Ultragene Warlord

Yang Ze explained, "I trusted in your strength, Captain. With the three of you here, you'd easily be able to take down the group of cultivators coming at you. I'd be irrelevant. Rather, there's something more urgent I had to collect, that we're currently lacking."

"What is it?" Fang Yi asked.

"News, of course."

"And what news did you manage to get by betraying us?" Li Feng asked.

Yang Ze cried out, "I didn't betray you!"

Fang Yi nodded solemnly. "A very good excuse. You claim this is why you hadn't participated in the fight?"

Li Feng rubbed his palms. "We'll tickle you for just fifteen hours, then."

"But I really was working hard to collect news!" Yang Ze exclaimed.

Fang Yi and Li Feng were about to strike when Zhang Lie stopped them. "Let's hear about your news first, then."

Yang Ze replied, "We're considered to be part of the top echelon of competitors. You might be the strongest among us, Captain, but we know barely anything about the other competitors who might pose a challenge. That's our weakness, and that's why I took advantage of this opportunity to try to gather information."

"And what information did you gather?" Zhang Lie asked.

"The first one is that the bone talisman you obtained, Captain, is used to access the land of inheritance."

"Is that it?" Fang Yi rubbed his palms together in anticipation.

Yang Ze hurriedly continued, "The land of inheritance has another name: the Final Circle."

Everyone was surprised by what Yang Ze revealed.

Li Feng frowned. "What does that mean?"

Yang Ze replied, "According to the information I gathered, this tournament isn't just a free-for-all a la Fortnite. In order to get into the Final Circle, we'll have to pass through two more barriers along the way."

The hunters of Team Zenith listened attentively. They knew nothing about this!

Yang Ze continued, "To pass through those barriers, there are two possible strategies. The first is to teleport in. There are several special regions in this virtual realm associated with special inheritances that permit direct teleportation into the Final Circle. That's what Sun Xiaowu did. The bone talisman in your hands is much the same, Captain."

"And what about the other strategy?" Li Feng asked.

"We can walk toward the Final Circle, but passing the first barrier requires that we eliminate a hundred competitors. The second barrier requires that we eliminate a thousand."

The marks on the backs of the competitors' palms were the key to passing through these barriers normally, but doing so would require defeating an inordinate number of other competitors.

Zhang Lie looked at the mark on the back of his palm that had extended all the way to his arm and was glowing with light.

"To think that this mark would not only influence the final rewards we obtain, but also serve an instrumental role as we approach the later stages of the tournament..."

Li Feng sucked in a deep breath. "Just how many competitors are there? Defeating a thousand of them to enter the Final Circle—this has to be a joke!"

They had seen fewer than three hundred cultivators so far.

Zhang Lie asked, "How many competitors are there in this tournament?"

"According to the news I collected," Yang Ze replied, "there are about ten thousand."

"So only ten people will be allowed into the Final Circle?"

Everyone sucked in a breath.

Wasn't this sort of elimination rate far too extreme?

"Not quite." Yang Ze shook his head. "There are a few beasts in this virtual realm, and each one counts as the equivalent of ten competitors. Of course, these beasts can kill unprepared competitors as well. Heading toward the Final Circle by brute force is usually a last resort, though, chosen only after the other methods are exhausted. Competitors tend to prefer to fight for bone talismans or to pass through by teleportation from the special regions that provide inheritances."

"How many people tend to make it into the Final Circle?" Zhang Lie asked.

"No more than fifty."

"What?!" Li Feng cried out. "Bu Wentian's estimates were way off!"

Bu Wentian had said that there were roughly a hundred cultivators, but the actual number was about ten thousand. A factor of a hundred—two orders of magnitude!—was far too large a difference.

Yang Ze continued, "The qualifiers were split up into several regions. We participated in the central region, which was full of talented cultivators."

Li Feng frowned. "Bu Wentian must have scammed us."

Fang Yi shrugged. "Why would he do that? There's no need to deliberately send some cannon fodder into the tournament."

"What about a few strong cultivators unaware of how the tournament operates, then?"

Yang Ze disagreed.

Zhang Lie shook his head as well. "There's no motive for doing so."

Li Feng replied, "But you have to admit it's strange. There's so much information that the competitors take for granted, but that Bu Wentian's completely unaware of."

The information that Bu Wentian had given them was simply too different from their actual circumstances.

Fang Yi suggested, "Could Bu Wentian just know nothing at all about the tournament?"

Li Feng countered, "Isn't Bu Wentian's actual body in the fifth realm?"

"What if Bu Wentian is in an abnormal situation?" Fang Yi refined his thoughts.

"What other hypotheses do you have?" Li Feng asked.

"Perhaps Bu Wentian might be trapped," Fang Yi said. "He can only access the world at large during limited time intervals, and he can't gather information readily."

Yang Ze made a bold hypothesis. "Or perhaps Bu Wentian isn't from the fifth realm at all. He might be a lifeform of this virtual realm that bridges the fourth and the fifth realms, as we proposed earlier, who found a way to link up to the fourth realm."

Zhang Lie cut them all off. "There's no reason to discuss such matters at the moment. What we need to do is win the tournament. As for why there's such a large discrepancy between our actual situation and the information that Bu Wentian gave us, we can find out by asking him once we've returned to the fourth realm."

The other hunters all agreed. There would be time to consider Bu Wentian's situation in more detail later.

Zhang Lie turned to Yang Ze again. "What other news have you managed to obtain, Yang Ze?"

Yang Ze shrugged. "That's about all I have."

Fang Yi and Li Feng rubbed their palms in anticipation. "Your information was somewhat useful, so we'll reduce your punishment to an hour or two or tickling."

Yang Ze cried out, "Help me, Captain!"

Zhang Lie cut them all off again. "Alright, that's enough. Yang Ze didn't make a mistake in heading out to search for more information. We'd still be in the dark if he hadn't done what he did. We'll keep him around for the time being."

Yang Ze relaxed as Fang Yi and Li Feng obediently gave up on the punishment.

Li Feng said, "To think you'd be able to obtain so much information despite how chaotic the situation was..."

Yang Ze smirked. "That's precisely what made it easy to gather more information. I just have to rescue one or two people, then fight with my injured 'teammates' to win their trust. They revealed tons of information after that. Under ordinary circumstances, everyone would be on their guard, and it would be far harder to get such information out."

While the hunters were chatting, a deafening bang suddenly resounded from behind.