Of all the resistance skills, the one that was the easiest to raise was the burn resistance.
As for cold and heat, creating the environment for them itself was hard.
It seemed this was the reason why the demand for the resistance skill performance itself was a little high.
Grinding for resistance skills were done mostly at the waiting room or in front of the waiting room portal. Considering this fact, it really was impossible.
The only things left were pain, burn and frostbite.
I could raise it easily with heat stone. Also, before the heat stone’s heat withered, I could create fire on fabrics or woods. That way, I could continue the process with the fire.
Even the burn resistance’s growth became slower, so I ended up quitting the grinding for it.
Recently, I had been working on not the resistance skills but the power skills gifted to me by the gods. I had been using power skills by myself to work on getting used to them.
However, when it came to just killing time mindlessly, there was no other grinding that was as efficient as resistance skills.
It had been a while since I raised my burn resistance. Sitting in front of the waiting room’s portal, I looked at the Community window as I fiddled with the heat stone.
No, perhaps not exactly?
The Representative Federation, as usual, did not show up on the Community.
[TL: Another change, previously we used Representative Confederation, but Federation would be more accurate.]
A few hours ago, one of the rankers leaked the information about the day of the great harmony on the Community.
Also, the opinion was that others should be informed with minimum knowledge about the event at least to minimize chaos. Because of this, the information leak was looked over without much complaints.
The excuse was that this was an accident.
Also, you could meet the managers after clearing a floor.
Because of these two conditions, knowing sweet information and telling people about it was a form of bragging.
Recently, people in the lower floor started to support rankers. As of result, fandoms and factions were starting to form.
It was similar to overdone fraternization and attention seeking in SNS.
‘Maybe the ranker that got turned to be the pawn of Representative Federation did it for the same reason? I am not sure.’
I could not get any more information about them.
Coming back to the topic of Community, with the information about the day of the great harmony released, the Community was in a state of festivity.
Round 3, Day 27…
The sense of security of being able to rest in a safe space, away from the stage and the constant danger…
While being thrown in the deadly and harsh environment of the Tutorial stages, people were either trying to clear the Tutorial or just survive 30 days and wait for the day they could go back to the waiting room. All of those people were overjoyed about the day of the great harmony.
Of course, I was not sure if the day would progress peacefully.
Regardless, looking at the excited Community, it was no different from kindergarteners causing ruckus the day before a fieldtrip out of anticipation, although they were liking it a little more than that.
I didn’t bother with joining them in the excitement.
Although they were just texts, I got to see people being swept away and acting happy in the atmosphere of festivities. It somehow made me a little excited and happy.
* * *
[Round 3, Day 27, 00:00]
[The day of the great harmony will now commence.]
[Please enter. Time left until forced summoning: 5h]
‘Oh, it is finally here.’
As the information obtained by some ranker indicated, the message appeared on the Round 3, Day 27, 00:00.
The forced summoning was also there as the information indicated.
The clear condition for the second floor’s boss room was surviving it for 3 hours.’
[Round 3, Day 27, 00:00]
The timer did not move from Day 27, 00:00.
‘Is the timer not going to move for the duration of the day of the great harmony?’
I walked around a little, and the portal followed me around.
‘Oh, I didn’t know a portal could move on its own like this. It is like having a puppy follow me around. This is fun.’
Enter.
I felt the floating sensation that I was used to. I closed my eyes for a moment.
[In this place, you are restricted from attacking another.]
I ignored them for now. I kept on looking around.
‘Is Kiri Kiri going to be the MC for the day?’
Thinking like that, I kept looking around to find Kiri Kiri, but I could not find her.
For some reason, I was disappointed.
Many people were happy, saying it had been a while since they got to see a bright, open field like this.
Busy atmosphere…
I could not recall how long it had been since I was in a place like this.
‘At least, at this very moment, as the title said, which read ‘the day of great harmony,’ people are all in harmony, crying and smiling.’
* * *
“Can I have your autograph?”
While I was looking around the field, I met a ranker who was among the upper group in the normal difficulty.
For the Round Three, the 24 hour stay duration for the waiting room was long gone before yesterday evening.
They made simple introduction with six people and started to chat.
They were mostly junks about the old days as professional gamers or hot topics since they entered Tutorial.
I did it with enough force to pierce through my palm, but the knife slipped away on the top of the palm as if it was just passing by.
‘I can’t attack myself either.
Um… How does this work?’
I tried placing the knife’s edge on my palm again, and I moved the knife as if I was sawing.
‘It feels like a very fine layer is surrounding my entire body. It is so fine that it is to the point of being difficult to notice. Perhaps I can think of it as an ultra performance super micro full body bullet-proof, sword-proof suit?’
As I continued the sawing motion, eventually, the skin was cut a little, and there was blood.
I really could feel almost no pain from it.
Despite that, I could only feel slight pain, the kind felt from tightly massaging my hand.
One thing fortunate about this was that the minimum momentum from the impact was still in effect.
My breathing was blocked, and I slowly felt light headed.
After that…
My hand was bounced off from my neck.
My brain, which was struggling due to lack of oxygen, came back to normal at an instant.
Although choking worked, something restrained me from continuing when it went far enough to endanger my life.
All of sudden, the move would be bounced off, and twisted muscles and joints would be recovered back to normal.
Tsk…
I was getting frustrated from the reality not quite cooperating with my expectations. At that moment, someone came to me.
“Let’s talk for a bit.”
“Who are you again?”
“Kim Min-huk! We just talked.”
One thing special about Kim Min-huk was that he had an ordinary looking face that did not look special or stand out.
I personally had been thinking highly of them for being good people.
What they were doing was not going to benefit them or hurt them in any way.
So, although I didn’t remember his name, it was not because I didn’t care about him or thought little of him.
Actually, I was thinking the same.
“So, a dirty conflict among certain factions are packaged as fight about pride.”
‘They sure do all sorts of things.’
“Clearing the Tutorial will continue. While some people continue to move up, it could not be helped that some people will be lagging behind. There are talks about social system that connects waiting rooms on the lower floors for the people like that.”
“Does that make any sense? That? That side is doing stuff right now.”
“Of course not. It is just a cover story that those bastards are putting up. They are trying to make it so that a third party would have a hard time butting in to this. Also…”
“There are too many people who are connected to that side. There are more of them than I thought. I was determined and worked hard on digging around… I think there are over ten people among the challengers at the third floor. I’m talking about just in the normal difficulty. I don’t know much about the hard difficulty, but there probably are some.”
… This was slowly making my head ache.
“At the moment, anyone at even third or fourth floor are called upper group challengers or rankers. However, if you consider the entire 100 floors, these are lower floors. Those bastards’ plan is to expand their organization to tenth floor at least. That guy named Lee Chang-suk… He must have a way with words. There are too many people who had been turned.”
“… To summarize, the work got fucking tangled up.”
“Yeah. I’m asking because of that. You… How strong are you?”
“Me?”
The first thing I had been checking since entering this place was other people’s equipment and abilities.
If they didn’t have much of the clothing or items from the real world and had many of the weapons and armors purchased from the Tutorial, I could assume that they were relatively strong.
As for the abilities, there was not much to see.
‘I can’t tell how strong that person is, but I can certainly tell how weak that person is.’
Things like the way a person walk, body pose, distance maintained from other people…
As the last thing, I based it off by listening in to their conversations.
‘It won’t be possible to determine everyone’s strength precisely. It is not like I’m the Terminator.’
However, looking at the people who were usually called rankers, I could see the overall standard of the challengers inside the Tutorial.
“I’m fucking strong.”