Fake Professor, Misunderstood As Strong - Chapter 195

Chapter 195: Crossing the Golden Path…
The ‘Golden Path of Hope’ is a massive road that leads to the palace grounds located high above the half-mountain, right after the city’s broken ruins.

Why ‘Half’ you ask?

This mountain used to be the tallest one in the whole abyss altar area, but the first king sliced it in half and leveled the ground so that he could create his palace in a very high place.

He wanted to glance at his magnificent empire every day from his room’s balcony.

The path that leads to the main gate of the palace walls is called the ‘Golden Path of Hope’ as this path was the sole path that the people of the empire could use to meet their benevolent king.

It was once created using real gold floor tiles, and it shined brightly all day long.

Those who went to the palace for the king’s audience returned smiling, their despair and regrets swept away.

That’s why they called it the path of hope; the King was a symbol of hope for them, and those who saw him could feel his benevolent aura caring for them.

Jareth stepped on the broken path, which was littered with rotting bodies of monsters and several small potholes filled with miasmic mud, ready to shoot spears made of condensed miasma at you, and a look of nostalgia appeared on his face.

When he watched the videos of the people who made it to this place, he laughed at them whenever they tried to cross this path and died.

The main reason is that in the game, the whole path of hope is filled with these rotten corpses that explode at your face when you get close to them, and the explosion will directly make your player character lose their balance.

The player character will fly into the sky, and a glitch will happen that will directly make the player character fall towards the side, and as this path is located quite high above the ground, falling down means instant ‘Death’ for the player.

If you carelessly allow those miasmic spears to strike you, they will propel you skyward, causing the glitch to recur.

In other words, any trap you encounter in this location will result in instant death for your player character, as the glitch will cause you to fall down.

This was so funny that many streamers made videos and reels about this glitch to show how miserable it was.

‘The fact that this game is riddled with glitches everywhere is not a joke; there’s so many glitches that you can’t even count them…’

‘Every time you think that you have seen them all, another new one gets discovered by some random player…’

Jareth shook his head and decided to try it for himself.

‘I wonder if something like this will happen here or not…’

Jareth walked over to the side of a rotting corpse to satisfy his curiosity.

*BOOOM!!*

And sure enough, the corpse exploded, and a massive shockwave spread out in all directions; even the ‘Path of Hope’ trembled crazily from that massive explosion, and a loud voice rang out in Jareth’s ears.

‘Quite the big explosion that is… I wonder if Miasma has turned these rotting corpses into exploding traps on purpose?…’

As Jareth’s Mana Shield is a bit too strong, it’s literally impossible for such a weak explosion to forcefully make him fly in the sky.

Even though he was standing right in the center of the explosion, not even a scratch appeared on his mana shield.

He just shook his head and started to head towards the palace grounds directly.

‘If not for the dark fog that blocks vision when you fly in the sky, I wouldn’t have even bothered to walk on the ground; it would have been ten times easier to just fly and skip this place altogether…’

Crossing the illusion in the city of horrors was important, as that was a set condition to make the palace grounds and the golden path of hope appear in front of you.

If you don’t cross the illusion and try to walk around the city to go to the palace grounds directly, you will not be able to find them as they won’t appear at all.

The situation with the palace grounds and the golden path is something similar to that of the ‘Death Cage’ in which Nathan is stuck.

The space-time fabric itself is being manipulated here; the palace grounds do exist in that location; it’s just that they are hidden behind the folds of the space-time fabric.

Unless you fulfill the condition set by the miasma in this place, you won’t be able to access them at all. And the condition is to cross the illusion barrier.

This is basically a trap from the start to finish; crossing the illusion barrier itself is a very difficult task, as only the most strong-willed people can make it out of there.

Even Jareth had to face his own inner demons to finally get rid of the influence of the illusion on him.

In other words, the miasma is purposely luring you inside the illusion if you want to meet your first king, and once you enter the illusion, its over for you.

That’s likely how the last few surviving people ended up dying in the days of calamity.

‘I guess Konda was the one who brought this calamity upon the city?… But maybe the First King had long died before Konda even came to this world…’

The first king was a strong person who was beyond the realm of grade 1 mages; either he had already died before Konda came, or he was just too old by that time and wasn’t able to defend his empire from Konda’s rampage.

In the first place, Konda had an insane amount of resistance for both magical and physical attacks, even in its weakened state that Jareth fought.

‘It is possible that the First King sacrificed himself along with his subordinates to seal the Abysmal Dragon near the node of the seal of the False Dome…’

Konda spreads miasma just by existing in a place; the law of miasma is firmly embedded in the body of every Abysmal Dragon from birth.

After getting sealed, Konda likely still kept spreading miasma and polluted the whole forgotten city to the current state.

It was a slow death that the people of the forgotten city couldn’t contend against.

‘In the game, you have to undo the seal to fight Konda, and then you have to reinforce the seal after defeating him… Only then will the fight end…’

‘I wonder if this will still work though… In the game, you use Konda’s soul to reinforce the seal, but now I have already erased that guy from his very existence… Not even it’s soul is left behind…’

‘Moreover, I have no idea how long it’s been since the False Dome Cult members have destroyed the seal…’

Walking on the path of hope that was covered in miasma and rotten corpses, Jareth had a lot of questions in his mind, but there was no one to answer them.

He has to find the answers to these questions on his own, it seems.

‘If only that guy Konda could have left me with some boss loot or something…’

Despite the fact that Konda is such a difficult endgame boss monster, the only thing you get from defeating is just a lot of ‘EXP’ to level up your character and a useless skill that makes you immune to miasma for a few seconds at most.

The players were so angry at that sh*tty loot that they cried tears of agony after they found out that all their efforts in defeating Konda were in vain.

Konda played a largely irrelevant role in the game’s main plot; in fact, Jareth questions whether the protagonist ever visited the abyss altar area in the game’s actual story.

‘Maybe that’s why I only got so few credit points after beating that planet destroying level calamity… that sh*t was irrelevant to the plot of the game…’

Konda has little to do with the False Dome seal, and it was likely added by the game developers just to Sh*t on the players and torture them with it on purpose.

By now Jareth is absolutely sure that the developers of this game were sadist people who were doing literally any kind of random sh*t to just annoy and torture the players on purpose.

‘In the first place, even if Konda did give any important loot, I still wouldn’t have been able to get it…’

Jareth literally erased the guy from his very existence by throwing a ‘Heavenly Punishment’ on him, and even the space-time fabric was reduced to ‘Nothingness’ in that moment, let alone Konda.

If Konda had any loot, that would have been ‘erased’ along with him in that instant.

‘Imagine killing a boss monster so thoroughly that the guy doesn’t even leave behind it’s loot… sigh…’

Sometimes Jareth wonders if he’s a bit too efficient in his work; maybe having a bit less efficiency will help him solve a few problems too.

Shaking his head at these thoughts, Jareth finally crossed the whole golden path and arrived at the main entrance gate of the Palace Grounds.

Looking at that closed palace gate, Jareth had an urge to kick it open, but he stopped and didn’t try to do that.

After all, this gate is not an ordinary one; it’s made out of Adamantine and Mithril; even if a semi-grade-0 attack was thrown at it, the gate wouldn’t even budge.

‘Using such rare items to create a door for your house… only someone as wealthy as the First King can do so, I guess…’