Living Life As A Game: Through And Through 237 The Tricky Time Substation

Resolve as many conflicts within the Ancient Phantasmagorial Timepiece as you can. Performance will be graded on the number and difficulty rating of conflicts resolved.

Time Remaining: 23H 59M 59S]

Elizabeth was once again in the starry space that led to the massive Ancient Timepiece. She looked down and saw the same sight of Earth she had come across on her first visit and sighed.

'Seriously,' she thought, 'if that really is Earth, just what is its connection to all of this? The Sky Seizing Castle might just be using some advanced arrays I'm too ignorant to understand to project the Earth that I know as the background for this trial. But I wouldn't even be surprised if the Sky Seizing Castle's Lord had a connection to Earth.'

She entered a rabbit hole of thought as she considered, 'Persephone and the Cataclysm have a connection to Earth and they're entities that look down on Gods, for fuck sakes… Earth has a Martial Society and Cultivation Methods that obviously transcend it's originally spiritually inert state, so what gives?'

Unfortunately, now was not the time nor the place to be asking those questions as she was on the clock for the Time Substation Trail. Moreover, Persephone had already told her that she would only know after receiving the appropriate Divine Transmission.

Elizabeth flew into the Ancient Timepiece as she had during her first visit to the Sky Seizing Castle and frowned.

"Hmm… There's no method to help with the Substation Trial?" She muttered.

Once more, she stood in a room with thousands of projections with subtly noticeable disturbances in their rate of time. Elizabeth squinted with a tinge of malice as she felt the room was mocking her. It gave her the same problems she had resolved when she was in the Mortal Stage.

"Hmph," Elizabeth snorted as her Spiritual Sense flooded the room and resolved every single projection in the room at once.

A vein on the side of her forehead throbbed as the test continued in the same fashion as her first visit. Now, she had to resolve incorrect projections of time as they appeared one by one. However, because she had already completed the Space Substation Trial and cultivated her Forsaken Continuum Baptism Cultivation Method, the incorrect projections were beyond simple to resolve.

A second passed and Elizabeth completed the first hundred even as the difficulty increased after each subsequent projection was resolved. Another seven seconds passed and Elizabeth's eyes narrowed; she still managed to resolve over a thousand incorrect projections of Time.

Nearly three minutes would go by before the last, 9999th, incorrect projection was resolved. After the last projection was resolved the boundaries of the room were erased, seemingly extending on into an infinite area.

As her Spiritual Sense was still active, Elizabeth instantly noticed that behind her, there were two objects decorating the white void where she stood. One of the two objects was a lever with numerical settings ranging from one to ten, and the other object was an unfurled scroll containing the information Elizabeth was looking for at the start of the Substation Trial.

[Status

Name: Scroll of Timeborn Precognitive Divination

Spirit Grade: SSS

Description: Teaches the user the Time Art, Precognitive Divination, an Auxiliary and Defensive Time-type Skill. Unfortunately, the user's cultivation of the Skill can only be fruitful in very dire and specific environments.

Skills:

Name: Time Art: Precognitive Divination

Level 1

Experience: 1,066,000/1,097,448

Spirit Grade: F

Energy Cost: 0.25 True Qi per hour

Description: An Auxiliary and Defensive Time-type Skill that allows the user to peer into the future in their localized and immediate setting. Proficiency, Understanding of Time, and knowledge of whatever is being divined dictate how far and accurate the divination of the user is.

Primary Effect: Within the user's range of sense, the movements of all objects can be divined. Accuracy and clarity descend from highest to lowest by order of the sense used: seeing, Spiritual Sense, touching, smelling, hearing, tasting.]

"Uh oh," Elizabeth grew apprehensive as she looked at the unassuming lever next to the floating scroll.

'Just what will this Substation throw at me?' She hesitantly approached the lever and set it to the number "one."

Already prepared with her recently learned Precognitive Divination active, Elizabeth shifted her head such that it rested on her right shoulder.

Shooh!

A drop of sweat rolled down the length of her face as she watched a soundless illusory arrow sail off into the infinite white void ahead of her.

Given hardly any time to rest or react, Elizabeth watched as another arrow entered her periphery. She dodged by taking a step forward when another arrow was sensed, aimed at her torso.

'Fuck,' Elizabeth strained herself to dodge all the arrows that tracelessly aimed for her vitals.
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'These are the extreme circumstances required to cultivate Precognitive Divination?' She squinted.

She was only attacked by one arrow at a time, but as the projectile was nearly undetectable, even with her Speed, each encounter was a close call.

However, before even half an hour passed, Elizabeth's increasing Understanding of Time and proficiency in her new Skill allowed her to casually dodge in the first level. She could still only see a relatively short time into the future of her immediate environment, but every fraction of a second further into the future that she could see made a monumental difference.

Before moving on to the second level, Elizabeth thought, 'Let's see if these arrows…'

She let an illusory arrow graze her right forearm and smiled, 'There's only a phantom pain, not any real damage.'

She moved the lever affixed to the white void to the position for the second level and almost immediately regretted it. The level of difficulty didn't increase linearly; unless, of course, it was plotted logarithmically.

Elizabeth dodged four arrows but still managed to get grazed by three. Moreover, the number of attacks wasn't the only thing that increased going from the first level to the second.

Elizabeth gritted her teeth as dozens of arrows assaulted her from all angles every second. Sometimes she was let off rather lightly with scrapes and scratches, but occasionally, she would be hit directly.

In one instance, Elizabeth had been cornered into either having to take an arrow in the head or chest. Around ten arrows were traveling about half as fast as her at her max speed and there was little she could do by the time her Precognitive Divination detected them.

'Time Art: Temporal Pulse!' Elizabeth panicked.

Despite the skill being cultivated only to the upper bounds of Mortal Grade Mastery, Elizabeth's increasing Understanding of Time allowed for the skill to instantly transcend to the Spirit Grade and then some.

[Skills:

Name: Time Art: Temporal Pulse

Level 1

Experience: 1,089,000/1,097,448

Spirit Grade: F

Energy Cost: 0.5 True Qi

Range: 20 meters omnidirectional about the user. Thickness of the pulse is 1 meter.

Primary Effect: Expels a pulse wave of Time Energy that alters the rate of time experienced by everything it passes through.

Secondary Effect: Against all entities with a lower Understanding of Time than the user, the rate of time may either speed up or slow down by 100%. The rate of time doubles if the entity also has a weaker Cultivation Base than the user. Constructs without a Cultivation Base have their structure compared to the user's Understanding of Time and proficiency with the skill to determine the rate of time experienced.]

With the pulse of Time True Qi slowing down the arrows as they entered its effective range, Elizabeth contorted her body at irregular angles and managed to completely dodge seven illusory arrows and only be grazed by two. Unfortunately, the tenth arrow managed to score a direct hit.

For the next couple of minutes, Elizabeth continued to dodge with the occasional activation of Temporal Pulse. However, a great portion of that time, her face was downcast with grief as she thought, 'Of all the places for an arrow to hit… It just had to be the knee, didn't it.'

…

Sun had just finished passing through the fifth and final instance of the Yang Trial in the Ancient Redvile Temple. It had taken about three weeks since he left the group with Jiuu, Kirun, and Liam to make it this far, but the gains he had made more than made up for the time spent.

Looking at the core of the Ancient Redvile Temple, its sixth and topmost floor, there were only treasures for him to collect.

"Sol Exalt Nascent Method," Sun read aloud, pausing as he had found a Cultivation Method that interested him after tossing about a dozen others to the side.

"Let's see, here…" Sun picked up the note attached to the Cultivation Method.

He read, "It is my life's greatest regret to have not been able to cultivate this technique. The foundation I had built up over thousands of years of cultivation was not solid enough, nor was my path as a Lightning-Yang Cultivator. I leave this technique here hoping that a day might come where a talented youth from my home planet may revive it for the world to see it's glory and claim it as my inheritance. Signed, Nascent Immortal Redvile."

Sun looked over the technique and wrinkled his brows in confusion. He thought, 'My foundation is more solid than this Nascent Immortal?'

He might have understood if Redvile hadn't been able to cultivate the technique due to not being a Pure Yang Cultivator. But, to not have a stable enough foundation?

"Maybe the later Stages of Cultivation tripped him up," Sun muttered before sealing the technique away in a Storage Talisman.

At the moment he had already fulfilled the Transcendent Foundation Stage requirements of obtaining eighty or more Spiritual Pillars; his prolonged cultivation in the Yang Trial having brought his count up to eighty-seven pillars at the moment. Moreover, with all the resources he saw lying around in the room, he could easily see the number rise even higher in the near future.

Sun collected everything of value in the room aside from the Cultivation Methods he had no need for. He left those to any other challenger that might complete the Yang Trials in the future.

Alas, Nascent Immortal Redvile was not an Alchemist, rather he was an Array Saint; one step higher than the rank of Grandmaster. Sun still collected his Array Legacy for Jane to browse, but he couldn't help but feel a pang of disappointment for not having a new perspective on Alchemy to look over.

Still, Sun wasn't complaining; he had Yrre as an Alchemy teacher and she was a Level 79 anomaly. Her strength may not be quite at that level due to the Law Linking Chains, but her knowledge of Alchemy more than likely surpassed Nascent Immortals.

Chapter end