Chapter 47 (1/2)

Chapter 47: Go Inside

Outside the Mo Family’s Great Cave.

There were a few corpses at this place. They were all Zhao bodies.

A dark figure gradually appeared on the flat lands. He wore a Zhao Army uniform, but his attire was different from a common soldier or a sergeant. Three black feathers decorated the shoulder area of his uniform.

He crouched on the ground and counted the number of corpses carefully.

“One, two, three, three of them had bled to death. Two of them were actually frightened to death, and we even lost a sergeant… did something unexpected happen?” the figure muttered to himself, “It’s good that I came. Master Zhao Yan truly has prodigious foresight…”

The dark figure no longer bothered with the corpses on the ground as his figure slowly faded, blurred, and finally vanished. The direction at which he vanished was exactly Mo Family’s Great Cave.

…

A new message had appeared on Yue Qiang’s monitor:

System Message [Blue]: First stage of Quest ‘Request Aid’ is complete.

The content of the quest ‘Request Aid’ was to reach Mo Family’s Great Camp and seek help. Just moments ago Yue Qiang had killed a boss by a hair’s breadth, and the message he got indicated that he had just finished the first stage. Unless he was mistaken, this seemed to mean that a more powerful enemy would be coming after him very soon?

Wait… what’s with this blue color?

Right now, he was incredibly sensitive towards colored system messages; this colored messages were usually much more important than the normal messages. Green color meant the activation of a new system, stats or skills, and red meant the decryption rate, which was still at a very basic level. However, the color blue was different.

The blue progress bar represented the conversion rate, and this thing was incredibly deadly. His blue progress bar was already seventy percent at this point. He remembered that Luqiu Duanyi once reminded him that, from now on, he must suppress the progression of the blue progress bar as much as possible and thus acquire more time from it. Obviously, this meant that to him, the slower the blue progress bar rose, the better.

He looked at the corner of the monitor and found that the blue progress bar sat at exactly 80% right now. Obviously, this quest had caused the progress bar to grow a little more and reached 80%. This time, the system had even made an exception to warn him after the progress bar had reached 80%. This probably meant that something important was about to happen.

Yue Qiang surveyed his surroundings and quickly noticed a change.

There were no HP bars.

Everyone’s HP bars were gone.

When he hovered his mouse over the tiger’s corpse earlier, it had showed a dark grey and empty health bar. The rest of the Zhao Soldiers’ corpses also had empty health bars, whereas the girls with her eyes closed wrapped in bed sheets had more than half of her health left. But after this system message had appeared, all of the HP bar had vanished from the screen.

When Yue Qiang noticed this change, he very naturally recalled the time he first played the Game. At that time, he was astonished by the weird combination of the game’s ridiculously realistic graphics and ridiculously simplistic UI. He had tapped every key on the keyboard but found only the character and item windows. Options such as resolution or save/load or shadow or background depth etc were completely missing, much less the on off b.u.t.ton of a health bar indicator.

Health bar was something that was on by default from the moment he played the Game until now.

However, when the blue progress bar ha

d reached 80% right now, the health bar indicator had suddenly turned off by itself.

The result of missing health bar was of course, a more realistic game.

When he first played this game, he simply felt that it was very realistic. But as his game time increased, he could clearly feel that the level of realism was gradually increasing. The first indicator was the NPCs’ growing intelligence. From the beginning where he could repeatedly converse with Chen Zi Han a dozen of times, to the point where the NPCs could make independent decisions of their own, before finally arriving at characters such as the righteous and heroic Hunter Tu Xu and the perverted and cowardly doctor Ming Que. The NPCs’ behaviors and character had grown vivid and defined over time. They weren’t this realistic from the beginning.

This was a gradually changing process.

The more prominent evidence was when the progress bar had reached 50%.

After the cutscene had begun, an incredibly unforgettable character had appeared before Yue Qiang – Ai Qian. His incredibly high charm and incredibly weak libido was a combination that very few people could forget, and this person did not look like an NPC at all. Moreover, Ai Qian also had an attribute that was different from other NPCs – Memory Unlock Rate 3%.

While recalling the memories, Yue Qiang’s eyes could not help but stare at the ridiculously beautiful girl before him. Yue Qiang refused to believe that she was just an NPC even if he was to be beaten to death. Forget that she shared the same attribute with Ai Qian ‘Memory Unlock Rate 0%’, just based on her deductive skills and ability to distinguish all kinds of details to make out the truth, and the cool-headedness she displayed such as the miniscule detail where she tore the bed sheets to create a noise alone, there were probably no more than a few people in real life who could pull off such a thing, much less an NPC.

These changes hadn’t appeared abruptly. They had gradually become prominent as the blue progress bar increased.

When the two characters, Ai Qian and Yin appeared before him, these changes had reached a point where he absolutely could ignore them no longer.

If he wanted to try discovering the cause behind these changes, there was a question he could ask first.

This question was also a very easy question to ask.

Ai Qian and Yin. Were they players?

Or in other words, was this game truly a single player game? Could there be other players in the world who encountered similar circ.u.mstances like Yue Qiang? Did they start playing the Game for baffling and unaccountable reasons, discovered the tri-colored progress bar, and as they continued playing the real world grew more and more fake and the game world grew more and more real?

Would there be someone else who experienced the same thing?

Was the girl in front of him this ‘someone’?

It wasn’t difficult at all either if he wanted to know the answer.

He just needed to ask her.

And so Yue Qiang typed, “I have a lot of things to ask you.”

Coincidentally, Yin had also chosen this moment to speak. Her voice was very nice, “I have forgotten everything, so I have a lot of things to ask you too.”

“Me first.” Yue Qiang typed swiftly, “Who are you, where did you come from and, how did…”

Before Yue Qiang could finish typing the sentence, he was interrupted by Yin. After all, typing was in no way faster than speaking.

“Let me speak first, because I am sure that what I’m about to say is more important than yours.” Yin said flatly. Her voice was nice but her tone gave no room for doubt, “Maybe what I’m saying is a little hard to bear, and my tone may be a little harsh, but the most important thing right now was to solve our problems. On this point, I believe that we are of the same goal.”

“I am able to a.n.a.lyse you very easily during the short few minutes of our contact. You are well-versed in combat, and the fact that you were able to overturn an absolutely disadvantageous situation and kill the tiger proved that you are of great prowess. As a man, your great prowess will make you very popular.”