[NR] What Is Experience - Chapter 741

After the goblin centaur monsters, the group continues their scouting, making a wide circle around the clearing. Though after that encounter, they pass from the newly changed area into more familiar terrain. Which also brings with it less significant monsters to fight.

Like, there are always monsters you could fight. Presumably, the Deep Wilds is actively moving stuff around so no one area becomes overcrowded. Because low-order monsters like regular squirrels, except they’re carnivorous, and small earth elementals made from a double handful of pebbles are always everywhere. No matter how many you kill.

And while the earth elementals do spawn basically out of nowhere, everything else needs to be born. And even the elementals do need an environment more saturated with earth-aligned Mana.

Rosha, “Yeah, Peter once found a location much deeper in that was crawling with a common nuisance monster. Some kind of insect. Anyway, the location didn’t have anything else, the bugs constantly eating everything around them and producing more. Yet despite there being nothing holding them into that one spot, they didn’t seem to be expanding.” And while that doesn’t 100% explain things, it does point to why no matter how much you clear an area, there are always a bunch of weak monsters around.

More importantly for Jason, those small nuisance monsters were actually perfect for him.

With each battle, he tries to actually Feel what “experience” was. Because it wasn’t self-improvement. Experience was an outside source of power being integrated into one’s self. Otherwise, instead of filtering it, Jason would have had to refine and expel.

The problem was that when fighting a battle that actually takes effort, the rush of power, while subtle, is still pretty wild. If experience produced light, every death would be like a flash bang going off. Which is fair enough, death should be significant.

Except, this flash bang of power made examining said power pretty hard to do in detail. Which was where the scrub-tier monsters came into play. While their defeat still released a ton of power, relative to an actual fight, it was like one of those snap-pop fireworks you throw on the ground compared to an actual firecracker. Explosive, yes, but on a much smaller scale.

Which led to Jason’s biggest discovery yet. Though presumably others had found this out in the past.

As the trio make it back to the clearing and they sit down at the campfire, Jason looks at the other two. “So, experience? Yeah, it doesn’t actually come from the things we’re killing.”

Courtney raises an eyebrow, “Well, that doesn’t make sense. Where would the power come from if not the enemy? I’m sure the local area could provide power for us, but what about when some high-level group kills some sort of world boss-style monster? I’ve not heard of the area around such fights being reduced to magical deserts afterwards.”

Jason, “That’s the thing, it is being taken from around you. There are just a few factors that seem to make this possible.

“The simplest is the fact that the longer a fight goes on, the more local power gathers around those fighting. I assume there is some limit to that, likely based on how strong those fighting are.

“But beyond that, I feel you might have forgotten what we’re dealing with. This isn’t electricity or the wind. We’re talking about supernatural powers. There is no vacuum of power when the strong gain astronomical amounts of experience as presumably, the power is being drawn from a different layer of reality.”

Courtney, “That’s a little extreme of a claim. Do you have any proof of that?.”

Jason, “Not directly, but I do know that I have a hole in my core that leads directly to the world’s Energy.”

Courtney frowns, “I feel like you mentioned that at some point, but what? What?”

Jason shrugs, “Yeah, it’s where I draw my Energy from and the source of the System’s control. Though that won’t be where the experience comes from. Otherwise, once again, it would be internal and not something from outside.”

Courtney sighs, “We should really take a week and just hang out all the esoteric nonsense we’ve managed to collect. I mean, seriously! What is with you two? One is an honest to goodness cultivator, and the other accidentally stumbled into having a master who specializes in the strangest place on all of NeoRealm.”

Rosha raises an eyebrow, “Says the rare Shadow Pantherkin whose species of origin is a different plane of existence?”

Jason laughs, “Maybe we’re made for each other. Like, there are entire guilds of players out there who are just generic species and that just level up normally, never interacting with locals magnitudes more powerful beyond maybe a single quest like with Andrew.”

Courtney shakes her head, “All that aside, it feels like we’ve all gathered a bunch of nonsense and even if we’ve shared it, much of the information hasn’t actually made an impact on us. I don’t blame us, mind you. Me and Rosha are literally cultivating IRL. Like, we’re excavating meridians! That feels as much fantasy as NeoRealm as a game existing would have felt a few hundred years ago.

“Then we stack on top the realization that NeoRealm is even crazier? Like, the fact that no one else has copied NeoRealm enough to be a competitor simply because NeoRealm is literally real? What even is that!”

Jason, “Add on the fact that those at the top not only know this, but for some reason are super interested in anyone that manages to break through to level 500?”

Rosha shrugs, “I think the fact we’ve apparently been opening portals to other dimensions and flooding our own with spooky supernatural powers is also high up the list. Though I guess that’s more of a passive thing. Not like people started gaining superpowers or some such. Because that seems like a completely possible outcome. Open a portal just a moment earlier hundreds of years ago and right now instead of playing NeoRealm, we might be a team of superheroes or some such.”