[Selection complete. You are currently participating in: Solo Mode (Normal).]
[Script Name: Blood Hunt in the Rotting Forest.]
[Current Script Danger Rating: C-Grade.]
[The Script introduction will now play. Once the playback is complete, the Script will begin immediately.]
After waiting for a few seconds, Bai Mu heard the notification chime.
'Another solo Script?'
Bai Mu pondered if he had exceeded the average level of an E-Grade Player by such a wide margin that Paradise simply could not find suitable teammates for him, thus placing him in a solo Script instead.
However, compared to his last match in the Abandoned City of Doppelgangers, his strength had increased significantly. He had acquired quite a few items and skills, and had even gained Xiao Wei as a teammate. Yet, Paradise still did not place him into a B-grade Script.
'Perhaps Players can only be matched with Scripts that are at most two grades higher than their own level,' Bai Mu mused.
But even Scripts of the same difficulty level had varying degrees of danger.
He personally felt that Paradise was still gradually raising the difficulty. This current Script should be even more challenging than the Abandoned City of Doppelgangers. Calming his mind, he focused on the Script introduction. The opening cinematic had already begun. The lighting in the scene was extremely dim, and the camera shook violently. The sound of galloping hooves echoed, indicating that the person in the footage was likely riding a horse.
But as the camera panned, he spotted a pair of massive antlers.
The person in the first-person view was actually riding a towering stag. A piercing roar rang in their ears, sounding like a frenzied wild boar. The camera abruptly whipped around to face backward, revealing a colossal, hill-like silhouette emerging from the darkness of the night.
It was a monstrous boar, larger than a house and standing at least three or four stories tall. Curved tusks jutted aggressively from its snout. The behemoth was covered in a surging layer of tar-like slime, with hundreds of black, centipede-like insects burrowing in and out of its festering flesh.
The creature charged forward like a speeding truck. The camera jolted violently as the protagonist of the cinematic was sent flying upward. Without even a scream, the person was hurled into the air by the thick tusks, which pierced straight through their abdomen. Blood, organs, and intestines spilled from the gaping wound. The scene was so vivid that one could almost feel the warm, slick sensation of the viscera raining down.
It was an incredibly primal and gory spectacle. After the giant boar gored the rider to death, the camera slowly zoomed out, showing the startled stag galloping away across the grassy mud.
Observing the landscape, it was a hilly region dotted with rolling mounds. The environment was completely primitive; Bai Mu could not see a single trace of modern civilization, such as power lines, streetlights, or concrete.
A man wearing a cloak and a headscarf, with a bow and arrows slung across his back, lay dead in the grass, covered in blood. He had stopped breathing, his eyes wide open as he stared blankly at the moon in the sky.
Bai Mu gathered quite a bit of information from this single frame. First was the man's attire. He wore a coarse, grayish-brown linen tunic, with white cloth wrapped around his feet and simple straw sandals. His trousers were a loose fit, secured with a basic sash. Combined with the bow and arrows on his back and the pristine surroundings, it was enough to conclude that this Script was set in an ancient era.
It seemed akin to an agrarian or nomadic period. However, judging by the impossibly massive boar—a creature that could never exist in a normal environment—this place was clearly not any historical ancient world he was familiar with.
At the same time, the writhing black cursed snakes covering the boar's body proved that this was a world possessing mystical powers.
Although there was no narrating voice, the information provided by these short few scenes was actually quite comprehensive.
"It harbors a tremendous amount of hostility toward humans."
After goring the human to death, the boar did not bother chasing the fleeing stag. Bai Mu initially assumed the beast would devour the corpse, but it did not feed. Instead, it simply trampled the body a few times, crushing it into a bloody, mangled paste, before letting out a high-pitched howl and charging off in another direction.
Soon enough, Bai Mu saw the target of the boar's charge: a human settlement built in the middle of the wilderness.
Calling those structures a village felt somewhat inappropriate. In fact, the place struck Bai Mu more as a primitive tribe. The inhabitants did not even seem to know how to use bricks and tiles; all the houses were constructed from straw and wood. Outside the settlement stood watchtowers bound together with timber and straw ropes. The structure was incredibly basic, literally just felled logs stacked like building blocks to form a tower. The center was completely hollow, looking as though a slightly forceful stomp would bring the whole thing crashing down.
Behind the watchtower was a wooden fence. Its only real function was likely to stop animals like weasels and wild dogs from sneaking in to steal chickens. Barely over a meter high, it was slathered with a mixture of straw and mud that served as filler.
The houses within the fence were essentially makeshift tents cobbled together from dry grass, wood, stones, and mud. These dwellings required zero technical skill to build, and one glance was enough to tell they would leak in both wind and rain. If the wind picked up just a bit, the roofs would probably blow right off.
Given the materials, Bai Mu could build a house like that in a single day, and it would undoubtedly be much more comfortable to live in than the heaps before him. He was not trying to be disparaging; it simply confirmed that this Script was set in an era far removed from modern times. The people here still lived in rudimentary settlements and perhaps even bartered for goods.
The Script cinematic continued playing. The giant boar plowed into the village, shattering the fragile fences like building blocks and ripping a massive hole through the perimeter.
The villagers had been alerted and were already raising torches, firing arrows at the beast. But their efforts were completely futile. The wooden arrows could not even pierce the boar's thick hide. Furthermore, the black cursed snakes writhing on its body possessed a terrifyingly corrosive property. Wherever the creature passed, the grass rapidly withered and turned yellow, suggesting that it constantly emitted some sort of corrosive toxin.
These people, still living in a primitive hunter-gatherer society, were naturally powerless against such a monster. In just a few short charges, the boar smashed the village structures to splinters. Anyone caught in its path was sent flying and gored to death.
Torches scattered across the ground, and soon, the entire village was engulfed in flames.
Right at that moment, Bai Mu suddenly felt that he could control his body again.
The pungent smell of burning washed over him. Pale yellow firelight illuminated his surroundings. Above him was a sparse, thatched roof, and chunks of brown smoked meat hung from the slanted rafters.
Beneath his feet was a dirt floor, and directly in front of him lay a square fire pit dug right into the ground. A clay pot was suspended over the pit, presumably used by the locals for cooking.
To the right of the fire pit was a bed made of straw and animal hides, which happened to be the exact spot where the fire had started. He realized he had been dropped directly into the burning village from the cinematic.