『Ding——! Congratulations, you have completed a daily quest (progress 1/3). Obtained Calming Tea Leaves x1.』
『Calming Tea Leaves (Honey Type): one cup of this tea, and your mood settles right down.』
With that chime, the hour and a half of horror-game time came to an end. Fang Tian saved at the nearest spot and made his honorable exit.
He hadn't been able to avoid a few scares along the way, but on the whole everything had stayed within his control. He glanced over at Chu Lun, who was still locked in a fight to the death with dragons of every kind.
Fang Tian stretched and took off his headphones.
After a short rest, he opened the Qingkong University official site. It was the first time he'd visited his own school's homepage as a Qingkong student. It looked much like any other university's — mostly welcome notices for freshmen and congratulations to so-and-so on winning some award.
This was, after all, a school that ranked among the top three in the country; "a breeding ground for talent" wouldn't be an overstatement. Nearly every semester some student stood out at one competition or another.
But that wasn't what Fang Tian had come to see. He made straight for the student forum, because he remembered Su Xiao saying the legend of Qingkong's Seven Wonders had spread from there. He skimmed the forum's first page and found almost nothing about campus legends.
There were people pontificating on current events, people debating the recruitment rules of various clubs, people fishing for the contact info of girls in other departments.
These were the categories with the most replies. At a glance, it was a perfectly normal student forum.
Fang Tian had to type the keywords "campus legend" into the quick-search bar to filter the content. He clicked search, and about a second later, less than a page of results came up.
The most recent post was from yesterday: a request for any upperclassmen who'd encountered a campus legend to get in touch with her.
Fang Tian saw at a glance that Su Xiao had posted it — not only had she bluntly used her own name as her forum handle, she'd even left her contact details in the body of the post.
Sadly, a full day had passed without a single reply; it looked like the thread had sunk the moment it went up.
In the spirit of bumping an acquaintance's post, Fang Tian quickly typed out a "Study hard and stop daydreaming about nonsense" to encourage her.
Backing out of Su Xiao's thread, he soon found the hottest "Seven Wonders" master thread. After skimming the first paragraph, he gathered that the very name "Campus Seven Wonders" had evolved out of this post — it gathered together seven widely circulated Qingkong legends and gave them the name.
From the top post, Fang Tian quickly located the two familiar entries: "Welcome Day" and "Basement Level 3 of Building C."
He'd triggered an E-rank quest down on the third basement level earlier, and that quest was still incomplete. Its prompt had specifically mentioned the name "Campus Seven Wonders," so Fang Tian guessed each of these seven wonders corresponded to a quest.
He was still in the early game. Since the system wanted him to play support, he'd have to find a core worth supporting.
He actually thought Senior Hao would do nicely — except Senior's "rank tier" seemed a fair bit above his own; her Favorability hadn't even cleared 10, so she probably still looked down on a rookie like him. No point inviting a snub.
For now, Fang Tian decided to farm and level up on his own first.
His single biggest advantage at the moment was being a Qingkong University student. Qingkong seemed to be a newbie protection zone — Senior had said the school itself was reasonably safe, but outside the gates, who could say. He took that to mean that as long as he stayed on campus, the malicious monsters outside couldn't touch him.
As a talent-type player, Fang Tian realized he had to make the most of this newbie protection zone to wring out the maximum return.
Soon his gaze settled on one of the titles.
"Ghost Server, and the Player Who Doesn't Exist."
"On the Qingkong campus forum there circulates a mysterious link. It appears at random and leads the player to a server that doesn't exist, where you'll meet a player who doesn't exist."
This one was good — it looked like a quest he could clear without setting foot outside.
After skimming the description below the entry, Fang Tian decided to make this close-to-home campus legend his first conquest.
He knew full well a dorm door wasn't enough to keep out a malicious ghost, but staying in his dorm still felt a lot safer than a morgue like Basement Level 3 of Building C.
With that, he typed the keywords "mysterious link" into the student forum's search engine.
To his surprise, this search turned up far more results than the campus legends — a whole page of threads with "mysterious link" in the title, several of them with frankly astonishing reply counts.
Could it be that quite a few Qingkong students were interested in campus legends?
Without a second thought, Fang Tian clicked into the thread with the most replies, and without even reading the body carefully, opened the link attached to it.
A new webpage popped up, and the instant he saw what was on it, his pupils shrank.
Fang Tian stared at the screen for a full ten seconds before he forced his mouse up to the red X in the top-right corner.
The site attached to this mysterious link was simply too terrifying — so much so that he very nearly delivered the famous line, "And that's all the campus legends we have time for today."
Back at the master thread, he scrolled down and found the replies eerily unanimous, nearly all of them blessings along the lines of "Thanks, OP, may good people live long and prosper." In the Qingkong student forum, which prized critical thinking and the clash of competing viewpoints, this was an absolute marvel to behold.
Fang Tian marveled that, in this world, perhaps only a "mysterious link" could make people set aside their grudges so quickly, cast off their respective positions, and arrive at one and the same demand.
It wasn't that he didn't understand what "mysterious link" implied — he just hadn't expected anyone would dare run such a risk on the student forum.
This person was a true menace to society!
Fang Tian denounced him in his heart: as Qingkong students, we ought to scrutinize this content with a critical eye! And so he indignantly added the page to his favorites, the better to subject it to thorough criticism another day.
After backing out of the thread he thought it over. Searching for a needle in a haystack like this was no way to go about it — and besides, the legend's link might not even appear on the student forum at all. The master thread had said the link was sent out at random, so what he needed to do now was raise the odds of the "mysterious link" noticing him.
So he quickly fired off a new post —— "Former High-Rank Ladder Player Here, Mysterious Link Please Come Quick"!
Simply mentioning "mysterious link" might be ambiguous, but adding "former high-rank ladder player" out front ought to cut that ambiguity to a minimum.
Five minutes later, a notification appeared in his message list.
The first person DMed him: "Hey bro, share the link when you've got one."
Eight minutes later, a second person DMed him: "gogo, can you help me hit 2500? I've got a few links."
Ten minutes later......
His account was banned.
The reason: posting prohibited content on the student forum.