Chapter 9: The Valley of the Tragic Dead (1/2)

The town outside of the Valley of the Tragic Dead was not a place that he had chosen on a whim, but a place he had chosen after meticulous planning.

Kennington Village was too remote, and the surrounding forests only held regular beasts. It would not be a good place for players to grind and earn levels.

Due to the fact that other deities existed, there were a lot of churches or temples built in their honor all over the Prime Material Plane, releasing divine energy like a protective barrier. If Xi Wei did not have any believers around those places, he would not be able to observe those places using his Divine Eye alone.

On the other side of the spectrum, places that were not covered by divine energy were impoverished and unsuitable to become a starter village for his believers.

But in the end, Xi Wei found a few passable areas after spending some time.

The Valley of the Tragic Dead was exactly one of those places.

In a world filled with deities, the cliché sounding war of gods and demons had naturally happened before. Xi Wei did not know the details as the God of Games had not been created at the time, but from the vague marks left behind by natural laws on his Divine Records, it seemed that a lot of realms had been involved with this terrible war.

It was that war that had almost reset the entire world and had caused the Three Saints of Creation to completely separate the divine realm from all the other realms and made them forbid deities from heading to other realms.

As the bridge which connected the east and west continents, the Valley of the Tragic Dead which spanned up to a hundred kilometers was one of the warzones of the war. It was here that Lord Hades had slain the Primordial God of Death, and stole his power over the netherworld and death itself.

When the Primordial God of Death ceased to be, it let out copious amounts of deadly miasma, killing almost half of the living beings on the Prime Material Plane.

A thousand years later, the gray miasma still filled the Valley of the Tragic Dead, turning the valley into a forbidden land for all living beings, and cutting all contact between continents entirely.

Xi Wei was not overconfident enough to have the players challenge the remains of the primordial god so quickly, but a rift in space caused by the miasma was formed. From this place came millions of revenants that immediately flooded the valley—even the parts that were not covered by miasma.

The number of revenants increased by the dozens each year, and their natural hate toward everything that lived and breathed made them leave the valley in hordes—sieging any human settlement they came across.

Every year, the empire spent innumerable amounts of money to wipe out these revenants. Not that the empire didn’t want to solve the root of the problem: there were no mainstream deities that held influence over death, and so they could do nothing.

Even if they expended large amounts of divine energy to create protective talismans for their believers, they could only protect one or two of them from perishing in the miasma. This amount was pitifully low when compared to the revenants that filled every nook and cranny of the valley.

Lord Hades was an extremely introverted deity and always kept to himself, not interacting with any other deities and by extension, not helping to deal with this problem.

Ultimately the Valley of the Tragic Dead could only stay the way it was on this continent. The priests of the Brilliant White church had predicted that the miasma would dissipate on its own in three to four thousand years… And that was if they were lucky.

This land which was seen as poisonous and deadly by the other deities became the ideal place for Xi Wei to set up his starter village—unlimited number of monsters, imperishable resources, and he did not have to worry about affecting the ecology of this world by slaying beasts. In addition, the revenants here grew stronger from Skeletons and Zombies to the Dullahans and Zombie Dragons deep within the miasma—basically a complete chain of monsters that continued getting stronger! He did not have to worry about the players not being able to meet their match.