Extra's Strategy: Cultivate Protagonists, Become Invincible
Chapter 75: The Stadium

Chapter 75: The Stadium

A red glow superimposed itself over his vision the moment Han Xuhan’s foot fell into the dense layer of fog. The red panel of the system was just as bright as the red orb he was sprinting towards.

[ Bronze Token: Consumed ⟩ Issuing Alert... ]

[ Alert: Host’s body and spirit are being polluted. The pollution will cause irreversible damage within the next three minutes. ]

’There goes the token, what a waste!’

His heart ached upon seeing it being used for a warning that he was already aware of.

Despite keeping his mouth and nose covered with the mask, a foul smell assaulted his olfactory senses as soon as he had stepped inside. The poison of this fog was quite an extraordinary creation!

Three minutes were more than enough for him to reach the first orb of red light. However, Han Xuhan didn’t know what would happen once he touched it. The people who had delved deeper into the fog were surely crossing their own limits.

The orb was further away than he had thought. A burning sensation began to build up inside him the longer he ran inside the fog. He could feel the strange heat reaching every part of his body through his blood vessels.

Han Xuhan increased his speed even further, not caring about safety measures or measured breathing anymore and focusing on reaching his destination with every cell of his body.

His eyes began to water, affecting his sight. Halfway from his destination, he tripped and nearly fell down...on corpses.

There were giant corpses that barely resembled humans littering the ground. Han Xuhan noticed some of the humanoid ones that looked very similar to the zombie they had faced outside.

The rest...they looked too terrifying; grotesque to the point where he did not want to think about them anymore after a few glances. Some of them would definitely plague his dreams for a long time.

It seemed that these zombies had died fighting among themselves. With this discovery, the mystery of what had happened to the lost townsfolk was more or less solved.

Keeping his eyes focused on the shining orb, he ignored the squishing sounds and sickening sensations coming from beneath his feet and kept running at the fastest speed possible. Since he had witnessed a mortal escaping back outside the fog all by himself, Han Xuhan was confident of reaching his destination safely as long as he tried his best.

Eventually, he could see the orb clearly despite the foggy curtain.

It was about the size of a beach ball. Its entire body was made of a semi-transparent, glassy material. There were countless small words engraved on its surface, barely visible due to the radiance leaking out of it.

Han Xuhan couldn’t recognize the language the words were written in. But he was too exuberant to care!

The moment he had gotten within the range where he could see it clearly, Han Xuhan had felt the searing, painful heat in his body dissipate slightly. The poison was being suppressed!

Energized, he ran like the wind and leaped to touch the orb like he had seen Mu Ran’s figure do. The moment his hands came into contact with the glassy exterior, he felt the world around him twist and disappear, almost similar to how jumping into the portal had felt.

After a brief moment of disorientation, Han Xuhan felt the steady ground rematerialize under his feet. Blinking rapidly, he looked around.

The foggy surroundings, the looming balls of light, the stink of blood and rot—everything had been replaced suddenly.

Han Xuhan was standing inside a huge spherical stadium, made entirely out of semi-transparent glass. The walls were filled with the same unfamiliar writings he had noticed on the surface of the orb.

Was this the world inside the orb?

Had he been transformed into a miniature version of himself and then transported inside the orb?

How did this process even work?!

The source of light inside the stadium seemed to be the walls themselves, radiating a red hue that pulsed in a hypnotic rhythm and attracted eyes toward the words on them.

And the most important thing here was that there were other people inside the glass stadium with him. Han Xuhan’s sudden appearance didn’t surprise them at all. After one suspicious look at his attire and masked face, they went back to minding their own business.

All of these people were standing close to the walls, their eyes glued to the writings there.

Han Xuhan didn’t quite understand how his body size had shrunk so much that he could fit inside the orb and feel like he was inside a huge, round stadium. But a veteran cultivation novel reader like him had a very flexible mind when it came to accepting sudden bullshit magical developments.

He didn’t freak out as much as he should have. Instead, he found this entire experience rather fun, a very dangerous type of fun. He really felt like one of those protagonists in mystery novels, exploring secrets after secrets on an incredible adventure. It was a refreshing sensation.

Rather energized, he looked around with more focus this time. Mu Ran should be here too, right? Both of them had leaped into the same orb, after all.

Yet as he went through every figure inside the stadium, masked and unmasked, he realized that Mu Ran wasn’t here.

He could even see some of those cultivators from the Stardust Sect. But strangely enough, none of them stood close to each other, unlike their previous display of unity outside the fog.

Brother Feng Jun himself didn’t seem to be among them either, despite being the leader.

Relying on this observation, Han Xuhan came up with two tentative theories.

One—it didn’t matter who targeted which orb in the fog. Where they’d be transferred into was up to some other mechanism, perhaps a randomized distribution.

Two—people who targeted the same orb did end up in the same stadium. But cultivators like Mu Ran and Feng Jun were just resourceful enough that they had found a way to leave this place and pursue their goals, whatever those were.

Deciding not to jump to conclusions so quickly, Han Xuhan walked over to an unfamiliar cultivator in a cyan robe, covered from head to toe. Underneath the hood, Han Xuhan could see a featureless mask completely obscuring his face.

This secretive appearance was the reason why he was attracted to this cultivator. He looked like he had come here with a lot of preparation.

Why would anyone walk around in such attire otherwise? It would look crazy suspicious anywhere other than a situation like this.