[ ← Entrance ]

[ ← Resource Center ]

[ Academic Affairs → ] 

[ Student Council Room → ] 

[ Storage Room → ] 

The arrow pointing towards the direction of the storage room was also in the same direction that Hamagku had dragged the mutilated body of the snatched woman, her splattered blood dragged in a gruesome trail like the carcass of a deer. 

Zack tried to remain calm, holding the steel bar in his hand as steadily as possible, but his racing heartbeat and clammy hands betrayed his true feelings. This wasn’t fighting a scorpion that he’d fought ten thousand times anymore; this was a completely new enemy that he’d never even heard of in his entire currency mining career on the Royal Road. 

Still, he had a sense of mastery and competence that carried over from his currency mining days. A professionality when it came to exploring new situations like this one. 

Walking slowly and deliberately, he quietly stalked the trail of blood down the hallway, his eyes scanning the area for anything out of the ordinary. He was approaching the corner. 

Damn. If only he had grabbed a piece of a mana crystal from the preliminary examination, he’d be able to check the reflection to see what was down that hallway around the corner. Those fluorescent blue crystals were excellent mirrors when it came to reflecting light. 

Tossing a mana crystal up and down to check his surroundings was his signature move, and the one that earned him a fearsome reputation as the strongest resource farmer in the game. Unfortunately, he didn’t have anything crystal-like at the moment. 

Zack momentarily thought about breaking a piece of glass, but he didn’t want to alert the demon if he could help it. He simply had to take a peek, the old fashioned way. 

Steeling his nerves, Zack peeked around the corner. 

Krrrrrr…..krrr….. 

Less than five yards away, the four limbed demon with a twisted body hovered over the body of the woman, the woman’s black size-seven kitten heels that were often seen at offices cracked and bloodied. A black aura of such malevolent intent surrounded the female demon that Zack felt chills down his spine. 

“It’s over there!” someone’s voice shouted from the other side of the inner courtyard. 

Hamagku’s head rotated backwards at an impossible angle towards the voice across the courtyard, the demon’s black eyes bulging with interest. Zack could only hold his breath as the female demon began to walk further down the hallway, leaving the corpse of the woman behind. 

That was his chance. He snuck across the hallway while the beast was still occupied as stealthily as he could, crossing the office of Academic Affairs and the Student Council Room, until he finally came across the Storage Room. 

Taking the small key with the circular bow out from his pocket, he inserted the key into the keyhole as quietly as he could and turned. With a satisfying click, the door to the storage room unlocked. 

Now, he could monopolize all the resources from this storage room. Even in a life-or-death situation like this, the collection maniac that resided deep within him was waking from its dormant state. Zack thrived in situations like this, where he could be first to harvest the spoils from previously undiscovered areas. This was gaming 101, and wasn’t this just some kind of morbid game, played for the entertainment of the sponsors that Callow had mentioned? 

The key to the storage room was very likely a gold mark exclusive item. So, not a single other examinee would have access to the storage room. Zack opened the door quietly, curious of what it would contain. 

Dust. That was the first thing that he encountered, or should he say the first thing he got ambushed by, as he coughed heavily without any means of suppressing the sound he was making. At this moment, if that monstrous ghoul had not moved on, he’d be dead to rights. But there was no sound of movement from the hallway where he’d last sighted the demon. If his luck held, he’d be safe. He stepped into the storage room, only to get inundated by notifications. 

[You have found a hidden location in Gakuen High.]

[You are the first to discover the Storage Room.] 

[Your cosmic notability has increased.] 

… 

[Your hidden reward for clearing the preliminary examination under 10 minutes has been revealed. Limited constellation communication has been unlocked earlier than scheduled.] 

[Restricted constellation communication has been restored.] 

…

[Several potential sponsors have noticed your existence for the first time.] 

[A sponsor is angered by the other examinees’ disrespect of you in the lecture hall.]

[A sponsor is in awe about your decision not to flee through the window in the lecture hall.]  

[A sponsor is excited by your bravery skirting across the hallway behind the demon’s back.]

Just what the hell was all of this? Was this entire examination being broadcasted somewhere for these so called ‘sponsors’ to watch? 

…

This reminded him of online game streaming sites, the same ones that made that clip of him mining during a boss fight viral. Zack was used to online attention around him, as he had accumulated quite the notorious reputation as Zero, but that was still humans watching human streamers. But this? Constellation communication? Just who the hell was watching him now, then? 

Shaking off his surprise by the grandiose notifications that he received for stepping into the storage room, Zack closed the door behind him and locked it for extra safety. It was a bit larger than the tiny utility closet he’d been expecting, and he could walk around a bit. 

Thankfully, the notifications could be pushed to the side. Zack wasn’t sure what he’d do if notifications continuously popped up when he was just about to die. With his newly earned peace and quiet, he examined the storage room for the first time. 

He spotted three unlit candlesticks on a shelf, but his eyes were drawn to the back wall. Draped on the wall was a tapestry of sorts, but instead of a painting of a landscape or something mundane like that, what rested in white paint on the tapestry was a diagram that looked undeniably like a magic circle. Within the very center of the diagram was the Akashic character for water. 

He had learned the Akashic characters during elementary school alongside ancient Latin, as was the standard for all schoolchildren. They were part of the mandatory curriculum as a part of ancient heritage class, and were still commonly used in the business world despite being outdated. There was a bit of a high class connotation to the ancient characters, and thus corporations and traditional priests alike heavily used them for their symbolic nature. 

Thankfully his memory was quite good, and he remembered the basic Akashic characters by heart. This one was definitely water. 

[You have found a magic circle. Spell diagram has been uploaded to your phone.] 

At that moment, his phone vibrated, and Zack eagerly took it out of his pocket. It was a black screen once more, except now there were two tabs. The first tab was a spell diagram tab, which contained the pictograph of the water magic circle drawn in chalk on a blackboard. Ah, so that was what chalk was for. Zack’s mind quickly revisited the paltry amount of chalk he had saved from the lecture hall, and it was now becoming more clear just how precious of a resource chalk was. With the amount he had, he’d just barely be able to draw a single magic circle. 

The second tab was Chronicles of Gakuen High, which had a notification icon on it. 

Zack tapped on the chronicles tab, curious as to what was updated. 

[Chronicles of Gakuen High has been updated.] 

Strangely enough, instead of completing the original entry and telling him how to repel the demon with a line of salt and something else, there was now a completely new entry dated slightly after the original entry. The new entry was quite short. 

The girls soon discovered that Hamagku doesn’t like water, more likely than not a remnant of her trauma from drowning in a well. We collected seven buckets of water from the school bathroom, when– 

…

Well that wasn’t very long, but still, this Chronicles of Gakuen High book was simply a cheat, wasn’t it? It told him the background of the demon as well as the demon’s name, and then its weakness to water upright? 

Meanwhile, Zack had to wonder, the other examinees had absolutely no idea about Hamagku except for what they saw. Only the marked examinees would have a clue… and as the gold mark, he was given not just a clue but nearly the whole picture. 

A smile began to spread across Zack’s face. With this kind of informational advantage, he was in position to excel at this examination, just like he had done in the preliminary examination on the fire pit island. 

[Several sponsors are waiting in eager anticipation for your next move.]

Zack very carefully unpacked the stub of chalk that he recovered from the lecture hall and repackaged it in a little paper pouch, using the slip of paper that gave the original hint about its location. He gingerly tied it around his neck with the piece of string. Next, he spent five minutes staring at the spell diagram on his phone, committing every line of it to memory through brute force. With that done and the three candlesticks collected, it was time to leave the storage room. 

As he left the storage room and made a right, Zack noticed that the entire hallway leading to the other side of the building had collapsed. How did he not hear this happening? Maybe the sound was a bit muffled while he was inside the storage room. 

Suddenly, the dead man’s advice made more sense. Had he leapt down from the window like the rest of the examinees, there would be no way back up and into this side of the building anymore. The rewards from the storage room would have been lost permanently. 

How did the dead man know all of this, anyway? Was he from another cycle, like that strange talking tabby cat Sylvester mentioned? 

Those were questions that Zack did not have the time to ponder, as a piece of the roof suddenly fell behind him. 

[Zone is now closing.]

[Please move to another zone.] 

Grabbing his metal rod, Zack made a run for it past the corpse of the woman. A move that he would later regret.