Worldwide Awakening: My Soul Kinds Are Lost

After Wang Linchi resolved a series of Erroneous Sins, such as the Ghost-Face Shadow and Black Mantis, he had a very quiet night.

No one bothered him, but Wang Linchi was sure that there must still be other "ingredients" on the fourth floor. There were ten room numbers in total, and he had consumed three of them. One had managed to escape late at night, leaving six still fresh.

When he woke up in the morning, he began to ponder how he should consume them.

First, he had to activate them. Because no Players had been staying, Wang Linchi's previous efforts in opening up rooms 401 and 402 had failed to make the Erroneous Sin in room 402 emerge. Who knew where it had wandered off to.

I'm idle anyway. Might as well go down and stroll through the lower floors, Wang Linchi thought.

The entire Night Hotel had five floors. Apart from the first floor, which housed the lobby, kitchen, and the like, the second to fifth floors consisted entirely of rooms. Ten rooms per floor made a total of forty rooms.

I should have eaten the Muddy Skull later. Now look, the elevator is broken, Wang Linchi thought, finding the remains of the elevator. He had violently disassembled it once, and last night it had been burned by the Saint Master's Dragon Talisman. Now, even if Wang Linchi wanted to fix it, it wouldn't be an easy task.

I have no option but to take the stairs. It fits perfectly, as I haven't eaten breakfast yet anyway, Wang Linchi mused, feeling that the Book of Soul Resonance was a little hungry. He wouldn't eat an Erroneous Sin just because he was hungry—that stuff was too unpalatable. Only when the Book of Soul Resonance was hungry would Wang Linchi resort to eating it.

He opened the door to the emergency exit and had just stepped onto the stairwell landing when he found he had lost his connection with the Saint Master. He and the Saint Master had entered one after the other, but once they were inside the stairwell, they were separated. However, their connection wasn't completely severed; Wang Linchi could still sense the Saint Master's location, realizing he was trapped in another spatial dimension.

This is a bit troublesome. It seems the power systems I possess don't involve spatial abilities, Wang Linchi scratched his head, having also noticed this minor issue. But the problem isn't that significant. Even those three newbies managed to get out, so why can't I?

Wang Linchi raised an eyebrow and began to descend the stairs. But after walking for ten minutes, he looked up and found he was still in the fourth-floor stairwell.

"What a clichéd setup. Don't tell me it's something like a Mobius strip or a Klein bottle structure," he muttered. "Oh, Erroneous Sins probably don't have this kind of knowledge; most of them are illiterate. This is more like the 'thirteenth step' kind of trap."

Wang Linchi grumbled, then sat down on the stairs, considering what to do next. A solution wasn't proving easy to find. After pondering for a while, he quickly thought of one.

He directly instructed the Saint Master to destroy it.

The next instant, Wang Linchi felt the floor collapsing underneath him.

"Holy sh*t..."

The surroundings shattered like glass. The Saint Master instinctively grabbed Wang Linchi and used his own power to forcefully clear the surrounding debris.

"Seriously, what's wrong with this setup?" Wang Linchi complained. "Splitting the space is one thing, but why do all the separated spaces share the same foundation? If the stairwell in one space is destroyed, do the others have to break too? Isn't that a design flaw?"

He dropped directly from the fourth floor back to the second floor. He didn't fall to the first floor because the wreckage of the broken stairs had blocked the way, piling up as high as the second floor.

As for the Erroneous Sin from the stairwell, the Saint Master had already grabbed it. It was an emergency exit sign—yes, that thing that glows green at night, showing a running figure and an arrow to indicate the emergency exit. Who would have thought this thing could be an Erroneous Sin? Wang Linchi had noticed it before, but he hadn't thought about it in that way. It didn't matter that he hadn't realized it; the Saint Master was there. The Saint Master had smashed the entire stairwell, so no matter how powerful that thing was, it would have been affected.

After quickly rinsing the emergency exit sign, he shoved it into his mouth like a cracker and began chewing. This thing was much lower-grade than the Human Pupa Insect, only Ordinary Level, so Wang Linchi consumed it without any resistance.

"So, are most Ordinary Level Sins inanimate objects?" Wang Linchi mused aloud. He finished the emergency exit sign in a few bites and found that it was only worth 0.1 spiritual power, likely because its quality grade was too low. Otherwise, if it had reached Excellent Level or Excellent Level, like the Human Pupa Insect or even the Shadow of Devourer, it probably wouldn't have been so easy to deal with. It was, after all, a rule-based error of the Space-series.

"If there are errors in the spatial rules, is it possible that there might be errors in the temporal rules as well?"

Wang Linchi thought it was possible, though not likely at this stage. Similar to the spatial rule errors, even though they had already manifested, their overall strength was not high, suggesting the erosion by the error wasn't severe. Otherwise, there was no way it could be destroyed so easily by the Saint Master through physical means.

"But this is indeed a serious matter," he considered. "With the increasing emergence of Erroneous Sins, stronger and more bizarre ones will appear, and my life might be at risk."

He could kill Erroneous Sins by eating them, but that didn't mean he was immune to the damage they could inflict. The Erroneous Sins could still harm and even kill him.

It was still the early stages, so he could cope with and defend against the killing rules of the errors. But as time went on, things would become increasingly bizarre and unpredictable.

The Soul Aspect World and the Game World indeed had differences. Based on levels, the Soul Aspect World would probably top out at LV3, while the Game World could reach up to LV10. Before the Game System appeared, the Game World might not have compared to the Soul Aspect World, as the Game World was still in its developmental stages. However, after the Game System's appearance, the level cap was instantly raised, though the average player level hadn't caught up yet.

By the time the Erroneous Sins appeared, if Wang Linchi hadn't enabled them to possess Soul Seed Traits, Awakeners would have been powerless to resist, and Wang Linchi himself wouldn't dare to hunt Erroneous Sins so openly. However, this advantage would only last through the early stages. Once the Erroneous Sins further eroded the world, even with the advantage of his Soul Resemblance, Wang Linchi wouldn't be able to maintain his edge.

CREAK...

Wang Linchi entered the second floor. Before he had time to take the elevator down, he saw a tall figure appear at the end of the hallway. Its upper body was barely recognizable as human, but Wang Linchi immediately identified its lower body as that of a spider. Combined with the black spider silk drifting through the air—which an ordinary person might not have noticed—it was clear, mainly because the second floor was extremely dim. On the fourth floor, even without sunlight, it had merely been dim. But here on the second floor, it was completely dark.

This further confirmed the difficulty scaling: the fifth floor was likely the easiest, with the difficulty increasing progressively downwards, making the second floor the hardest. This wasn't a level a new account like his was meant to handle.

As for why he wasn't on the fifth floor, it was most likely because there was simply no one to match him with there. Where would new accounts come from at this stage? Everyone had already been forced to log in previously, so new accounts would likely only be newborns. However, after the Fusion of the game and reality, newborns didn't participate in the game. Only those who reached the age of eighteen were inducted as official Players, and they were all brought into the game at once. So, there were definitely no new Players available now. Thus, Wang Linchi was assigned to the fourth floor, adventuring with the other nine unfortunate souls with negative contributions.

Otherwise, why would they give 1 Gold Coin? Gaining a level wasn't a big deal; the Gold Coin was the main reward. Normal Level 1 tasks mostly awarded copper coins, and only one or two at that. This was clearly compensation plus a bonus; after all, those willing to venture into a dungeon and contribute at Level 1 deserved support. The unfairness and bias of the Game System had also been inherited.

BOOM!

This Man-spider hadn't even had time to act before the Saint Master punched it. The tremendous force instantly turned the human upper part of its body into minced meat. As for the black spider silk drifting in the air, although it wrapped around the Saint Master, its inherent power couldn't affect him at all. The Saint Master's attack was indeed ferocious, but the damage dealt to the Man-spider was still relatively limited.

Wang Linchi, on the other hand, didn't concern himself with this. The Saint Master could handle the creature, since neither of them was an ordinary being.

He kicked open the nearest room, number 201. The entire door shattered into fragments under his violent kick.

AARGH!

Then, a sound wave blasted him in the face, making Wang Linchi momentarily doubt his life choices.

Apparently, the second floor wasn't like the fourth, where Erroneous Sins would leave their rooms to roam if unoccupied. Here, they resided directly in the rooms. More importantly, each room housed more than one Erroneous Sin. This realization made Wang Linchi gleefully slap the Erroneous Sin that had just roared at him across the face.