Challenger Plan

[Player count: 90]

Number of Origin Primordial traits contained: 9

Sacrificial power produced by players today: 552 points

Average player monster level: 5

Domain nodes owned: Emperor Tomb Village (the place where Emperor Zhao's last wisp of origin was buried; possesses the territory rule trait of reforging living flesh and blood)

After checking the day's earnings, Qi Sheng saw the Primordial Sacrificial Altar beneath his feet light up.

After a brief distortion of space, he appeared in his bedroom in the real world.

He glanced at the calendar hanging on the wall, opened the window, switched to Emperor Zhao Form, and flew into the vast night.

A long while later, Qi Sheng appeared before an abandoned cemetery.

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

Qi Sheng stopped before a gravestone.

The photograph on it had blurred, and the engraved words had weathered away.

Gazing at the gravestone with a complicated expression, Qi Sheng finally knelt before it and bowed his head heavily to the ground.

After holding that posture for a long time, he stood and began repairing the gravestone, memories welling up as he worked.

As a child, he had always dreamed of possessing abilities beyond ordinary people, but when he actually gained them, he discovered that he already bore a heavy mission.

He had been eighteen the year he crossed into the Monster World.

At the time, the Monster World was in violent turmoil. The Monster King, Emperor Zhao, had disassembled himself, leaving the various factions leaderless and plunging them into a chaotic era of warring powers.

War had already raged for thousands of years before his arrival, and every faction that had once served Emperor Zhao wanted to become the master of the new world.

Four factions were the most powerful among them.

They were Yan Ming, who wielded spatial power; Nine Yin, who wielded purification power; Guide, who wielded analysis power; and Ultra-Dimensional, who wielded the power of Universal Extraction.

They had once been Emperor Zhao's most faithful vassal servants. After his disintegration, each believed they were his best successor and wanted to inherit the "power of the self-fixated origin" buried in Emperor Tomb Village after his self-disassembly, becoming the next Emperor Zhao.

But the arrival of the terrifying dark tide changed the deadlocked, chaotic war.

The Monster World was gradually corroded by the dark tide's power. Its environment and ecosystems were ravaged, and spatial rifts appeared across the world.

At this rate, the Monster World would eventually be swallowed by the dark tide.

The Four Devoted Servants ultimately chose to join forces against the dark tide and fight the endless evil spirits.

The long war weakened the Four Devoted Servants by the day, while the evil spirits grew ever stronger as the dark tide infiltrated the world. Defeat had become irreversible.

Eventually, the evil spirits drove the Four Devoted Servants back to the edge of the Monster World, to Emperor Tomb Village, where Emperor Zhao had left his self-fixated origin. Together, they opened the forbidden seal and hid inside.

Emperor Tomb Village was also the last unfallen sanctuary in the Monster World.

The Four Devoted Servants had originally intended to try merging with Emperor Zhao's self-fixated origin, inherit his power, and use it to battle the dark tide once more.

But at the critical moment, the terrifying dark tide returned and engulfed Emperor Tomb Village.

It was at this moment that he crossed into the Monster World and was sucked into the terrifying dark tide's vortex, where he could have died at any moment.

At that moment of crisis, the Four Devoted Servants joined forces to repel the dark tide, rescuing him and bringing him back to Emperor Tomb Village in the process.

This intervention further weakened the already weakened Four Devoted Servants, and their bodies suffered problems of varying degrees during the fight against the dark tide.

It was also then that Guide was stripped of living form and became a ball of water.

What the Four Devoted Servants had never expected was that none of them would inherit the wisp of self-fixated origin Emperor Zhao had left behind. Instead, he, a mortal who had crossed over, inherited the honor they had pursued all their lives.

Qi Sheng still clearly remembered the complicated looks in the Four Devoted Servants' eyes the moment he inherited Emperor Zhao's power.

Anger, confusion, despair, unwillingness, excitement... all kinds of complicated emotions intertwined, but ultimately gave way to calm acceptance.

The four figures knelt before him, swearing loyalty to him and pledging to serve him as vassal servants for all eternity.

He also took on the Four Devoted Servants' obsession, promising to save the Monster World with Emperor Zhao's great power and dispel the endless terrifying dark tide.

In the years that followed, he first merged with Emperor Zhao's self-fixated origin and slept for three hundred years.

Then he spent another hundred years learning under the Four Devoted Servants' guidance, as they taught him to understand Emperor Zhao's various abilities and the things of the Monster World.

But to become a true Emperor Zhao God, he still needed to leave Emperor Tomb Village, explore the Monster World, and contain the primordial power Emperor Zhao had lost.

Yet this process was incredibly difficult. Apart from Emperor Zhao's self-fixated origin, he had no other power to bolster him, and Emperor Zhao's body could not be strengthened through any method of cultivation. Only containment could grant him power.

At the time, he was only a little stronger than the weakest creatures in the Monster World. With evil spirits rampaging outside, growing stronger was a struggle at every step.

Emperor Zhao's self-fixated origin was immensely attractive to evil spirits. The Four Devoted Servants believed that discovery by high-level evil spirits would inevitably bring disaster, so every time he went out, he had to continuously expend sacrificial power to conceal Emperor Zhao's aura.

Every trip outside cost a considerable amount of sacrificial power.

During this time, he contained the Eagle-Headed Demon, Gargoyle, and Black-Armored Snake, gradually increasing his strength.

But in the Four Devoted Servants' eyes, this pace was still far too slow. The sacrificial power spent on each trip far exceeded the gains from hunting and containment. They had already poured their remaining divine power into Emperor Tomb Village to keep the dark tide from destroying it and could offer no help with his combat strength.

At this rate, Emperor Tomb Village would fall when its sacrificial power ran out, long before he became strong enough.

Just as the Four Devoted Servants were despairing over the future, Qi Sheng proposed an idea.

This plan was the prototype of the Challenger Plan, the player recruitment plan.

The Four Devoted Servants each wielded different powers of rules.

He had Guide, who wielded information power, build the datafication system for the Challenger Plan, allowing Challengers to read data about the things they saw in the Monster World.

He had Yan Ming, who wielded spatial power, build the guidance system. Through this system, Challengers from different worlds could be brought into the Monster World, and their consciousnesses could be sent back when they chose to log out.

He had Nine Yin, who wielded purification power, build the purification system, which could cleanse the mental trauma Challengers suffered in the Monster World, as well as various other negative conditions.

He had Ultra-Dimensional, who wielded the power of Universal Extraction, build the growth system, which could help players extract the life force of dead monsters and merge it into their bodies, making it part of their strength.

These four systems combined, together with Emperor Tomb Village's territory trait, "Life Reforging," made the player recruitment plan feasible.

To achieve this goal, the Four Devoted Servants spent fifty years continually refining and revising their work, until the Challenger System was finally complete.

At that time, Emperor Tomb Village's sacrificial power pool had only a little over ten million sacrificial power left, enough to keep the village running for ten years at most. The maintenance cost was also rising as the dark tide grew stronger, having already increased from the original five hundred sacrificial power a day to one thousand a day.

The Four Devoted Servants left the choice to him, and he made his decision.

He would wager the remaining sacrificial power on a future, having Yan Ming burn it to use spatial power to search other Planar Worlds for living beings who could be recruited as Challengers.

Throughout those years of searching across space, Qi Sheng's consciousness remained beside Yan Ming.

During that time, he saw countless Planar Worlds corroded and swallowed by the terrifying dark tide, where all life had withered and only countless evil spirits roamed the world.

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

It was a blue planet.

As the view of the planet's surface enlarged, although far too much had changed compared with his memories, he was still certain.

This was his former home.

At that moment, Qi Sheng smiled with joy.

He knew he had succeeded. The Challenger Plan had finally found a place where it could be put to use.