Maluo rubbed his chin.
“Boss, you mean…
we’re heading out to mess around now?”
“Bingo!”
Ji Luo snapped his fingers.
“Our main task during the day, while visibility is good, is to head outside and expand our map!”
“First, we’ll find some monsters and level up.
Once we’ve earned enough to cover the cost of resurrection coins, we can gather wood, thatch, and food in the wild while we’re at it.”
“When dusk approaches and it gets dark, we’ll retreat to the church’s safe zone, work on our infrastructure, and turn in our quests in peace!”
[Ji Luo] summed it up.
“Grind mobs and farm gold by day.
Return to town and build thatched huts by night.”
“Safe and efficient.
That’s what I call maximizing profits!”
“Awesome, Old Ji!”
[Passing Pure Love God of War] gave him a thumbs-up.
“Flawless logic!
We’ll do exactly that.
Today, I’m going to strip this forest clean!”
“Me too.
I’ll be in charge of carrying the wood.”
Bigshot nodded earnestly.
The four of them instantly reached an agreement and were just about to charge valiantly out through the church doors when—
Hum!
A beam of light suddenly shot into the sky from the magic circle at the center of the church.
The intense white light was so blinding that everyone instinctively covered their eyes.
“Yo, our Wall Street elite finally finished his classes and logged on?”
[Passing Pure Love God of War] whistled, stopping in his tracks and turning around.
As the light gradually faded, an aloof and indifferent figure slowly emerged from the center of the magic circle.
There was even a faint air of melancholy and brokenness about him.
The moment the four players saw who it was, they all sucked in a breath.
The player’s ID was—
[I Am Not Jiahao].
Who knew how this guy had adjusted his character’s color settings, but he had pushed his skin tone all the way to the system’s absolute limit.
His entire body was deathly pale, practically indistinguishable from someone who had just been pulled out of a formalin tank.
His long black hair was parted down the middle, with every strand apparently adjusted pixel by pixel with obsessive precision.
The long bangs fell at an unnaturally perfect angle, covering his left eye completely.
Just that single detail created an overwhelming aura of loneliness and desolation.
The kind that seemed to say:
My entire clan was wiped out in a bloodbath.
You mortals could never understand my pain.
His jawline had been sharpened to an almost ridiculous degree.
Lu Ziye swore that if that chin were used to slice steak, it could probably cut straight through in one stroke.
And as if that weren’t enough, Jiahao had used the system’s customization features to add a tiny beauty mark beneath his exposed right eye.
His right eye was half-lidded, his gaze radiating the quintessential domineering CEO aura.
Three parts coldness.
Three parts mockery.
Four parts indifference.
The only flaw was that he was still wearing the beginner’s linen shorts provided by the system.
Jiahao slowly opened his right eye and swept his gaze across the crowd.
Then, just like yesterday, he habitually slipped both hands into the waistband of his shorts and slightly raised his sharp chin.
“Heh.”
A quiet chuckle escaped his lips.
His voice dropped into a deep, melodramatic murmur.
“The aesthetic standards of my peers are, as expected, painfully shallow.”
“Look at all of you.
Still blindly pursuing vulgar muscles and ordinary features.”
He casually flicked aside the bangs covering his left eye, his tone filled with the lonely coldness of someone standing at the summit of the world.
“Whereas I…”
“What I have sculpted is a sense of fragile artistry—a dying aesthetic blooming alone within a hopeless world.”
“This is what you call a dimensional strike against conventional aesthetics.”
“It’s just…
well, you understand.”
The church fell silent.
Five seconds passed.
Another five seconds passed.
[Passing Pure Love God of War] finally couldn’t hold it in anymore.
He clutched his stomach, squatted down on the spot, and burst into uncontrollable laughter.
“Pfft—HAHAHAHA!
What the hell does ‘fragile artistry’ even mean?!”
“Bro, with that skin tone and those shorts, you look like some overindulgent gigolo who just escaped from the morgue!”
Maluo leaned closer and carefully examined Jiahao’s face.
A mischievous grin spread across his face.
“President Jia, I just have one question.”
“With your bangs that long, don’t they poke you in the eye?”
“And don’t you have to tilt your head whenever you walk?”
“What the hell do you know?!”
Jiahao’s cold composure instantly shattered.
His face flushed with anger.
“This is my left eye sealing away dark power!”
“Alright, alright.
Dark Power Bro.”
[Ji Luo] desperately suppressed his laughter as he stepped forward and patted Jiahao’s pale, slender shoulder.
“Get in line.”
“The game just launched a gold-farming system.”
“If you keep standing here posing instead of grinding, you won’t even earn enough to pay for your resurrection shorts.”
Before Jiahao could fully understand what was happening, Lu Ziye and Maluo each grabbed one of his arms and dragged him toward the church doors.
“Hey!
Don’t pull me!”
“My suit will get wrinkled…”
He paused.
“Wait.
I’m not wearing clothes!”
On the altar, the stone statue inhabited by Lynn quietly watched the five strange players shouting as they rushed outside.
Although the system had only just gone online and these Fifth Calamities seemed even less reliable than expected, Lynn wasn’t particularly worried.
After all, their greatest trump cards right now were—
Relentless nagging.
And—
Infinite resurrection.
Even if they were wiped out by some high-level anomaly outside, the worst that could happen was that they would become five piles of ash and line up neatly to respawn in the magic circle beneath his feet.
As long as they didn’t tear down his home base, they could do whatever they wanted.
Lynn withdrew his gaze and began slowly sorting through the other settings related to this so-called “game world.”
Beneath the statue, the little nun Sivier had no idea how shrewdly her Lord God was calculating.
After witnessing the five believers’ increasingly bizarre and ever-changing appearances, her faith had completely collapsed.
At this moment, she was kneeling devoutly on a prayer mat, quietly reciting prayers under her breath and contributing a steady stream of faith power to Lynn.
Even if that contribution was pitifully small, it was still faith power.
…
Meanwhile, on the other side.
The moment the five players officially stepped through the dilapidated wooden church doors and saw the outside world—
Everyone froze.
It was as if they had all been hit by the same paralysis spell.
There were no cheers.
No complaints.
Only dead silence.
What lay before them was a suffocating apocalyptic wasteland.
The sky was a sickly grayish yellow, with thick clouds pressing down like blocks of lead.
Not a single ray of sunlight could penetrate them.
A thin, fine-grained gray mist shrouded the entire world.
On the distant horizon, there were no familiar plains or mountains like those found in ordinary online games.
Instead, there was an endless black silhouette.
A vast and boundless—
Black Forest.
The trees were grotesquely tall.
Their withered, twisted branches stretched toward the sky like countless ghostly hands.
Deep within the Black Forest, faint crimson glimmers flickered intermittently.
Low, indescribable roars echoed from somewhere within.
Even from this distance, the players could tell that some terrifying “Bigshot” capable of tearing them apart with ease was definitely lurking in there.
Not far from the church stood a small abandoned medieval European-style village.
Broken walls and ruins were scattered everywhere.
The entire place looked as though it had been completely devastated.
The blades of a collapsed stone windmill were hung with the dried hides of unknown creatures.
At the entrance of the village stood a gallows stained a dark crimson, its thick hemp ropes creaking ominously in the gloomy wind.
Black vines crawled across every dilapidated stone house like venomous snakes.
The air was thick with the smell of damp earth and dried blood.
What was even more striking was that this “game world” wasn’t merely dark and grim.
It possessed an oppressive sense of epic scale.
The players could clearly see mutated insects writhing between cracks in the floor tiles.
They could hear the wind passing through the broken rooftops, producing a sound eerily reminiscent of a woman crying.
The extreme realism brought with it an equally extreme sense of horror.
And awe.