The sun gradually sank in the west, and the first night of the apocalypse arrived.
A chilling sense of dead silence instantly swept across the entire globe, making those experiencing it for the first time shiver involuntarily.
After the descent of fantasy into reality, daytime was naturally endowed with a new “mystery.” It suppressed the strength of monsters, boosted the growth of all things...
A series of positive “settings” had been applied to the sun.
However, the same was true for the night. Monsters would become more ferocious, their abilities more powerful, and they might even undergo additional mutations...
In fact, it wasn't just the night; each celestial body had been assigned its own “mystery” derived from fantasy.
Among them, the most prominent was the moon. After all, there were simply too many works of fantasy regarding the moon.
To give the most classic example, when the moon descended in the form of a “Red Moon,” monsters would enter a state of total frenzy.
Moreover, a frenzy was merely the most basic buff; the Red Moon provided various other enhancements to different species of monsters.
Of course, nothing was absolute. Harsh days could occur during the daytime, and a Silent Night might occur at night.
Speaking of Silent Nights—holidays would also be affected. They would possess their mysteries in a literal sense, rather than just the meaning humans assigned to them.
Today was October 27th, and there were no holidays, but the Double Ninth Festival was in two days, and Halloween was in four.
The Double Ninth Festival was actually quite good. It fell on the ninth day of the ninth month, when both the sun and the moon were aligned with Yang energy. With two nines overlapping, it was called “Double Ninth.”
But Halloween was a bit of a trap. As a festival of ghosts, all sorts of demons and monsters would receive a power boost.
Fortunately, China wasn't a major cultural zone for Halloween, so the influence here was relatively weak.
As for why there was any influence at all—it was because there were still quite a few games and commercial activities in China that observed the day.
“I’ll need to make some preparations later...”
...
While Mo Shao was making her calculations, the “Minecraft Village Phantom Realm” she was in finally began spawning monsters.
Monster after monster seemed to precipitate out of thin air.
Skeletons, zombies, creepers, spiders... one by one, monsters began to spawn rapidly.
To be fair, the threat level of Minecraft monsters in the early stages was completely inferior to some other monsters.
Even their drops were quite decent. For her—and for many others—the early stage was purely a source of free benefits.
Armed with a bow and her staff, she retreated to a high point, casually farming the area as a resource point.
The safety level here was comparable to an official safe zone.
But the sheer mechanic of “infinite spawning” was enough to compensate for their weaknesses.
After all, this wasn't the game; they didn't need a player to load the chunks for monsters to spawn. As long as a monster wandered away and freed up the space, another could continue to spawn.
What’s more, there were “people” who would take advantage of this fact.
...
“Looks like there’s a large settlement over there.”
From the top of the church, Mo Shao muttered thoughtfully while using her bow and arrows to attack monsters, watching them surge continuously in one direction.
The vast majority of monsters would be classified directly as part of the [Chaos] faction—because they were truly under the influence of [Chaos].
And due to the influence of [Chaos], the Phantom Objects that descended were almost entirely monsters; friendly characters were an extremely rare minority.
—Generally speaking, only objects belonging to characters would descend.
For instance, Bronya herself might not descend after the apocalypse, but Project Bunny or the Core of Reason might.
This information was something she had gleaned from fragments of words in the super-large Phantom Event “Retrospective” in the extremely late stages of her previous life.
By the way, as a king of wilderness survival who spent all her time hiding in Phantom Realms, she hadn’t made it onto any power-scaling Retrospectives.
—But she did make it onto an [Oddity List].
After all, in all those years, she was the only survival junkie who had spent her time roaming the Phantom Realms without dying... Cough, anyway.
...
[Chaos] would influence and drive these creatures, sending them to attack locations where [Order] resided.
Thus, the bases and safe zones established by survivors... every single one of them would be attacked by wave after wave of monster tides.
However, there were naturally benefits for the [Order] side as well.
Once a settlement developed to a certain stage, it could obtain special territorial abilities.
Usually, these were abilities from various fantasies.
For example, defense towers from various tower defense games, or the troop-recruitment abilities from strategy games, with Red Alert being the most famous among them.
However, she had no intention of building such things.
Since [Chaos] went after [Order].
As long as one was a lone traveler or part of a small group that hadn't established [Order], they wouldn't be directly targeted by [Chaos].
—Of course, that just meant monsters wouldn't travel long distances specifically to attack you. If you actually encountered them on the road, you still had to fight.
It was just a matter of convenience for them.
...
Even though she didn't want to build large factions, she still had other goals.
That brought her back to her objective—becoming a courier, or more accurately, a wandering merchant of the apocalypse.
Although the Real Realm was fragmented by Phantom Realms, that didn't mean the pieces of the Real Realm were particularly far apart.
If one's luck was good, some places might even be closer due to spatial shifts—provided, of course, that one traveled through the Phantom Realms.
Since the “specialties” of each region were different, traveling across the land could be incredibly lucrative.
—The key point was that this behavior inherently led to getting stronger along the way. There were too many Phantom Realms; the speed of getting stronger while staying in one place was far too slow.
It was true that she could stay safe and slowly grow stronger—but she had spent her entire previous life playing it safe, only to end up being reborn for some inexplicable reason.
So, in this life, she decided to accelerate her development.
Of course, she didn't intend to be a lone wolf forever. She planned to find some teammates, as a single person's capacity was limited after all.
Besides... being alone in the wilderness was truly exhausting. Constant vigilance left no time for rest.
If she hadn't been a robot in her previous life, she would have dropped dead long ago.
The fact that her emotions had almost zeroed out in the later stages was likely due to that.
Otherwise, the robots in RoboWars were actually emotional—at most, they were a bit NPC-like.
Even more crucially, it was actually easier to “read people” and find “good people” after the apocalypse than it had been before.
Aside from those like Mo Shao who actively made contact with Phantom Objects to change their bodies and change accounts.
There were also people who, due to having an exceptionally high Compatibility with a certain Phantom Object that descended near them, directly underwent a transformation.
—Thus, they produced a change.
If the character these people transformed into had a righteous personality, then they were very much worth taking along.
They would be subtly influenced by the character, and eventually, there would be no difference between them and the character themselves.
Furthermore, the fact that their Compatibility was high enough for a direct transformation proved that they were inherently very similar to the character they became.
She hoped she would encounter a few of them soon.
Rate on N.U.
