Chapter 140: Virtual Training Area

After leaving the auction house Joshua moved out of the crowded area so that he could find a spot to create a portal to his private training area. Since he had his own place to train and the update could be used there Joshua had no reason to go to the training hall like most people to check things out. Joshua knew that a lot of the larger guilds bought their own private training areas as well so the training hall shouldn't be too overloaded.

It was a shame that you had to be considered a large scale guild to purchase a private training area from the system so at the moment the Fenrir Guild didn't have a private training ground to use. Joshua was just lucky that Marlow gave him the private area to keep after they finished training together, but of course the place wasn't just a training area, but an entire nature reserve that Ysildea, Thoren, and the others tended to visit him at whenever they stopped by.

Luckily the private training grounds that the Phoenix Guild and the Serpent Guild had can both be used by alliance members, so Fenrir Guild members had another place to go and train with the new update if they didn't want to get caught up in the large crowd that would start forming around the training hall. Once Joshua got clear of the crowd around the auction house he went down a side alley and created a portal to his training grounds. The place was just as calming as ever with the sound of the large waterfall in the background making it feel like Joshua was truly somewhere on earth at the time.

After taking a few minutes to relax Joshua started to rifle through the portion of the system that controlled his private training area and what changes he could make to it. When he first checked things there wasn't anything there for him to use to create the virtual training set up that the system was talking about, but Joshua could see a timer for the update at the bottom of the system panel and there was still two hours before the update would go through. For those two hours Joshua decided to spend a little time meditating and messing around with Buster who was excited to see Joshua visiting him inside of his own soul realm. From the one trip through the prairie Joshua could already see that buster had grown a lot bigger. He was already getting close to the same size as one of the smaller coyotes they had fought in the prairie and that said a lot considering the size he started out at.

Joshua was looking forward to the time when Buster would evolve to his next stage. He had the distinct feeling that the happy little dog would end up being much larger than his current size when he was done growing to his next stage. Joshua was interested in seeing what that would be like and what kind of effect it would have on his capabilities as well. He gained a lot of different abilities from his soul beast, but it still felt like he had an infantile control over his aura in comparison to what he had seen from Ysildea, so he was looking forward to seeing what changed would occur once he got his second tier job and his soul beast grew stronger.

The time passed by quickly as he waited for the update to go through and when it did a notice was sent to him to let him know. The moment the message was sent Joshua went straight back to looking through the information to see how this virtual training area would work in a private training ground like his own. The first thing the system showed that he had to do was scan the entire area that he planned on using for the virtual training area and the moment he selected that option a pulse came from the system panel that spread out throughout the entire area. It continued to pulse as if it was analyzing the surroundings and after a minute or so it stopped as another message popped up for Joshua to read.

[Private training ground scanned. Virtual training area ready for construction…completed. Press initiate to enter virtual training area.]

Joshua eagerly pressed the initiate portion of the panel in front of him. The moment he did another pulse shot out into the surroundings but this time around the pulse didn't just scan everything, but instead it created a layer of digital images that seemed to blur into existence around Joshua. The images were an exact replica of the training grounds that had been previously scanned, but Joshua could see that it wasn't exactly the same since the aura he would usually feel from all of the plants in the area seemed dulled and not quite as organic as usual.

[Virtual training Area deployed. Everything within the area is digitalized and not real, so it will all be reconstructed when destroyed or can be completely shifted into something else if you want to. Just make sure to use the system panel to change the settings of the terrain if you want to change the surroundings.]

Joshua started looking through the system panel to see what different kinds of terrains were in it that it was talking about. There was just about any type of training area you could think of. You could actually fight underwater virtually if you wanted to, along with several different areas based off of places on earth. Joshua quickly turned the terrain to an open plain setting since the flat open area would be likely the most similar to how the arena would be during the tournament. He even made the area he could move in restricted in size since the battle arena wasn't a wide open space. There was still plenty of space, but it wasn't nearly as large scale as before.

The next part of the panel that Joshua started looking through was the section that was supposed to allow him to pick a scenario that he wanted to train against. He could pick an assortment of beast that he could fight against and he could even fight against several at the same time. Every single beast that Joshua had fought in the past was available for him to pick from since he was the one logged in and then there were some best that were under public domain although since there hadn't been a bunch of people that had accessed the virtual training area yet there weren't a lot of public domain enemies. Joshua would probably put up several of the interesting beast he fought up himself later on when he was done, but first he wanted to test out how the virtual training area worked.

The first thing Joshua noticed about setting up a fight was that he had to designate how many beast he wanted to fight. The next thing he had to do was something that was a bit surprising to him. He was given the opportunity to select what level the beast would be at when he picked any of them and that was something he wasn't expecting. Joshua thought the beast would only come in at the level he had seen them at, but he could make them stronger if he wanted to up to the top of his current tier of level. In other words for him the max level he could make one of his opponents in the virtual training area was eighty-nine. Once he reached level ninety that number would shoot up to ninety-nine.

This meant Joshua could pick one of those horned rabbits from the starting area that he initially started exploring at and ramp it all the way up to level eighty-nine. Even if there levels were risen they would still have the same abilities since the beast wouldn't evolve or anything even if you increased their levels, but they would gain a ton of stats and the system made sure that the stats gained would fit the creature as it leveled up and gained strength. This meant that all though the rabbit wouldn't be able to learn new abilities it would move much faster and hit much harder than a lower level version of itself.

After figuring this out Joshua started scrolling down through several of the beast he had faced in the past to see what kind of things he could fight. What stood out to him was that he could actually fight against boss class beast he had fought in the past and he could even fight against multiple of them at once if he wanted to while leveling them up so that they would be closer to his level. This would make for one hell of a way to train without the risk of death, so Joshua was looking forward to the different combinations of opponents that he could put together and fight. The virtual training area also allowed groups of people in it at a time which meant if needed the main members of the alliance could use this as an opportunity to train with each other in the future.

Something that Joshua did notice about the list of beast that was laid out before him was that any beast that he hadn't actually fought and been a part of taking down wasn't on the list. This meant that some of the powerful beast he had seen like the guardian wolf, Tank's friend, or that giant snake that seemed to be waiting for Madalyn couldn't be put in the simulation. Beast companions weren't on this list either so none of Lilly's beast companions could be generated since they technically hadn't been defeated even in Cinder's case since she was held down and tamed.

Joshua was a bit disappointed by this fact since he wanted to see what a virtual version of the giant owl could do if he faced it since he knew there was a good chance that his group was going to have to fight one in the prairie at some point. It was a shame that they weren't going to be able to train for it beforehand, but they could raise the levels of the coyotes, bobcats, and vultures in preparation for fighting higher level ones in the prairie. They cold even test how they would do against larger groups of these creatures now so they wouldn't have to find out when getting ambushed in the prairie.

All of those ideas flashed through Joshua's mind as he read over all of the different things that the virtual training area could do, but in the end he just needed to focus on training for the tournament now and not worry about future exploration. With a grin Joshua created an interesting group of beast to face before pulling out his scale blade for some fun.