Athanasia: My Hacker System-Chapter 116: The Totem Scale Special Effect

During this period of stagnation, on their fifth day at the new base—exactly seven days after the end of their grand battle—the environment changed.

Without warning, the distant magical core at the old den suddenly flickered, its light pulsing weakly before its effect diminished. The fog-clearing effect radius collapsed.

The fog, which had been pushed back kilometres away, surged forward to reclaim the land, covering the same area it had when the machines first used the big core.

The wall of mist was so close to them now that they only needed a ten-minute walk to reach its edge.

The safety bubble had shrunk. John sent Luke, Elena, and Ricky to check on the core and see if they could somehow haul it back to their current position, while he decided to stay behind and try something, using the chance the fog came closer to him, hoping it might finally trigger a quest for him.

Cissel didn’t leave with the others. She still feared that John might snap back into that weird, feverish state he had suffered during the map expansion. She stayed by his side, her daggers at the ready, as the two of them walked into the encroaching fog.

Once inside the white fog, John reached into his inventory and took out one of the metallic, multi-conical items he had gained from the silver trees. He held the Totem Scale between his fingers, its surface cold and heavy. He expected it to react instantly, perhaps igniting into a silver fire similar to how the Blue Serpentile fruit reacted.

The moment he took it out, he threw it away into the ground. He braced for an explosion, but nothing happened. The scale tumbled through the air and landed with a dull, metallic clink on the grass. It didn’t catch fire; it didn’t roar. However, a system notification popped up for a brief moment, vanishing the second the item left his hand.

"Nothing?!" Cissel also waited for a fire or a spectacular explosion, but seeing the object just sit there in peace made her quite disappointed. She kicked at a tuft of grass. "Tsk! I thought I’d finally have a fiercer bomb this time. What a letdown!"

"Wait..." John stepped forward to retrieve the silver Totem Scale. The moment his skin made contact with the metallic surface again, the system notification popped back up with a clarity that made his heart race.

[Ding! You can pay Mental Points and trigger the Totem Scale special effect!]

[Ding! The minimum to trigger is 5 Mental Points!]

[Ding! Paying 5 Mental Points will create a freezing area for your enemies, a square of 100 square metres!]

[Ding! The Freezing Area won’t affect your allies!]

[Ding! Paying 5 more Mental Points will add half of this area each time you do it!]

[Ding! The effect will last for ten minutes!]

"Fascinating," John whispered, holding the scale in his palm and looking at it as if he were holding a treasure. The cryptic "precursor to something nice" was starting to make sense. This wasn’t a grenade; it was a very useful utility.

Seeing the intense look in his eyes, Cissel regained a glimmer of hope. She leaned in closer, her disappointment forgotten. "What’s so special about it? Tell me! Can it explode if you hit it hard enough?"

"Well," John started, hesitating to describe a debuff freezing zone to her. After all, there wasn’t a single enemy around to test the Totem Scale on, so he couldn’t show her the results without exposing it himself. "It’s not a bomb, Cissel. I don’t know for sure what it is yet, but I’ll need to run further tests to decide exactly if it can be used in a fight or not."

"Dammit, John! I thought you found a way to let it explode!" Cissel rolled her eyes, her shoulders slumping as she felt more disappointed than before. To her, a silver item from a metallic tree should have at least resulted in a flash of light or a thunderous roar.

"As we are on it," John said, feeling a bit bad to let her down like this, "I may have found a clue about more blue trees around. I was thinking we might want to check them later..."

"Take me there right away!"

Without even waiting for him to finish his sentence, she grabbed his arm and began dragging him toward the edge of the fog. John hardly managed to dissuade her from sprinting off right then.

He eventually convinced her that they had to wait for the others to return first. After all, they needed to see what had gone wrong with their magical core, and leaving the group while the fog was encroaching was a recipe for disaster.

It wasn’t long before Luke, Ricky, and Elena appeared on the horizon, hauling the heavy core.

"We didn’t find anything back there," Luke wheezed, laying down the big core with the help of a disgruntled Ricky. He panted for breath, wiping sweat from his forehead, while Elena added, "Everything there looks fine! The place of the battle is still a wreck, and there were no enemies. The core just... Stopped working on its own, it seems."

"Then it must be this," John said. He had a theory forming the moment the magical core had first consumed the Ogolith core.

"You know what happened?!" Ricky said amidst his racing breaths, his eyes darting between John and the big core. "Then do you know how to fix it? Because I am not carrying that thing back and forth for fun."

"It seems the core it absorbed got depleted," John explained his theory simply. He opened his inventory, taking out a handful of normal Fog Seeker cores. "Let me try this."

He began placing the cores in a wide circle around the magical core. The moment the hundredth core touched the ground, John’s Frame Recognition kicked in. He spotted the faint, stagnant red codes within the small cores begin to swirl and dissolve. They turned into a copious, rushing red stream that got sucked into the magical core’s pull.

To his friends, who couldn’t see the code, the sight was magical. The small cores suddenly melted, turning into thousands of specks of red light that spiralled through the air like fireflies before being absorbed by the bigger core.

Then the big core erupted in a brilliant, steady glow.

"It’s back on full power again," John noted. One hundred cores were more than enough to arm the magical core. As the light intensified, the wall of fog got pushed back with invisible force. "Wait... It seems it pushed the fog even further than before!"

The effect of the big core didn’t stop at the previous perimeter. It surged outward, reclaiming tens of kilometres of land in a single, silent explosion of clarity. Standing in their spot, the team looked out across the newly revealed landscape. In the far distance, they noticed the unmistakable shadowy silhouettes of towering giants.

"The blue trees... There are more blue trees out there, hahaha!"

Despite being so far away, the silhouettes were unmistakable to Elena and Cissel. There were clusters of Blue Serpentile trees at the far south—one of the many resource spots John had identified on his newly unlocked map.

"You weren’t joking! There are more blue fruits out there!" Cissel laughed, punching John lightly on the arm. She and Elena exchanged a meaningful, almost greedy look.

"Let’s go!" Cissel didn’t wait for a formal order, and neither did Elena. "Let’s gather more blue grenades!"

"Blue grenades, blue grenades, blue grenades..." As if possessed by a singular, explosive spirit, Elena walked by Cissel’s side, chiming the words in a melody.

The boys exchanged helpless, weary gazes. They knew they had no say in this matter; they were merely the pack mules for the girls’ excitement. They picked up their pace and followed.

The team spent the rest of the day in a harvesting frenzy, collecting every blue fruit they could find. This time, the orchard was massive—over five hundred trees in number. It provided the girls with a stockpile of blue grenades far beyond what they had initially imagined.

As for the boys, they kept a portion in their storage devices for emergencies, but neither of them shared the girls’ enthusiasm. Luke was more worried about the fruits exploding while still holding them, and Ricky was still suspicious of anything that came from the fog.

John had hoped that after doing all this, he would trigger a new system quest. Yet the day ended without achieving the prompt he desired. Eventually, he gave up for the night, settling in by the fire, and slept.

He didn’t know it yet, but by the tenth day of their stay in the new territory, he was finally destined to find exactly what he was looking for.