They continued talking about more pleasant things for the rest of the thirty minutes. Sam noticed a large drop in the hostility between Jacob and Glakassa, and he did his best to broker that as best he could. By the end, the two were talking unbidden, a bit frostily perhaps, but still talking.

The event has now begun!

With those words, the System galvanized the treasure hunt. Sam and the others leaped to their feet, and raced off into the wasteland, ready to see what sorts of cultivators their compatriots were. Sam couldn't contain the excitement, the thought of finally finding someone that could compete with him other than his own father. Perhaps that wasn't here, but then again, perhaps it was.

There weren't any other cultivators nearby, but Sam could feel their presence at a distance. To his pleasant surprise, many of them felt like actual challenges. Maybe on the level of the Foreman, while not under the effects of his final skill.

"I can feel some decently powerful aura signatures," the Overlord said, surprised. "Maybe this floor won't be as boring."

"Let's hope so," Sam said. "I'm looking forward to a real fight against peers, not against creatures centuries older than me."

They headed towards the nearest of the auras. As Sam drew near, he started to sense some of the nuances to it. That particular E Ranker was a Time cultivator, something that Sam hadn't really seen yet. Time was an element that needed a lot of power to be anything more than a glorified speed boost, presumably the power of an E Ranker. It was just like Fate in this regard. Those two elements weren't as flashy as the others initially, but they grew massively in power the further one stretched their elemental mastery.

When Sam caught up with the other cultivator, all he saw was a blur racing across the ground. Rather than being a question of speed, a bubble of time dilation surrounded the cultivator. The world within was warped, sped up to immense levels.

"I'll deal with this," Sam said to his father and Glakassa. "I've been training my Domain to break enemy concepts and Daos."

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"Domain?" both asked in unison.

"I'll tell you later. Right now, let's get this threat out of the way."

Sam reached out with his will, and slammed a spike of reality warping Dao energy into the time dilation bubble. He found his power contested by his foe's, to a surprising degree. The bubble bent around his assault, curving in until one of the Time cultivator's arms stuck out of it. The entire energy construct fell apart, and the cultivator within rolled across the ground as all of his momentum caught up to him.

"Surrender," Sam called out. "You can't beat me." He quickly scanned his enemy as he said that.

Jelrak Talon(Tower Alias)

Elthak

Level 171

Sam wasn't familiar with the alien species, but his eyes told him enough. Jelrak was covered in scales, seemingly in lieu of armor. Every inch of his body was covered, and he wore no clothes, or any sort of accoutrements.

Rather than say anything, he rose to his feet, ethereal grey light blooming around his fists. With a roar, he thrust them forwards, and a wave of all consuming Time swept out across the land. The world broke, fragments of reality speeding up, while others ground to a halt. Jelrak stomped his foot down, shattering the earth. The cracks spread unevenly, and the difference in the timescales exponentially increased the damage as chunks of rock and dust were shunted between different zones of Time.

Stones were accelerated to supersonic speeds, shattering into shrapnel as they were suddenly slammed into far slower projectiles. Sam took this all in as he moved, teleporting through the gaps in the Time mage's control. He gathered his own Dao, sheathing himself in its light. Not as a means of assault, but rather, to render the space around him harder to alter.

Jelrak raised his fists, and slammed them down against the ground. A spectral clock rose from the dust, shadowy and grey, but still visible. It was a monstrous amalgamation of every sort of timepiece that Sam could imagine, from a grandfather clock, to a bell, to even what looked like a high tech atomic clock.

Before he could move, the largest clock in the amalgam, the grandfather clock's face, moved. The seconds hand ticked forward, and between one moment and the next, Jelrak slipped through time. He appeared before Sam and thrust his palm into his chest. Sam didn't move. In fact, the strike felt like it had come from the hand of a mortal. Instead, the battlefield around him began to speed up, Jelrak's motions growing faster and faster until he was a blur even without using his abilities.

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