Chapter 299: Undead Entering the Town
He had just had some bad thoughts in the morning, but when he went out in the afternoon, he saw Lord Yang riding an undead horse into the town hall courtyard. Operator Ron was almost scared to death at that time.
The people of Everlook had seen few undead, and even fewer undead horses. Everyone who came in and out of the town hall had the same horrified look on their faces as Operator Ron, which inadvertently provided a cover for Ron...
Yang Qiu jumped off the horse, put away the undead horse, looked around and found that only Operator Ron looked familiar, so he strode towards Ron and asked, "Where is Patton?"
"Upstairs." Operator Ron used all his courage to stay calm.
Yang Qiu thanked him politely and walked past Ron and up the stairs.
Ron stood there without moving until Lord Yang's footsteps could no longer be heard. Only then did cold sweat pour down his body...
He had just defeated the evil ideas of his "direct line" in the morning, and in the afternoon he saw Lord Yang appear at the door of his office. Patton, who had been busy all afternoon and had no time to eat lunch, almost spit out the milk and cereal he had temporarily used to fill his stomach.
Yang Qiu glanced at the pile of documents on Patton's desk, then at the cup of milk and cereal in Patton's hand, and said disapprovingly: "Is this what you're eating for lunch? Isn't the welfare canteen of the Logistics Department open yet?"
"Uh... I missed the time myself." Barton put down the cup and stood up.
Yang Qiu raised his hand to stop the other party: "Don't worry, it's not a big deal, drink it first."
Patton was a little confused and quickly poured the remaining half cup of cereal into his mouth.
"Brook is missing in Everlook Town." Yang Qiu waited patiently for him to finish drinking before speaking.
Patton "poofed" and sprayed out the remaining milk...
The young boy Brook, a Rhine native, has quasi-professional strength at a young age, but he is too ignorant of the immensity of the world and runs away from home early to seek adventure. He is deceived by a caravan and trafficked to the former red-light district of Westram. He escapes with two orcs and is luckily rescued by the undead.
Patton was a subordinate of Lieutenant Wagner Pitt and one of the first city defense soldiers captured by Westram. He had dealt with Brooke.
Barton also knew that Brooke was one of the people closest to the core of power among the "non-Tarantan faction", and his status was similar to that of the clerks - he was someone who was personally brought up by Ms. Zhao.
Others didn't know that Brook had left on a secret mission after reuniting his adventuring companions, but Barton, who was extremely sensitive to his surroundings, knew about it... Ms. Zhao had deliberately not mentioned any information about Brook for several months, and Barton could guess with his knees that Brook's purpose for leaving was not simple.
Patton privately speculated that it was possible that the mission Brooke was carrying out was more secretive than that of the orc Osrian King who came to the town disguised as a citizen of the Kenyan Empire five days ago. Patton was quite surprised when he saw this familiar face entering the town.
Knowing the importance of Brooke, Barton's reaction at this moment was absolutely genuine. He asked in astonishment, "Has Brooke been to Everlook? When did it happen?"
Yang Qiu silently withdrew the spiritual field that had silently enveloped Patton's entire body... He did not lie, and it was obvious that he really did not know about Brooke's disappearance.
"Within a week." Yang Qiu was relieved and sat down in the chair in front of Barton's desk. "You may have guessed that Brooke is working for me."
Patton knew that Yang Qiu had something for him to do, and his expression became solemn.
"The undead are on their way." Yang Qiu immediately dropped a big bomb on Barton. "While the undead are searching for Brooke's traces in and outside the town, I want you to ensure that no large-scale escape incidents occur in the entire territory of Everwatch Town, especially in the north."
"Understood!" Patton answered readily and immediately went out to organize people.
After all, Barton had been the lord of Everlook for three months. Not only did he have the full support of the city hall, he was also good at understanding people's hearts and had learned organizational skills from Ms. Zhao. If he failed to take control of this small place that was only half the size of Westram and had a population of just over 30,000 after such a long time, then Rex and Zhao Zhenzhen would have valued him in vain.
Soon, the militia and security teams of Yongwang Town, which had been cleaned up from top to bottom by Barton himself, were all dispatched. The militia rushed to various villages, and the security team supervised the entire town, setting up checkpoints on all roads in and out of the town , and notifying the townspeople with loud speakers that they were not allowed to move around without permission, and that no one was allowed to stop the undead from coming to investigate...
Yang Qiu watched from upstairs as the militia security teams assigned patrol and supervision areas to Barton, and nodded with satisfaction: "If every Aboriginal tool person could have this quality, it would save a lot of trouble."
When the undead, traveling at a leisurely pace as if they were on a picnic, arrived in the territory of Yongwang Town in groups, there were already checkpoints set up by the security team on the road, and even militia patrols could be seen on the dirt roads in the countryside.
The villagers working in the fields marveled at the sight of the undead coming in horse-drawn carriages. Some teenagers wanted to follow the carriages pulling the undead to watch the fun, but were scolded and shouted back by their parents and relatives.
It has been more than half a year since the undead first appeared in Westham, and the cheap and affordable "Tarantan products" have long since flowed into thousands of households.
The salt used in countless farm kitchens in the countryside around Yongwang Town is refined salt sold by affordable stores in the city, with skulls printed on the packaging bags. The earthen stoves at home have long been replaced with small stoves made of "Tarantan stainless steel" that save more fuel. Many families with better financial conditions can even afford one or two pieces of clothing made of dead ghost cloth. Naturally, the people here will not make a fuss when they see the dead like outsiders do.
Seeing a carriage of dead souls passing by on the road, the villagers who were tired from working and sitting on the edge of the field to rest were curiously discussing whether one or two "Tarantan Goods Stores" could be opened in the town so that they would not have to run to the city when they needed to replenish their salt.
Compared to the villagers who were just watching the fun without caring about anything, the people in the town were much more nervous.
Although the townspeople also like cheap and useful Tarantan products, and look forward to buying good things sold in the city's discount stores at their doorstep, this is not the same as getting the townspeople to accept that there are undead running around all over the town - people in the city are not happy to run into undead when they go out!
Although there were security guards holding loud speakers all over the streets shouting that people were not allowed to go out unless necessary, many townspeople still ran to the South Gate and looked towards the south nervously and curiously, blocking the South Gate, which normally could accommodate two carriages side by side.
When the public carriage carrying the dead appeared at the other end of the road, the townspeople, who were not busy with spring ploughing and had time to join in the fun, even shouted in a voice that was unclear whether it was fear or excitement...
The public carriage stopped at the platform at the town gate, and the undead wearing various equipment got off the carriage. If the men from the Public Security Department hadn't been sweating and shouting to stop them, the townspeople blocking the south gate of the town might have been trampled...
"Wow, the NPCs here are quite welcoming to us!" Yang Ying glanced towards the town gate and said in surprise.
"Of course not. We are here to investigate a case after all." It was the first time that Jialuo saw an NPC welcoming players instead of being scared away by them. He started to show off like a ginger cat boss.
"Huahua, how are we going to complete this mission? The only hint is that it's near Yongwang Town." The makeup girl at the comic convention, Runlu Jinyu, patted her wrinkled robe and shouted to Miaobishenghua.
"Let's go into the town and look around first, Qingyue, what do you think?" he said to the temporary guest who was called online.
"Let's search the town first. If we can't find it, we can search the surrounding areas." En Bu Zeng studied the information about Yongwang Town in the mission text and said, "This town is bigger than Westram and has more streets. I think why don't we split into two groups, one to search the east and the other to search the west?"
"That's fine. You lead one group and I lead another." Miaobishenghua said to everyone, "Come on, let's split into groups. The family and friends team may have to act separately, so let's even out the professions."
Nearly forty undead came down from the public carriage that could only carry sixteen people. Among all these undead, only five were wizard players who were doing quests, and the rest were all relatives and friends who came to help. This shows how powerful the nanny player's appeal was...
After being divided into groups, the players didn't care whether the town gate was still blocked by NPCs, and just walked over openly...
“Over, over!” The townspeople in the front row went from being curious to nervous, and shouted to the back in panic, “The undead are coming, make way, step back!”
"I want to retreat too, but there are people behind me pushing forward!" The person stuck in the middle was also annoyed.
The local security guards who came to maintain order had sweat dripping down their foreheads and shouted at the top of their voices: "Don't gather here! Evacuate! Move back! The undead have entered the town, you can watch as you please!"
"Back off! Back off!"
But... Everlook is not Westam. More than 70% of Westam's residents have done labor organized by the town hall and know how to queue up according to orders and evacuate as required. However, Everlook is not like Westam, where there is an entire street that needs to be completely renovated or roads need to be repaired. Since Patton took over, he has not organized any large-scale group labor, so the residents naturally have no concept of abiding by team discipline.
The more nervous the hundreds of people became, the more they huddled together and couldn't disperse. The undead all walked behind the security guards, but there was still a dense wall of people blocking the way in front of them.
"What are you doing? Are you welcoming us or not letting us in?" Jialuo was unhappy.
"Hey, if they say we can't go in, then we can't go in?" Yang Ying didn't care about that. Relying on the flexibility of the undead body, he grabbed the security guard's arm and climbed onto his shoulder...
The security officer felt a weight on his body, turned his head and looked upward, and was stunned.
In the memory of his younger brother Yang Qiu, Yang Ying was very fierce, vigorous and daring. He didn't care what the NPC under his feet thought. He ran forward briskly on the shoulders of the townspeople. In a few seconds, he climbed over the several-meter-thick human wall from above and landed on the South Gate Street inside the town gate.
"It's okay to turn over, hurry up!" Yang Ying, who successfully entered the town, urged in the team channel.
“All right.” Seeing this, En Buzeng, who was wearing a robe, put his thick wooden staff on his belt, put the hem of his long robe into his belt, and climbed up to the top of the crowd...
Sub-healthy adults with intact limbs can climb over waist-high obstacles relatively easily. For the undead, whose weight plus equipment is only half of their original weight and whose arms and legs are long (after all, they are the skeletons of ancient warriors) , it is really not difficult to climb over a human wall that is less than two meters high... Even if this human wall is not flat at all and moves around, young people's reflexes can still cope with it.
The townspeople, who were piled up in a circle and unable to move, looked up in astonishment, watching the undead step over their shoulders expressionlessly, forgetting even to scream...
Yang Qiu, who had just emerged from the town hall under the subspace barrier, was speechless when he saw his elder sister who had taken the lead in climbing over the human wall from the player anchor point vision...
"...Forget it. I don't expect you to get married. I will take care of you in your old age." Yang Qiu wiped his face, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
The players who entered the town started searching the whole town without any delay. With these players attracting attention, Yang Qiu had the time to do his work.
The task that Brooke and his fellow adventurers took on was to investigate the whereabouts of a group of slaves. After the fall of the Bartles family, all farms and estates were divided up by local nobles, including the slaves that originally belonged to the Bartles family.
Unlike farm estates where evidence of "legal" transactions could be found, the transfer of these slaves did not go through any transaction procedures that needed to be implemented on paper... After all, the Constitution of the Rhine Kingdom strictly prohibited the slave trade. Even if no one would really hold a noble responsible for the slave trade, the local nobles were already accustomed to cleaning up their messes and not leaving any excuses for their political opponents to attack them.
It was precisely this habit of the nobles to keep their butts clean that gave Yang Qiu the opportunity.
All nobles would prepare a clean "source" and an apparently impeccable identity for the slaves and serfs they kept, such as servants, or free people who voluntarily depended on them or volunteered to be servants.
These people, who were called servants but were actually slaves, could even be traced back to their "family tree" - their parents were all servants with clean origins and had served a certain noble family for generations.
In other words… even if a righteous judge appeared in the Rhineland City, who was not afraid of hardship or offending people, and went to a noble’s farm to find evidence of the other party’s enslavement of slaves; if he dragged a dirty horse-raising child out of the stable, the farm owner could throw the child’s “innocent” origin in the judge’s face, and he might even sue the judge for malicious slander…
So the question is - did the Bartles family voluntarily package up their own slaves and serfs along with their farm estates and sell them to local nobles at a price as low as one-tenth of the price they would have paid?
Of course not... When these manors, farms and slaves were transferred, Adela III himself and his loyal old butler were in prison in the city, and his wife took her children to Odysseus for refuge.
In other words... the local nobles can produce documents proving the legal transactions and transfers of the farm estate, but they cannot clearly explain the "origins" of that batch of slaves!
Even if we fabricate seemingly legal identities for these slaves, they still won’t stand up to scrutiny!
This group of local nobles, including old Viscount Darcy, who also took advantage of the feast of the Bartles family and died at the hands of vampires before he could make his will, all knew that these "servants" were not worthy of being seen in public, so they simply broke them up into small pieces, either selling them to others or dispersing them and distributing them everywhere.
What Brooke had to do was to find out the whereabouts of these slaves.
A week ago, Brook submitted information to Yang Qiu through the matrix. When he was staying at a farmer's house in Horseshoe Town, he heard the farmer mention that when he was in prison in Adela III, he saw a middle-aged man who looked like a deacon, accompanied by several fierce thugs, taking a group of half-naked men, women, and children away from Horseshoe Town through a country road, seemingly heading towards Yongwang Town.
At this time, Osrian King, who was disguised as an "orc citizen of the Kenyan Empire" looking for relatives across the country, also went to Everlook Town with the slave trader who led the way.
The direction of investigation by both sides pointed to Yongwang Town, which made Yang Qiu instinctively realize that there might be something wrong with this town. He did not rush to assign an Undead Archon to Yongwang Town to avoid alerting the enemy - the national team had already prepared a candidate for the "Undead Mayor", and was just waiting for Yang Qiu to find an opportunity to secretly manipulate and send someone to the post.
After waiting patiently for a few days, unexpectedly, Brook lost consciousness and Osrian King was in danger.
Yang Qiu didn't show any expression on the surface, but he was unhappy in his heart.
If he is unhappy, then others must be unhappy as well.
The undead were searching the town wantonly. Most townspeople were just watching out of curiosity, but for some people, it was truly terrifying.
On the East Street of Yongwang Town, the owner of a grocery store stared in amazement as several undead ran into his store and made strange gestures toward every corner of his store and even toward himself (actually, they were the same middle school gestures that players make when using skills), with cold sweat pouring down his forehead.
Fortunately, these ghosts did not cause any trouble. They just circled around the store twice and then flew away.
The grocery store owner swallowed his saliva, walked to the door bravely, and found out...it was not only his store that was broken into by the undead. The vegetable store next door, the butcher shop opposite, and the leather store diagonally opposite were all broken into by the undead.
The owners of East Street were frightened by the undead entering their homes and ran to the door in confusion and nervousness, whispering to each other, not understanding what these guys were doing.
"I just heard the security team shouting that we must not stop the undead from coming to investigate. What are they investigating?" The old lady at the vegetable shop next door seemed to think that this could be a topic of conversation after being frightened, and she excitedly shouted to her old neighbor, the grocery store.
"Who knows?" The grocery store owner tried to imitate the gossipy woman and acted curious. "Just now, a ghost ran into my store and scared me."
"Are they looking for someone?" The owner of the leather goods shop across the street looked around with his hands in his pockets. There were not many people on the street because of the undead running around. The well-informed shop owner winked at his old neighbors and lowered his voice and said, "A while ago, a few orcs from the Kenya Empire came to look for their relatives. They said they were sold to our place. I heard that those orcs were quite rich. Even the slave traders in Adler sent people to help find people. Could they also pay these undead to help?"
The story of the Tarantan Undead being hired to work for the church in the neighboring territory of Odysseus and to help the Odysseus family fight wars was also reported in the Innadli Weekly.
The grocery store owner's heart skipped a beat. He didn't even realize that the muscles on his face were becoming unusually tense and his voice was getting louder. "How is that possible? When have we ever seen orcs in our town? I only saw what orcs looked like when I went to the city with my dad to buy goods."
The neighbors didn't notice anything strange about this old neighbor. Most people wouldn't think anything outrageous about the people they often see around them. They all agreed, "That's right. We've never seen orcs in our town. The orc from Kenya might have been deceived by Adler's slave traders. Those people are capable of doing anything bad."
"That's right. I heard that the slave traders in Adler even sold their own people. Many Adler people were sold to Moses Port, and some were sold to the Far South to grow spices."
"Fortunately, we don't have this kind of thing in Innadeli!" The proprietress of the vegetable shop said exaggeratedly, "If I knew that there was a slave trade here, my God, I would be so scared that I wouldn't even dare to go out!"
The grocery store owner agreed on the surface but cursed inwardly, "An old woman like you with a waist as thick as a bucket, how much can you be worth!"
Everlook is a small town that appears to be extremely quiet and peaceful. In the past, when the lord here was still the Baroness, the most widely circulated event that happened in the town was that a worker on the Baroness's tobacco farm accidentally cut off his toe. It was said that even the most daring men did not dare to roll and smoke the bloody tobacco leaves.
The Baroness offended a big shot in the city hall and was ousted. She was replaced by a lord named Patton, who installed large loudspeakers on several streets in the town that could play songs and teach people how to farm. People then forgot about the Baroness, and the topics of the women's gossip were all about Caroline's story that had been played on a loop a while ago, or the recently launched daily drama series about the farming life of country people.
After chatting with his old neighbors for a while, the grocery store owner returned to the store to sort the shelves. When he turned his back to the street, his expression suddenly became scary.
"It was those orcs who caused the trouble. How troublesome!" The grocery store owner cursed inwardly with gritted teeth.
Because there are very few orcs and outsiders in the town, when those well-dressed orcs sitting in a large carriage entered the town five days ago, they attracted a lot of onlookers.
When the grocery store owner first saw those orcs, his eyes lit up. Later, he stopped thinking when he realized that those orcs were accompanied by Adler's slave traders. His "small business" was not big enough to provoke those giants.
It was really tempting to see such a piece of fat meat that I dared not eat in front of me. Fortunately, the grocery store owner soon found some new fat meat...
"We can't wait any longer. We have to get the goods out quickly." The grocery store owner tidied up the shelves that were messed up by the rude undead and made up his mind secretly.
I stayed in the store for more than half an hour pretending to have nothing to do. The vegetable shop next door was packing up the stall in front of the door and preparing to close, so the grocery store owner also got up and closed the store.
The talkative old woman in the vegetable store saw this and yelled in surprise, "Hey, old Jack, you closed the shop so early today. Are you scared by the ghosts?"
"I'm greedy. I want to close the shop early and have a couple of drinks." Old Jack, the grocery store owner, cursed inwardly but responded in a good-tempered manner on the surface.
After closing the door and coming out, the grocery store owner discovered...there were more undead on the street than he had imagined.
Not only East Street, but South Street was also filled with ghosts. Not only did they run into shops that were open for business without any courtesy, they even ran into residential homes to harass them.
The townspeople who were watching the fun with interest at first were now annoyed by the undead that kept running into their homes again and again - after all, there wasn't just one group of undead that came to complete the mission, but batches of them...
When the grocery store owner Old Jack entered South Street, he saw a sturdy housewife whose washed sheets had been messed up by the dirty hands of the undead standing at the entrance of the alley and cursing.
But the housewife could only curse... The ghosts coming and going didn't care whether she was resistant or not, they still ran towards her house, waving strange gestures around the house.
Old Jack suddenly felt his heart rise to his throat - these undead ghosts actually searched so carefully, if the "goods" were not shipped away quickly, it would only be a matter of time before they were exposed!
