Free Web NovelChapter 121: Seeds of doubt
The classroom instantly exploded into a loud, frantic chorus of shouts and eager chatter the exact moment Instructor Argenta turned around and left the room after concluding the lecture.
The heavy, suffocating pressure that had been locking the amphitheater down vanished into thin air, allowing the one thousand elite students to breathe normally once again.
Almost immediately, the geniuses began jumping out of their seats, moving quickly across the aisles to talk to their peers. Since teaming up was explicitly allowed within the system rules of the survival trial, nobody wanted to face the terrifying prospect of wandering into a forest filled with Gold-ranked monsters completely alone.
"Hey, we need to form a defensive front right now!" a muscular warrior with rocky gray skin shouted, waving his thick arms to attract the nearby rankers. "My race excels at heavy earth magic and shielding arrays. Any high-tier damage dealers want to form a vanguard with me? We can split the resource drops evenly!"
"Count me in," a female humanoid with shimmering purple feathers lining her arms replied, walking down from the upper rows. "My wind blades can pierce through Bronze and Silver beast hides with ease. If you can hold the monsters in place, I can clean them up from a safe distance."
"We should form a larger alliance of at least twenty people," another student with sharp metallic spikes protruding from his shoulders suggested loudly to his group. "The Gold-ranked simulation monsters are not a joke. If we don’t aggregate our combat numbers, we will be ejected back to our rooms and thrown into the Trash tier before Tuesday morning even arrives. Let’s merge our teams!"
Ayla sat perfectly still in the back row, watching the chaotic scrambling with her deadpan golden eyes. As she scanned the vast sea of one thousand students, she noticed an interesting structural detail that she had not paid much attention to during the busy week.
Every single student gathered inside this specific Class One division possessed a humanoid shape. Some of them had extra limbs, weird skin colors, scales, or feathers, but they all walked on two legs and had a recognizable torso structure.
Ayla found it quite interesting that they all chose to manifest in this specific configuration.
According to the data packets the Nexus system had previously dropped into her brain, most of the infinite races chose to adopt a basic humanoid form when entering the academy purely because of the logistical easiness of attending the lectures, sitting at the desks, using the metallic training tools, and wearing the standard academy uniforms.
It was simply the most universally accommodated shape across the sectors.
Currently, out of the entire crowd of one thousand elite recruits, only she was sitting in a completely non-humanoid form.
She was just a small, round puddle of translucent blue liquid resting on a wooden desk, looking entirely out of place among the proud warriors.
Suddenly, a shadow fell over her desk, cutting off the bright sunlight coming through the high classroom windows.
Ayla tilted her jelly mass upward to look at the entity that had approached her coordinates. The student was a tall, broad-shouldered humanoid who possessed the head and tail of a predatory green reptile.
His thick skin was covered in dark green scales, and his slit-like yellow eyes looked down at her with a remarkably friendly, non-threatening expression.
"Hello there, little recruit," the reptile man spoke out in a soft, low rumble, trying his best to sound welcoming and gentle.
"I have been watching you during the lectures this week. You have excellent conceptual control over your thermal traits. Since the survival trial is going to be incredibly dangerous for isolated rankers, I wanted to invite you to team up with my group.
We already have five strong members from high-tier beast lines, and we could really use a talented elemental controller like you to balance our formation. What do you think?"
’Acting like death there is real..’ Ayla rolled her eyes inwardly. It’s too funny these stupid idiots even planning to team up in a trial where death wasn’t real.
These so called talented beings from infinite races weren’t even daring as little humans....
So, just like every single time someone had tried to approach her during the past seven days, Ayla was automatically going to ignore his words completely and roll away toward the exit doors.
She had absolutely zero interest in playing house with a bunch of weak alien teenagers. But right as she was about to fluidify herself and slide off the table, she suddenly stopped.
Her golden pupils expanded slightly beneath her blue surface as a very simple, genuine curiosity popped into her primitive monster brain.
"If you team up with so many people," Ayla’s multi-layered voice projected clearly from her fluid body, cutting straight through the reptile man’s friendly smile, "who will get the rare Bone Fragment at the absolute end of the week?"
Her blunt, direct words were not spoken with any hidden malice or sneaky intent. She was genuinely curious about their logic because Instructor Argenta had clearly specified that the unassigned Bone Fragment was a unique, single reward that only the first-place winner of the division could ever obtain.
There was only one fragment available in the vault, and it was physically impossible for a team of five or twenty people to chop a world-class item into pieces to share it.
The reptile man instantly froze, his yellow jaw hanging slightly open as her question stunned him into a complete, dead silence. He opened his mouth to say something, but his throat clicked and no words came out.
Because the classroom was filled with highly sensitive rankers who possessed advanced perception skills, Ayla’s clear voice had resonated across the nearby desks.
Within a fraction of a second, the loud, cooperative chatter of the surrounding teams began to rapidly wither away until the entire amphitheater fell into a strange, heavy quietness.
The students who had just been smiling, shaking hands, and slapping each other on the back to seal their defensive alliances suddenly stopped their movements.
All of them slowly turned their heads to glance at each other, their eyes instantly filling with a deep caution that had been completely absent just a few minutes prior.
"Wait a minute," the rocky gray warrior muttered, his eyes narrowing as he slowly pulled his thick hand away from the purple-feathered girl’s shoulder. "She is actually right. The resource coins can be split, but what about the primary prize? If our team wins the highest score, who gets the right to claim the Bone Fragment?"
"Obviously it should go to the person who deals the most damage to the Gold monsters," the purple-feathered girl replied, her voice dropping its previous friendly tone and turning quite sharp. "My wind blades are the strongest offensive tool in our current layout, so the fragment should logically belong to me."
"Are you playing a joke on me?" the gray warrior sneered back, his mana flaring slightly with anger. "Without my heavy earth shields holding the monsters in place, your weak feathers would be shredded to pieces in an instant. I should get the first pick!"
Just like that, with a single, innocent question, Ayla had unknowingly seeded deep, irreversible doubts and greed directly into the hearts of every single squad inside the room.
The fragile illusion of initial cooperation completely shattered before the trial had even begun, replacing their teamwork with a quiet, plotting paranoia as every student began to look at their own companions as potential rivals who would steal their ultimate evolution prize.
The reptile man stood in front of Ayla’s desk for another ten seconds, his green tail twitching nervously on the floorboards as he failed to find a single logical answer to her question.
He realized that if his group actually managed to win first place, they would likely end up murdering each other in the forest just to take ownership of the bone.
Seeing that he was just standing there like a brainless stone statue without giving her a proper reply, Ayla felt secretly annoyed by his slow processing speed. freewёbnoνel.com
She didn’t want to waste any more of her precious resting time on him. She smoothly shifted her weight, rolled right past his green hand, and slid down the side of the desk.
She hopped onto the floorboards and quickly slithered out of the quiet classroom, leaving the tense aliens to glare at each other in the dark.
Anyway, it didn’t really matter what they planned or how they divided their numbers. In Ayla’s mind, she was already the one who was going to get that unassigned Bone Fragment, no matter who stood in her path.
Tonight was the final night of the preparation week, and she was going to finally, completely master her new invention for the Emotion Weaver trait.
A small, pleasant bubble of pure happiness tickled her internal core at the thought of her upcoming breakthrough.
"You, sure are so talented to create conflicts out of thin air.." Nexus sounded amused.
Ayla ignored the always annoying system as she navigated the stone bridges back to her private quarters with extreme speed.
The moment her blue body slipped through the secure alloy doors of her suite, she skipped the luxury bedroom and went straight into her heavily reinforced training room.
The space-compression arrays on the walls hummed to life, glowing with a faint purple light as they prepared to lock down her aura.
Ayla floated onto the center of the training floor, her mind sinking deep into her system status layout.
Over the past week of non-stop practice, she had systematically incorporated the advanced conceptual properties of her Twin Lens of the Weaver bone fragment directly into the operational code of her legendary Emotion Weaver trait.
By using the logic of understanding and invention that Instructor Argenta had taught her, she had successfully broken the original template boundaries of the skill, unlocking an entirely new suite of sub-functions that completely redefined how emotions could be manipulated in combat.
The first and most basic new function she had perfected was the complete removal of emotions.
If a living target approached her with an intense, burning rage or a sharp fear, Ayla no longer had to waste her precious mana trying to balance or alter their mental state.
She could use the Twin Lens to focus her gaze on their soul container and forcefully delete that specific emotion from their consciousness entirely.
A warrior who had their fear or anger completely erased would lose all of their psychological momentum, transforming into a numb, hollow husk that could no longer find the motivation to swing a weapon or defend their own throat.
But her invention did not stop at simple erasure. Through the deep structural manipulation of the Twin Lens, she had also unlocked a terrifying second function: the ability to interchange emotions between different targets.
If two enemies were attacking her simultaneously—one being an arrogant prince filled with supreme confidence and the other being a cowardly servant filled with absolute terror—Ayla could instantly swap their internal states with a single thought.
The proud prince would suddenly find himself paralyzed by a wave of unexplainable, whimpering cowardice, while the weak servant would become blinded by a fake, delusional arrogance that would make him run headfirst into a lethal trap.
It was a chaotic tool that could turn a perfectly coordinated enemy vanguard into a self-destructive mess within a fraction of a second.
Finally, the absolute pinnacle of her week-long invention was the third function, which allowed her to combine conflicting emotions inside a single brain structure.
Ayla had discovered that if she forcefully fused two completely opposite emotional states—such as hysterical joy and suicidal despair—directly into a target’s mind at the exact same moment, the sudden conceptual contradiction would completely overload their cognitive nervous system.
The victim’s brain would be unable to process the clashing data packets, causing their psychological pathways to violently short-circuit.
Their physical body would fall into an immediate, uncontrollable seizure, leaving their skull perfectly exposed and ready for a clean harvest.
Ayla spent the next several hours running these three new sub-functions through her internal metal core, ensuring that the mana flow was perfectly smooth and required zero casting delay.
Every time she visualized the endless tactical combinations of removal, interchange, and combination, her blue jelly body let out a very soft, happy ripple against the cold alloy floor.
