757 Chapter 757 - May God Guide Us (1/2)
Foe-herder and his guild were ostracized by the three large guilds, and he was very displeased. But he did not dare to go up and argue with them about it this time, since he was just left with this one life and there was no way to ensure that the other guilds might not backstab him ruthlessly, pretending their grip on their weapon momentarily lapsed and 'accidentally' kill him. By the time that happens, it would take a long time before he would be able to get any resolution to the matter.
However, just through his internal contacts that he had planted in the three guilds, Foe-herder was able to distinctly learn about the things that the three guilds were up to. Now that his suspicion toward Ye Xiaowu had been dispelled and the fact he was unable to work together with the three guilds, Foe-herder suddenly thought of the wrong guidance that Ye Xiaowu had provided.
Since the man could still be trusted, then the mistake that he had made would only be a result of being misled by Thousand Miles Drunk and his bunch. Thus, the problem was with his judgment, which meant that there must surely be some important lead relevant to the quest over by Yunjiao Quarry, without any shadow of a doubt. As such, Foe-herder immediately led his most trusted guildmates over to the location and searched for any traces, going so far as to dig around the place, literally and metaphorically. They carried on digging until Broken Water Arrow and Youthful Reflection both arrived at the scene, yet nothing had turned up in the meantime.
”D*mm*t!” Youthful Reflection cried the moment he stepped into Yunjiao Quarry, immediately recognizing the players there to be men from Cloud Herder guild. He was a smart man after all, so he instantly understood what Foe-herder was trying to do.
But when he saw that these people were all still busy, Youthful Reflection had instead laughed, as he very quickly deduced that they had not managed to find anything.
Broken Water Arrow's expression had become a lot more dignified, looking toward a certain direction before calling Youthful Reflection, ”Over here.”
The two pretended for a bit, acting as if they were just the average player doing missions, mingling with the other players. Because this clue was already Foe-herder's last hope, he had already reminded everyone to take note of all the players with unknown origins. When Broken Water Arrow and Youthful Reflection both first arrived, both were not wearing emblems and they had their faces covered. There was nothing more conspicuous than that, so it was hardly a stretch that they were being watched closely by the men from Cloud Herder.
”Let's not alert the others,” Foe-herder instructed. ”Let's act like we do not care for their presence and let them carry on with what they are doing. We'll eliminate them the moment we know what they are up to!”
”Roger that!”
Broken Water Arrow and Youthful Reflection were walking amidst the crowd, and it was apparent that Broken Water Arrow had been told by Ye Xiaowu just where he had to go to find the item he needed. Without taking any detours, he simply had his eye on what he needed to achieve here and went straight for it. When Broken Water Arrow was right in front of the target location, Broken Water Arrow came to an abrupt stop and stared ahead of him, a little surprised.
”What's the matter?” Youthful Reflection came over to ask.
Broken Water Arrow did not reply, merely pointing his hand in a certain direction. Ahead was one of the excavated tunnels here in the Quarry, and the men from Cloud Herder had already dug out a sizable hole there.
”Can't we go over?” Youthful Reflection had his doubts.
”We can't… The thing that we needed was inside that hole…” Broken Water Arrow was pointing to that hole as he spoke.
”This…” Youthful Reflection was stunned. If the location where said item was supposed to be unearthed had already been dug, that meant that the item had already been picked up by someone else. And if that was indeed the case, why did the men from Cloud-herder continue to keep digging here?
”Is there anything else?” Youthful Reflection asked Broken Water Arrow.
”Nope,” Broken Water Arrow answered.
”So they have already…” Youthful Reflection was confusing.
Broken Water Arrow shook his head, ”There's no way that they would be so careless as to miss finding it. I'm afraid that this means that someone else has already dug the item out and made off with it before these people did.”
”F*ck! Who could have done this?”
”I have no idea. Perhaps it was discovered by a random player on another quest or something,” Broken Water Arrow said.
”D*mm*t. So what do we do now?”
”We've got no choice… At least this is someone from one of the guilds, so perhaps we can get in touch with whoever found it,” Broken Water Arrow said.
Seeing that this was such a vital quest, to think that it might inexplicably fall into the hands of some random guild left Youthful Reflection feeling extremely despondent. It was such a pity that the failure of this quest would result in the entire city assaulter's side to be defeated; that was an outcome that no one could benefit from. The only hope that they could hold out for was that the player who picked up the item was from some infinitesimally small guild, so maybe they would be able to offer a more appropriate reward in exchange for the ownership of the quest.
Youthful Reflection was thinking about all this as he was about to inform Oathless Sword about what happened here when the players from Cloud Herder suddenly surrounded the pair. Foe-herder had received the report about how the two men had suddenly come to a halt, looking like they had some sort of scheme to hatch. Foe-herder had also become impatient by this point and decided to have the showdown.
Walking over, Foe-herder saw the two were masked, so he asked, ”Who are you?”
Youthful Reflection saw what sort of situation they were in, so he pulled off the cloth on his face and smiled, ”It's me.”
”And you are?” Foe-herder turned to regard Broken Water Arrow, as he silently revealed his face as well.
Foe-herder saw his face and became even more certain of his deduction. He nodded, ”Looks like I guessed correctly. Is there still something here that is related to the quest?”
”To be precise, it's a quest item. Did you guys not find it?” It was no longer the time to beat around the bush.
”Hehe, we're just waiting for your guidance,” Foe-herder said.
Broken Water Arrow shook his head with much regret, pointing at the cavity behind him, ”It should have originally been there.”
”Is that so?” Foe-herder looked to the left and right. ”Who's in charge of that location over there?”
Immediately, a player answered, ”Our team was the one excavating it, but we found nothing!”
”Have you checked through it thoroughly?”
”Of course! There's no way we could have overlooked anything,” That player very confidently called out.
Foe-herder knew this person as well, and he was someone who was trustworthy and dependable. As such, he turned his gaze to Broken Water Arrow and Youthful Reflection, somewhat confusedly asking, ”So what do we do now?”
”It's very simple. Someone has previously dug out the quest item before you did. There's no more time now, so you'll have to hurry and find this person. It should have been a player from a guild who was assigned to complete missions here in order to be able to retrieve the quest item from this location. We must now make haste and mobilize all the guilds from the city to search for this player!” Broken Water Arrow said. Honestly speaking, neither he nor Ye Xiaowu were concerned about which guild ended up being the guild that completed this quest. They were more worried about a guild obtaining such a huge benefit as a result of their revelation of such important information, and that would most definitely make Ye Xiaowu harbor complex feelings about it for a long time.
However, Ye Xiaowu finally realized that for Thousand Miles Drunk to complete the quest that would lead to Yunduan City's city assaulters to fail en masse was a far more unfair and imbalanced outcome, which was why he ultimately elected to leak this information and let the city assaulters skip the step and reach the completion phase of the quest, all in an effort to prevent Thousand Miles Drunk from succeeding. This might perhaps be another sort of imbalance, but Ye Xiaowu felt he no longer had any other choice in this matter...
”D*MM*T!” Foe-herder had not expected that he would have busied himself over nothing, to actually have someone else out there preemptively gotten away with what he wanted. However, he still had his doubts, ”For a normal player doing missions out here, there's no reason for him or her to dig at this place. It's a cavity. There's no reason whatsoever to dig it further.”
Broken Water Arrow did not have any explanations for this either. For players to even make their way here and dig at this cavity, that would be like Thousand Miles Drunk finding the underwater cave; they would need to have done it through a quest to get hints every step of the way to lead them to that point. If it was really a case of happenstance that some player actually managed to dig the quest item out… Then that would just be luck at fantastical levels. However, even if a normal player were to luck out and dig it out, the lack of any prior leads for the quest means that there would be no prompts at all, so there would be no instructions on how to use the item even if they got a hold of it. This was also the issue that comes with skipping to the last step which the three guild leaders had previously been very doubtful of.
Even though it was possible to skip right to the final phase of the quest, if they did not have someone like Ye Xiaowu who had complete knowledge of the quest's storyline, the average player, without the step by step hints that the quest gave, simply lacked the circumstances to make such a deduction. Even if they were standing right at the final stage of the quest, how would they know how to continue on?
”Now's not the time to discuss everything. Shall we go look for this person before anything else? If we don't stop Thousand Miles Drunk, I'm afraid the city assaulter's forces will soon be met with defeat,” Broken Water Arrow said.