[Third trial will now be initiated! 'Chase the Cheetah' has been selected as the third trial! Challenger has one week to touch the Cheetah of the Golden Sun once!]
The moment the message of the artificial intelligence resounded in his mind, a golden furred Cheetah emerged out of a spatial portal that had appeared out of nowhere.
Staring at him, the Cheetah growled at him before it jumped through a new spatial portal it had manifested, only to appear behind him.
There, it touched his shoulder before disappearing once again, emerging more than a hundred meters away.
It was almost as if the Cheetah was playing with him.
However, owing to the fact that it didn't kill him the moment it appeared behind him, Jason realized that it was not supposed to attack him.
This was great because Jason knew that his strength was not high enough to cope with the attacks of a being at the Initial Ascendion stage.
Evaluating the strength, speed, and spatial affinity of the Cheetah of the Golden Sun, he couldn't help but frown, thinking that it would be quite difficult to pass the trial in merely seven days!
Focusing on the carefully moving Cheetah that had its eyes trained on him, Jason wanted to experiment a little bit.
Because of that, he first exerted the Floating Sky movement technique followed by circulating mana through his body.
Only then did he charge towards the Cheetah of the Golden Sun, without using any other means to further enhance his speed, or to slow down his opponent.
In the end, the trial's task sounded quite easy because he only had to touch the Cheetah once, but that was quite big of an issue because he was unable to even get near it.
Whether it was its speed, reflexes, and unique running pattern that even his foresight blessing was having problems to keep up with, the Cheetah was clearly far better in every aspect.
window.pubfuturetag = window.pubfuturetag || [];window.pubfuturetag.push({unit: "64ce79d606107d003c23ea27", id: "pf-5140-1"})It might only be at the Initial phase of the Ascendion stage, but that didn't matter.
Its racial traits were fully focused on increasing its speed, even more so because it had two cultivation veins.
This allowed the beast to cultivate in the path of Pryr and Maest.
Thus, its physical condition was extremely strong only to be further enhanced with the use of mana and its spatial affinity.
Because of that, Jason was not astonished when the Cheetah of the Golden Sun evaded him the moment he rushed towards it.
It was not even its full speed and simply ran away from Jason.
Yet, instead of allowing the Cheetah to get away, Jason threw fireballs towards it, attempting to distract it while manifesting walls of ice simultaneously.
Unfortunately, the Cheetah evaded the fireballs easily before it simply advanced through the thick layer of ice as if it was made of paper.
This destroyed the majority of plans Jason had already begun to formulate in his mind.
Not knowing what to do next, he started to experiment using the different affinities, and how great certain abilities went along with it.
With his strength, the petrification curse was almost completely useless against the Cheetah, while the race specific weakening curse had some use, but its efficiency was rather counter-effective.
Meanwhile, the abyssal effect with just a little boost of mana inserted proved to be the most efficient in slowing down the Cheetah of the Golden Sun for a moment.
He didn't even have to try using the chaos attribute for the time being.
window.pubfuturetag = window.pubfuturetag || [];window.pubfuturetag.push({unit: "64cc9e79c7059f003e4ad4b0", id: "pf-5109-1"})Through this, Jason had been able to erect several layers of ice in order to see the exact number of walls he would require to force the Cheetah to use its affinity to escape being touched by him.
Unfortunately, it simply continued to storm through the ice walls by barely enveloping its body with a faint membrane of mana.
Other than that nothing happened, and Jason couldn't help but frown.
He was getting a feeling that the Cheetah was truly playing around with him.
It may have been a little bit confused when the abyssal effect had affected it, but apart from that, it didn't really slow it down.
In the end, Jason knew that all of his abilities were not in their strongest form because Jason had retracted his aura completely while the Stigma above his right eye was not activated.
Other than that, he hadn't allowed his soulbonds to enter his mana core right now. Instead, Jason wanted to devise a proper plan before he would initiate it.
There were multiple ideas coursing through his mind, and thinking of the best plan was not as easy as it seemed.
The Cheetah of the Golden Sun had yet to show its full speed, let alone how quickly it could react and manifest a spatial portal.
The speed at which it could manifest a spatial portal was one of its key strengths because Jason was unable to prevent the Cheetah from manifesting a portal.
He had no technique or tool that could seal the space around him, after all.
Because of that, he simply continued to test all kinds of things.
As Jason kept using a trial and test method to see what would work and what wouldn't, an entire day had passed before he had finally completed his experiments.
window.pubfuturetag = window.pubfuturetag || [];window.pubfuturetag.push({unit: "663633fa8ebf7442f0652b33", id: "pf-8817-1"})After that, he took the simplest plan and initiated it.
Thus, Petri entered his mana core, enhancing his physical strength by a large margin.
Afterward, he began to rush after the Cheetah, using his strongest speed, while utilizing the curses once in a while to distract the cheetah.
At the same time, Jason laid out hundreds of tiny black flames that belonged to Solaris.
Wherever Jason went, tiny black flames were planted in the lush grass below him.
Yet, oddly enough they were not spreading. Instead, they remained at the exact same spot they had fallen to.
Following that, hours passed in which the entire enclosed area was filled with tiny black flames, obstructing the Cheetah's path.
From the beginning, it had noticed that the black flames were dangerous because a simple brush of its fur had been enough to burn a layer of its mana membrane. Thus it was avoiding the flames that were sustained through Jason's mana, restricting him severely.
The Cheetah of the Golden Sun was confident that Jason wouldn't be able to sustain thousands of flames for a long time, and when his speed slowed down, the Cheetah's assumption was proved to be correct…or so it thought.
However what it didn't know was that Jason had simply replaced Petri, who had occupied his mana core before, with Solaris, drastically reducing the mana consumption of the black flames it could create, consumed.
His speed had decreased owing to the non-existent physical enhancement he received through Solaris, but that didn't matter because everything he had secretly prepared was already completed.
In fact, the second phase of his plan was not something Jason was sure would work as he had planned.
With thousands of black flames scattered across the ground, he would be unable to sustain them for a long time once Solaris were to be replaced by another soulbond in his mana core.
However, that was the only way in which he would even remotely reach the Cheetah of the Golden Sun, using his fusion with Petri or Artemis.
Thus, the moment he replaced Solaris in his mana core with another soulbond everything had to be perfect, and there was no room for error!
Owing to that he prepared everything thoroughly and awaited the perfect timing to grab the chance of touching the Cheetah of the Golden Sun only once.
