“Brother Jue… that’s so disgusting,” Wang Tanzhi said.
“How is it disgusting?” Feng Bujue jogged to the body as he replied.
“Whether in terms of thought or action, it is disgusting!” Wang Tanzhi answered. “You shouldn’t act so randomly simply because of a belief that the system will provide us with a reward.”
“Act randomly?” Feng Bujue said. “If there is sh*t or monster inside the belly, then I’ll admit I’ve acted randomly.”
He squatted down next to the second body. “If there’s nothing inside, then it only proves that my analysis is wrong, not that I’ve acted randomly. However, if there’s something inside…”
At that point, Feng Bujue already reached into the ghastly open wound on the stomach and started to feel about with his fingers like this was the most natural thing in the world.
“Brother Wang… do you mind telling me what kind of work Brother Feng does in real life?” Long Aomin’s Terror Points rose slightly due to his teammate’s weird action.
“He’s a novelist,” Wang Tanzhi answered with a dumb expression.
“Are all novelists so creepy nowadays?” Ms. Saddest overheard the answer, and she could not help providing her comment.
“Naturally… he’s not a mainstream novelist,” Wang Tanzhi added as explanation.
“Haha!” Feng Bujue suddenly laughed, and it caused the other four to shiver.
“Look!” Feng Bujue said proudly as he raised something in his hand. He really did find something amid the dead body’s intestines, and it was an excellent quality item.
———
Item Name: The Eye of Hostility
Item Type: Armor
Quality: Excellent
Defense Points: None
Element: None
Effect: Wearer can immediately discern a monster’s hostile target.
Equipment Requirement: Character Level under twenty. Not tradable after use.
Can be taken out of the scenario: Yes
Remark: Since you’ve found this item, finder’s keepers. These goggles were created by a necromancer. He had made too many enemies in his life, and he wanted to use this to see any threats that might be hiding in public. Unfortunately, this accessory only allows you to observe one target at a time. When he was still alive, he once carved down this sentence on the top part of the goggles—When you’re watching me, I’m also watching you.
———
The equipment looked like common goggles worn by World War two pilots. The only problem was they had been pulled out of a dead body’s stomach, and that was quite disgusting.
“See, I told you, the hints inside this police station were too obvious. There has been zero sign of human activity around the city, but there are three dead bodies here. There were items to be salvaged from the other two bodies, but only this one appeared useless. If all it could provide was a police baton, the system wouldn’t have come up with such a memorable dead body. It could have just placed the baton in the corner of the room.”
“Fine… You win…” Wang Tanzhi sighed. “We’re short on time, so we should go now. We’ve spent enough time recovering and exploring. You’ve also scared our teammates.”
…
After leaving the police station, the five continued to walk down the street. Exploring the police station meant that they had completed a mission that they should have done later. They had also obtained valuable items from it, and that should have raised their moral… but Feng Bujue’s peculiarity prevented that from happing. The fear that he brought the players was probably more intense than the scares created by the system. No matter how scary the scenario was, everyone knew internally that it was all fake, but if Feng Bujue intensified the fear factor of his actions… that was hard to imagine. After all, he was a real person behind this game character, and it was scary to know that such a person existed in real life.
“Look ahead!” After another ten minutes of walking, Long Aomin stopped moving and pointed forward. The group looked ahead and saw a plaza. It was large, pebbled area. There was a large door sitting in the middle of the plaza. It was about ten meters tall and four meters wide. One side of the door was shrouded in a black fog, while the other side was open.
When the five reached the door, the system audio began. “Current quest completed, Main Quest updated.”
They opened the menu to investigate. The earlier quest, Search the city to find the Demonic Door, had been ticked, and two new quests had appeared underneath it, ’Find the Key of Fire in the police station on East Ninth Street’ and ’Find the Key of Wood in the shopping complex at South Fifteenth Street’. When the first quest appeared, the next second, it also had a tick next to it.
After looking at the quest tab, Feng Bujue walked up to the large door. He studied it for a few seconds before commenting, “Oh… Looks like the mission is not as impossible as I thought. Three of the parts within the magic circle have been lit up already. This means that we don’t need to search for the Key of Metal, Water, and Earth; they have been maintaining the seal all this time.”
Wang Tanzhi and the rest walked over, and they followed Feng Bujue’s gaze. The middle of the open door was surrounded by a cloud of inky darkness. It felt so thick that even sunlight would not be able to penetrate it. Around the door frame, there were five magic circles with different colors, arranged in the shape of a pentagon. The magic circle was painted with a pattern that was impossible to understand, and currently, three of them were lit up.
Feng Bujue took out the Key of Fire and placed it in his palm. He raised his arm as he walked closer to the door. But even after a while, nothing happened. He put the key away and said, “Hmm… We probably need to collect both keys and finish the quest first because it’ll tell us how to recover the seal.
“So, let’s not waste time. The time between the first darkness descent and the second one was thirty minutes, and it has been eighteen minutes since the second darkness descent. If the interval between each one is the same, we’d better get to the shopping complex within the next twelve minutes and kill the monsters there, or else…”
At that point, Long Aomin also charged ahead, leading the way. “Hurry! Let’s go!”
Even though the man was brash, he did learn from experience. If they ran into another evolved creature, it was definitely him who would bear the brunt of the experience. He had already dealt with one zombie, and he had barely survived. He was not going to wait and die to this one.
With Brother Long leading the way, the five rushed down the southern street. The plaza where the Demonic Door sat contained the city map. It was marked with street names, so even without navigation from Feng Bujue, Long Aomin managed to find the route to South Fifteenth Street quickly.
They ran one kilometer within five minutes and reached the entrance of the shopping complex. This was an averagely long journey. Basically, it was doable for those who had normal practice in real life, but they would need to rest for at least two minutes before they could catch their breath again.
“There’s electricity here…” Long Aomin had obviously run marathon in real life, and the jog was like child’s play to the man.
At this point, the story had to explain a new concept—’Inapparent Attributes’.
This was something that was ubiquitous even in the virtual world, an attribute that could not be quantified. Using Long Aomin as example, as a player who was physically fit in real life, the exhaustion that he would experience after completing the same action as another player would be different. The Stamina Points exhausted by Long Aomin were the least after running this one kilometer. Even though it was just a difference of a few dozen points, this minute difference would continue to exist even in the later stages of the game. In other words, if there was an upper limit on Stamina Points, if the two players maintained the same speed as they ran in the same direction until they were exhausted, Long Aomin would cover a larger distance than the physically weakest player on the team, Ms. Saddest in this case. This was the difference in inapparent attributes.
As another example, take someone who knew how to handle a gun in real life and one who did not. Both had increased their marksmanship mastery to A (Mastery Level A: Superb, there was a chance for the player to comprehend the skill of said school on their own. At this level, the activation success for relevant skills would be one hundred percent). If both of them used the same skill on the same target, the damage and accuracy of the real-life shooter would be higher. Of course, this minute difference was not something conspicuous enough for players to notice; only the system would know how much the difference was.
Further in the game, the players’ overall ability would become stronger. After level thirty, they would be no different from experts who could fly through the sky and punch like the wind. By then, the difference caused by inapparent attributes would be even harder to discern. If one had to explain the need of this system, it was to turn one’s ’talent’ into a type of resource and provide certain players with some advantage.
“Similar to the police station, it looks like locations that are related to the main quest have things other places don’t, like lights and dead bodies,” Feng Bujue said.
“So, what should we do next? Wait for the monster to come attack us?” Wang Tanzhi asked.
“Do you think the system would be so boring as to repeat the same sequence?” Feng Bujue replied. “Let’s go in. Don’t expect another zombie to break through the door. In fact, I believe there’ll be a different type of monster here.”
He led the group to walk through the entrance. It was a large glass door that moved simultaneously to the side. It was open, and Feng Bujue walked through readily. The shopping complex was huge, and it was difficult to tell how large it was at first glance. The interior was well-lit. The elevator, escalator, and even the vending machines… all the machines that required electricity were working perfectly, but some of the shelves destroyed.
The main structure of the building alone had five floors. There were two cylindrical, transparent elevators on the sides that could take the customers up and down. There were escalators on each floor, and the doors to the fire escape were not locked. Thus, there should be normal stairs beyond them.
After walking through the entrance, there was a market that was so large that they could not see its end. Just the checkout counters alone, there were about thirty of them. They lined up like soldiers reporting for duty, forming a wall. There were many different shops on each floor: boutiques, restaurants, KTV, a pool hall, and so on. If there was time, the players would not have minded spending some time there.
Feng Bujue walked directly up to the building layout that was next to the entrance. He skimmed over the layout for all the floors immediately, but since this was a shopping complex, it had everything, and that added to the confusion.
“Where could the key of Wood be? A store that sells furniture or toys?” Mr. Loneliest volunteered his opinion. If there were five Feng Bujue’s in the team, they would have split up by now, and each would have roamed around a floor and split up the workload. Unfortunately, there was only one Feng Bujue on the team, and splitting up was not going to work. If anything, it would only make them more vulnerable to danger.
Just as Feng Bujue was drafting the plan, the group suddenly felt a shake underneath their feet. Another change was happening.
The sound of something knocking against the floor came from a few dozen meters ahead of them. The ground bulged upward to form the shape of a volcano. The tiles on the floor cracked, and the nearby shelves were tipped over. This ramming continued eight more times before a monster crawled to the surface and appeared before their eyes.
“I’ll bet five dollars that we’ll get the key after killing it.” Feng Bujue pointed at the ’tree’.
Half of the monster’s ’body’ was still submerged in the ground, and the part that was exposed was a burnt trunk that was about two meters large in diameter. The rest was an expanding system of branches. Instead of leaves, there were things that looked like sensory organs that dangled from the branches, and of course, they were made of wood as well.
Long Aomin was not in the mood to joke. “From how I see it, the monster is immobile, and it can only wave its branches around. In that case, we only need to sneak behind it and avoid its mouths; that should expose its weakness to us.”
Feng Bujue listened to the man as he took out his Eye of Hostility and put it on. After an item was placed inside the backpack, it would be cleaned. Even a weapon covered in blood and guts would come out looking as fresh as a daisy after being placed into and taken out of the backpack. Therefore, the goggles that Feng Bujue wore did not have any lingering smells or detritus. Still, that did not stop the others from imagining it.
“Hmm… Let me see first… His current target is…” Before Feng Bujue could finish, his expression changed, and then he lifted his head and turned his body around to look at the escalator on the fifth floor. That was a blind spot where the sun could not reach. Hanging onto the edge of the escalator was a humanoid shadow. As the group turned, the thing also realized that it had been discovered. It opened its bat wings, skipped down the walls, and glided on the wind.
“What’s happening? Batman?” Wang Tanzhi asked.
“I’m more inclined to believe it’s a demon… Get down!” Feng Bujue suddenly screamed as he held his head and collapsed to the ground. Feng Bujue had already realized the monster’s hostility target was not on anyone of them but the burnt tree monster that had just crawled out from the ground.
As he predicted, the demon changed its direction before it hit the ground. It changed its angle and picked up speed as it charged at the tree monster. The tree monster opened its lips to release a low, heavy growl.
The sound was powerful, and it caused the wind to rise. The five on the ground instinctively covered their ears, but for the flying demon, the roar was nothing. The demon also opened its fanged lips and retorted with a screech.
The screech was shrill and sharp like nails scratching on glass, causing one’s ear drum to quiver. The two monsters were like a deep male baritone and sharp female soprano, creating a concert with their voices. However, they did not bring enjoyment but endless torment.
