Chapter 94: The Hidden Conditions of Evolution

After One Beast left that thread, he saw the thread beneath it and could not help but wear a peculiar expression.

The first thread had originally been a boast: the poster claimed he had sold a ticket to another player for fifteen hundred coins. The thread below it, by contrast, was the opposite: that same player was complaining to others about having bought a ticket from someone else for the same price.

The two threads had been posted at slightly different times, so it was impossible to tell who had borrowed whose momentum, or whether both accounts were true.

When One Beast clicked into the thread, he found that the replies were all the same sort of thing: finding the original poster, the rich tycoon, and begging to cling to his coattails. It had to be said that putting those two threads side by side was somehow hilarious.

Yet neither of the original posters had started an argument, so naturally there was no need for outsiders to say much either. They simply became glorified echo chambers.

After that, One Beast left the thread again and moved on to the next one. The title was shocking: A Hundred-Man Battle, a Tearful Bloody Retreat.

If One Beast had not known he was browsing the game section of the Digimon forum, he might have wondered whether he had stumbled upon something he should not be seeing. So, without hesitation, he clicked in.

The content of the thread was also about yesterday’s event. Only, this time it was not about tickets, but about dungeon raiding.

Because the poster had a clear sense of his own strength, he knew full well that he could never win by going alone. So he had found a few people to form a small squad. Who would have thought that this small squad would snowball into a hundred-man party?

At that moment, they truly believed themselves invincible. Dungeon bosses and the like meant nothing to them at all. With so many people, to put it bluntly, even if each of them spat once, they could drown the boss. And yet they were wrong, and spectacularly so.

The moment they entered Indaromon’s room, Indaromon attacked them directly. One sonic blast wiped out the entire hundred-man party, leaving no trace behind, as though they had never entered at all.

At the end of the post, the author even offered his own guess: he deeply suspected that Indaromon, though outwardly a Perfect, had already reached Mega-level combat power at the time. Perhaps even Digimon on the lower end of Mega would not have been his match.

After seeing this post, One Beast’s expression also turned grave.

If, back when he was still a Champion, he had reached the peak of his former Champion strength, then perhaps he might have had the ability to contend with a Mega Digimon, though only one at the lower end of the Mega tier.

Having experienced it himself, he knew that the poster was both right and wrong.

This Indaromon was not as strong as they had imagined. It should have possessed only first- to second-tier Mega combat power.

If he were to use his former Champion peak state together with Burst Mode, he might still have been able to defeat this Indaromon. Of course, in his current state, never mind whether Indaromon had Mega-level combat power—if Indaromon even possessed thirty or forty percent of a Perfect’s maximum battle strength, he would have no chance at all.

In any case, from this alone, it was clear that the more people there were, the more the dungeon boss’s strength really did increase.

Afterward, One Beast scrolled through the replies below the thread. Most of them were either worthless drivel, gleeful mockery, or people bragging to the poster that they had latched onto a powerful backer and cleared Indaromon’s room.

So One Beast left the thread. There was really no need to reply here. He had nothing useful to say, and anything he could have said would have fallen into one of those three categories anyway. It was better not to waste the time.

The threads below were not very useful either. Still, as he kept scrolling, One Beast found another one. Its title was: The More People There Are, the Worse It Gets.

After clicking into it, he found that the content was much the same as the thread he had just seen. It, too, told the story of a large squad going to raid a dungeon, only to be annihilated by the boss.

The squad in this poster’s account was a thousand-man team, more than nine hundred people larger than the previous one. And after they entered the room of Zhen Daromon and were about to attack, they suddenly realized that they had been pulled into a cutscene.

First they endured a painful round of verbal sparring with Zhen Daromon, and then, before their eyes, Zhen Daromon evolved. It went straight from the Perfect-stage Zhen Daromon into the Mega-stage White Tiger Beast.

Only when White Tiger Beast appeared did the cutscene finally end. After that, White Tiger Beast unleashed an Adamantine assault, and every one of them turned into metal, then into rust, and in the end the whole team was utterly wiped out.

Strictly speaking, this thread was no different from the previous one. Both were about how, when there were too many people, someone would try to rely on numerical superiority to injure the dungeon boss, only to be harshly taught a lesson by the system.

Still, this thread did yield one small piece of information: the bosses in the dungeon could evolve. The only question was what conditions had to be triggered for that evolution to occur.

From what he saw here, it was very likely that once the number of people exceeded four digits, that alone became one of the conditions. Of course, since no one could keep endlessly testing it, nobody knew whether teams beginning with seven, eight, or nine hundred would also provoke the boss’s evolution.

There were not many people in this thread who were taking pleasure in the misfortune, either. Instead, one after another, they were analyzing the hidden conditions that might cause a dungeon boss to evolve. Of course, they were not gods; they could not know everything. Moreover, the dungeon had not been open for very long. So rather than saying they were analyzing it, it would be more accurate to say they were guessing.

Whether their guesses were right or wrong, even they did not know, let alone anyone else. After looking for a while and confirming that the thread was also largely useless, One Beast simply backed out.

And so, by slow degrees, noon arrived. The landlady also came by with food. After the two of them finished eating, the landlady left, and by then it was already afternoon. One Beast’s IV drip had also finished, so he once again entered the game.