The sun shone brightly in the sky, the oppressive heat of the summer raining down on the world. Inside a forest, bugs crackled. Even with the noises of the bugs, the forest still felt silent—deadly and awe-inspiring.

​But within that forest, there was an opening where ruins of something out of history lay barren. Broken pillars, ruined walls, moss-covered bricks. The whole place looked like a castle but was completely covered in moss.

​The structure gave off a feeling of something profound that hit the soul in layers the human mind fails to understand. A profound, deep sense of loss washed over the hearts of whoever looked at it.

​But right now, the entire ruin site was filled with the clamor of students, with small transportation ships landing and taking off.

​This historical site was known as the War Castle of Holocaust. What was currently visible was just the top of the castle that had a balcony, yet the grandeur of the architecture could still be felt.

​It was located near the border of the outer layer of the Great Forest of Academy City. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

​The Great Forest was massive, extending beyond the 100,000 kilometers of Academy City. The Academy City could be said to be situated near its outer rim. There were three layers to the Great Forest:

​Outer Layer.

​Inner Layer.

​Core Layer.

​The Great Forest is so big that it covers almost a quarter of the Neutral Continent. The entire north-western part of the continent is occupied by the Great Forest.

​This was the second largest forest in the world after the Elven Forest, which spanned a whole continent. Because the Elves loved nature, their entire landmass was a forest.

​The Great Forest itself possessed a landmass of more than 10 trillion kilometers in diameter.

​The Academy City was as small as a grain of sand in comparison. But the dangers within it were just as massive. The Outer Layer had been fully explored, while quite a bit of the Inner Layer had also been charted, but nothing was known about the Core Layer.

​Additionally, the area of Academy City was once a war zone for civilizations from an unknown time. From what had been found in this area, it was obvious that a massive multiracial war had taken place.

​A war that eventually made many ancient races go extinct.

​The War Castle of Holocaust was one such example. Records of a humanoid race with four arms and three eyes had been found inside.

​There are currently many different races with similar features across the world, but what made this specific race distinct was their dedication. In the historical archives, they were recorded as an extremely powerful race capable of using Apex Energy.

​But that wasn’t the shocking part; the records claimed that this race used to be born with Apex Energy naturally.

​Apex Energy is the most tangible energy archetype in existence. It is a perfect fusion of a Yang-attributed Aura Core and a Yin-attributed Mana Core slamming into each other in the solar plexus. Only a flawless fusion results in Apex Energy, which possesses the raw strength of Aura and the extreme versatility of Mana.

​Enabling one to use it like both Aura and Mana but with a thousand times more power, it was dubbed the Strongest Energy Archetype by experts.

​For a race to be born with it naturally, one could only imagine how ridiculously powerful they must have been.

​And that may very well have been the cause of their extinction.

​The War Castle might look like normal ruins from the outside, but it had been turned into a low-level dungeon. It was originally a dungeon meant for Level 100 to 200 combatants. But through repeated exploration throughout the last nine thousand years, its quality had dropped, and now only low-level monsters spawned here around Level 10 to 20.

​Even though the students here could easily take down monsters near Level 90 solo, they were stuck in this dungeon because this was the maximum distance first-years could afford to travel without going broke.

​But as the 20th Rank with 10 million points as leverage, Quash didn’t have to come here to level up. In fact, he wasn’t here to level up at all. Near the bottom of the Castle, there was a hidden cavity where Spirit Water could be found.

​Spirit Water forms after coming into contact with Natural Energy for an extremely long period of time. The higher the grade, the longer it took to form.

​In that cavity, there was a wall, behind which lay a small pond of Spirit Water of at least Ancient Grade.

​The reason Quash knew of such a thing was because he had read about it in the novel. A few months from now, some random first-year would accidentally discover the pond by destroying the wall that hid it.

​That event caused a massive uproar in the Academy, and many factions fought fiercely for the monopoly. The conflict got so big that the Academy City Council eventually had to step in to resolve the issue.

​Right now, Quash was walking towards the entrance of the dungeon. He was wearing a hoodie and had wrapped a piece of cloth around his face, using it as a temporary, makeshift mask to hide his identity. He was fully committed to changing his personality and curbing his bad habit of getting on people’s nerves.

​The surface layer of the War Castle Dungeon was filled with students conducting trades, mostly exchanging monster corpses. The prices were incredibly cheap—1 ACP per goblin corpse. The reason was that there was an abundance of them in the market, and since the goblins were low level, their corpses didn’t have much structural or magical use.

​Quash briefly scanned the marketplace and started to stride towards the entrance. The ride he came with would be waiting for him in the parking area.

​Before leaving the ship, he had told the captain not to speak to another soul about his whereabouts. Seeing that Quash wanted to hide his identity for some reason, the captain had felt the urge to expose him, but with the threat of the phone recording hanging over him, he couldn’t risk it. He would get into way bigger trouble than he could handle.

​And with that, Quash ensured that his identity wouldn’t be exposed. And even if it were, it wouldn’t matter. He was just trying to protect others from himself.