Chapter 179 Clearing the World!
He glanced at the monsters he had just mauled, all of them adorned with a golden color somewhere on their bodies. He then glanced at the golden tree that sparkled with a strange color, and he reached out to grab the fruit on it.
To Dante's surprise, the fruit actually avoided his grasp!
It wasn't that it got up and moved, but it seemed that the wind had shifted it slightly, and made it quickly leave his reach. This made him raise an eyebrow as he analyzed the tree once more and had a guess in his heart, though it seemed strange.
Initially, he thought that this tree must be of the gold element, relating to either wealth in western ideology or sharpness in eastern ideology, but it was neither.
Rather, somehow bizarrely, it had to do with the power of agility. In all honesty, Dante thought about it and found that it should have occurred to him at the beginning.
His movement speed was so great that him casually walking at his full speed should be like time had stopped for all other beings. Like a certain famous time-stopping vampire who liked throwing road rollers, while Dante moved, everyone should be frozen in place, unable to even notice that they were unable to move.
For Dante though, this was not due to actual time-stopping powers but the relativity of time in relation to speed. It was basic physics.
However, not one, not two, but all of the five golden colored monsters had been able to not only see him but also react to his presence. The horse-like one even charged at him and displayed exceptional speed in its movement.
That alone should have clued him in. Dante had initially thought he had ambushed them and not allowed them to use their superpowers, but the obvious question was that if the five were confronting each other with a battle about to break out, how could they not be using their superpower?
This fact made Dante frown as he casually caught the fruit by using his maximum speed and plucked it down. He held it in his hand and turned it over and over again, his mind lost in thought.
It seemed like this was a lesson. He should not assume that others with abilities or methods would not always have them active, or at least some part of them active.
If he, Dante, was smart enough to always leave his Spirit Sense on as well as have his 1st Rank or 2nd Rank space element shield spells mostly active in case of an emergency, why wouldn't others be just as smart to activate their methods?
After all, Dante was not the only one who unlocked new sub-abilities with every rank up of his superpower. Whether it was humans or beasts, their base ability would be upgraded with each rank, and they had a chance to unlock new sub-abilities.
It was only for Dante that the sub-abilities were guaranteed because of how high quality his superpower was, but others could also have them too.
Dante thought back to the first 9 beasts and finally understood what he felt was wrong back then, and what they were hiding from him. He also glanced at these 5 beasts and felt sorry for them.
Even if they unlocked new sub-abilities, they were completely suppressed by Dante's whose base speed surpassed anything their superpowers could boost them up to. Since sub abilities only followed the same type and element as the main ability, their sub abilities would likely be agility related.
And to think, Dante had not yet activated his Bionics or Psionics which would boost his stats by a maximum of 10 times. Once he reached 15000 in all fields, his energy consumption would be crazy, but with Gluttonous Inferno and the infinite energy of the Zero Gate world, he could maintain his full power for a long and active great power!
This was also another path for him in the real Zero Gate if his superpower could not grant him invincibility. He could just raise his stats and bulldoze through everything like a barbarian.
He held the golden fruit and popped it into his mouth. Now that he had more than one fruit, he could use one to test if he could take it out through his quantum space and he could eat this one to see if he could use his quantum body to gain new superpowers.
Dante swallowed and waited for a bit, then his smile became bitter. He only felt zero energy gather in his Quantum Entanglement, raising his progress by 10%. This brought the total progress to 50% energy required for the next rank, which was worth about a day of nonstop absorption in the Black Land for Dante.
Despite that, he couldn't be happy. After all, he felt the entire process and knew that the fruits themselves were the problem, not himself. He had downloaded and absorbed a lot of knowledge and information relating to the topic of quantum computing and virtualization due to his superpower for obvious reasons.
At first, some things didn't make sense or were speculations by him, but this experience made him understand the problem. It was because the code used to create the zero energy in this world as well as the fruits were wrong.
It wasn't that Dante could not absorb Zero Energy in a quantum world or could not gain superpowers through fruits, but because firstly, they needed the precise code to perfectly replicate the quantum information of those two things, and secondly, they needed the right amount of energy to manifest the items in their full power in the quantum world.
Both of these things were not present here, at least not in full. Because the formula for the Zero Energy was wrong, basically replicated from the same energy source powering this world, it could not be used for superpowers.
However, the fruits had a hint of correct coding in them due to the fact that Dante's assumption that most of the school's worlds were crafted by a superpower user was likely very true.
In fact, Dante had a sinking feeling that he had underestimated the amount of resource and effort the school had put into crafting all those stable quantum worlds where he could plunder their power system and resource without repercussion.
Especially the Apocalypse World, Dante was beginning to suspect the true purpose of that world and how the school made it. It literally meant that to quantum code the superpowers, they had to have some of the details of the real superpowers and how they worked.
In fact, they did not just have some. Given how accurate the superpowers were and the fact that Dante could even use his stably and see it in his soul space, temporarily forming a mirage as if it truly existed in another realm, he felt that they likely had more than 95% of not all of the quantum code of the various superpowers in the database.
The question was then, how did they get this information? Even if the current Dante was cruelly tortured to his limit and questioned, he wouldn't even be able to answer and reveal such intricate details about his superpower.
While some superpower users reached the C and above rank, it didn't mean that they had comprehended such intimate details of their own superpower, so once again, how would the school know this?
Dante began to feel like there was a huge conspiracy behind this, but he currently knew too little, and many things were just confident speculations at this point. In the end, he could only take the energy boost from the fruit and move onto the next one.
From there, Dante soon encountered the other 8 trees after spending a whole day crossing the realm. He fought the monsters that were guarding? them viciously and carefully, while also confronting each other in their numbers who were of similar element types of powers, so one could outright kill the other.
When Dante usually involved himself in such banal and meaningless disputes, they tended to be resolved rather directly, with either one of 3 outcomes happening.
Firstly, the beasts were hypnotized by him and made to fight each other.
Secondly, if he felt their power was interesting and could grant him combat experience, he would take them out with his physical methods.
Thirdly, if he felt that their power was interesting and not something easily dealt with, he would use his two magical methods to change the fate of many local fauna, turning them into endangered species!
At the end of it all, Dante grabbed all the other 8 fruits with ease, and only a single day had passed since he landed here. He definitely had won an award for being the fastest to gather the fruits in a virtual world, but that was not within his current concerns.
With so many fruits in hand and having fought so many monsters, his experiences made him notice some similarities and differences in the entire matter. He rapidly parsed through them while taking the various fruits out and inspecting them one by one.