Upon entry into the Little World, each prodigy was issued a single token, a circular disc of spirit-forged jade etched with runes that pulsed faintly with their qi signature.
The token floated behind the prodigies like a low orbiting satellite, bound to their aura.
A voice spoke out:
"Lose your Token, and you lose your place in the Little World.
You will be expelled—no matter how powerful you are.
Victory is survival. Survival is ownership."
These Tokens can be stolen, won, or tricked away."
The voice finished speaking.
The mist broke as the sun of the Little World rose, casting amber beams across a horizon that felt too far, too vast. I crouched silently atop a rising ridge, gazing at the Central Mountain—a towering spire of black stone wrapped in spirit fog. Its peak vanished into the clouds. My token floated around me like an orbiting moon.
"I need a view of the whole island; that's the only way I'll understand the battlefield." Behind me, the trees of the jungle sighed with warm wind. I was alone and I chose not to group up.
For now.
My legs coiled. With a blast of muscle and qi, I leapt—vaulting hundreds of feet between cliff shelves and boulders, bouncing over the topography of the island like a flea blinking from dog to dog. I bounded from ledge to ledge, dancing up the Central Mountain with the ease of a spirit beast. At the peak, I found a jutting crag and sat cross-legged, focusing inward. I let my breathing slow.
My Intent pulsed. The world turned quiet. My essence began to stream off my body like rising smoke from an incense cone. My Spirit-Man—rose into the air like drifting vapor.
WHOOSH!
I shot off across the skies like a comet, soaring through the misty air. In spirit man form I could see everything: Jungle Regions — dense, wet, full of fog and massive spirit beasts. Swamps — toxic-looking pools with glowing-eyed beasts watching from reeds. Blazing Lava Canyons — cracked with ember winds and volcanic chi geysers. Frozen Tundra Zones — complete with blizzards, crystalline ice, and ancient glacier-wrapped ruins. Deserts, plains, spirit stone graveyards, and hidden structures buried by time. Then the realization began to dawn on me. This was not just an arena.
I realized. This world was real. This was not a domain construct. We had been transported here. This was a real location somewhere out in the limitless ocean, with real history and real danger. I activated the Astral Veil—a gift from the Dream Stag. The cloak shrouded around my Spirit-Man, rendering it undetectable to even sharp spiritual senses. From above, I watched them. Weaker prodigies forming teams of ten or five, the more powerful solo prodigies being hunted by those same teams for their Tokens.
Some groups constructed makeshift forts while others went on resource runs—securing rare and powerful cultivation fruits, beast cores, and water. In another region I watched as Dimitri incinerated a stealth attacker by lighting the man's soul on fire with a glare. The man yielded and surrendered his token.
I spotted Nara setting up her tripwire zones and intent traps around an old ruin that she was exploring. Finally I observed Elyahna seated on an iceberg in the cold zone portion of the island that shouldn't exist, meditating while sharp icicles rotated around her like moons. It seemed that Nara and Elyahna had been drawn to regions that called to their specific path. Yogrek Grimbark was already hounding those weaker than himself for their tokens.
My Spirit-Man glided higher—above even the clouds cloaking the Central Mountain—until I hovered near the azure edge of the sky. From here, the island sprawled out beneath me like a coin, I estimated it to be around sixty miles in diameter, its biomes fractured and colliding like a dream scape stitched together by chaos.
Then I descended, banking wide, beginning a full rotation around the island perimeter. I wanted to know everything. To the West was a deep dark jungle, I caught sight of something that made my astral heart pause—a Cyclops, twenty feet tall, dragging a spiked club the size of a small house. Its single eye glowed with ghostly fire, and its skin was plated with chunks of stone like armor.
It let out a bellow and shattered a tree in a single blow, hunting something…or someone. I traveled to the north, a Lord Tier Manticore stalked the savannah region. The beast's red lion body rippled with muscle as its black scorpion tail lashed behind it, venom dripping in streams that burned the earth. It reared its purple bat-like wings and launched into the air with a scream that split the sky.
To the South was an Emerald Hydra—nine serpentine heads hissed, fangs steaming with acidic qi. When a wandering beast approached, three heads incinerated it with elemental breath while the others fed greedily. In the stone valleys, I found a Hundred-Armed Giant—each arm easily five times the size of a normal person. It towered forty feet tall but sat peacefully in meditation, surrounded by floating boulders.
A deep drumbeat of power radiated from its core with every breath. A former god of war, maybe? Sealed here? As I was looking down at the Giant Suddenly, I had to veer to dodge a Feathered Sky Serpent, its wings a tapestry of light blues and violent purples. It glided effortlessly across jet streams and weaved through clouds like silk in wind. Every flap caused space to ripple.
Then I spotted the Hill Monster.
It wasn't a hill with a monster on it.
It was the hill.
Lichen, moss, and small trees grew on its back. Its mouth was a cave. It slept unmoving, but the spirit pressure it gave off nearly shook my Spirit-Man form to pieces. If it woke up… this region would vanish in its footsteps. Curious, I soared past the island and glided out over the sea—its waters impossibly calm.
But then I saw them. Leviathans. Some ancient. Some biomechanical. Others impossibly large. There was a golden three headed sea dragon. I saw a spiral-horned whale that looked to be sleeping on a sea ridge. And deeper still—monsters I could not even describe. Behemoths in silhouette. Shapes older than time. My instincts screamed. The sea was a forbidden zone. Even if the Little World was built to test the greatest of this generation...
The sea was not meant to be part of that test. I turned back inland fast, diving for the Central Mountain again, mind racing. This wasn't just a competition anymore. This was a proving ground of ancient beasts and forgotten legends. As I was returning to the island I felt a sudden calling, an urge to fly southeast, feeling as though I was being guided, I relented and detoured through the southeast region.
Here I observed a scarred battle ground with a profound battle essence, I could tell that many great and ruinous battles had been fought in this wide-open plane. But more importantly I felt comfortable here, almost like the region itself was drawing me in. Fully returning to my body I took a deep breath and stood up. Using my spiritual senses I could discern that many of the prodigies had not ventured far into the island yet, and this gave me a head start to find and plunder its resources.
I circulated tempest breath and the Cloud Step technique, summoning the evolved feather foot sigils and took one mighty leap off the side of the central Mountain! My cerulean feathers drawing in and compressing the wind essence into Flight essence. The Barren waste battlefield was at least 40 miles away from my current location, but I would be there with in thirty minutes of power gliding. As I flew across the Island trial ground landscape I observed various factions of prodigies, resources gathering and cultivating privately.
The jungle behind me faded into silence, as I crossed the invisible threshold between life and ruin. A hot wind blew across cracked stone. My boots struck black rock with metallic thuds. Each step sent up little puffs of scorched ash. I had arrived. The Barren Battle Wasteland stretched before me like a war god's graveyard — a land carved by slaughter and sealed by legend.
Massive beast bones jutted from the ground like buried gods' ribs. Weapons — real and illusory — floated through the air, slowly spinning, suspended by leftover rage and martial intent. Broken blades, halberd heads, and arrow clusters drifted like forgotten memories, still sparking with hate.
Above, embers danced through blood-colored clouds, staining the sky a permanent dusk. "This place remembers everything…" I muttered.
I crouched and pressed two fingers to the ground. The battle essence here was thick—a spiritual gravity that nearly buckled my knees. It hummed with grief and power, mourning its lost champions. Then I saw them. Flickers of qi.
Ghosts.
Martial phantoms reenacting the final clashes of long-dead cultivators. Warriors locked in eternal duels—cutting, striking, defending, falling—only to reset and begin again.
Their limbs were transparent, but their strikes made real sound. "This… this is where a Martial King must've died," I whispered.
In the distance, I saw it. A jagged sinkhole, glowing from within with an eerie veridian radiance. My gut twisted. A sound echoed—wet, wrong. Something was climbing out. I stepped forward. Then it emerged. I crouched in the wasteland, the ash whispering against my feet, gaze locked on the sinkhole. Behind me, my Token hovered like a silent moon, tethered to my spiritual core. The glow from it pulsed in rhythm with my heartbeat. "It wants more than just blood," I muttered. "It wants Tokens."
When the Stalker Revenant emerged, it wasn't just stitched together from corpses—It had two tokens impaled into its warped chest plate. They flickered—one red, one violet—trophies of slain prodigies it had consumed. Each Token radiated rejection and pain, as if the spirits of their original owners were still bound within.
"It's not just killing them…It's absorbing them. It's… using their Tokens as fuel." This wasn't just a monster.
It was a Prodigy-Slayer.
If I fell, my Token would join the others—feeding this cursed revenant further.
And with each Token it claimed, it grew stronger.