Whilst I pondered on the nature of the universe and the future, the scientist continued talking, going on about some nonsense regarding his scientific achievements and detailing the creation process of the embryonic universe. His excitement contrasted directly with my own boredom with the topic.

I had stopped listening long ago.

I could barely understand him to begin with, the words that the scientist used were complicated. They were not something that I could understand with my conversational level in this universe’s language. Trying to understand his scientific jargon was basically impossible.

Additionally, the scientist was speaking too quickly and energetically to properly access the meaning of specific words and jargon. That increased the difficulty in understanding him dramatically.

This resulted in my brain tuning him out and ignoring him. Instead of bothering with him, I took the opportunity to examine the laboratory more carefully.

The robot had wandered throughout the lab and gathered various vials of liquids. Doing whatever jobs it was created for as the scientist rambled on.

Staring at the humanoid robot, a weird expression came over my face as the robot slowly mixed an oxidizing agent with a strong acid. On the table, there was a vial filled with a substance similar to liquid nitrogen… judging by the freezing ice condensing on the outside of the vial.

I certainly didn’t have enough chemistry knowledge to understand what the mechanical creation was doing… In fact, even if I had the chemistry knowledge, I was barely able to read the labels on the vials and was only hypothesizing as to the translation to English.

Regardless, the contrast between the scientist’s excitement and the robot’s precise motions of mixing the vials formulated a bizarre atmosphere in the room.

Walking closer to the robot, I tried to figure out precisely what it was doing.

The oxidizer and acid slowly began to mix, and the robot poured several drops of the freezing liquid similar to nitrogen into the vial. The freezing liquid slightly chilled the air as it dropped into the vial, the temperature of the room noticeably dropping several degrees.

After the new freezing liquid was added, the liquids in the vial stopped mixing together and instead began to separate.

The robot sealed the vial and began to rapidly shake it. This caused the liquids in the vial to begin to mix violently, expanding and completely filling the previously half-full vial to the brim.

Whilst the scientist continued with his rambling, a noticeably bad feeling swelled up and I instinctively took a step back.

There was a sudden and massive deadly crisis.

Look at the robot and the vial… I immediately understood the source of danger.

That vial was going to explode, and the explosion wasn’t something that could be easily shrugged off.

I would be killed directly if I didn’t act.

My problem was there was no safe place.

While I didn’t know the specifics, I knew the scale of this sudden crisis was extremely large. It extended all the way to the edge of the castle. I was simply too deep inside the castle to escape the upcoming chemical explosion. I could only reduce the damage.

If I knew about it earlier, I could’ve stopped the robot from mixing the liquids and prevented the explosion or escape beforehand… but the explosion was inevitable at this point and I was too deep inside to escape.

Despite the fact that my actions would cause the liquid to violent shake, without hesitation, I used God-hunter to slash apart the robot’s shaking arms to prevent it from continuing to mix the liquids in the vial. I knew that the faster those liquids were mixed, the quicker the explosion would go off.

The robot had shown no signs of slowing down its shaking movements to mix the liquids. Whilst I had little time to react before the explosion occurred… If I had let the robot continue to mix the liquid, the explosion would’ve gone off in a matter of seconds.

All these thoughts happened in almost an instant and the subsequent actions happened almost concurrently.

Teleporting in two controlled bursts out the laboratory and into the hallway, I sprinted as far away from the explosion’s epicenter as possible.

In the process of escaping, I silently began the process of creating a barrier.

Unlike other wards that required more complicated calculations, a barrier simply required encouraging the environmental mana to group together into a whole bunch of mana and was relatively quick to set up.

There wasn’t time to gather the environmental mana to make a barrier sturdy enough to survive this explosion so I could only utilize my own reserves to make up the difference.

While creating an array like this is a waste of my mana reserves, the entire purpose of collecting mana was to be used when appropriate. If I didn’t choose to dip into my mana reserves, the result would be taking those mana reserves to my grave.

When the preparations were finished, I stopping running and set up the barrier. I directly continued pumping my mana reserves into the barrier without the slightest reservation until the threat of death dissipated from the surroundings.

Little time remained before a chain reaction occurred on a massive scale.

Freezing ice and acid spread out from the laboratory and an explosion within the castle began to occur. Shortly afterward, the stone walls of the castle joined in the chain reaction, exploding with a force visible to the naked eye and amplifying the impact of the explosion dramatically causing my barrier to shake violently.

The thickness of the barrier prevented the blast from the explosion and the blast’s noise from reaching myself… but the damage it caused could easily be seen.

The castle was gone.

Only a small portion of the castle remained within my barrier.

An icy field spread in out into the distance, the entire ground was covered in a thick layer of ice.

Even the surrounding trees and grass in the visible distance were gone. Eaten away by some strong acidic substance that had spread violently from the explosion.

There was nothing left of the castle in the surroundings and everything else had been destroyed by the explosion along with it. The sight of the damage caused a shiver to run down my spine.

I had little doubt that the explosion would’ve killed me had I weathered it directly.

In fact, everywhere within a few miles had basically been demolished.

Even escaping the castle would’ve been pointless. The explosion would have caused severe injuries so long as I had been within vision distance of the castle. The damage was probably comparable to a nuclear bomb.

Survival was basically impossible with my current physique.

An explosion on this scale couldn’t have been an accident. The walls of the castle had been clearly designed with a material that would amplify the explosion and reacting when exposed to under those specific chemicals.

At the same time, I understood why the castle had been left alone by the Redeemer faction and the numerous monsters in the area despite the decay.

Who dares to mess with what was basically a nuclear bomb? Are you tired of living?

If I had known the castle was basically a nuclear bomb… I would’ve never considered entering such a deathtrap.

In surviving and building the barrier, I had used 90% of my mana reserves.

Nearly died.

I shivered at the thought.

At the same time, it felt incredibly lucky to be alive.

Luckily, I happened to have enough mana to block the explosion and that I hadn’t tried to simply outrun or weather the explosion.

Whilst I knew that exploration of Hell Difficulty’s tutorial would be dangerous, I’d vastly underestimated the danger. I’d thought that I could run or escape from anything in the tutorial with my current methods and means.

Clearly, that was not the case.

While I could avoid general dangers and ignore most others… If there was another explosion on that scale, I could do nothing besides keel over and die.

At the same time, I wondered if the projection of that scientist was a purposeful attempt to distract people and prevent them from paying attention to the robot. The scientist had been suspiciously forthcoming with his life achievements and scientific progress in hindsight.

I’d thought nothing of his willful display of his life’s work before… but I couldn’t stop myself from wondering whether the cultist had purposefully created the projection to distract people and prevent them from preparing for the explosion beforehand.

At the same time, I wanted to vomit if that was the case.

A villain should be evil and forthcoming with their plans! What happened to manically laughing as you revealed and explain the motivations behind your evil plan for world domination? Who would silently prepare an evil scheme on the level of a nuclear explosive without giving a warning or hint beforehand? That’s simply cheating!

The villain needs to reveal their evil plan! Otherwise how does the audience know the stakes?

At the same time, revealing your plan gives the protagonist the chance to defuse the bomb, and use their last moments to think about the terrible situation and their dying regrets before successfully preventing the explosion!

Simply blowing up the entire area without any warning is cheating!

The idea that I’d almost been blown to bits by a low-key villain that didn’t follow the rules made me want to cry out in anguish at the unfairness of it all.

Additionally, I’d gaining nothing from coming here. I’d waste almost my entire mana reserve without any gains.

What happened to dangers and opportunities being interlinked? I don’t see any opportunities!

…Isn’t it commonly said that people are rewarded when they overcome deadly danger? Where’s my reward?!

I looked around with bloodshot eyes at the icy flatland that surrounded me for miles. There was absolute no rewards or anything in these surroundings. There was just cold, empty ice beyond the barrier.

Staring at the cold emptiness, I closed my eyes and sighed.

Truly, Hell Difficulty is not a safe place.

While all rewards have dangers, not all dangers have rewards. My inability to recognize or prevent the explosion from occurring had completely preventing the possibility of obtaining anything useful from this venture.

Life isn't fair.

...and without Rin’s unlimited lives, careful is the name of the game in this place.

Realizing it was pointless to stay in this place, I silently began to dissipate the barrier.

As the mana in the barrier dissipated, I tried to recover as much remaining mana as I could. I’d directly utilized my body’s mana reserves to form the barrier, which meant that I could reabsorb the dissipating mana to a degree.

After all, this wasn't environmental mana that I typically utilized to create wards. Environmental mana contained various impurities and corrupted mana. Only a small portion could be absorb at a given time.

As it was already purified and refined by my body, I could still influence the mana dispensed to create the barrier by a certain degree and attempt to reabsorb it into my body to prevent it from going to waste.

Although the portion of the dissipating mana I was able to successfully recover was small, only around 20% of the mana utilized, it was better than all of it going to waste.