NOVPUBA screen materialized before Eren, right between him and Trisa. He froze, reading through the options.
"You really want to get me killed here, don't you?" he mumbled once he finished reading all the options.
[Option One: Find the key hidden inside Trisa's clothes, free yourself, and run away.
Reward: Level +10]
[Option Two: Do nothing and spend the night here peacefully.
Reward: Escape Talisman]
[Option Three: Forcefully break the chains and escape.
Reward: Level +5]
[Option Four: Find out Trisa's Secret before sunrise.
Reward: Tea of Enlightenment (can be used to upgrade one skill)]
Option One required him to find the key and run away. It seemed the easiest method for escape, but he had to be extremely careful.
Not only did he have to search for the key, but he would also have to retrieve it from where she had hidden it within her clothes.
Even if he could manage it without waking her up, he didn't feel it was the safest course of action, especially given her identity.
If it was any other person, he might have selected that option, but not with Trisa.
The second option seemed easiest overall, as it required him to do nothing. He just had to stay put and wait peacefully for the morning. But this option had a hidden danger he'd noticed.
The hidden danger was the reward. If the system was rewarding him with an escape talisman, it implied this option was actually the most dangerous.
Trisa wasn't likely to hurt him in the morning if he did nothing. So where was the danger coming from? Elsewhere in the city? He wasn't certain.
The only thing he knew was that, because of this option's reward, waiting for morning in this city felt like a death sentence.
The third option didn't require him to find the key. He could simply break the chains, but Trisa would definitely wake up. Could he really outrun her? It was easier said than done.
He now understood the pros and cons of the first three options and what they entailed. What he truly didn't understand was the last option.
It was like the system asking him to solve a puzzle without even revealing what the puzzle was.
The reward was also tempting. It was perhaps the best of them all. But again, he had to complete it before sunrise, reinforcing his suspicion that something significant was going to happen in the morning.
He quickly moved aside, getting off Trisa and lied on the bed next to her, lost in thoughts. He didn't know which option to choose. The second option was the most dangerous in his eyes, and the third option was impossible to achieve without getting caught.
The only choice for him was between the first option and the last option whose demand he didn't even understand completely.
"Do you like screwing me over?" he mumbled as he looked at the system screen.
If he wasn't given any options, then he would have just waited for the morning after failing to find the key under the bed. But these options changed everything.
He had this system for a long time, and he understood it a little. Only at certain absolute points in his life, did the system give him the options.
Even the most insignificant of options held extreme significance, sometimes being the difference between life and death.
"I feel like you really want me to cross over to the forbidden Territory by making the last option so vague. But you made one mistake, my friend."
Eren moved his fingers towards the screen. "Even if the fourth option is the most bizarre, the reward is something that I will never ignore. Maybe this time, I might really take the risk and go for the harder option."
Leveling up ten times was a good reward but the reward of the enlightenment tea was something that ignited the greed in his heart.
No matter how beautiful a woman was, she couldn't compare to the charm of an item that could help him evolve a skill.
The reward didn't mention any limitation on the type of skill it could evolve, and there was exactly one skill out of his many magnificent ones that he wanted to evolve.
The Echo of Eternity, was his strongest skill, albeit also the most unreliable one. But if he could evolve that skill with enlightenment tea, would it become a little more reliable? At least that's what he hoped.
He wasn't sure if he was going to regret selecting this vague option, but he still tapped on it. And when the option was selected, the screen closed.
'Now, how do I go about finding the so-called secret? Can it be any random secret of hers, or does it have to be a precise secret?'
He had the entire night left to figure out the so-called secret that the system wanted him to discover. There were still over six hours left to dawn, but it still felt like there was not enough time.
"Would she tell me if I wake her up and ask her for it? Of course she won't. Then I have to find out that secret without waking her up?" Eren thought to himself.
"I have a skill that can control people, but I doubt it would be effective on someone at the level of a demigod. That goes out the window. That means... Wait a minute, did I just get screwed over?! Isn't this back to square one?!"
He had to find that secret without waking her up, and there were only two possible paths that he could see.
The first path was to go through her things to see if he could get any clues. But the problem was that her things were in her storage ring.
If he wanted to check her things, he had to get her storage ring, which brought him back to square one of this conundrum.
The second option was for him to invade her consciousness. He had a treasure that could allow him to do something like that. He had used it to control the Guardian of the Necromancer Tower in the past.
The only problem was that Trisa was a demigod. If he entered her consciousness, and things went wrong, he might get obliterated. It was the riskiest option, and the last thing he wanted to ever test.
