“Why are there only four attributes: Loyalty, Morality, Intellect, and Ambition? Shouldn’t there normally be something like Combat Power too?” With only twenty-three points of Intellect, Zhang Yang naturally didn’t bother with the finer details.
Her attention was soon drawn elsewhere.
Her fingers tapped and poked at the panel, searching through it over and over, but she couldn’t find what she wanted to see.
In the end, her gaze settled on Recruitment.
There was a “Recruit” tag beside both Shen Zhi’s portrait and the mysterious woman’s.
Zhang Yang was quite familiar with the term.
In the game world, apart from a few individual quests, most activities required a group, and putting a group together meant recruiting teammates.
Players could post group recruitment notices on the Recruitment panel.
Depending on the activity, the maximum party size could be as few as five, ten, or twenty-five, or as many as a hundred, a thousand, or even ten thousand.
Zhang Yang rested her chin in her hand and pondered.
Based on what she’d learned over the years, the developers wouldn’t give players quests they couldn’t complete.
No matter how difficult a quest was, players could recruit teammates and clear it together.
Yet the Homestead Side Quest blocked out other players while still displaying a recruitment prompt.
That meant Homestead Quests also required a party, but the teammates wouldn’t be players.
They’d be NPCs on the Homestead Map.
A flash of inspiration shot through Zhang Yang’s mind.
She clenched her left hand into a fist and slapped it against her right palm, suddenly understanding: “The game designers are trying to force players to bond with the NPCs this way.” You build the team with your own hands, conquer the world with your own hands.
How could you not grow attached?
And once players got attached, all sorts of game merchandise would fly off the shelves.
As one observation sample put it sarcastically: “If the character I love weren’t a cyber hostage in this crappy game, who would keep playing for sixteen years?”
Back then, Zhang Yang hadn’t thought much of it.
Now, though, she had to admit the game designers really were devious.
“This is clearly a plot to hold cyber hostages and use them to make players obey!” Zhang Yang stared at the recruitment tags beside the two portraits and silently warned herself, “I absolutely must not fall for the villains’ trick!”
But—
The problem at hand was recruiting people as quickly as possible.
Reclaim the lost territory and restore her homeland!
Zhang Yang opened the recruitment page.
Unlike the simple recruitment page she was familiar with, the brand-new one had a column of portraits on the left.
The top two were unmistakably Shen Zhi and the mysterious woman.
All the portraits beneath them were grayed out, and every detail, including the names, was replaced with question marks.
On the right was a platform, with a three-dimensional star floating above it.
When Zhang Yang placed her finger on Shen Zhi’s portrait, the stars on the platform transformed into a miniature Shen Zhi.
A series of data silently appeared beside the figure’s phantom.
Would you like to recruit Tail Mansion · Shen Zhi?
Recruit,Cancel
Zhang Yang tentatively tapped the word Recruit.
A passage quickly popped up in the System Log.
Tail Mansion · Shen Zhi, affiliated with one of the Four Symbols, Azure Dragon.
Martial Class.
He has little fondness for you, so the chance of successful recruitment is low.
We recommend waiting until you have earned enough of his trust before inviting him.
The data beside the phantom also changed.
Stars: Azure Dragon · Tail Mansion
Talent: Tail Fire Tiger
Zhang Yang tapped the mysterious woman’s portrait.
Would you like to recruit Nüchuang · Xie Shu?
Recruit,Cancel
“So that’s her name, Xie Shu? It’s a rather strange name.”
Stranger still, when Zhang Yang shifted her gaze to the platform on the right, she found that the phantom on it was not the mysterious woman.
Instead, there stood a twelve-year-old girl with an expressionless face and ashen skin.
The young girl’s clothes were ragged, the fabric covered in burn marks.
Blood dripped steadily from her face, neck, and fingers.
Stars: Purple Forbidden Enclosure · Nüchuang
Talent: Unknown (unlocked later)
Zhang Yang stared at the figure’s faint, ghostlike image for a long while.
“The Nüchuang of the Purple Forbidden Enclosure? Shen Shude said before that the princess was also some kind of Nüchuang. He also said the Star Official Nüchuang lost in a struggle, and ever since then, anyone who obtained the Nüchuang Star was born with some innate deficiency?”
So Xie Shu’s star was Nüchuang too?
The Talent field said “Unknown,” not “None.”
That meant the other person did have a Star Talent, but they would have to keep exploring and uncovering clues before it became visible.
She calmed herself and searched for clues, but after thinking it over for ages, she still couldn’t make sense of it.
All she could do was pull out her notebook and jot it down.
The next day, dawn broke bright and clear.
The mysterious woman, Xie Shu, had gone to work before daybreak.
When she opened her eyes, she saw Shen Zhi bare-chested, grunting and going through his moves.
She found a spot beneath the covered walkway, sat cross-legged, and enjoyed the bodhisattva’s gift, her gaze fixed on Shen Zhi until he grew uncomfortable.
“Don’t you have any shame?”
Shen Zhi was rarely watched so intently by a woman.
Zhang Yang said, “If you’re showing it off, isn’t it for people to see?”
There were plenty of bare-chested male players running around in the game, their trouser legs practically split up to the waist.
Zhang Yang had seen so many that she was used to it.
On the other hand, since entering the Homestead Side Quest, she’d seen one humanoid NPC after another bundled up from head to toe these past few days.
She wasn’t used to it.
Shen Zhi angrily grabbed her clothes and wrapped them around his upper body.
“Flirt.”
Zhang Yang was utterly unmoved by the assessment.
She only reacted to what interested her, and cut straight to the point: “Xie Shu is also Nüchuang. Why does she have Star Talent?”
“Xie Shu? Who?”
“Xie Ruxin, that mysterious woman from yesterday.”
“To give your all is zhong; to put yourself in another’s place is shu. Xie Ruxin. That’s a lovely name.” Shen Zhi saw from Zhang Yang’s bewildered, peach-blossom eyes that she hadn’t understood a word.
Skipping the commentary, he sat down and wiped away his sweat.
“Where did you learn her name? And that she’s Nüchuang?”
“That’s not important.”
What mattered was why Xie Shu had Talent despite being Nüchuang.
Shen Zhi didn’t press her for an answer either.
The explanation was probably that she had some special ability of her own.
“I told you before: even Stars who have lost their respective Star Officials still have a chance to defy fate and change their lot, though the price is steep. Everyone is born with their allegiance already decided, and each Star Lord is the leader of their own group. When a Star Lord falls, the stars are left without a leader, as if they’ve lost their source of power. To restore it, they need only change allegiances.”
“The price is steep?”
“Who doesn’t despise a two-timer?” Shen Zhi said.
People like that had to endure some kind of pain every moment of every day.
“Pain?” Zhang Yang asked.
Shen Zhi replied casually, “There’s a whole lot of it. Drowning, burning alive, being struck by lightning, being flayed alive; deafness, blindness, loss of sensation, losing limbs… You name it, it exists. If the Star Lord they switch allegiance to stays safe, then fine. But if something happens to that one too… Tsk, tsk, tsk. That would be worse than death.”
Many people had been tortured until they went mad.
“Only a tiny fraction of people have Star Talent to begin with, and switching allegiance doesn’t guarantee you’ll get it. But the price has to be paid either way. No one would take that risk unless they had no other choice.” As he spoke, Shen Zhi thought of Xie Shu.
She was also of Nüchuang, yet from their brief conversation last night, she seemed perfectly normal.
“With your strength, you don’t need to worry about this.”
“Why did the Star Lord lose?” Zhang Yang asked.