Soon, the trialmaster Circe Lavender and the trial attendants led the contestants out the hall and through a long tunnel lit by rows of purple-flamed torches hanging at the sides. After a few minutes of walking, everyone arrived at a set of stone stairs, which they walked up to come to a large, circular stone platform in the middle of a wide-open stretch of forest.
The contestants gazed upon their surroundings with a sense of wonder and awe. Acres upon acres of trees and shrubs as far as the eye could see—ones filled with bluish-purple leaves and teeming with wildlife of all kinds, both familiar and exotic. Furthermore, upon closer inspection of the sky, there seemed to be a thinly translucent veil encompassing the entire area from above—almost like some sort of large, hemispherical barrier made of glass.
“The first trial is Scavenger Hunt,” Circe announced to all the contestants as she remained hovering in mid-air above them. “Here you see before you is a patch of wilderness where the Scavenger Hunt is going to take place—an area covering several square kilometers, separated from the outside by a dome-shaped magical barrier.
“The rules of this trial are simple. There are 100 special star runes scattered throughout the area. Each of you must acquire one of these runes and escape to the outer boundary of the barrier in order to pass. However, if your faux-health rune has managed to receive enough damage to register you as dead, you will automatically be teleported to a special waiting area and subsequently be eliminated. Since there are only 100 star runes, only 100 of you shall pass the first trial.
“Out of the 100 star runes, 80 of them will be embedded within the hearts of various magically constructed monsters wandering within the enclosed area, meaning that you’ll have to kill them in order to obtain their runes. Different monsters contain different numbers of runes on them, ranging from one to five. As a general rule, the more runes a monster contains, the more powerful that monster is, meaning that it usually requires more people to team up together in order to defeat them. The information on all the available star-runed monsters will be provided to you in a scroll stored in your faux-heath rune. Note that some of these monsters are not embedded with star runes as they do not have star marks on their chests, meaning that you’ll have to be perceptive enough to discern which monsters have star runes on them and which do not.
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“As for the remaining 20 star runes, they will not be embedded in any monster. Instead, they will be hidden in secret locations scattered throughout the area as well, with the clue to each of their locations also provided to you in another scroll stored inside your faux-health rune. These clues are all in the form of riddles, meaning that you’ll have to use your intellect to solve them in order to figure out their locations.
“The entire trial will last for a maximum of 12 hours, but will end before that as soon as all 100 star runes are found and claimed. Once the trial reaches its 6th hour mark, a hidden function from within your faux-health rune will automatically activate, giving you the ability to track the location of a rune within a certain distance, regardless of whether it’s a monster star rune or a riddle star rune. The radius of this tracking ability will start out small, but will gradually grow larger until it covers the entire trial area, at which point it will reveal the location of all remaining star runes by the 11th hour mark.
“Before the trial starts, you will be given 5 minutes to prepare, allowing you to do various things such as studying the information on your scrolls, forming strategies with your team, and making quick alliances with each other. Once the 5 minutes are up, that’s when the Scavenger Hunt officially starts. Now, let the 5 minute pre-trial phase begin!”
