The spectating players, upon receiving the emergency notice from their guilds, began teleporting away. It was at this moment that Bai Youyou received a message from the Order Court.
Seeing the text on the screen, the girl's expression shifted slightly. She looked toward Angelina and Xu Xiaoyou with a hint of resentment; the latter's wanted status had just been lifted.
Outside Oasis City, she could no longer act as she pleased as she did within the city walls, so she had no choice but to drop the matter.
"Don't let me catch you next time."
Bai Youyou turned around, giving Xu Xiaoyou a cold warning. Leaving behind a dangerously profound gaze, she was enveloped in the light of teleportation and vanished from the spot.
With the crisis averted, Xu Xiaoyou turned to leave, but Angelina grabbed her by the collar from behind, her face expressionless: "Are you utilizing me?"
"Hmm?" Xu Xiaoyou was somewhat surprised.
"It's about the guild honor points," Angelina said, her tone neither heavy nor light. "You obviously knew..."
"Sorry."
The girl's answer caught Angelina off guard. For a moment, she forgot what she wanted to say, only to see Xu Xiaoyou looking at her earnestly before suddenly letting out a soft chuckle.
"Anya, didn't you also realize long ago that I was lying to you?"
"I'm just returning the favor from a few days ago," Angelina said. "Don't be so full of yourself."
"Then you owe me quite a lot of favors," Xu Xiaoyou replied. "Whether it was the encirclement of Section 6 on Siren Island or the trouble with the association, I was the one who solved those for you."
A layer of frost gradually condensed in Angelina's eyes. Just as she was about to end the conversation and leave alone, the girl's voice came from behind her.
"But one thing at a time; what happened in Corrupt Hive City was my fault. Sorry, Anya. When we met again earlier, I shouldn't have thought about dominating you, even though you really did intend to kill me at the time," Xu Xiaoyou said seriously.
"If you want to leave me and gain true freedom, I can give it back to you at any time. It's not a charity."
Angelina stopped in her tracks. After a long silence, she gave an ambiguous response.
"If something like this happens again, you should tell me clearly. I don't like being kept in the dark."
Angelina had never been very good at expressing her thoughts. Perhaps it was because she had walked the world in isolation for so long, or perhaps it was because she had actively closed off her heart to prevent herself from being swallowed by coldness and numbness.
When she truly wanted to open the tightly closed doors of her heart and reveal a more authentic self, she found that the doors seemed to have rusted. The hinges let out a long creak, and the words she wanted to say changed the moment they reached her lips, every syllable feeling awkward.
Clearly, what she wanted to say wasn't such shallow words.
To think that a person like her would actually take the initiative to apologize.
"Do I need to start calling you Angelina?" Xu Xiaoyou asked.
"Suit yourself, as long as you're happy."
"Then I won't change it?"
"Mm."
Watching Angelina walk away, Xu Xiaoyou's gaze grew calm, settling on the world instance prompt in front of her.
This was the perfect opportunity to spread the reputation of Light-Chaser Garden.
...................
Weeds grew across the city walls, the gaps between bricks and stones serving as a paradise for these climbing plants. The girl's slender fingertips brushed against the rough patterns of the giant stones; the walls of this city were relatively primitive, built from stacked boulders.
They looked as if they had been hacked out with axes, with serrated profiles.
A cold and damp sensation traveled from her fingertips as Sevia looked up along the towering walls. The day was growing late, and dark clouds were piling up over the city, looking strange and chilly.
The thick moisture in the air brought a premonition of rain; a downpour was coming soon.
Sevia shook her head.
She hadn't expected to encounter a civilized city in the badlands.
Rather than a city, it was more like a small kingdom. On the way there, she had seen many villages and lordly fiefs, with populations concentrated around four or five hundred people. There were also larger territories with complete production facilities—pastures, farmlands, windmills, and ironworks.
However, one thing left the girl puzzled.
Whether it was the villages and fiefs along the way or the royal city before her, they all seemed to be permeated by a kind of... dead silence.
As a starry singer, she was particularly sensitive to such silence.
Crows let out hoarse cries overhead. Every household had its doors and windows tightly shut, and the city gates were closed as well....
The shadow of death hovered over the entire country. Had something happened here?
At that moment, a squeaking sound came from near her feet. Sevia looked down to see a massive black house rat with filthy fur and blood-red eyes scurrying past her leg, slipping into a gap beneath the city wall.
It vanished right before her eyes.
Sevia blinked, thinking she had seen it wrong.
That rat was almost as large as a pomelo.
Chilly dark clouds drifted slowly across the sky. Sevia swallowed the bitterness in her throat and decided to check the nearby villages first. Although she didn't think the villagers there would be interested in her paintings, there would surely be something she could help with—turning over the soil in the fields or kneading clay for the brick kilns—as long as it earned her a bite of food.
With that thought, Sevia traveled for about an hour along the outskirts of the city. By then, the sky had turned completely dark.
A drizzling rain shrouded the forest, and a thin mist drifted through the mountains.
The muddy path stretched out beneath her, the wet topsoil soaking the tips of Sevia's boots. She tightened her thin shawl and continued forward, pursing her dry, cracked lips.
The pattering raindrops fell on her body, and a cold wind blew, the icy sensation seeping into her skin. As the soil in the mountain forest was soaked by the rain, the scent buried deep within the earth was released, wafting past the girl's nose.
It was like the advanced decomposition of some animal carcass, the proteins in the flesh being broken down to produce the smell of hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and methane. The intense stench of rot was daunting.
Sevia felt as though she had smelled this scent often in her memory. Aside from an initial brief discomfort due to the overwhelming intensity of the rot, her furrowed brows soon slowly relaxed.
"Whoa, hyah! Hyah!"
The sound of galloping horses and the shouts of soldiers came from the forest. With the help of passing torchlight, Sevia saw a squad of soldiers driving horses along the post road toward the depths of the forest.
Looking ahead, the torches held high by the soldiers connected into a trail of light leading deep into the mountains. The flickering, weak light allowed Sevia to see the flatbed carts being pulled behind the horses. A small segment of a dirty, stick-like object peeked out from under the crude protective netting... was that a human arm?
Swarms of flies buzzed over the flatbed carts, and white, fat maggots bounced on the protective netting with every bump in the road.
Are those carts all carrying human corpses?
Sevia wondered.
What are they doing?
Driven by curiosity, Sevia stepped out from behind the bushes and quietly followed the trail of light into the mountain forest.
Before long, she followed the soldiers into the depths of the woods. The stench of rot in the air grew increasingly dense; this seemed to be the source of that lingering, inescapable smell.
Sevia hid behind a tree, observing the soldiers' movements through the gaps in the path.
She saw the soldiers stop in front of a hillside. They all wore protective netting over their heads. One of them began clutching his stomach and coughing loudly as soon as he got off the cart. The sound of his coughing echoed through the forest, growing more rapid and violent, until he finally collapsed to the ground in the dense blackness of the night, motionless.
The other soldiers seemed accustomed to this. They dumped their companion's body down the hillside along with the corpses from the flatbed carts. One of them, seemingly too weak, nearly fell over while tipping the cart, drawing laughter from the soldiers around him.
However, perhaps because the laughter was too intense, one soldier let out a dry cough, and the atmosphere abruptly fell into a dead silence.
The forest became so quiet that even the sound of a needle falling would have been clearly audible, with only the laughter lingering overhead.
The soldiers finished clearing all the transported corpses and headed back.
Sevia crept forward soundlessly, standing at the edge of the slope to look down. The sight that met her eyes made her pupils shrink violently.
Corpses...
Thousands upon thousands of corpses!
They didn't just pile up into a mountain; the bodies almost filled the entire valley below!
The deaths were horrific, their expressions hideous...
People's arms were tangled together like snakes, their bodies covered in black lumps like the back of a toad. Bleached bones protruded from the flesh, and their rotting faces were so swollen that their expressions were unrecognizable. The piled-up corpses blocked the river like driftwood, overflowing the valley and touching the cliffs, becoming a paradise for maggots, flies, and plagues. Rain washed over the surface of the corpse mountain, and the water flowing out from beneath was yellow and turbid. This water, carrying deadly pathogens, flowed into the stream and wound its way down toward the villages and towns below.
Sevia instinctively took two steps back. Just as she turned to leave, she suddenly heard movement behind her.
When she looked back again,
A pair of rotting faces covered in blood occupied her vision.
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