I Can Only Cultivate In A Game-Chapter 409: Boxed In

Victor’s eyes flickered with recognition at the title.

’A Mana Defense Officer...’

She continued quietly.

"We wound up in the Uncharted Wilds a year back. Patrol mission went wrong. Communication severed. Extraction failed."

Victor slowed.

"...The Uncharted Wilds?"

Aria glanced at him sharply.

"Yes."

"You’re saying this... we’re in the Uncharted Wilds right now?"

Her eyes narrowed slightly.

"You weren’t aware?"

Victor stopped completely.

For a second, the purple haze seemed to thicken around him.

"This... is the Uncharted Wilds?"

Aria stared at him.

"Of course it is."

Victor felt something cold settle in his stomach.

Now everything made sense...

The constant danger...

The unpredictability...

The icy region and all other regions...

The Sylrith dominion hidden within what appeared to be normal terrain.

The unending hostility of the land itself.

The Uncharted Wilds wasn’t just a dangerous place...

It was a forbidden zone.

Even seasoned Mana Defense teams never entered the sectors on the outskirts without full battalion support.

It was the area humanity had marked on every map with a single designation:

Do Not Enter.

And he had been here... for five months.

Aria studied his expression.

"You really didn’t know," she murmured.

Victor let out a slow breath.

"That explains a lot."

She gave a hollow, humorless laugh.

"You should be dead."

He didn’t argue.

She continued with a quieter voice now.

"there was me. Daniel. Samira. Ross."

Her eyes flickered briefly as she spoke the names.

"We protected each other. Saved each other. Every step of the way."

Her grip on the dagger tightened.

"Samira was first. Ambushed during a insect fog."

There was a brief pause...

"Ross three months later. Something burrowed under him."

Her throat tightened slightly.

"Daniel and I made it this far."

She looked ahead.

"And now he’s gone."

Victor muttered. "I’m sorry..."

She shook her head once, regaining composure.

"Why are you here, kid?"

Her eyes scanned his bruised, bloodstained and barely dressed body again.

"Someone your age shouldn’t be wandering anywhere outside a domed city. How did you even get this deep into the Wilds?"

Victor hesitated only briefly.

"I got displaced," he said. "Space-time distortion. Five months ago."

Her brow furrowed.

"Displaced?"

"I’m a first-year at the Awakened Academy."

She immediately stopped walking.

"You’re what?"

"First-year."

Her face went pale.

"You’re telling me," she said slowly, "you’re a first-year awakened... and you’ve been in the Uncharted Wilds for five months?"

Victor nodded once.

"And you’re alive?"

He gave a small shrug.

"I guess I just got lucky."

Aria stared at him.

There was no humor in her expression.

"Luck?" she repeated quietly.

Teams of full-fledged Mana Defense Officers—battle-hardened veterans with coordinated squads and tactical protocols—were wiped out in weeks.

Some in days.

And this kid who was a barely trained first year had survived alone for five months?

Her gaze sharpened.

There was something off about him... the lack of nervousness and fear almost like he’d already been in countless life or death situations... the charisma and easy going bearing he carried...

She had a feeling that him staying alive for this long wasn’t luck but now wasn’t the time to dissect it.

Survival first...

Questions later.

"Let’s move," she said and Victor nodded.

They resumed their pace, deeper into the warped forest.

The Veilwood Dominion’s outer forest wasn’t passive.

The ground shifted unpredictably beneath their feet, occasionally dipping like quicksand before solidifying again.

Thorned vines shot out from underbrush without warning.

Once, a tree branch bent downward unnaturally fast, nearly skewering Aria through the shoulder before Victor yanked her back.

She glanced at him once, surprised at his reaction speed.

He said nothing.

The truth was, even though Victor was severely weakened and incapable of using his qi, his senses were still heightened due to possessing the Void Emperor Bloodline. He didn’t have to channel any power to sense the ripples in space around them.

They vaulted over a rouugh ridge of stone only for the rock to ripple beneath them like disturbed water.

"Stay light on your feet," Victor warned.

"I noticed," she replied dryly.

They hadn’t been running more than a few minutes when Victor suddenly stopped mid-stride.

He grabbed Aria’s forearm and yanked her sideways into a thick cluster of warped shrubs.

"Down," he whispered sharply.

She dropped instantly without argument.

Two figures burst through the clearing they had just left.

Victor recognized them immediately to be two out of the seventeen captives... but these two were weaponless.

Apparently, they had managed to flee the encirclement from earlier.

They kept running blindly not seeing Victor and Aria.

They were focused only on escape.

Victor held Aria down firmly.

"Wait," he murmured.

She didn’t argue.

The two captives kept sprinting past their hiding spot.

All of a sudden, the ground beneath the lead runner shimmered.

For half a second, nothing happened and then the earth liquefied.

A grotesque maw erupted upward from below as the ground itself split open into layered teeth.

It happened so fast that the captive didn’t even scream.

He was swallowed whole in a single motion.

The earth sealed shut instantly.

The second captive froze mid-run with his entire body locked.

The forest behind the second runner rippled and a long, serpentine shape phased partially out of a tree trunk... its body was translucent and distorted like heat waves.

A head emerged...

It was featureless except for a circular ring of inward-facing teeth that rotated slowly.

The creature shot forward and the other captive screamed this time as the creature’s body phased through him halfway before solidifying.

His torso split and his lower half collapsed.

The upper half was dragged backward into the tree trunk.

The bark rippled once and returned to normal like it was a regular tree.

Then silence returned.

Victor’s grip on Aria tightened unconsciously.

She stared and her expression hardened.

"We have a weapon," she whispered.

Her fingers tightened around the curved dagger she had taken from the clearing. It wasn’t large, but the blade was well-balanced and wickedly sharp, faint etchings running along its edge that hinted it wasn’t entirely mundane.

Victor kept his gaze scanning the trees.

"Yeah but even with that... it would have been useless if we didn’t know what we were walking into," he replied quietly.

They both glanced back toward the area where the two former captives had just died.

One swallowed whole by the earth itself.

The other dragged screaming into a tree.

Weapon or not, ignorance was fatal here.

Victor exhaled slowly.

"We go around," he said. "Whatever that stretch of ground was—it’s active. We don’t cross it."

Aria nodded once.

The problem was that "around" in the Veilwood Playground wasn’t simple.

They moved cautiously, circling wide around the patch of forest where the ground had liquefied. Victor stepped lightly, watching for even the faintest ripple in soil or bark. Aria followed his movements carefully.

She was obviously well trained due to how she distributed her weight and scanned her periphery.

But the deeper they went, the clearer something became.

They weren’t navigating an open forest.

They were navigating a trap.

Every direction that seemed passable soon revealed something wrong.

One path narrowed into a corridor of tightly clustered trees whose branches shifted overhead like closing jaws.

Another route opened into what looked like a clearing... only for the ground to ripple faintly, as though something massive moved just beneath the surface.

A third direction was blocked by a wall of interwoven roots that throbbed faintly with violet veins.

It was as if the entire region subtly herded them.

Boxed them in.

Every attempt at detouring led them into another hazard.

To make matters worse, they didn’t know which direction led out.

"This place is designed," Victor muttered in frustration.

Aria glanced at him.

"You think it’s intentional?"

"Yes. Must be why they named it a Playground... this must be some sick game for the Sylrith..."

After another failed detour which nearly cost them their footing when a stretch of ground fractured into needle-like spikes without warning, Aria stopped abruptly.

"That’s enough," she said.

Victor turned toward her.

"We can’t keep circling. We’re burning time. We need to push through one of these paths."

He didn’t like it but she wasn’t wrong.

The longer they lingered, the more likely something would find them.

"Fine," he said. "But we move slow."

They chose the least immediately hostile route which was a winding path between massive, corkscrew-shaped trees whose bark emitted faint bioluminescent pulses.

They hadn’t taken more than twenty careful steps when both of them froze simultaneously.

Two figures stepped into view from the opposite end of the path.

Victor recognized them instantly.

They were the ones who had secured weapons early and both still had them.

They were very large.

The one on the left towered nearly nine feet tall even with a slightly hunched posture. His skin was thick and gray-green, textured like layered stone plates. Spiky ridges protruded from his shoulders and spine, and two blunt horns curved forward from his brow. His arms were long and corded with dense muscle, veins like dark cables running beneath the surface. In his hand he held the spear-like weapon that crackled faintly with residual purple energy.

The other was even broader.

A hulking, bear-like humanoid with dark reddish fur matted with drying blood. His jaw jutted forward slightly, revealing thick tusk-like canines. His shoulders were massive, his torso barrel-wide. Thick bracers—taken from one of the fallen captives perhaps—wrapped around his forearms. In his grip was the spiky blade and its edge were still wet.

Aria’s eyes narrowed as she recognized the species.