Dimensional Descent

Leonel and Aina appeared in the Dream Pavilion. Compared to the rest of the world, this place was still one of absolute peace. Those that could have caused trouble here had long since fled with their tails between their legs, they thought that there was really no point in staying behind as there would only be death waiting for them.

Leonel doubted they’d have the balls to come back for years, and that was only if one of them had a particularly potent daredevil side to them. For all they knew, the Pavilion had already been taken over by another Race and they just couldn’t be bothered to deal with the humans below. In fact, now that he thought about it, they probably assumed that the Gathering of Kingdoms was precisely that method to “deal with them”.

The Human Race had been immune to the Gathering of Kingdoms since its inception. Considering how far they had fallen from grace, there likely weren’t even legends or folktales remaining.

Plus, even if they did come back, this was Leonel’s domain. He could crush even the Sun Demon Emperor if he was stupid enough to step into this place.

Leonel led Aina by the hand into the very same Pavilion he had taken the Life Tablet from. Soon, they had entered a familiar world of white with a glass counter that extended toward both sides into infinity. This time, however, there was no honey trap-there wasn’t even a person on the other side.

With a wave of the hand, a long list of materials appeared and a ranking appeared above.

[Vast Dream Pavilion] [Rank: 101] [Prestige: 0.1]

Leonel smirked.

The Prestige ranking was a multiplier that ranged from 0.0 to 1.0 most often. Though, there were some that could go above 1.0 and some that were in the negatives.

This number hadn’t existed with the inception of the Dream Pavilions, instead it was one of those convoluted rules buried in legal jargon designed quite specifically to deal with the Vast Dream Pavilion.

In the past, there were no barriers on what you could buy. Gathering Contribution Points was difficult enough, so if you had enough to gather an obscene amount of resources, then it was your prerogative to spend it on whatever the hell you wanted.

Obviously, though, the higher ups felt that the Humans were leaning too much on their past glory to solidify their positions, and as such the rules changed.

First there were three divisions. Mortal, Demi-God and God. These separated treasures into tiers.

You could trade for a Mortal Treasure in, almost, any case. For a Demi-God, you would have to have a Prestige of 0.4 at the very least, and for God you would have to have 0.7.

However, these were only the surface level rules. As Leonel had said many times, these Dream Force experts loved to drip their rules in complexities as though everyone would forget how smart they were if they didn’t.

What you had to look out for wasn’t just Prestige, but rather the formula they tagged it with.

The graph looked like a normal exponential curve, the problem was that the formula was so long you’d probably need several mortal textbooks to stuff it all in.

Prestige was on the x-axis, so the higher your Prestige was, the greater the chance you had of your “access” shooting to the skies, and the lower your Prestige was, the greater the chance you’d be stuck on the slow growth side of the graph.

The question was, what was the rest of the formula made out of?

The first was time, not in terms of how long the Pavilion had existed, but rather how long it had been since said Contribution Points were earned. It took an average of all the years and plugged in a single number.

Unsurprisingly, the Vast Dream Pavilion got the short end of the stick. Even after this recent success, half of their points were still earned countless generations ago, causing the graph at 0.1 to not even look like it was moving at all, it just looked like a flat line infinitely close to 0 Access on the y-axis.

But that wasn’t the only thing plugged into the formula. The list was so long and convoluted that Leonel couldn’t be bothered to go through them all, but there were even things like number of disciples, how talented said disciples were, then there was a plugin for current strength of disciples versus potential strength, then there was yet another just for current strength.

Each one was yet another ding that caused the unique graph of the Vast Dream Pavilion to be by far the worst maybe in the existence of this system.

Essentially, if Leonel were to summarize, “Prestige” was just a surface number while the real important metric was “Access” which went from 0 to 9.

And right now, the Vast Dream Pavilion’s Access wasn’t even 0.1, and as a result what they could trade for was frighteningly limited.

There was also one other thing to mention, and that was the fact that Prestige was also a multiplier for the worth of your Contribution Points. Having 0.1 Prestige meant that everything they bought would cost ten times more than it should.

Quite frankly, Leonel was surprised they didn’t go with something even more exaggerated than this, but it was probably because they felt the rest of it was enough of a kick to the balls.

Still, Leonel looked at the obscenely long formula with a sneer on his face.

The thing about exponential graphs was that you didn’t need to go very far before your returns were suddenly far more than you bargained for, but that was a thought for another day.

It didn’t matter much to Leonel. He could trade for the lower level Mortal items, and then use Anastasia’s Cleansing Waters to raise them to God items. Although he couldn’t trade for any elaborate, high level stuff right now, raw resources wouldn’t be a problem at all.