“Absurd!” Meinhard Janek’s face turned ashen, twisted with the deep, burning disappointment of a mentor watching brilliant potential go to waste.
“The defining feature of a fortress is its wall.
To construct one capable of standing, you must master load-bearing architecture, structural distribution, and complex adhesive compounds…”
Building a fortified structure required far more than simply stacking boulders.
A proper fortification demanded a deeply calculated foundation, a precise skeletal structure, and high-strength mortar to weld those massive stones into a seamless barrier.
Without those fundamentals, any attempt would yield nothing more than an unstable pile of rubble.
Watching Reed Newt charge farther down this reckless, dead-end path, Meinhard felt a sharp pang of helplessness.
As the principal of Valley View Academy, he was heartbroken, yet the strict rules of the assessment bound his hands.
Once the trial commenced, no outside force was permitted to interfere; not even a formidable ninth-level Island Holder like Wisław Zackery possessed the authority to intervene.
“Why waste precious time attempting to build a stone city?
Was he not content with a simple log cabin?”
“Every other student is still struggling through the primitive reality of sleeping on the dirt and foraging for scraps…”
“Not to mention, an ordinary man cannot hope to haul raw boulders out of that quarry without heavy equipment.”
“City building requires an immense body of engineering knowledge he simply hasn’t demonstrated.”
A collective murmur of disapproval rippled through the observing mentors.
They shook their heads, abandoning any lingering expectations they held for Reed Newt.
Though the young man had achieved astonishing, record-breaking results early on, they knew this triumph would be short-lived.
The trial was designed to escalate continuously.
The tide of sea creatures battering the shores would grow larger, fiercer, and exponentially more dangerous.
The beasts attacking now were merely the weakest wave; it wouldn’t be long before true first-order sea monsters made landfall.
Crude gunpowder could decimate weak targets, but it would barely scratch the armored hides of first-order beasts.
Unless Reed Newt succeeded in becoming a true evolutionary, his ambitious venture was guaranteed to end in a swift, tragic death.
Meanwhile, in the dusty heat of the island’s quarry, Reed Newt stood before a colossal heap of shattered rock, deeply absorbed in thought.
Thanks to his improvised black powder, blasting the bedrock to yield raw stone had proven remarkably easy.
The true bottleneck was logistics. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Moving hundreds of tons of stone from the quarry to his chosen building site was an impossible task for a single pair of hands.
At his current pace, hauling it alone would take until the end of time.
“Time to recruit a labor force,” Reed muttered with a casual shrug, unbothered by the setback.
He had anticipated this obstacle long before he set off his first explosion.
Aside from himself, the island teemed with diverse wildlife, ranging from small game like hares and wild monkeys to heavy beasts such as bison, antelopes, and wild elephants.
Out of all these species, two had immediately caught his eye: the monkeys and the elephants.
Both possessed remarkably high intelligence, making them ideal candidates for rapid domestication.
Leaving the quarry behind, he trekked into a dense patch of jungle, where a large troop of wild monkeys occupied the canopy of several giant hardwood trees.
“Bah!” The moment Reed stepped into their territory, the canopy erupted into aggressive chattering.
The troop bared their sharp teeth, flashing threat displays as the entire family group shifted into high alert.
A few bolder individuals snatched heavy, unripe fruit from the branches and hurled it directly at his head.
“Fierce and stubborn,” Reed noted, ducking beneath a shower of projectile fruit.
Recognizing that forcing the issue would only cause unnecessary chaos, he wisely retreated to a safe distance.
He set to work gathering sturdy vines to weave makeshift live-capture traps.
If he could snag a few healthy monkeys and bring them back to his cabin, he could finally test out his newly acquired [Grandmaster-level Animal Domestication].
Far across the Endless Sea, on a neighboring landmass, the atmosphere was far more lethal.
“Roar!”
Rudyard Wilf stood his ground, his eyes locked onto two thrashing sea monsters trapped in a narrow ravine.
He maintained a tight, defensive posture, watching for any desperate, final counterattacks.
Under his relentless assault, the beasts were already horribly bruised and bleeding out.
The trial had officially entered its third day.
By consuming more than ten evolutionary cores in rapid succession, Rudyard’s personal strength had escalated dramatically.
Facing two low-level sea monsters simultaneously was no longer a life-or-death gamble for him.
Gathering his internal energy, he wove the roaring flames surrounding his body into a concentrated sphere, compressing the fire until it glowed with a blinding white heat.
With a sharp flick of his wrist, he hurled the thermal orb straight into the pair of creatures.
“Detonate!” A thunderous explosion tore through the ravine.
The beasts let out agonizing screeching cries as the intense heat incinerated their flesh, leaving behind nothing but a pair of glowing red evolution cores amidst the ash. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“Another twenty points in the bag,” Rudyard exhaled, letting his combat stance relax.
He closed his eyes, extending his consciousness to link with the official Valley View leaderboard floating within the island’s realm network.
As an ascended evolutionary, he could easily access the real-time rankings with a simple thought.
Scrolling past the lower tiers, he found his name holding steady at eleventh place, just three sea monsters away from breaking into the coveted top ten of the entire Valley View standings.
Yet, as his eyes drifted to the very top of the board, his breath caught in his throat.
Sitting comfortably at the number-one spot was a familiar name: Reed Newt.
Another student from Valley View Academy, his own peer.
Yet Reed was dominating the trial with an absolute, crushing authority, trampling over every elite candidate in their year.
Even the celebrated prodigy, Hanna Raelene, had been forced into second place beneath his overwhelming score.
“Fifty-nine sea monsters…
how on earth did he slaughter that many?” Rudyard’s hands trembled slightly as he stared at the staggering tally.
It made no logical sense.
Unless Reed had somehow bypassed the preliminary stages and broken through to a second-level evolutionary, achieving such an insane kill count in just three days should have been physically impossible.
That was no longer the performance of a mere genius; that was the work of a complete monster.
The only small comfort lay in the fact that Reed’s score had finally plateaued.
After claiming his fifty-ninth kill, his total had remained frozen at 590 points.
Meanwhile, Hanna Raelene appeared visibly provoked by the gap.
She was slaughtering sea monsters at a frantic, desperate pace, her score jumping by small increments every few hours as she tried to close the distance.
“A battle between monsters isn’t my concern right now.
I just need to secure my spot in the top,” Rudyard muttered, taking a deep, stabilizing breath to steady his nerves.
He knew he had to keep his feet on the ground and take things one step at a time.
If he could slay just three more targets, he would claim a spot among the elite.
And when that happened, Valley View Academy would proudly hold two of the top ten positions on the global board.