Chapter 30: The Extremely, Extremely, Extremely Dangerous Sun-Swallowing Tower

Thirty minutes.

It took Shen Youran a full thirty minutes to drag herself out of her grief.

She lay on the trash bags, rolling all the way from the pile on one side of the room to the pile on the other, looking like a desperate salted fish.

Finally, she rolled back to Yan Jing, stood up, and spoke her first words in half an hour:

"If you dare die in the next Dungeon, I won't let you off even if I become a ghost!"

Her expression was so fiercely serious she looked ready to eat him alive, but Yan Jing couldn't help letting out a laugh.

Her face instantly twisted into even deeper despair. Tears gleaming in her eyes, she howled at the ceiling:

"I knew it! I knew I shouldn't have gone all-in! Fuck, you huge liar!"

The next second, she cut off her crying, grabbed Yan Jing by the collar, and dragged him over to the computer, glaring at him fiercely.

"No! You have to survive!"

Her vicious tone sounded more like she was trying to convince herself.

"These are all the key files on the Sun-Swallowing Tower. They've been heavily filtered compared to the information online. I'll send you a copy later, and you have to memorize all of it within five days!"

"Now for the core data! I'll walk you through it, so listen closely!"

She looked up at Yan Jing with murderous intent. Yan Jing nodded obediently.

"Got it, Teacher Shen!"

Shen Youran pointed to the top section of the screen.

"The Sun-Swallowing Tower. Based on consolidated posts from Survivors, we can determine this is a Domain of Sin. Most of the inner world residents inside belong to the Gluttony branch of the Sin pathway."

With that, she prepared to scroll down, but Yan Jing raised a hand.

"Question! What is the exact definition of a Domain?"

Shen Youran's eyes widened behind her glasses.

"You don't even know what a Domain is? Didn't the Yan Family teach you this?!"

Yan Jing answered honestly:

"Actually, I don't know much about the Inner World Pathways either."

This was the truth. Everything he knew about Domains and Inner World Pathways came from player forums and the memories inside Cameraman's head. He had never studied them systematically.

As he spoke, he clearly heard Shen Youran's breathing turn ragged. It took her quite a while to calm down.

Seeming to accept the fact that Yan Jing was a complete rookie, Shen Youran pulled up a document containing the most basic Inner World knowledge.

The file had been created over a decade ago. Its font was from such an old version that the system spent a long moment recalibrating for compatibility before it loaded properly.

"What do you think the Inner World is?"

Shen Youran asked.

"Another world. The opposite of our Surface World."

"Correct."

Shen Youran's expectations for Yan Jing had plummeted so far that even this simple answer left her highly satisfied.

"Then what do you think the Inner World would look like if you looked down at it from high above?"

She asked again.

Yan Jing frowned. The question was rather abstract, but he recalled the image he had seen when the Ritual began. He ventured a guess:

"Maybe... shattered."

The answer had just been a flash of intuition. To his surprise, Shen Youran froze for a second before nodding.

"Exactly. The Inner World is extremely vast, and we players get very little time to spend inside it. Because of that, no one has explored its entirety yet."

"But according to the theory of a certain great entity at a high Tier, the Inner World should be fragmented."

"Some kind of special power carved the Inner World into fragments of varying sizes. Those fragments are what we call Domains."

"Domains can be large or small. A small Domain might just be a public restroom, while a large one could be far, far larger than the entire Fifth Ring Domain. This hypothesis is known as the Domain hypothesis."

She cast a glance at Yan Jing. Seeing that he was listening carefully, she continued:

"Based on the different classifications of power on them, these Domains also possess different attributes."

"Take the Rotten Vegetable Village you just went through, for example. It belongs to a Domain of Order. So naturally, the most powerful faction within it is a faction of Order."

"Speaking of this, have you understood anything?"

Yan Jing nodded.

"It's a matter of sequence. Different Inner World powers on a Domain trigger the rise or stationing of different factions; it isn't the power of the factions that alters the Domain."

A strange light flashed in Shen Youran's eyes. She hadn't expected Yan Jing to catch on so quickly:

"Spot on. And the so-called Inner World Pathways are the power systems on the different Domains across the Inner World."

"Sin is just one of them."

"Since they're called systems, they naturally have branches. Gluttony is a branch of Sin."

"Do you get it now?"

"I get it."

Yan Jing nodded. "How many Inner World power systems are there in total?"

Shen Youran shook her head. "There's no conclusive number yet. Inner World information is every player's most precious asset, so no one shares it easily. And the Inner World power systems are something even the authorities forbid discussing."

"Why?"

Yan Jing remembered that he hadn't been able to find a single scrap of information about the Inner World power systems on the player forums.

"Because the Inner World power systems cause distortion!"

Shen Youran's expression was solemn:

"Many people say the drawback of the Inner World power systems is that they aren't suitable for players, but that's just a smokescreen released by the Public Security Association. The real reason is that once you step onto an Inner World Pathway, there's no turning back. You will only continuously spiral toward distortion."

"Walking an Inner World path with a Surface World body while living in the Surface World—the most likely result is turning into a sociopathic lunatic!"

"You can catch glimpses of similar things happening in the Inner World itself."

"Take the Sun-Swallowing Tower you're about to enter. As a Domain of Gluttony, once you go inside, every player's Mental Immunity Value will automatically drop by ten points, and you will feel a constant hunger."

"If you don't eat in time, your Mental Immunity Value will continuously drop at a rate of one point every two minutes. That means you have to find food once every hour."

She had circled back.

Yan Jing couldn't help but look at Shen Youran with a newfound respect. He hadn't expected her to steer a seemingly derailed conversation back on track so naturally.

"Is finding food dangerous?"

"Of course. The Sun-Swallowing Tower has fourteen floors, and only seven of them are dining areas. All the food on those seven floors is strictly provided for the guests."

"Meaning, for those of you working as waiters, aside from the fixed meals provided for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you have to figure out a way to secure all other food yourselves."

Shen Youran clicked twice on her computer, and a 3D model of a skyscraper appeared on the screen.

All the odd-numbered floors were highlighted in red:

"The red areas represent the dining zones. Every dining floor has six patrollers assigned to it—three out in the open, and three hidden in disguise. If they catch you stealing the tower's food, the patrollers will attack you directly."

"Every patroller possesses the strength of the First Tier. If you get tangled up with them, the absolute best outcome is having to fight them off, which will cause your Mental Immunity Value to drop."

Yan Jing stared at the simulated image of a patroller on the screen.

Its legs were incredibly thin, like two bamboo poles, but its belly was massive and jutted out sharply. A belt hiked tight black pants all the way up to its waist, and its upper half wore a uniform.

It looked exactly like a giant egg skewered on two chopsticks.

The head perched on top was an oval, and the mouth was surprisingly small, like pouting lips.

"There should be other ways besides stealing,"

Yan Jing said, looking at Shen Youran.

"Like eating a few extra portions of the fixed staff meals."

His eyes were dark and deep, but Shen Youran answered him with an elbow to the ribs.

"Don't mess around!"

"Don't think you can do whatever you want just because you have a yellow-grade Day Selection Ritual. Those geniuses from the big clans all have defensive items given to them by their families."

"Stealing someone else's fixed meal might work as a backup plan, but if you let your guard down, you're bound to suffer for it."

After she finished, it was as if they both realized the same thing at the exact same time. They sighed in unison:

"That's what being poor is like."

Shen Youran hadn't expected Yan Jing to be so on her wavelength in some aspects. She patted him on the shoulder in relief:

"It's okay. Even though we're poor now, Xiao Yanzi, you just need to work hard and go out to earn money later."

"..."

Yan Jing realized he had still underestimated just how shameless this woman could be:

"Are there any other dangers?"

At his question, Shen Youran's face wilted once again:

"Of course there are. What I just told you is only the most mundane part of that tower."

"Next is Task 1. As a waiter, you'll need to serve five customers. That task alone will weed out at least fifty percent of the players."

"The catch to this task is that every customer can make one request within your abilities, and they'll rate you on a scale of one to five stars when they finish their meal. If you get rated one star twice, the Sun-Swallowing Tower will hand you over to the customers to be disposed of."

"And the Sun-Swallowing Tower gets a massive, highly fluid volume of customers. If you run into a difficult one, getting a one-star rating is inevitable."

"Although I have files on quite a few customers here, there's no guarantee you'll actually run into any of them during the Dungeon."

Yan Jing frowned slightly.

This was indeed somewhat troublesome.

If the customer turnover was that high, even if he entered the Dungeon early, the groundwork he laid might not take effect.

"Are there no regular guests?"

"A few. They're at the very top of this list."

Shen Youran quickly printed out the list and handed it to Yan Jing:

"Even though you might not run into the same people, you still need to memorize the entire list. Three days. You must memorize it all within three days!"

Yan Jing stared at the list in his hands—at least a hundred or two hundred pages—and couldn't help pressing his fingers to his temples.

The Inner World System had been right. The difficulty of this Dungeon was truly on a completely different level than the Rotten Vegetable Village.

Seeing his headache, the corners of Shen Youran's mouth ticked upward:

"Don't worry. After advancing to the First Tier, all aspects of your physical fitness will improve depending on your Day Selection Ritual, and that includes your mental attributes."

"Unless you ended up picking that head, in which case your mental attributes might increase a little less, but three days should still be enough."

She looked down and began mapping out Yan Jing's future path on her computer:

"I'll arrange for two helpers to go in with you for this Dungeon. They're both veterans and will coordinate with you the whole way through. Before you go in, I'll also give you a detailed guide, exact to every step, with a time margin of error within ten minutes. Follow it as closely as you can and don't screw up. Plus, I'm going to write up a training plan covering live combat and physical conditioning. We're expected to start daily training in five days. There's also psychological resilience training, which is estimated to..."

The moment a Dungeon was involved, Shen Youran seemed to become a completely different person. Her expression was solemn and serious as she meticulously organized everything.

She was gradually accepting the reality that she was bound to Yan Jing, officially getting into the zone.

"Right, what did you end up choosing for your Day Selection Ritual? The head or the Badge? Don't tell me it was that Pillow."

"Neither."

"Neither?"

Shen Youran froze, her fingers stopping over the keyboard.

Suddenly, a chilling gust of wind swept into her pajamas, making her shiver.

She looked up at Yan Jing in disbelief.

A pitch-black shadow of a tree hung heavy with apples swayed gently behind him, occupying half the room.

With every sway, an inexplicable freezing wind howled through the room, echoing with miserable wails.

A pale yellow light flared throughout the space.

But Shen Youran's attention was entirely captivated by the thin ring of purple circling the outer edge of that yellow light.

Even though the purple was so faint it was nearly invisible, her pupils trembled in shock, as if she had seen a ghost.

Yel... yellow-purple?!!