Chapter : 547

He looked at his two Trans-level spirits, who now stood at his side. Iffrit, the silent demon of flame, was a towering monument of cooled magma and dormant power. Fang Fairy, the graceful goddess of the storm, stood beside him, her ethereal form once more serene. They were a study in contrasts—the brutal, earthy power of fire, and the swift, ethereal grace of lightning. His hammer and his scalpel.

He checked his System interface, a slow, deeply satisfied smile spreading across his face as he reviewed the results of their brief, brutal work. The progress bar for the repeatable slime quest, a new version that had appeared after his first foundational clear, was ticking up at a dizzying rate.

[Repeatable Quest: Slime Field Maintenance]

[Objective: Eliminate 1000 Glistening Slimes.]

[Reward: 100 Farming Coins (FC)]

[Progress: 250/1000]

Two hundred and fifty slimes, eradicated in what felt like no more than thirty minutes of exhilarating, if comically one-sided, combat. At this rate, he could complete the full quota of one thousand in less than two subjective hours. The 500 FC he needed for his first major System Upgrade felt not just achievable, but imminent.

“Excellent work, both of you,” Lloyd said, sending a wave of approval through their bonds. He did a quick internal check. His unified core felt strained, but not depleted. The new architecture of the 2.0 system was proving its worth. He estimated they were at about seventy percent of their total capacity. More than enough for another round.

“Alright, team,” he announced, his voice ringing with a renewed, almost cheerful, purpose. “Phase one of the harvest was a successful field test. Now, for phase two. Let’s clear the next sector.”

He turned, his gaze sweeping across the plains, expecting to see the next teeming, jiggly horde of oblivious slime-fodder waiting for their appointment with fiery, electrified oblivion.

But he saw… nothing.

The Slime Plains, which had been a vast ocean of bouncing blue gelatin, were now empty. Completely, utterly, and strangely, unnervingly, empty. The scorched, blackened earth from their recent slaughter was a stark, ugly wound, but beyond it, the pristine grass stretched on, devoid of a single, bouncing slime.

Lloyd froze, his brow furrowing in confusion. “What…?” he murmured. He extended his senses, reaching out across the empty plains. He felt… nothing. No life signs. No gurgling. No jiggling.

Master? Fang Fairy’s mental voice was a hum of shared confusion. The prey… it has vanished.

Iffrit shifted his immense weight, and Lloyd could feel a wave of what could only be described as profound, almost childish, disappointment from the massive fire-god. He had been promised a glorious, endless slaughter, and it had, it seemed, ended prematurely.

“They can’t just be… gone,” Lloyd muttered to himself, his own mind racing. He had assumed the slimes were a limitless, respawning resource. But the sea had, apparently, dried up. He turned his focus inward, to the one source of information that might explain the rules of its own insane game.

“System,” he commanded. “Report. Status of the Slime Plains biome.”

The cool, blue interface shimmered into existence, and the voice of the Administrator, calm and synthetic, replied. “Query registered, User. Current hostile lifeform count in the ‘Slime Plains’ biome: Zero.”

“Zero?” Lloyd’s voice was incredulous. “That’s impossible. I cleared a section. Where did they go?”

“The entities have not ‘gone’ anywhere, User,” the Administrator replied with a hint of pedantic correction. “They have simply reached their designated spawn limit for the current temporal cycle.”

Lloyd stared. “Spawn limit? Temporal cycle? Explain.”

The interface displayed a new, and deeply frustrating piece of information.

[System Functionality Note: Soul Farm Biome Population Dynamics]

[Each biome within the Soul Farm is governed by a Spawn Rate Protocol. This protocol dictates the maximum number of hostile entities that can be generated per a standardized unit of Primary Reality Time.]

Lloyd’s mind seized on the last four words. Real-world time.

“Elaborate,” Lloyd commanded, a sense of cold, dawning dread beginning to creep up his spine. The beautiful vision of a single, marathon session of grinding was rapidly being replaced by a much grimmer, more bureaucratic reality.

“The Soul Farm’s monster generation engine,” the Administrator explained patiently, “is linked to the temporal flow of your primary reality of origin, Riverio. It is not an infinite, self-contained system. It requires a baseline of one real-world hour to fully repopulate a designated biome to its maximum capacity.”

The words hit him with the force of a physical blow.

Chapter : 548

“Your recent harvesting operation,” the Administrator continued, its voice a calm, clinical, and utterly devastating, final nail in the coffin of his dreams, “was, by all metrics, highly efficient. You successfully eliminated the maximum hourly spawn allocation of two hundred and fifty Glistening Slimes in approximately… thirty-two subjective minutes of Farm time.”

A new line of text appeared, stark and unforgiving.

[Current Spawn Allocation for ‘Slime Plains’: 0/250]

[Time until next full respawn cycle: 57 Real-World Minutes.]

Fifty-seven minutes. He had to wait nearly a full hour, in the real world, before another single, pathetic, bouncing slime would even deign to appear. And worse, his current kill count of 250 was just a fraction of the full quest. The quest was all or nothing. He had to kill the full one thousand to get the 100 FC. This meant he would have to wait, leave the Farm, and return at least three more times, over the course of three more real-world hours, just to complete a single, low-tier quest.

The time-dilation effect, his greatest strategic advantage, was still there. But it was… neutered. Gated. Throttled by a resource cap that was tied to the one thing he couldn't control: the slow, relentless, and now deeply, profoundly, frustrating, march of the clock in the real world.

He stood in the silent, empty plain, the frustration a cold, hard knot in his gut. He had the power to annihilate thousands, but the System would only feed them to him in bite-sized, hourly portions. It was a maddening, artificial bottleneck, a clear and deliberate throttling of his potential.

He looked at his quest log. 250/1000. It was a monument to his own wasted effort. He had expended a significant amount of his own energy for a quarter of a quest that yielded absolutely no reward until it was fully completed. This was not just a grind; it was an inefficient one. And for the Major General, for the engineer, for the man who saw the world in terms of systems and optimization, inefficiency was a cardinal sin.

A grim, stubborn resolve settled in his heart. He would not be beaten by the System’s frustrating rules. He would optimize. He would conquer.

He sat cross-legged on the empty plain and entered a state of light meditation, letting his and his spirits' reserves slowly recover while he waited. He felt the subtle shift in the dimension as the real-world hour passed. The air was once again filled with the gentle, squelching gurgle of a fresh batch of 250 slimes. The hourly cycle had reset.

“Alright team,” he announced, his voice a low growl of pure, unadulterated determination. “Let’s finish this.”

He spent the next subjective half-hour in a state of mindless, efficient slaughter, clearing the new wave of slimes. His quest log updated. 500/1000. He waited again. Another real-world hour. Another wave. He destroyed them. 750/1000. He waited one last time. The final wave appeared. He annihilated them.

Finally, after a long, frustrating, and strategically fragmented battle that had taken four real-world hours to facilitate, the notification he had been waiting for chimed.

[Repeatable Quest: Slime Field Maintenance - COMPLETE!]

[Reward: 100 Farming Coins (FC) Issued.]

He checked his new balance.

[Current Farming Coins: 350 (Previous) + 100 (Reward) = 450 FC]

Four hundred and fifty. The slow, inefficient process had yielded its reward. He was now just 50 FC short of his goal. He could repeat the entire four-hour slime process for another 100 FC, but the thought was a wave of pure, unadulterated dread. There had to be a better way. The economics of the Farm were screaming at him to find a more valuable target.

The silence of the now-empty, four-times-scorched Slime Plains was a profound, mocking thing. The 100 FC he had just earned felt less like a victory and more like a paycheck for a long, grueling, and deeply unsatisfying shift at the world’s most dangerous gelatin factory. The grand, strategic vision of a high-speed grind had collided with the cold, hard, and deeply infuriating, wall of bureaucratic reality.

This is untenable, his internal eighty-year-old sighed, the voice a mixture of weary resignation and a new, grudging respect for the sheer, elegant cruelty of the System’s design. The slime fields are a low-wage trap. Continuing this way is the definition of insanity. It’s not about how fast I can kill; it’s about the value of the kill.

The revelation was a clarifying, if deeply frustrating, one. His own personal time, even with the time-dilation, was his most valuable resource. To spend it clearing out low-yield, time-gated mobs like the slimes was a strategic, and deeply, profoundly, unacceptable waste. He had to find a more profitable venture.