The Challenger Plan

[Player Count: 90]

Number of Primal Source Traits Contained: 9

Sacrificial Power Produced by Players Today: 552 points

Average Player Monster Level: 5

Domain Nodes Owned: Emperor's Tomb Village (the place where the last wisp of Di Zhao's origin was buried; its territory rule allows it to reshape flesh and blood)

After checking today's earnings, the Origin Altar beneath Qi Sheng's feet began to glow.

A brief distortion of space later, he appeared in the bedroom of his home in the real world.

He glanced at the calendar hanging on the wall, opened the window, shifted into Di Zhao Form, and flew into the vast night.

After a long while, Qi Sheng appeared before an abandoned cemetery.

No one had tended to the place for years. Vines covered many of the gravestones, and a city rail station was under construction nearby.

Qi Sheng stopped in front of a gravestone.

The photo on it had faded, and the inscription was weathered and indistinct.

Staring at the gravestone, Qi Sheng wore a complicated expression. At last, he knelt before it and bowed his head heavily to the ground.

He stayed in that position for a long time. Then he rose and began repairing the gravestone, memories flooding back as he worked.

As a child, he had often fantasized about having extraordinary powers. But when he finally acquired them, he found himself burdened with a heavy responsibility.

He had been eighteen when he crossed over into the Monster World.

At the time, the Monster World was in the throes of upheaval. The Monster King, Di Zhao, had disassembled himself, leaving the various factions without a leader and plunging them into a chaotic struggle for dominance.

The war had already raged for thousands of years before his arrival. The factions that had once served Di Zhao all wanted to become masters of the new world.

Four factions stood above the rest.

They were Yan Ming, who commanded the power of space; Nine Yin, who commanded Purification; Guidance, who commanded the power of analysis; and Hyperdimension, who commanded All Things Extraction.

They had once been Di Zhao's most loyal attendants. After Di Zhao's disassembly, each believed they were the rightful successor and sought to claim the Power of Solidifying My Origin buried in Emperor's Tomb Village after Di Zhao's self-disassembly, becoming the new Di Zhao.

But the arrival of the Terror Black Tide changed the stalemated conflict.

The power of the Black Tide gradually corrupted the Monster World, destroying its environment and ecology. Spatial Rifts appeared in many parts of the world.

If things continued this way, the Monster World would eventually be swallowed by the Black Tide.

The four attendants ultimately joined forces to fight the Black Tide, battling an endless tide of evil beings.

The prolonged war left the four attendants increasingly weak, while the evil beings grew stronger as the Black Tide seeped further into the world. Their defeat could no longer be avoided.

In the end, the evil beings drove the four attendants to the edge of the Monster World, to Emperor's Tomb Village, where Di Zhao had left the Power of Solidifying My Origin. There, they worked together to open the forbidden seal and take refuge within.

Emperor's Tomb Village was also the last untainted place in the Monster World.

The four attendants had originally planned to try to fuse with Di Zhao's Power of Solidifying My Origin and inherit his power, so they could fight the Black Tide again with Di Zhao's Power.

But at the crucial moment, the Terror Black Tide struck again, engulfing Emperor's Tomb Village.

That was when he crossed over into the Monster World. He was sucked into the vortex of the Terror Black Tide and could have died at any moment.

At that critical moment, the four attendants joined forces to repel the Black Tide and rescue him, bringing him back to Emperor's Tomb Village.

Their intervention left the already weakened four attendants even weaker, and they suffered varying degrees of physical damage while fighting the Black Tide.

Guidance was stripped of its lifeform at that time, becoming a water-ball-shaped being.

What the four attendants hadn't expected was that none of them would inherit the wisp of Power of Solidifying My Origin left by Di Zhao. Instead, he, an ordinary man from another world, inherited the honor they had pursued all their lives.

Qi Sheng still clearly remembered the complicated expressions in the four attendants' eyes when he inherited Di Zhao's Power.

Anger, confusion, despair, unwillingness, excitement... A jumble of emotions had flickered across their faces, but in the end, they had all accepted the outcome.

The four figures had knelt before him, sworn their loyalty, and vowed to serve him as attendants for all eternity.

And he had shouldered the four attendants' convictions, promising to save the Monster World with Di Zhao's might and dispel the endless Terror Black Tide.

In the years that followed, he first fused with Di Zhao's Power of Solidifying My Origin and slept for 300 years.

Then, under the four attendants' guidance, he spent another hundred years learning to understand Di Zhao's abilities and the world around him.

But to become the true Di Zhao God, he still needed to leave Emperor's Tomb Village, explore the Monster World, and contain the Primal Powers Di Zhao had lost.

The process was incredibly difficult. Aside from Di Zhao's Power of Solidifying My Origin, he had no other power to draw on. His Di Zhao body couldn't be strengthened through any form of training; only containment could grant him strength.

At the time, he was only a little stronger than the weakest creatures in the Monster World. With evil beings running rampant outside, his growth was painfully slow.

Di Zhao's Power of Solidifying My Origin was extremely attractive to evil beings. The four attendants believed that if a high-level evil being discovered it, disaster would surely follow. So every time he went out, he had to continually expend Sacrificial Power to conceal Di Zhao's aura on his body.

Each trip outside cost a considerable amount of Sacrificial Power.

During this time, he contained the Eagle Head Demon, the Stone Gargoyle, and the Black Armor Snake, gradually growing stronger.

But in the four attendants' eyes, his progress was still too slow. The Sacrificial Power he spent on each outing far exceeded what he gained from hunting and containment. They had already poured their remaining divine power into Emperor's Tomb Village to keep the Black Tide from destroying it, so they couldn't help him in battle.

At this rate, Emperor's Tomb Village would fall when its Sacrificial Power ran out, before he could grow strong enough.

Just as the four attendants were despairing over the future, Qi Sheng proposed an idea.

That plan was the prototype of the Challenger Plan—the player recruitment plan.

The four attendants each commanded different rule-based powers.

He had Guidance, who commanded the power of information, create the Data System for the Challenger Plan. It would let challengers read data about the things they saw in the Monster World.

He had Yan Ming, who commanded the power of space, create the Reception System. It could bring challengers from different worlds into the Monster World and return their consciousness when they chose to leave.

He had Nine Yin, who commanded Purification, create the Purification System. It could cleanse challengers of mental trauma suffered in the Monster World, as well as other negative conditions.

He had Hyperdimension, who commanded All Things Extraction, create the Growth System. It could extract the life force of dead monsters and help it merge with players' bodies, making it part of their strength.

Together, these four systems, combined with Emperor's Tomb Village's territory trait, Life Reshaping, made the player recruitment plan viable.

To achieve this, the four attendants spent fifty years making constant improvements and revisions. At last, the Challenger System was complete.

By then, the Sacrificial Power Pool in Emperor's Tomb Village held only a little over ten million points. It could sustain the village for at most another ten years, and the cost of maintaining it continued to rise as the Black Tide grew stronger. What had started at 500 points a day had climbed to 1,000.

The four attendants left the choice to him, and he made his decision.

He would gamble their remaining Sacrificial Power on a future. He had Yan Ming burn it and use the power of space to search other Plane Worlds for lifeforms they could recruit as challengers.

Throughout the years spent searching across space, Qi Sheng's consciousness remained at Yan Ming's side.

During that time, he saw countless Plane Worlds corrupted and devoured by the Terror Black Tide. All life had withered, leaving only evil beings to roam the world.

Just as the Sacrificial Power was about to run out, Qi Sheng saw a familiar place.

It was a blue planet.

When the image of the planet came into focus, he saw that so much had changed since he remembered it. Still, he was sure.

This was his former home.

At that moment, Qi Sheng smiled with delight.

He knew he had succeeded. The Challenger Plan had finally found a use.

The National Day holiday is over~