Alex barely had the thought before he hurriedly rolled to the side.
A split second after he moved, a bolt of lightning as thick as his torso tore through the spot where he had been standing, exploding against the ground with enough force to send dirt and debris flying in every direction.
Had his instinct not screamed at him to dive a moment earlier, he might as well have been burnt to a crisp right now.
"What the hell..." was all Alex managed to utter as he raised his head and took in the sight before him.
It had only taken him one step, one fucking step, and it seemed as if he had been thrown into a completely different world!
If before, the word he would have used to describe his environment was green, as there had been nothing but short grass and small herbs around him, now the only word that came to mind was chaos.
It was as if he had been thrown into an apocalyptic world, or one on the very brink of destruction.
Black, ominous clouds churned violently above him, swallowing the sky in an endless mass of darkness. Purple lightning, not too different from the bolt that had nearly struck Alex, crackled through the clouds, followed by thunderous booms that shook the very ground beneath him, and occasionally descended from the heavens to strike the earth with terrifying force.
That was only in the sky.
On the ground, the chaos was a hundred times worse.
Winds howled across the landscape with enough force to tear chunks of earth from the ground, sending dust, rocks, and debris flying through the air. The ground itself was anything but stable, trembling violently whenever one of the massive lightning bolts struck nearby, while cracks spread through the earth like veins. Here and there, patches of grass had been ripped from the ground entirely, leaving behind bare, fractured soil.
There was no sense of order anywhere Alex looked. The wind constantly changed direction, making it difficult to even keep his balance, while the occasional lightning strike turned the surrounding landscape into a blinding flash before another deafening boom followed.
'Where the fucking hell have I ended up?' Alex asked himself as the reality before him seemed closer to hell than the peaceful surroundings he had witnessed upon coming here.
He didn't have time to dwell on that as the soil around him suddenly liquefied and he abruptly fell inside.
Before it had completely engulfed him, he leapt away, rolling on the ground a few times before coming to a stop.
Alex cursed under his breath as he rolled a few more times before standing. Yet, the moment he did so, he didn't hesitate for a single second before he began to run, gusts of wind, lightning bolts, flying rocks, sudden fissures opening beneath his feet, violent bursts of energy erupting from the ground, razor-sharp shards of earth shooting out without warning, and all kinds of random hazards trying to kill him along the way.
Alex huffed for breath, his body beginning to feel the toll of the constant pressure and barrage of attacks he was being subjected to. He couldn't continue like this; something needed to change.
But what?!
He didn't know what he was doing here, nor what objectives this dimension wanted him to accomplish. Of course, he hadn't forgotten the message telling him to traverse the plain. In fact, it was that very message that was throwing him off.
How was he supposed to traverse the plain when, everywhere he looked for kilometers around, the only thing he could see was the damn plain that he was supposed to traverse?!
Well, it was a chaotic and very fear-inducing plain, but a plain nonetheless!
He had no idea in which direction he was supposed to go, least of all when he was busy trying to keep himself alive against the very plain he was supposed to cross. Alex could also feel that despite the time that had passed, he was still near the invisible wall he had passed through to get to this hell. This meant that he had made no significant advance in his objective.
All of this was without even mentioning the glaring elephant in the room: Alex himself.
As previously emphasized, he was currently the weakest he had ever been, weaker than he had been even before gaining the system.
Not only that, but his abilities were also sealed away. Well, he only had one useful ability, but still, not being able to use his smoke element was making everything harder. Not that he would have been able to use it for long anyway, considering how pathetic his mana reserves currently were, and that was despite him being a Sovereign and therefore requiring less mana to manipulate his smoke element.
To summarize it all, Alex was in a situation that even the most sub-par analyst would probably describe as completely fucked.
He wasn't discouraged, though.
'There has to be a way,' he thought as he tore his shirt completely apart. Quite frankly, with how badly it had been torn already, it was only getting in his way.
'Think, think, think. There's certainly a way out of this,' Alex thought, forcing himself to remain calm even as a tree trunk three times his size came barreling toward him at terrifying speed. 'What are my advantages? What can I use to survive this place?' he asked himself.
He immediately mobilized a portion of his mana into his legs and jumped, soaring high enough to avoid the massive trunk as it barreled beneath him.
He had barely cleared it when a violent gust of wind suddenly came from the opposite direction, slamming into him and throwing his body back down.
"Shit!"
Alex had just enough time to realize what was happening before he crashed directly into the still-rolling tree trunk.
Alex groaned in pain as the trunk swatted him away and he violently collided against the ground. He coughed and spat blood before forcing himself back onto his feet and continuing to move.
By now, there was one crucial rule he understood if he wanted to survive this place: always be on the move!
So despite his protesting muscles and aching body, Alex kept moving, never staying still because he knew damn well that if he did, he wouldn't last a minute before dying.
'My level has been reset to the lowest possible, my abilities are sealed, and even the assistance of the system is impossible,' Alex thought. 'There are still some things that haven't been sealed away.'
One of these things was the power of his mind and soul. Well, he had no way of using the power of his soul, nor could he see how it would help him, but for his mind, things were very different.
First of all, his mind worked just fine. Secondly, he still retained his thinking speed despite his level being restrained. This confirmed that the power of his mind and soul wasn't forcibly tied to his body's inherent strength.
Besides these two, the one thing that Alex had retained, which had been saving him and was the reason he was still alive, was his instincts.
Despite his body now being weaker, his instincts hadn't dulled even one bit. In fact, they felt sharper as Alex kept relying on them to avoid the more lethal blows.
It wasn't enough, though.
Even if he could feel the danger a split second before it came, his body was too slow to react, and sometimes, he was already in a position where there was simply nowhere to move. And that was without taking into consideration the sheer randomness of this place.
He could feel danger coming, but what good did that do if he had no idea what kind of danger it was?
Just sensing the danger wasn't enough. Somehow, he also needed to detect the type of danger, or at the very least, the general direction it was coming from.
If he still had his smoke element, that would have been easy. He could have spread it around himself like a dome and detected anything entering it or anything happening within its range. However, he clearly couldn't do that right now.
He honestly had no idea how he could achieve such a feat, but he at least knew that if he wanted to succeed, he would have to rely on his instincts.
And that made Alex wonder about something: what exactly were instincts in the first place?
This wasn't the first time he had asked himself that question.
He had been asking himself that question since he was still on Earth and had come across more definitions of instinct than he cared to remember.
To some, instinct was nothing more than a survival mechanism, a set of innate behaviors engraved into every living creature since birth. To others, it was the culmination of countless generations of evolution, the body's way of responding to danger before experience could be acquired. Some believed it to be an unconscious warning system, born from the brain processing countless details beyond conscious awareness, while seasoned warriors often described it as the voice of experience, where years of battle had transformed deliberate actions into seemingly natural reflexes.
To others, it was the body's ability to interpret incoming information and react without the need for a conscious thought process.
Of all these definitions, Alex found himself favoring the last one. Still, he considered it... too simplistic. It answered one question, but left another untouched. It explained how instincts functioned, yet said nothing about the information they relied upon or where that information came from. If instincts were nothing more than the ability to interpret information before it reached conscious thought, then perhaps understanding instincts themselves wasn't the key. Understanding the information they could interpret, and the very sources of that information, was.The answer to that question seemed all too obvious to Alex though. Of course the sources of information were the five senses. Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. All of them rooted in the body, all of them feeding raw data into the mind.
The body recorded. The process of interpretation followed. And somewhere between the two, instinct was born.
Just as he came to that conclusion, an intrusive thought suddenly crossed his mind, making him pause in his tracks.
Who said that the five senses were the only sources?