The Primal Hunter

When they appeared on floor forty-three, they were on board a spaceship traveling toward a large asteroid belt, where each asteroid may as well have been a small planet. The story was that they were mercenaries in a vessel stranded in space after a battle with space pirates – yes, there were pirates on this floor again – and during this fight, the ship had gotten damaged.

Their job was to scour this asteroid belt for natural treasures that could be used to repair the ship, but after they arrived, they discovered that dangerous wanted people were also hiding out on these asteroids among the natives.

To further complicate things, these planets were filled to the brim with people of all sorts of races. Tens, if not hundreds of Billions of humans, beastfolk, demons, monsters, elves, dwarves… all sorts of races lived on these asteroids. The most powerful of which was only in D-grade. Outside of the criminals, that is, all of whom were firmly in C-grade.

Calling them criminals was honestly a bit… wrong? They were people who had pissed off major factions in a myriad of ways, some of which Jake deemed legitimate, others he found bullshit. For example, one of the criminals had purposefully created cursed weapons and armor and spread them to unsuspecting people, driving them insane and wiping out a huge kingdom by proxy. That guy was clearly an asshole, and Jake was all fine with stomping him.

However, there were also cases where the big bad criminal had done some rather basic stuff, just to the wrong people. One of them had killed someone with a Divine Blessing in self-defense and was now marked a heretic to be hunted down and killed on sight, and another had taken and consumed a natural treasure some kingdom totally had their eyes on first.

Now, this is where a bit of important context should be added… the spaceship wasn’t really one made for C-grades. In fact, the one controlling it was a mid-tier B-grade automata that had merged itself with the ship and, despite being damaged, could still harness the full weapons system of the ship.

This is to say, it had the ability to blow up smaller planets, or at least these asteroids.

The B-grade automata captain decided instantly that they should also investigate and eliminate the criminals, along with retrieving the items needed to repair the ship. Luckily they didn’t have to fully search the asteroids as the ship had a mobile scanner they could bring with them when going down on each asteroid.

So, to fully summarize, Jake and company had the job of investigating the asteroids for treasures to repair the ship using a scanner while at the same time identifying the C-grade criminals hidden there and eliminating them all. Locating these criminals was the hard part, and all they had to do to beat the floor was collect the treasures, and figuring out if a planet had any treasures wouldn’t take more than a few days for each.

Once it was decided there were no treasures, they could then decide to go back to the ship… and, to “optimize” their points per day, do a little bit of lying by telling the automata that the asteroid was filled with really bad criminals and to blow it up. That way, they could kill all the criminals there without bothering to find each one individually, only at the sacrifice of a few billion F, E, and D-grades.

This was one part of the moral lesson. Because while it was made clear that this was an option, it was also made clear this could be frowned upon. Killing billions to just take out a handful of potential targets wasn’t something any laws directly prohibited, but doing so wasn’t exactly looked kindly on either.

Not to say that actually eliminating the criminals on the asteroids was simple if one wanted to avoid collateral damage, even after they had identified them. A genius-level C-grade and a mid-tier C-grade fighting could wreak a lot of damage, something Jake had been a witness to during his visions of the Malefic Viper, so deciding to kill them also had to be done with caution to avoid widespread destruction.

The reason why wholesale slaughter of the “weak” was so frowned upon wasn’t entirely due to some altruistic intent from the multiverse’s major factions. Sure, there probably was a bit of moral thinking in there somewhere, but one of the predominant reasons was the fear of setting a precedent.

If one faction decided to send a group of C-grades to destroy a few small planets belonging to a major faction, chances are the faction would retaliate in kind but with more force to not appear weak. So they would send a few B-grades and blow up even more planets… only for the first faction to then send A-grades before finally a bunch of gods are going around wiping out all life in galaxies. This kind of “war” would have no end and only lead to the ruination of a faction’s future.

No, it was instead far more accepted to just send the first group of C-grades after another group of C-grades. Then they could fight, and the only “fair” retaliation would be something similar, making it far less of a slaughter and more like a competition. It also meant that the higher-ups wouldn’t move, as that would ultimately make them look like the true aggressors by escalating the conflict.

This was also viewed as safer. In Villy’s words, most gods or even just very high-grade people were fucking cowards. They didn’t dare to fight others around their own level of power but instead preferred to settle matters through proxies. Rather than two gods fighting, they would rather compete in some other fashion, like setting up a tournament with A-grades or a war with C-grades, all while setting rules to make it a “fair” fight. This did also have the benefit of assisting the people made to take part in these competitions, effectively cultivating the next generation.

Killing a random planet of D-grades could also have other unwanted implications. Karma was a powerful thing, and no one knew if some random A-grade had once been born there or maybe some god had recently just come by and liked the place a lot a few millennia earlier, and your decision to blow it up annoyed them.

The spaceship had records of some such incidents that they could freely listen to while traveling between asteroids. One of the examples that struck Jake was about a late-tier god who had arrived on a planet and really liked a certain lake. He had settled down there for a long time and meditated, finally breaking free from his worries which allowed him to pass the final step and become a Godking. Two thousand years later, two S-grades were fighting and ended up accidentally destroying the planet, resulting in the Godking descending in the middle of the fight to destroy both of them for their transgression. He had then proceeded to wipe out both factions the S-grades were leaders of for good measure to quell his anger.

All because they had ruined a nice lakeside view.

To summarize, killing innocent people shouldn’t be done haphazardly, or you could piss someone off unintentionally. That, and it was just a bad look.

Anyway, when doing the floor, they didn’t blow up any asteroids. No, they were more than overpowered enough by themselves to utterly cheese the floors. Jake had his wonderful Pulse of Perception and a powerful innate Bloodline-powered ability to sense auras, allowing him to know if an asteroid had any C-grades pretty damn quickly after stepping foot on one.

Not that he was the most overpowered of them. You see, planets filled with enlightened beings and beasts were naturally full of life. Life meant plants. Plants meant Dina could also ask a damn forest that had existed for tens of thousands of years about stuff, and it would know, while sometimes even asking its friends, resulting in their fastest asteroid clearing – including getting a natural treasure – being less than half an hour.

This all resulted in them going through nearly a hundred and fifty asteroids with life on within only seven months, with the majority of the time spent flying between each of them. Jake got some good alchemy during this time and was gleefully experimenting with Curse Fragments whenever they had downtime. Sadly, there wasn’t a single time he had to go all-out during the entire floor, as the one time they did find a small asteroid just filled with criminals, Jake and Dina had already been sent off to two other asteroids nearby. The Fallen King, Sylphie, and Sword Saint had thus been the only ones to experience proper combat as they spent a week or so killing all the leaders of some criminal gang that had taken over the asteroid while also retrieving the final item they needed to repair the ship and move on to the next floor.

Thus they pretty easily did floor forty-three while learning the lesson that going full murderhobo on a bunch of E and D-grades wasn’t cool.

Onto floor forty-four, Jake honestly hadn’t known what to expect. What more rules and norms were there?

Well, floor forty-four ended up feeling kind of… personal for Jake. For many of them, actually.

Because while floor forty-three was about how valued large groups of weaker people were and how one should leave them alone as a general rule, floor forty-four was all about individual creatures one should leave the hell alone.

They had appeared on what looked like a massive disc floating through space, filled with large islands spread all throughout. Both below the water, on the water, and floating up in the sky. Each island had its own little ecosystem and was covered by some kind of barrier keeping all the creatures inside. New monster variants had begun appearing within these domes, with their job to pass on to the next floor being to find and identify at least two hundred and fifty variants worth noting.

Information was pretty scarce, but the one that tasked them with this quest was an old woman living in a hut who Identified as a level 250 Researcher but, based on Jake’s senses, was actually far more powerful than that. Not quite a god, but definitely A-grade. None of the others could notice this, though Sylphie did talk about how the wind avoided her, which made her think something was wrong.

Anyway, they were to find these rare variants and then categorize where they were while not directly engaging them in combat. The lesson from the Researcher was that all variants were of value to the multiverse as they represented new and growing Records. A single powerful variant appearing on a planet – or a dome, in this case – could uplift the entire ecosystem and lead to a cascade effect.

It was a bit like what happened with Earth, partly because of Jake. So many powerful people appearing there resulted in massive growth potential even for the average Earthling. People who could never reach C-grade before had not set foot in the grade, and then those who likely could have gotten there themselves now had far better evolutions and future prospects.

Variants appearing also mattered to many factions due to the potential of allying with them. Two beasts of a similar species but different variants having a child would lead to a merge of their Records, and sometimes a more powerful variant than both of them would emerge. Adding new variants thus mattered a lot to some factions, even to the gods. This was naturally something Jake was very well aware of, considering his status as a so-called “Harbinger of Primeval Origins.”

On that note, no, Jake didn’t even consider for a second trying to get extra points or achievements by making a variant on floor forty-four. The Primal Juice or whatever was far too valuable and not something to squirt out haphazardly.

Anyway, all of this is to say that a lot of factions would get royally pissed if someone went around killing weak variants for no reason. It was generally considered customary that if you, as a C-grade, saw a lower-grade variant running around, you would leave it alone. If you did want to get rid of it, one could always just send someone around their own level, at least allowing the person who kills it to get something out of the entire thing.

So, the entire floor was basically flying between massive domes all over ten thousand kilometers in diameter and categorizing variants and taking notes, with the Researcher then deciding if the observed beast or monster was considered rare enough to count.

Well, that, or just killing them outright, no matter their grade.

Because the lesson of this floor wasn’t just to respect variants and the Records they represented but to be aware that some creature variants were to be killed on sight. These types of creatures were often what was considered living calamities.

Curse Remnants.

Plague Spirits.

And, one Jake truly did agree with was a menace to the entire multiverse: Fungi.

Or, well, not necessarily just fungi or all kinds of fungi. In general, plant-based living creatures with Truesouls weren’t really that special. The tree Jake had met in the center of the forest close to Haven was a common example of a plant monster, and so was the fungi Jake had seen below Haven. But one of them was viewed far less favorably than the others.

Fungi that could infect other plant life were often seen as a pest akin to an ectognamorph hive but were not really viewed as calamities. But some variants that didn’t just absorb energy from and control plant life could appear. Some evolved to be able to control any form of life or just anything with a soul or energy. These fungi or plants could evolve to take over entire planets, creating massive bodies out of them. From there, they would then spread and try to consume other planets one after another until they were killed or died due to age.

These plant and fungi monsters weren’t that much different in that fashion from the aforementioned ectognamorphs, but there was one big difference: sapience. A hive could be talked to. Negotiated with. They could join a faction. These plants nearly never had any true intelligence, not even when reaching S-grade. It was only if they somehow managed to become gods that they would truly awaken.

Plague Spirits and such were much the same in that they only had an instinct. Curse Remnants also only existed to do whatever the curse was about, which was rarely something pleasant.

The final kind of creature one was meant to at least consider killing on sight was one familiar to Jake. It was monsters that had lost themselves and had become living killing machines that destroyed anything they came across without a care in the world.

Prime example? C and especially B-grade Villy. He had been a bloody menace back then, wiping out all life on his own birth planet, and then proceeded to slaughter whatever else he came across. Based on what Jake had seen, this was only in late-tier C-grade for Villy, though. Jake was unsure what exactly happened between the Villy he saw being crafty with the First Sage and fooling human kingdoms, to the Villy that sat in wyvern form on top of a cliff, roaring toward the sky. B-grade Villy was bad all the way through; no two ways about it.

Naturally, no powerful A or S-grade had killed Villy during his rise to power, and Jake was thankful for that. As for now… no one would even talk negatively about this. This was a great example of why these weren’t really hard rules. Though, to be fair, there weren’t truly any hard rules in the multiverse.

Plagues were not looked nicely upon, and some types were viewed as outlawed, yet Jake knew the Order still worked on them. One was not meant to mess with random weak people, yet Eversmile still did experiments that doomed entire civilizations without a care in the world, while Stormild could casually consume an entire galaxy indiscriminately. Yet none looked at the Primordials and called them criminals. These were ultimately just outlines of what one could expect to piss off other factions by doing, but as long as you had the backing or the power, it didn’t truly matter. Shit, based on some of the things mentioned, Jake and Eternal Hunger broke quite a few norms and rules.

Back to floor forty-four, this one wasn’t hard either but was all about exploration like the prior floor while having the Researcher tell them about how important rare variants were to the balance of the multiverse. This one was better, though, as there was a bit more combat, and they didn’t have to rely on a spaceship to take them around, allowing them to beat the floor in “just” five months. Pretty good for these larger floors.

After reporting on variants one final time, the Researcher summoned a portal as “new assistants were arriving shortly to replace them” while thanking them for their contribution. Another floor down.

Floors forty-three and forty-four had both been pretty simple and not that difficult, with them even raking up plenty of bonus points by doing things fast and well. Things had been pretty straightforward, and they had done as expected of them with great results. However, the final one of these “laws and norms” floors, as Jake dubbed them, would prove to be a bit more… complicated. Because this one was all about a rule in the multiverse Jake was really, really bad at:

Respecting divine authority.