Chapter 66: Cellar
As Unceasing Entropy's team grappled with the troublesome "grabbing killer monster" issue, over at the Wanderer Guild site, the three veterans of the closed beta were also deliberating on how to address the same matter that some of their team members had experienced.
"Forcing it definitely won't work, and we will only have more casualties. This quest clearly isn't about mindlessly farming monsters. We need to find another solution. Do you two have any ideas?"
Qin Guan (Vanilla Pudding), who had completed his job advancement to become a warrior, had seen a vast change from his earlier timid self and defensiveness when he had been mocked all over the Internet. Now, he exuded an air of calm confidence and no longer had that cautious and fearful edge. Clearly, he had been having a rather enjoyable time lately.
Besides his newfound confident demeanor, Qin Guan was also outfitted with equipment considered top-tier among players—
A steel knife, the player-standard, hung from his waist, while he wore half-plate armor snatched from an NPC. On his left arm, he sported a resilient bracer with bindings, and his feet were clad in Uncommon-grade shoes with speed-enhancing enchantments.
"I don't have any ideas. Let's go with whatever you guys decide." Beside Qin Guan, Give Me Medicine, with the Orb of Deception hanging around his neck and a Critical Strike Dagger at his waist, responded with little enthusiasm.
In contrast to Qin Guan's high spirits, Give Me Medicine, who initially had a casual and carefree approach to the game, seemed to have become more dispirited.
The incident of "keeping equipment for himself" during the [Birth of the Undead Race] worldview breakthrough quest had been quite a big blow to Give Me Medicine.
He had been the one to trigger the epic quest himself and hadn't gotten the dagger for free; he still needed half a month's salary to repay Qin Guan for the several hundred copper coins he borrowed. Unfortunately, the Blood Alliance that Brother Lahong and his buddies established was also vying with them to recruit players, and the incident was right smack in a critical period of tension between the two factions.
Thus, the whole incident had been greatly exaggerated into a personal attack and, by extension, the faction pulled together by this trio of closed beta veterans was also branded as "unscrupulous." This left him feeling particularly disheartened…
Were "OtherWorld" just another typical game on the market, non-players wouldn't care about the affairs of the in-game community. Players themselves had plenty to focus on daily and wouldn't be that interested in this sort of slightly unsavory "gossip." At most, there would be some brief flaming and beef for a few days until something with a higher sensational value emerged to divert everyone's attention away while the past incident faded into obscurity.
However… "OtherWorld" wasn't any other ordinary game. The countless non-players on the forum clamoring for accounts far outnumbered the actual players. This motley bunch of people would gladly dig up trivial matters to occupy their idle time. This incident was exposed on the forum and became Give Me Medicine's "dark past," permanently ingrained in the virtual realm. The voices of non-playing forum users criticizing him were even louder than those of actual players.
"Bro Meds, why are you still moping around? Haven't I told you before? Don't pay attention to what those outsiders say. We, insiders, know who you are, and that's what matters," Qin Guan advised. "Everyone experiences criticism in some way or the other. If every little comment affects us, celebrities wouldn't even be able to survive. Which famous person hasn't had a bunch of fabricated scandals thrown at them once they're in the limelight?"
"Exactly. Take me for example. Even when I wrote a book that did impressively, I still get criticized," Blossoming Strokes also chimed in. "Back then, all three of us were present, and we also discussed the ownership of the Critical Strike Dagger. If it's questioning one's character, none of us can escape that accusation. They targeted you because they knew you would take it to heart, and then they hit you right where it hurts."
Give Me Medicine quickly raised his hands in surrender. "Alright, alright, I didn't say anything, and here you two are lecturing me with a bunch of wisdom. I'm a grown man; of course, I understand. Let's just discuss the event, okay?"
Qin Guan shook his head and no longer dwelled on Give Me Medicine's sore point. He turned to Blossoming Strokes and asked, "What's your take, Blossom?"
Blossoming Strokes thought for a bit before responding, "The event notice mentioned that the shadow shrouding Exile Town is 'attracted by the flesh and blood of the living and arrives uninvited in the darkness.' I feel… this event seems to be some sort of unconventional 'monster siege.'"
"Mm, it does seem to imply that." Qin Guan clapped his hands together in agreement. "As soon as night falls, all the NPCs in town, except the zombies, disappear and hide. Clearly, these monsters are likely to kill the human NPCs in our town. We best hurry to eliminate them."
"Since it's a monster siege, we should just defeat the monsters and be done with it. What's so complicated about that?" Give Me Medicine interjected with a slight annoyance.
With their sizable group, someone quickly discovered something in the cellar behind an empty house shortly after the event started. The player rallied some friends and formed a party to venture down to farm monsters, but in the end, they were wiped out almost immediately when they went down.
Upon receiving news, Qin Guan called the wiped team back, and another squad was sent down to assess the situation. This squad, too, met a similar fate and was swiftly annihilated and kicked offline…
"Other games offer rewards as part of their events to entice players to log in. OtherWorld, on the other hand, is even strictly restricting account releases. Surely we can't lump this game's events together with those of other games," Qin Guan explained.
"That makes sense. OtherWorld isn't the type of game that's afraid players won't log in, and the damned developers wouldn't even need to go that far." Blossoming Strokes nodded. "The objective of the event is for us to resist. Since we can't defeat whatever is in that cellar, why don't we try sealing it off? With all the NPCs currently in hiding, we can sneakily gather some cement and wooden boards from the various construction sites… a bit from each, not too much, and it should be inconspicuous enough."
Qin Guan and Give Me Medicine simultaneously gave thumbs-ups to Blossoming Strokes for her brilliant idea. They hadn't thought such an approach was possible!
The minds of truly cultured individuals just worked differently!
Without hesitation, Qin Guan, as the leader, immediately led their players to gather material from all the different construction sides.
Within half an hour, under the leadership of the three closed beta veterans, several hundred kilograms of mixed cement and over twenty wooden planks of varying sizes were transported and laid out in front of the vacant house on Third Street.
"Let's get to work!" Qin Guan took the lead, picking up several planks and carrying a bucket of mixed cement as he headed toward the back of the wooden hut.
Exile Town's cellars, apart from those connected to underground passages, were generally small, with spaces of about four or five square meters at most. Filling the whole thing with cement would be a challenge, but sealing the tops posed no major issues.
These players, who had spent hundreds of work hours on construction tasks, skillfully laid the wooden planks over the opening of the cellar, which was roughly one meter in diameter. They layered the planks both horizontally and vertically, poured cement on top, and sealed it shut.
"Will this work?" a player asked uncertainly.
"It should. Even if the thing inside can't be suffocated, preventing human NPCs from accidentally wandering in should still solve the problem, right?" another player suggested.
"Eh? Why is my party suddenly short of members?" A player who was helping carry buckets of cement blurted out of the blue.
"Huh?" Qin Guan, who was in the middle of spreading cement with a trowel, raised his head in astonishment.
Qin Guan gasped. "Holy…!"
In just that short span of looking up, Qin Guan witnessed one of the players on the outer perimeter disappear.
There wasn't even any white light. It was as if a scene from a movie had been cut out, and the player vanished into thin hair.
But what sent even more shivers down Qin Guan's spine was the fact that… Give Me Medicine, who had just been talking to him a minute ago, had also gone missing.
"Run! Disperse quickly!" Qin Guan abruptly stood up. He threw away the trowel, then instinctively grabbed Blossoming Strokes, who was squatting next to him, and bolted.
"Huh? Vanilla, what's going on?" Blossoming Strokes was completely caught off guard.
"Nearly half of us are gone! Let's hurry and get out of here!" Qin Guan shouted as he ran.
Once he shouted, everyone suddenly realized that the "density" around them had significantly decreased.
"Oh my god!"
"Ahhhh!"
"Sh*t!"
The "fortunate" survivors scattered and fled for their lives in total panic.
They moved away from the eerie cellar and converged at the start of the Third Street. Each team leader quickly counted their members, and in the span of just a moment, they realized roughly a third of their total members were lost…
"Am I really playing an online game? I'm really playing an online game, right?"
"H-how did this turn into a horror game?"
Some players were nearly tearing up from fright.
"There are skeletons and zombies all over the town, so to a certain extent, you could say that we're indeed playing a horror game…"
Not everyone was scared; some players managed to find humor in this situation.
"It's not the same at all!" A frightened player's embarrassment turned to anger. "Can American splatter films be lumped together with Japanese horror movies?!"
"Alright, everyone, calm down." Qin Guan raised his hand to signal for silence and then turned to Blossoming Strokes. "Blossom, what do you think—"
Qin Guan's voice faltered.
Players who completed their first class advancement would obtain a basic weapon from their job instructor. Freshly advanced mage, Blossoming Strokes, much like Unceasing Entropy, received a rather simple-looking wooden staff, and she was dressed in a basic mage robe that her companions had helped her put together from available materials—a straight-cut, knee-length robe with a rounded neckline. Although the quality was a far cry from Old Yang's stylish mage robes, it at least gave her the appearance of a mage.
At this moment, the sole mage among them was trembling uncontrollably, her mage robe swaying as if doing a dance of its own.
Qin Guan: "…"
At the start of the game's launch, many players had trouble adapting to the skeleton characters, and even more struggled with the zombie NPCs—the game's "art style" was simply too realistic; player characters and NPC models were meticulously detailed. At the peak of the copper coin scarcity, some players still avoided zombie NPC missions or even refused to team up with others as they just couldn't get used to it.
Now, however… Even the most delicate players found themselves nonchalantly plunging into rivers to rinse off their skeletons after a manual labor quest or picking up their scattered teammates' bones without hesitation.
Even the zombie NPCs, looking like newly exhumed, waxen corpses from a swamp, were met with nonchalance.
In summary, it was all about getting used to it.
However, getting accustomed to the realism of character and NPC modeling didn't mean that all players were ready for horror-themed game plots. After all, there even existed funeral home staff that couldn't bear to watch horror films.
Blossoming Strokes belonged to such a category. When regarding an activity as an ordinary task, she could be fearless. But upon realizing that there were horror elements in this event, she got cold feet…
"Fine." Qin Guan had no choice but to temporarily abandon relying on their side's most dependable strategist. He looked at his fellow players with a heavy expression and said, "The situation is as it is. We can't defeat the monster in the cellar, and we can't seal it off. So, everyone, what do you think? Should we give up on this monster and search for other clues, or should we put our heads together and come up with a solution?"
The players exchanged glances among themselves but, ultimately, turned their gazes toward Qin Guan.
Now that the event had progressed this far and still feeling utterly helpless, the players seemed to have no other thoughts in their minds except for cursing and berating the game developers.
"Wait, hold on, Vanilla," Blossoming Strokes, who had been badly startled, finally regained her composure and hesitantly spoke up. "I remember something that might be related to this event."
"Go on," Qin Guan urged.
"When we were doing the [Birth of the Undead Race] quest, Morris' letter mentioned the concepts of 'madness' and 'infection.' When we reached the final part of the quest, the zombie general led us to an underground passage to see the remnants of an occult altar. The destruction of Exile Town was due to cultists among the foreign captives abused and enslaved by the townspeople summoning an indescribable entity, which brought ruin to the town. Do you recall this?"
"Of course I do. I wouldn't forget this questline even after ten years have passed." Qin Guan said with a frown. "Huh? Are you suggesting there's a connection between this event and the [Birth of the Undead Race] epic quest?"
"I can't say for sure." Blossoming Strokes tried her best to stay calm. "The human townspeople in Exile Town weren't directly killed by the entity summoned by the cultists; they were infected and driven mad by it, causing them to turn on each other.
"If the [Resurgence of Fear] event has a similar background to the history of Exile Town, then this so-called 'invasion' might be similar to what happened before the town's destruction. Of course, this is just my own speculation and might not be accurate… I believe that these monsters, which we are forcibly restricted from killing or sealing, might very well be human NPC characters that have been infected."
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