A Special Dungeon Theme
Core card: F-rank Name: Stone Attribute: None Category: Mineral / matter Note: A perfectly ordinary stone.
Su Mu froze.
That was it?
The chatter below the stage fell silent, as if someone had pressed a mute button. For a full three seconds, there was silence. Then, a tide of noise erupted.
"F-rank? A stone? His core card is a stone?"
"He's finished... completely finished..."
"An F-rank core card? In all these years, this is the first time I've fucking heard of someone awakening a stone. He's not just finished—he doesn't even qualify as finished."
"A stone card... how's he supposed to play that dungeon? Throw stones into the dungeon and smash monsters to death? What a joke."
"210 soul power, and he awakened an F-rank stone card? What shitty luck..."
"I told you soul power isn't everything. Look, a top student's grades don't count for a thing on the awakening platform."
"That's brutal. An F-rank core card would be bad enough, but it's the most fucking ordinary kind of F-rank, too. At least other F-ranks have attribute bonuses. His stone doesn't even have an attribute. It's the lowest of the low."
"Su Mu is finished."
Su Mu's fingertips were still pressed against the glowing card.
He felt as though his heart had skipped a beat, and his heart sank.
The feeling was all too real.
He knew all too well what a core card meant.
A core card was the "crystal core" of a dungeon theme, the central fulcrum of all the dungeon's rules.
A core card's rank, attributes, and skills directly determined the dungeon's combat style, growth ceiling, and build direction.
An SSS-rank Ice and Snow Queen came with a domain, a living body, and an extreme cold attribute. Countless powerful tactics could be built around it.
But his F-rank stone... had nothing.
No attributes, no skills, not even a decent category.
Worse still, core cards and themes were interconnected.
With a core card this terrible, the dungeon theme he awakened afterward was unlikely to be much better.
An F-rank core card foretold an F-rank theme.
What did an F-rank theme mean in a world of "limited resources, where the strong took all"?
It meant the bottom rung.
The very bottom.
"Student Su Mu?"
The presiding teacher's voice rang out. He had recovered faster than anyone else, and though there was regret in his eyes, he dutifully continued the proceedings. "Your core card has awakened. Please proceed to the stele and awaken your dungeon theme."
Su Mu fell silent for two seconds, then slowly withdrew his hand.
He glanced at the F-rank stone card and put it away in his soul space.
His heart had sunk, but he didn't want to give up until the very last moment.
There was still the theme.
His core card was terrible, but his theme hadn't appeared yet.
Maybe... maybe it won't be so bad.
He walked up to the stele, reached out, and pressed his hand against it.
The instant his palm touched the stele's icy surface, Su Mu felt a vast force surge from within it, rushing up his arm and straight into the depths of his soul.
It felt as though something that had slumbered for ages was awakening.
Thud...
A muffled boom rang out, like a heavy hammer striking between heaven and earth.
Immediately afterward, the entire sky abruptly changed color.
Everyone on the field looked up at once. A wave of sharp intakes of breath swept through the crowd like a tsunami.
Above them, gods and buddhas filled the sky.
Golden Buddha light bathed half the heavens. Countless golden-bodied buddhas, their faces indistinct, sat cross-legged among the clouds as Sanskrit chants drifted through the air and heavenly flowers rained down.
Within the Buddha light, solemn and majestic bodhisattvas held purification vases, fierce-eyed Arhats bore treasure pagodas in their hands, and celestial maidens danced around the clouds, their sashes fluttering.
The sheer grandeur and richness of detail made it seem as if the entire Western Paradise and the immortal realm of the nine heavens had been brought into the sky above Rongcheng.
"What is that...?"
"My god... the size of that phenomenon..."
"Wait! There's more! Look at the other side!"
Before the light of the gods and buddhas had faded, winds and clouds suddenly churned across the other half of the sky.
Demonic qi surged into the heavens.
A pitch-black demonic wind rose from the horizon, blotting out the sky and sun.
Within the demonic wind, enormous figures loomed in and out of sight...
There were vicious birds with wings on their backs, a giant ape that stood between heaven and earth, the silhouette of a fox whose nine tails stirred the winds and clouds, and a flood dragon covered in golden scales, rolling and roaring through the clouds.
The demonic qi and Buddha light met and clashed in the sky, forming a tableau like a war from myth.
"This phenomenon... Buddha—it's gods and buddhas against demons! Fuck, how can one theme awakening produce two phenomena?"
"A phenomenon on this scale... at least S-rank. No, probably SS—no, SSS!"
"Another SSS? Su Mu awakened an SSS-rank theme too?"
"Hahaha, I knew it! With 210 soul power, how could he be bad? Let's see who still dares laugh at Su Mu!"
"I didn't say anything just now! I've supported him all along!"
Su Mu was eager to know what his theme actually was, too.
He looked up at the stele, where words were slowly appearing.
The characters on the stele lit up one after another, every stroke seemingly imbued with an ancient, weighty power.
Dungeon theme: Journey to the West (unique) Rank: Special Category: Special Elements: Special
The entire crowd fell silent again.
"Special... special rank?" Someone broke the silence, a strange uncertainty in his voice. "What rank is special? Is it higher or lower than SSS?"
"Special rank doesn't mean higher. It means it can't be ranked."
A knowledgeable student nearby pushed up his glasses and frowned. "It means... it can't be categorized. This kind of theme might be very strong, or it might be very weak. Everything's unknown. It's marked 'special' because there's no way to measure it by conventional standards."
"Then what is this Journey to the West... thing? Has anyone heard of it?"
"Journey to the West? Sounds like... traveling? Sightseeing? Could it be a tourism theme?"
"No way. Have you ever seen a travel theme awakening cause a commotion that big? That's an enormous phenomenon with at least a gods-and-buddhas element. I've never seen a phenomenon that could cover the entire sky."
"Special category. No predecessors to rely on, and no established build experience. He'll have to figure everything out himself from scratch."
"But special categories need a powerful core card even more... His core card is an F-rank stone card. Can one stone support that theme?"
"That's why he's finished. A special dungeon has no precedents, so he has to figure it out himself, and his core card is the trashiest F-rank. Maybe this theme would have some hope with someone else, but with him, it amounts to zero."
"So what if he scored 210 in soul power? He still awakened trash. What a waste of such good soul power."
"Looks like good grades really don't mean a strong awakening."
Su Mu listened to the discussion and fell silent.
Only he knew how shaken he was at that moment.
Journey to the West.
It's actually Journey to the West!
In everyone else's eyes, the words Journey to the West represented the unknown, scraps, an obscure field with no predecessors to use as a reference.
But he was a transmigrator. He came from Earth.
Sun Wukong, Tang Sanzang, Zhu Bajie, Sha Wujing, the Journey to the West, Havoc in Heaven, Nine Times Nine, Eighty-One Tribulations... He had followed this story since childhood.
But there was no "Journey to the West" in this world's history...
Su Mu took a deep breath.
He lowered his head and looked at his palm.
Deep within his soul space, the F-rank stone card floated quietly.
Who says a stone is useless?
In everyone else's eyes, it was a perfectly ordinary, worthless stone.
But Su Mu knew.
In the world of Journey to the West, there was a stone that was the greatest marvel since the creation of heaven and earth.
A stone could be more than just a stone.