Buzz.
An invisible spatial fluctuation enveloped him, and a faint blue light rose from the soles of his feet, rapidly spreading throughout his body.
A familiar, slight dizziness washed over him.
The scene before him began to distort, stretch, and recombine.
When the vertigo subsided and his vision refocused, Leon found himself in a completely unfamiliar environment.
Cold, dry air laced with a pungent, sulfurous odor rushed into his nasal cavity.
He was standing on a massive platform of black rock.
Looking around, all he could see was a desolate, jagged landscape under a somber, leaden gray sky.
The earth was a chaotic expanse of sharp, pitch-black crags.
Some of these rocks pierced the sky like obsidian blades, while others twisted upward like the jagged fangs of a prehistoric monster.
Many were riddled with honeycomb-like holes, from which wisps of pale yellow smoke seeped out, carrying a foul, fishy stench.
This was a brutal, oppressive, and thoroughly dead stone forest.
[System Notification: You have entered the Personal Initiation Trial Instance: Black Rock Wasteland.] [System Notification: The baseline parameter for this instance is locked to Nightmare difficulty.
Please select your optional operational tier.] [Easy] / [Normal] / [Hard] Although failing an initiation trial meant a career death sentence, the entry-level dungeons weren’t inherently impossible.
Professionals could manually adjust the operational difficulty based on their personal comfort levels.
Naturally, the higher the chosen tier, the greater the endgame clearance rewards.
Based on historical data, clearing a Nightmare-tier instance on the highest difficulty layer yielded a guaranteed Legendary High Grade crafting material or a top-tier equipment piece.
“No point in holding back,” Leon muttered.
[System Notification: Difficulty layer selected: Nightmare-Hard.] [System Notification: Primary Instance Quest has been generated.] [Objective: Survive three consecutive waves of the elemental beast tide within the allotted timeframe.] [Time remaining until the first wave arrives: 10 minutes.
Please prepare your defenses.] Ten minutes.
Without further delay, Leon reached into his spatial storage and pulled out a grayish-white stone sphere roughly the size of an eyeball.
Item: Broadcasting Eye StoneQuality: White Common, Low GradeType: Automated Recording and Communication AuxiliaryEffect: Once activated with mental energy, it hovers automatically around the user to capture real-time visual data.
Built-in runes allow it to interface directly with external communication arrays to transmit live video streams.Note: Operational efficiency may degrade in highly corrupted dimensions, unique barriers, or high-interference fields.
He channeled a small stream of mental energy into the artifact.
The dull gray surface of the stone eye rapidly dissolved, turning perfectly translucent as a faint magical luminescence pulsed within its core.
It trembled slightly, floating upward from Leon’s palm to hover in mid-air, subtly pivoting its lens to frame him against the desolate wasteland.
Leon pulled up the Prodigy app running in his phone’s background, opened his broadcaster interface, and tapped the button to go live.
[System Notification: Livestream broadcast is now active.] Broadcaster: Leon – Beast Tamer (Legendary High Grade)Stream Title: Beast Tamers are weak?
I’m not targeting anyone individually, I’m saying every single streamer on the Prodigy platform is absolute trash.Active Viewers: 0 Meanwhile, inside an office building in Mountcrest City, a corporate drone was hitting his limit.
“Lee, I need you to clock extra overtime tonight and clear this entire stack before you leave,” the manager barked, dumping a heavy pile of paperwork onto the desk before walking away.
Lee gritted his teeth, glaring at the supervisor’s retreating back.
“Damn vampire.
Forcing us to grind on a Sunday night.
Sooner or later, I’m going to hang you from a streetlamp.” Looking at the overwhelming pile of documents, Lee slammed his keyboard down in defiance and pulled out his smartphone.
There was no way he was finishing this anytime soon anyway; he might as well take a mental break and browse the trial streams.
He launched the streaming application.
He bypassed the highly publicized, mainstream professional streams entirely.
Those were boring.
It was far more entertaining to dig through the obscure, bizarre classes to see people embarrass themselves.
His thumb moved mechanically across the screen, filtering out the glamorous genius recommendations as he scrolled aimlessly toward the deep bottom tiers of the active directory.
Suddenly, his thumb froze.
A stream title popped up on his screen, its custom font looking significantly louder and more obnoxious than the listings surrounding it.
Beast Tamers are weak?
I’m not targeting anyone individually, I’m saying every single streamer on the Prodigy platform is absolute trash.
“What the hell?” Lee’s eyes widened in sheer disbelief.
“Someone actually has the nerve to talk this big?” A Beast Tamer?
The single Legendary class universally recognized as a joke in the early game?
The class so structurally dependent on an absolute fortune that only the top-tier military clans and multi-billion conglomerates dared to touch it?
Even the most successful Beast Tamer run in human history had only managed to scrape through a trial instance on basic Nightmare difficulty, recording a final score that looked pathetic compared to real combat legends.
Where did this absolute nobody find the courage to launch a sweeping, indiscriminate insult at every single professional on earth?
“Perfect timing,” Lee sneered, his finger slamming heavily onto the arrogant headline.
“I’m already furious about this unpaid Sunday grind.
Let’s watch this clown get demolished.” [User: ‘Hang Capitalists from Streetlamps’ has entered the room.] [User: ‘Stirring the Pot in a Downpour’ has entered the room.] [User: ‘Little Ming’s Dragon Turtle’ has entered the room.] [User: ‘Miracle Walker is Still Farming’ has entered the room.] [User: ‘Black Stocking Cockroach’ has entered the room.] [User: ‘Auntie’s Gushing Stream’ has entered the room.] [User: ‘Grandpa Niu Seduces Zhuangzhuang’s Mom’ has entered the room.] [User: ’18th Generation Kun-Sect Disciple’ has entered the room.] [User: ‘Public Restroom Hemorrhoid Inspector’ has entered the room.] Weaponized controversy was indeed the ultimate traffic cheat code.
The stream had barely been active for a couple of minutes, yet a three-digit horde of viewers had already flooded the room.
The comment section instantly resembled a boiling cauldron, exploding with mockery, outrage, and toxic remarks.
I checked this clown’s background profile.
An undocumented orphan?
A Beast Tamer with zero corporate backing?
Who gave you the nerve to launch a stream, you absolute joke?A joke-tier Legendary class that is literally the weakest early-game build in existence expects us to take him seriously?
I don’t understand how someone can be this delusional.Is this kid just desperate for clout?
He’s farming hate-clicks on purpose.
Isn’t he terrified of getting canceled off the internet permanently?Wait, look at his settings panel.
He manually locked the parameters to Nightmare-Hard difficulty?!
Did this idiot slam his head in a car door?What’s the difference anyway?
He’s going to get instantly flattened in the very first wave.You dare call my favorite streamer trash with a broken class like that?
Sisters, get in here and dox this clown!
Locate his school!
As time ticked forward, the influx of users began to grow exponentially.
Within a mere ten minutes, the room’s metrics spiked from a few hundred viewers straight into tens of thousands.
This explosive growth was driven by two distinct factors.
First was the silver-colored “Legendary Class” metadata tag blinking next to the stream’s thumbnail.
Even an unviable legend was still a legend, naturally commanding curiosity.
Second was the platform’s automated algorithmic recommendation engine.
The core system detected that the user retention rate for Leon’s stream was abnormally high.
The vast majority of netizens who clicked into the room weren’t immediate bounces; they stayed in the channel to furiously spam insults in the chat log, signaling immense engagement metrics to the server.
Most of them refused to leave because they wanted to watch the precise moment this broke, unbacked Beast Tamer was brutally executed by the dungeon mechanics, giving them the ultimate laughing stock.
[System Notification: Preparatory countdown has concluded.] [System Notification: The Initiation Trial has officially commenced.] [Phase 1 Objective: Survive for ten minutes under the assault of the Black Rock Giants.] The synthetic voice resounded, cold and mechanical.
Boom!
A series of muffled, thunderous tremors suddenly erupted from the depths of the black wasteland.
Roughly a hundred meters away from the rock platform where Leon stood, the iron-hard stone ground violently bulged and split open.
Massively thick hands constructed entirely of igneous black rock burst through the crust, gripping the jagged edges of the fissures to drag their bodies upward.
Amidst rising plumes of thick gray dust, colossal figures materialized from the subterranean depths.
They stood well over ten meters tall, their massive, rock-solid torsos making them resemble small, walking mountains.
Their limbs, joints, and heads were formed from dense, polished obsidian, with a dim, yellowish-brown elemental energy pulsing lazily along their connective fissures.
Inside their hollow, stone eye sockets, two dark red embers flickered with ancient, unadulterated hostility.
[Monster Detected: Black Rock Giant (Elite Quality)]