I Awaken the EX Level Talent

Ares ran his hand over the Sharp Iron Sword, practically glued to it. He couldn't wait to see its future evolutions.

But he needed more gear.

He walked over to gather the loot dropped by the Bloodthirsty Sand Crabs. From these seventeen mobs, he picked up two base attribute points. The EXP turned out to be forty each, not twenty as he'd previously seen.

This wave alone gave him 680 EXP, plus an additional 1% of the badge effect, for a total of 748 EXP.

Ares opened up his status panel to see the increase:

[Current Talent Rank: D (EXP: 0.935%)]

"Huh? Decimals?"

After he did some mental math, he realized it would take 80,000 EXP to upgrade his D-rank talent to C-rank.

That was a huge leap, but as his own power grew, he'd be able to rack up EXP faster anyway.

Despite what he'd thought earlier, the creatures in the Crimson Flame Desert were anything but rare—monsters were even more plentiful here than in the Howling Plains.

After gathering up his spoils, Ares moved on and only walked a short distance before another crowd of Bloodthirsty Sand Crabs emerged from beneath the sand. This time, there were around twenty of them.

Again, he dropped them without much hassle.

At first, he chalked it up to some quirk of the desert region, but after five consecutive waves of Sand Crabs, Ares noticed something strange. The numbers seemed… artificially controlled?

Not only that, but it felt like the entire environment was fake. No matter how many steps he took, he always ended up back where he started.

Frowning, Ares began paying closer attention to his surroundings. Finally, after moving a few more steps and triggering yet another Bloodthirsty Sand Crab at his feet, he spotted the flaw. Something shimmered for just a second where the first crab came out.

Reacting in a flash, he jabbed his sword forward the moment the Sand Crab raised its claw. A faint "pop" echoed, and the air distorted briefly before snapping back to normal.

Everything looked the same, and the monsters were still the same, but Ares could feel he'd broken whatever illusion had been in place.

He walked forward a few steps and waited. This time, no new Bloodthirsty Sand Crabs appeared.

Whirling around, Ares knelt where he had noticed the shimmer and started digging in the sand. In just a few strokes, his hand hit something hard.

He grabbed it and yanked, struggling a bit until finally pulling out a black crystal pillar. It was as thick as an adult's arm and half as tall as a person, jet-black all over, and felt incredibly heavy in his hands.

Ares opened its status panel:

[Material: Dark Crystal] 

[Quality: B-rank] 

[Property: By paying a certain price, you can gain a speed-up effect for up to 24 hours.]

"Speed-up? What's that supposed to do? Auto-generate EXP?"

That thought had barely formed when a prompt leapt into view:

[Spend all your gold to activate EXP acceleration? Once activated, you'll gain 1 EXP per second automatically.]

"Wow!"

Ares couldn't hold back the exclamation. One EXP per second might not sound like much at first, but that would be 86,400 EXP in a full 24 hours. He could literally just lie there and sleep for a day and get a free level-up.

Without hesitation, he hit confirm.

The moment he did, his entire wallet balance disappeared—down to the last copper coin.

[You spent 15,984 gold, 7 silver, and 5 copper coins, acquiring 22 hours and 18 minutes of EXP acceleration.] 

[Countdown: 22:17:59]

Ares was momentarily speechless. So one gold coin bought him only two minutes of acceleration? That was highway robbery.

But on second thought, even if he had good Luck, fought more monsters, and leveled up faster than most, it wasn't like he was swinging his sword nonstop. There were always gaps when monsters weren't respawning.

This so-called Oracle game allowed most players to stay online forever thanks to nutrient pods in the real world. Ares, lacking that setup, still experienced mental fatigue. After days of grinding, he'd taken a few short naps in some secluded corner just to deal with mental exhaustion.

If he got a steady trickle of EXP whenever he rested, that would definitely make life easier.

Realizing he'd stumbled on a real treasure, Ares felt his mood lift. Watching his EXP climb automatically, he stepped further into the desert with renewed determination.

…

Two hours later, a group of people showed up at the edge of the Crimson Flame Desert, wielding a rectangular device that they used to scan the sand.

"Hurry, hurry! We have to find the Dark Crystal! This thing is super important to Robert Bradford! If we don't bring it back, we'll all be in deep trouble!"

A man who looked like their leader shouted commands, and the others answered nervously. But even after searching for more than an hour, they still hadn't found the Dark Crystal. 

The leader's expression was growing darker by the second.

"Fuck! Damn thief! You better pray I don't catch you!"

"What are you all standing around for? Spread out and keep searching!"

None of them dared to argue, so they expanded their search, scanning every inch of ground even more carefully than before.

They kept at it until nightfall. By that time, they'd combed through the entire Crimson Flame Desert, turning up nothing but a handful of baffled players and countless monsters.

The leader, who was itching to tear the whole desert apart, found it pointless to continue—after all, they were using a unique tracker engineered by a top crafter, said to probe up to thirty feet beneath the sand. There was no way anyone had buried it deeper than that.

"We got nothing, leader," one of them finally reported.

"Mr. Thomas, maybe we should just talk to Robert about it? The guy who took it might've been bluffing. That letter or whatever he left behind might be bogus."

Thomas managed the Bradford household. He'd overseen Master Robert's care since Robert was a child.

Shaking his head at his subordinate's suggestion, Thomas replied, "If it were any other thief, I wouldn't trust a word of it. But if it's Edward, then he'll do exactly as he said."

"If he claimed it was buried here, then it was definitely here. If we can't find the Dark Crystal, there's only one possibility: someone already took it."