"The hunting game... has begun, hasn’t it?"
Zheng Qing thought back to the puppet’s malicious curse, and his heart began to sink.
’Prepare for hospitalization if you participate in the hunting party!’ ’In any hunting game, there will be a permissible extent of disabilities!’ ’Never harbor any hope of luck!’ — These are all words repeatedly emphasized by Deng Xiaojian during the pre-game training for the sinful hunters.
Even though Zheng Qing had made every psychological preparation, he was still blindsided by reality.
Who would have thought that in the Hunting Ground Auditorium, located deep within the first university, the young wizards participating in the freshman hunting game would be hijacked by a few alchemical lives with clear brain anomalies?
Who could have foreseen that before the hunting game even began, two hunters were chewed and swallowed by a man-eating plant hanging from the ceiling for some absurd reason?
Zheng Qing greatly doubted that perhaps the quota for disabled participants in this year’s freshmen competition was already depleted within the small auditorium.
Although he didn’t know why the school’s response was so sluggish—perhaps there were unseen Black Hands manipulating the puppet or the Secret Garden Elf behind the scenes—but none of these mattered to Zheng Qing.
What mattered was how to escape from this hunting ground.
As it stands, Zheng Qing, our young scholarship student, hadn’t been thinking about following the puppet host’s guidance to find the ’Great Treasure’ but is pondering ways to flee this purgatory first.
Dispelling the horrific hunting stories Zhang Ji Xin once told him from his mind and blocking out the hunting experiences that a certain shadow brought back from the two-dimensional world, Zheng Qing closed his eyes, striving to sense his surroundings and trying to pinpoint his location.
If he remembers correctly, the puppet called that gnome wizard a ’Secret Garden Elf’.
Until last night, before the shadow returned, Zheng Qing had not the slightest clue about the concept of a Secret Garden Elf. But now, with his mind crammed full of information brought back by the shadow from the two-dimensional world, he could profoundly grasp the meaning of this term.
Speaking of Secret Garden Elves, the concept of a ’secret garden’ must be explained first.
Starting from a long time ago, wizards realized that the vast universe resembled a giant desert, and the granules in this desert were the desolate planets.
Occasionally, individual planets would give birth to life, like an oasis in the desert, great and precious, but simultaneously small and fragile.
So, from the very beginning, those transcendent beings tried to create ’desert boats’ that could exist in the empty desert to prevent the lives in the oasis from dying along with the desert following the exhaustion of the oasis.
The storied Noah’s Ark, Ling Mountain, Jade Virtual Palace, and many other legendary artifacts are results of these trials.
But after a long period, their efforts remained futile.
For some unknown reason, the worlds created by the transcendents always had one flaw or another. Even if they could persist for eternity, they couldn’t give birth to genuine creatures. To sustain the vitality of these ’worlds,’ they had to ensure that there was an abundant ’life supply area’ from the outside world. This was contradictory to their initial intention of opening up these small worlds.
It was not until about 500 years ago; a Grand Wizard named Christopher de Gama from Iberia, in a random space travel, accidentally crossed into a mysterious small island.
Despite the language barrier and the island inhabitants’ clothing entirely different, the islanders were unusually hospitable and weren’t different physically from the Southerners, leading to Master Gama mistaking himself as stranded on a small Atlantic island due to travel failure.
Only when he recovered and tried to use magic to return did he find, to his astonishment, that the island was in a different space-time that was outside his original world—the starry sky was still the same starry sky, but the laws were utterly different. Here, some laws were simpler than Earth’s by several times, while others were more complicated by several times.
It was unknown how long he stayed in that small world.
Nor did anyone know how an ancient wizard found his way home from a small world without understanding the modern magical theories like the Ostrowski’s Space-Time Theory.
The only thing wizards remembered was that shortly after Christopher de Gama’s return, following years of absence, a revolutionary masterpiece named "On the Exploration and Origin of the Multiverse" began to stir waves in the wizard world.
With the coordinates of a small world—a real and clear-cut case—as the foundation, the book elaborated on the principles, methods, and precautions of exploring other worlds. In no time, almost every Grand Wizard switched their research focus from ’open up’ to ’exploration’ in their ’desert boat’ studies.
Kunlun, Olympus, The Garden of Eden, Twilight Land, etc., one unfamiliar world after another was discovered by wizards from the void. Numerous knowledge and civilizations intersected and blended among these worlds; boundless treasures and lost histories were slowly excavated and revealed to the world inside these worlds.
To this day, the exploration of the void still continues.
However, with the rise of Dimensionism, especially after the birth of the ’Ostrowski’s Space-Time Theory,’ the pace of void exploration has greatly improved. The most apparent distinction is that in the past fifty years, the wizard world has discovered more new worlds than the aggregate found over the precedent five centuries.
According to the classifications standards in the "Wizard World Encyclopedia" by the Wizard Alliance, void worlds are divided into four categories: Secret Garden, Mystical Realm, Small Heaven, and Great Thousand, depending on their area and the intensity of their laws.
Not long ago, at the opening ceremony of the school’s hunting party, the small world used for the Hunting Meeting at the number one hunting ground was a top-grade Mystical Realm.
As per the puppet’s words, the hunting ground where Zheng Qing is currently located should be a Secret Garden.
Theoretically, the area of a Secret Garden world is generally within a thousand square kilometers and will have a complete ecological system. According to the Alliance’s general exploration experience, the strength of indigenous life in such a small world will not surpass that of registered wizards, and the hunters’ abilities will be enhanced to a certain degree under the Secret Garden’s relatively lenient laws.
At the moment, the members of the Absolution hunting team are sporadically spread under a tall tree.
The tree looks like a banyan tree, with several aerial roots of various thickness hanging down around it. Through these aerial roots, you can see the lush jungle plants around it.
The ground is covered with a thick layer of humus, filled with fresh leaves, rotting leaves, slippery moss, vibrantly colored fungi, and insects crawling in dread. Several ferns are scattered and growing in between. Looking up the trunk’s base, there are many creeping vines clinging to it.
The dim environment and the lack of light inevitably bring up an oppressive feeling in one’s heart.
After sensing his surroundings for a moment with eyes shut, Zheng Qing found nothing except the various discordant energies around him; he felt a slight loss of control in his every move.
He opened his eyes in frustration, finally comprehending why when he watched the Hunting Meeting before, the hunting teams did not start hunting immediately on entering but waited several minutes or even half an hour to act.
At the same time, the other members of the hunting team were gradually awakening and were gathering together.