fastest response, casualty numbers rarely fell below three thousand, and that was only when preparations had been made.

In the sudden Erosion Dungeon experienced by Wanghai City, casualties numbering over ten thousand would not even be considered many.

Without mentioning distant events, just recently, the B-rank dungeon loss of control on Sakura Island resulted in over thirty thousand dead and missing; this was merely the officially declared data, with the true situation being far more severe. Even if human negligence played a role, it was enough to demonstrate the danger of a dungeon going out of control.

After confirming the data was not filled in incorrectly, the Bureau recorded one B-rank merit for the main forces of this operation: Shi Ning, Sword Star, and Wu Chang, while all other Bureau members participating in the operation each received one C-rank merit.

The value of merit could be roughly converted into items of the same rank, including special products internal to the Bureau that were not available for external exchange.

The true value of B-rank merit was half a tier higher than that of ordinary B-rank items.

Wu Chang had originally thought that after the Erosion Dungeon ended, counting the casualties, handling ordinary people whose Willpower had collapsed, and maintaining city order constituted the entire impact brought by the dungeon.

But actually walking through the eroded Wanghai City, he realized that what he had previously imagined was merely the beginning of everything.

The harm brought to reality by the Erosion Dungeon was far greater than he had imagined.

When an out-of-control dungeon erodes reality, its essence is the fusion of the dungeon's spatial fragment with Blue Star.

Defeating the BOSS within the Erosion Dungeon merely rendered this extra spatial fragment harmless, but the extra space itself would not simply disappear.

For example, at the Orange Hotel west of Wanghai University, after the dungeon event, an extra area appeared in the lobby, which retained its previous layout as a restaurant.

Yet none of the passing citizens of Wanghai City expressed any confusion; two Wanghai University students passing by Wu Chang were even discussing whether to try this newly opened restaurant for dinner.

The impact of the Orange Hotel was relatively minor; Dream Square, which Wu Chang and Sword Star had visited, remained completely intact and was forcibly inserted into the center of the Peace District Commercial Pedestrian Street.

The length of the entire street suddenly increased by more than double, turning the compact commercial street into a circular shape, yet the citizens similarly felt nothing abnormal.

When passing by Dream Square for a stroll, some people would even subconsciously shout out their wishes, drawing laughter from pedestrians.

This change did not only target the citizens of the Peace District who had been enveloped by the Erosion Dungeon; citizens who had not been caught within the dungeon's circle were similarly affected.

Looking at Wanghai City, where everything seemed to have returned to normal, Wu Chang knew that Wanghai City could never go back to what it was.

Not just Wanghai City, but the entire Blue Star.

He felt a trace of fear, a fear for the future of Blue Star.

Every Erosion Dungeon was not merely a fusion of two spaces, but also a fusion of the rules of two planes.

This fusion would directly modify the cognition of humans on Blue Star, making people feel that the sudden changes were perfectly reasonable.

From the current situation, players of the Abyss Game would not be affected by this modification of consciousness.

But what if the out-of-control dungeons came from the second layer, the third layer, or even the fourth layer of the Abyss?

Could these players of the Wasteland Realm continue to remain unaffected? What was even more terrifying was whether, before everyone entered the Abyss Game, the common sense regarding their cognition of the world had already been tampered with countless times? He suddenly recalled that before he awakened his Super-degree ability, he would occasionally scroll through social software and see news of someone awakening special abilities in some place or another.

Should special abilities appear on Blue Star? What should Blue Star originally look like, and what will it become in the future?

Wu Chang felt somewhat lost.

Blue Star was the reality he acknowledged; his understanding of the world, his methods of recognizing things, including his cognition of himself, were all formed step by step based on his own experiences on Blue Star and the knowledge he had learned.

But now he was being told that perhaps the things in his memory were not his own realizations, but had been constantly tampered with by others, and the things he persisted in believing might not exist at all.

This doubt about himself was somewhat difficult for him to accept.

Just as he thought he had glimpsed the true face of the Erosion Instance, a sentence murmured by Shi Ning made cold sweat break out across his back.

"Fortunately, the citizens of Yifu City have already been devoured by the Great Miracle into empty shells; otherwise, settling these people would have taken considerable effort."

(End of Chapter)