Chapter 27 Healing System
Zheng Qingyue was not lying when she posted her essay on the player forum. She was indeed an ordinary top student at an ordinary first-class university - a first-class university located in the capital of a poor province. Although it was ranked low, it gathered the best talents in the province, not to mention the number of top students. Therefore, Zheng Qingyue was not considered a celebrity in the school.
But if we look at her among the 20-30 year olds in the country, she is a rare talent...
In short, Zheng Qingyue, who had no problem with her intelligence and mobility, led four players to run through several basements, and successfully found the second mission item in a well-maintained cellar of a wooden house: "Letter X1."
"Dear Anna:"
"On the 151st day since arriving in Tarantan, Yarlin was successfully elected as the mayor, and our close friend also gave me the opportunity to serve as sheriff."
"I can't wait to share my joy and my love with you, but the caravan only comes once a year. I look forward to the arrival of winter every day. I can't wait."
"We have successfully reclaimed the wasteland in the south and planted wheat, potatoes and radishes, which are growing very well."
"General Charlotte's long-wool sheep ranch has also been established. If all goes well, our ranch can also be established in two to three years."
"The goddess of prosperity blesses us. We firmly believe that the barren Tarantan will become a rich treasure land that we can pass on to our descendants. The climate here is pleasant, the rain is abundant, and the land is more fertile than we imagined."
“When you come here with our kids, you’re going to love it here.”
"Love you Maurice."
En Bu Zeng passed the parchment letter to her teammates, and after everyone had read it, she put it away.
After searching for about another half an hour, they found a filled-in cellar. After using tools such as wooden boards and sticks to dig out the gravel and sand that the players had filled in, they discovered that under the sand and gravel at the bottom of the cellar, which was about one meter deep, there was a dusty wooden door!
"Found it!" Tang Jia was overjoyed. She fumbled on the wooden door covered with thick dust with her hands, grabbed something like a doorknob, and lifted it up with force.
Shen Xixue, who had taken the initiative to clean up the landfill like Tang Jia, immediately let out a loud "Fuck!"
I don’t know how many years the underground passage that has been closed and never opened to the air must have a very unpleasant smell, but the players are all skeletons anyway, with only their vision, hearing and touch being relatively normal, their sense of smell and taste being relatively poor, and their sense of pain being almost non-existent, so the problem is actually not that big of a problem.
The reason why Shenxueji cried out... was that on the downward-extending tunnel stairs, there lay a mutilated skeleton with its head up and its feet down.
The skeleton had completely turned to bones, but the clothes on his body were still intact. One could tell that it was a brown shirt and black trousers. Hanging on his feet was a shoe that was so rotten that only the shoelaces were left.
On the back of the clothes, there were three very exaggerated cracks that looked like they were scratched by a tiger.
Tang Jia lifted the wooden door and stood aside, looking into the tunnel, complaining about the obsession with studying: "What are you yelling about? It scared me. If it was a real corpse, it would be fine, but don't we see skeletons every day?"
Addicted to studying: "..."
She didn't like the way Tang Jia said it, but she couldn't refute it for a while...
The storage cellar, which was less than two square meters in size, could not accommodate too many people. Tang Jia and Chenmi Xuexi entered the tunnel one after another, and then Zheng Qingyue jumped down with Yang Ying and Lahong Ge.
Zheng Qingyue did not rush into the tunnel. She asked everyone to wait for her for a while, then squatted down at the tunnel entrance which was slanted downward, only about half a meter wide and wide enough for only one person to pass through. She stretched out her bone claws and looked over the corpse lying at the tunnel entrance.
"Do you suspect that this body is Morris?" Brother Lahong was not in a hurry to move down. He squatted beside her and stared at her.
Zheng Qingyue shook her head: "No. This body should be a female."
Brother Lahong: “???”
"You can still see the difference between a female skull and a male skull. When I first watched Vanilla's video, I found that the player characters in this game were all independently modeled, so I read some forensic books on purpose." Zheng Qingyue held up the skull of the corpse and pointed at the temple. "Look, this part is smoother than your skull, without any obvious bulge."
Brother Lahong: “…”
Zheng Qingyue put the skull back and fumbled in the corpse's pants pockets. She actually found something...
"Gold ring?" Seeing what Zheng Qingyue took out, Brother Lahong also became a little interested.
"It's not gold, it's silver plated with gold. The identification technique can show the information of the item. It's a wedding ring." Zheng Qingyue held up the ring and signaled Brother Lahong to use the identification technique.
Lahong had to secretly feel lucky that his potential value had reached 41 points, so he could use the identification technique, otherwise he would have lost face...
Under the identification skill, the item information of this ring is displayed as follows:
"A silver-gilt wedding ring with the name 'Anna' engraved on the inside."
"Anna? Damn it!" Brother Lahong's face changed drastically, "Could it be the wife of Morris who wrote the letter?!"
"That should be it." Zheng Qingyue put the ring into her waist bag. "They can't afford gold for wedding rings, so they can only use silver plated with gold. This shows that the owner of the ring is financially tight, which fits the setting that Morris, as a husband, cruelly left his wife and children to follow the pioneer team to open up wasteland in another place."
Although Lahong is a man, he is still very emotional. He can't be as calm as Zheng Qingyue. He gasped and said, "Wait a minute, this mission can't be a healing one. His wife who was far away in his hometown ran to Exile Town and died at the entrance of the tunnel... Doesn't that mean that Morris, who wrote the letter, has died a long time ago?!"
Zheng Qingyue waved her hand downwards, signalling the people in front to go down, and continued to speak to Lahong in a calm and rational tone: "Think about it carefully. This town was chosen by the black magician Yang as the place where the undead race controlled by players will be resurrected. We appear in the game by emerging from underground... Looking at the nature of this mission, it is obvious that the planner is hinting to us: None of the residents of the original Exile Town escaped, and they were wiped out long ago."
Brother Lahong: “…”
On the other side, the Writing Team, who also found a complete letter, discovered a passage leading underground after checking several cellars filled up by players.
This passage was not discovered by the players because it was well camouflaged, but because the exit collapsed; it took everyone a lot of time to clear away the rocks and mud blocking the exit...
There was no corpse in the downward passage, but there was a crumpled piece of parchment crumpled up and thrown on the stairs.
Jiang Wei, who entered the passage first, picked up the parchment ball, took a look at it, then turned around and handed it to Miao Bishenghua who was behind him.
This letter was also made of parchment. The content on it was very confusing. It looked like scribblings, and 90% of the characters were not even translated by the system. The remaining characters that could be slightly discerned showed several unconnected phrases after the system translated them. They were: "Forgiveness, It, Desire."
"The system shows that this is indeed one of the five letters that players are required to search for." Miaobishenghua handed the parchment to his teammates for circulation. "If this letter, let's just consider it as a letter for now, is also written by the writer 'Maurice' that we know, then at least we can confirm one thing , that this 'Maurice' who wrote the letter must have had an accident."
"Is his hand disabled, or is he crazy?" Qin Guan glanced at the large number of characters on the parchment that were worse than children's graffiti, shook his head, and passed it to the next person.
"It's more likely that he's crazy, or that his mind has been severely stimulated." Miaobishenghua said this, touching his chin and looking at the end of the deep tunnel. "The letter suggesting that the writer has gone crazy appeared at the entrance of the tunnel. It seems that the 'underground world' of this town is very big."
Jiang Wei spent half the night with the two girls grinding for the lord's reputation. Although he still didn't get along with the number one player, Ou Yan, he got along well with the two female players - neither of them, whether it was the brilliant writing or the non-increasing entropy, were the kind of people who had the annoying personality of "I'm a woman, you have to give in to me and help me". On the contrary, they both seemed to have the spirit of "as a woman, you have to prove your female power", and they were the type that made people feel comfortable to get along with.
After hearing this, Jiang Wei naturally continued, "I was thinking about this when I was doing the lord reputation mission. In ordinary games, it is really hard to come up with a strange herb with a style like 'Big Leaf Vine'. If it is not the bad taste of the dog planner, but 'Big Leaf Vine' is the normal style that fits the background setting of this game, then maybe the background of this game is not the fantasy style we thought it was."
"You want to say Cthulhu style?" Miaobishenghua said.
"Yes." Jiang Wei nodded. "If it's the K-series, then Daye Teng's weird painting style makes sense. And the high-level NPCs in the game will mention a place called 'Kenya Empire' when chatting. This Kenya Empire has many factories and large ships. It is very rich and is a country that high-level NPCs yearn for. With factories and large ships, it can't be the feudal and ignorant Middle Ages. It also fits the K-series setting."
"Ah!" Qin Guan, who was walking behind Miaobishenghua, said hurriedly, "Speaking of which, Charlie Rex, the strangest warrior mentor among the high-level NPCs, often looks neurotic, especially like the half-crazy investigator in the Cthulhu game!"
In the town hall, Yang Qiu, who was monitoring the two groups of players at the same time, said in admiration: "Not bad, Earthlings. Even if there are only 300 players, there are still many awesome people."
From the objective standpoint of a non-fanatic, the Cthulhu mythology created by Earth novelist Howard Phillips Lovecraft has not actually transcended the limits of human imagination of the "fear of the unknown" within the upper limit of cognition: Howard, who was born in the late 19th century, was most afraid of the ancient gods of Cthulhu and his fear of the deep sea. He believed that the seabed was the limit full of unknown fear.
In the ancient god system of the Ksitigarbha system set up by countless fans, or in various secondary creations and secondary processing of game novels, comics and running group scripts, these ancient gods often appear in person; many games and movies hailed as classics of the Ksitigarbha system have similar scenes of Ksitigarbha "showing his divine power" on the sea surface...
There is a big gap between this dark magic plane and the "Resurrection of the Ancient Gods" that made countless powerful beings at the top of intelligent creatures tremble... the gap in level.
The ancient gods are not in the sea.
It is impossible for the ancient gods to exist in the material world where intelligent creatures live, not even a part of their bodies - otherwise this material plane would have fallen long ago, and it would be impossible for living intelligent creatures to remain.
It is impossible for the ancient gods to "show their prowess in front of people" or to intentionally plant their "seeds" in a specific person. Tiny intelligent creatures are not even as good as ants to the ancient gods... Will humans occupy an ant nest and choose one of the ants as their "spokesperson"? No one would do such a stupid thing.
Of course, even though there is a huge gap in the level of prestige, Yang Qiu must admit that the "K-series imagination" on Earth contains fragments of the reflection of the ancient gods.
Yang Qiu's guess is that the K-series mythology that was born on Earth is likely to be the result of a tiny bit of the ancient god's will that inadvertently passed through the space-time rift and entered the Earth dimension when the ancient god used spiritual projection to influence the material plane; because the ancient god's will could not survive in a magic-free universe, it quickly died out, but before it died... this tiny bit of the ancient god's will resonated with the spirit of the writer who created the K-series mythology, leaving behind... fragments of its reflection.
The Old Ones who were isolated outside the dimension and lost their twisted wills in the endless void actually no longer had the will to consciously capture or occupy a certain material plane.
The spiritual influence they projected onto the material plane was just the inertia they retained from their time as gods... It was just the projection behavior that was once hailed as a miracle, but after the ancient gods lost their divinity and were left with only madness due to their long-term existence in the void, it became a veritable natural disaster.
A madman who loses his mind will bring great disaster to all mankind, not to mention a god who loses his mind...
The biggest reason why Yang Qiu is not worried about the earth being eroded by the authentic ancient gods is that on earth, magic power will not recover naturally, and it cannot be absorbed... The dimensional rules of the earth's universe deny magic power.
"Rules" are very powerful.
Even the rules created, maintained and promoted by the people of Earth themselves are very difficult to eliminate (both positive and negative. For example, the anti-vaccine movement, which has only been around for more than a decade, was originally just an anti-intellectual activity organized by some Western populists. Normal people looked at these guys like idiots, but after becoming a certain rule of the game, even national power would find it difficult to suppress this anti-intellectual trend), not to mention the dimensional rules dominated by the cosmic will of a certain dimension.
To wrap Yang Qiu's ancient god tentacles around him, he had to be dragged to this plane to make some trouble...
"Although there is a huge difference in style... but with the 'K-culture' as a foundation, it will be much easier for Earth players to understand the background setting of this 'game world'."
Yang Qiu continued to monitor the actions of the two groups of players calmly.
He dared to release the big leaf vine, a herb that most people would lose SAN points when seeing it, for players to take care of because he was confident in the acceptance of the earthlings! The earthlings who could even make tentacle-type driving games popular were afraid of losing SAN points!
After walking in the tunnel for about ten minutes, the Entropy No-Increase Group was suddenly attacked by a spider-shaped, low-level Thirteen-legged monster hanging from the top of the tunnel.
“Fuck!”
“Nimaaaaa——!”
Being addicted to studying, entropy did not increase, and the Lahong brothers were horrified and ran away screaming.
The low-level monster threw out a tentacle with suction cups and grabbed the skeleton who was obsessed with studying, and threw it up. The weight was only 40% of that of a normal person...
"drink!"
“Aaaaa——!”
Yang Ying picked up a wooden stick found in the tunnel and scared the aggressive Tang Jia into waving a rotten shovel found in the tunnel. The two worked side by side to save the man who was addicted to taking drugs.
" Don't hit me, I'm going to be broken into pieces!" The student who was addicted to studying screamed after being hit several times in a row.
After running away, En Bu Zeng regained his ability to think and reminded loudly: "Don't hit the tentacles, hit the main body!"
"I can't reach it!" Yang Ying shouted.
"Carry Tang Jia up!"
Yang Ying quickly threw away the stick and picked up Tang Jia's legs... Anyway, the players' skeleton characters are very light and can carry each other and run.
This spider monster with thirteen tentacles was indeed weak. After being hit by Tang Jia's shovel, it gave up studying and fled deep into the tunnel.
"This monster will run away when its health is low! Chase it!"
Lahong, who was scared and ran away when he first encountered it, instantly regained his old player nature and quickly called everyone to chase after him...
"Hmm... it's much easier to understand the true face of this world from the perspective of the game."
After witnessing the heroic pursuit of these players, Yang Qiu felt relieved...
