Volume 4, Chapter 47 – Anqi

After finishing a round of discussion about Yunchou’s latest intel, Anqi, the one in charge of delivering the letter, left that nondescript little house.

Then Anqi took the letter, headed out of the city, and hurried in the direction of Fanster’s territory.

On the way, Anqi remembered the “True Elite Template” Yunchou had given him earlier. He still had no idea what that “True” actually did, but to Anqi, the benefits of an Elite Template were obvious.

So while he was on the road, Anqi directly used that template.

Namely, the “True Elite Template.”

After using the template, all of his stats received a huge boost. He hadn’t obtained any particularly powerful skill, but in terms of combat strength, he was more than twice as strong as before.

“I can really feel I’ve gotten a lot stronger… looks like Boss Yunchou really does treat me as one of his own…”

Completely unaware that anything was wrong, Anqi couldn’t help having a slightly scornful thought about Yunchou giving him this Elite Template in the first place.

Yunchou actually had warned Anqi repeatedly beforehand, but the careless Anqi had never taken his warnings seriously at all.

“But… if I remember right, Yunchou’s supposed to just have blank-slate stats, right? Why doesn’t he use something this good himself?”

On the road, Anqi had a few doubts about why Yunchou wasn’t using the Elite Template on himself.

But once he thought of how Yunchou must be doing this to win players over, Anqi stopped thinking about those suspicious points.

After hurrying for most of the day, Anqi finally came into the range of Fanster’s territory.

As he drew near, Anqi clearly noticed the blood-red color of the sky in the distance.

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“What the hell is that?”

He felt a bit puzzled, but Anqi didn’t think there was anything dangerous in that blood-red sky. After all, that direction led straight to the center of Fanster’s territory.

And there should be at least a couple hundred thousand players staying in that territory, so there ought not to be any danger.

To put it bluntly, even though Anqi knew there was something strange about this game, in the end he still treated it as a game. Even if something really had happened in Fanster’s territory, at worst he’d die once and then revive, right?

With that completely unconcerned mindset, Anqi headed straight toward Fanster’s land.

But along the way, Anqi slowly started to notice some odd things.

Originally, there were supposed to be up to a million players in this territory. Yet up to now, Anqi hadn’t run into a single player on the road.

Not only that. As he got closer and closer to the center of Fanster’s territory, the road under his feet changed from ordinary dirt to scorched earth. In the end, everywhere he could see, the boundless ground had turned into nothing but charred, blackened land.

“What on earth happened here?”

Unease.

Even with how thick-skinned Anqi normally was, after noticing all these strange phenomena one after another, a feeling of unease finally rose in his heart.

He had no idea what had happened. And as he took step after step forward, getting closer and closer, a bad premonition began to well up in his chest by instinct.

“No… I need to get out of here… there’s no way I can deliver Fanster’s letter now…”

His intuition was telling him he had to leave right this second. After muttering that to himself, Anqi turned around without any hesitation.

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He was just about to leave.

In that instant, a powerful gust of wind suddenly swept up behind him. At the same time, it felt like something dropped down right behind his back.

What is it?

His heart sank, but relying on the combat instincts he’d built up in the game, Anqi still reacted by instinct and dodged to his left.

It was at the very last second.

An indescribably evil aura brushed past his cheek, surging forward. At that moment, Anqi finally saw what that thing wrapped in that horrible aura actually was…

It was… a huge, blood-red arm, covered all over with backward-pointing spikes.

“Eh, he dodged?”

The owner of the arm muttered behind Anqi. Just hearing that voice made Anqi’s heart pound faster on its own.

Bang—!

Before Anqi had even managed to stop his own momentum, that arm which had grazed his cheek twisted at an impossible angle and, before Anqi could react, shot straight into his abdomen.

“Ugh…”

The next moment, a pain he had never felt before exploded in his stomach. It was so intense it nearly knocked Anqi out, but with such a powerful enemy in front of him, he still relied on instinct and used the force of that blow to his abdomen to ride the impact, staggering back more than ten meters.

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Then Anqi forced himself to stop his retreating body. Once he’d opened up some distance, he finally had a moment to catch his breath.

“Huff… huff…”

The agony in his abdomen made Anqi subconsciously suspect that his 1% pain adjustment setting had bugged out. But considering that he was in a fight, Anqi wasn’t stupid enough to start fiddling with his System combat settings right in front of an enemy.

“Not bad, not bad… for a mere outsider to manage this much, how interesting!”

A voice dripping with madness rang out. Clenching his teeth through the pain, Anqi looked toward the source of the sound.

And the moment he saw who it was, Anqi’s pupils shrank sharply.

“Y-You’re…”

The thing in front of him wasn’t something that could be described with words.

Twisted, bizarre, chaotic, insane. Every negative description he could think of could be used on the existence before him.

That kind of existence was now staring fixedly at Anqi, using those blood-red, eerily twisted compound “eyes” of its.

“As you can see, I’m… a demon, hahahahahahahaha… Well, well, are you shocked? Too bad for you, all I’m going to bring you next is death!”

“A demon from Inferno?”

Anqi instinctively ignored the last part of what the demon said, sharply picking up on its identity instead.

“Wait… how did you get out? Don’t tell me…”

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“You outsiders really are all sneaky, aren’t you. But I’m not giving you another chance to slip past death!”

The demon in front of him let out a cruel laugh, then in the blink of an eye appeared right in front of Anqi.

“Ugh…”

With a muffled grunt, before Anqi could react at all, the demon’s arm pierced straight through his abdomen.

It hurts it hurts it hurts…

Why does it hurt this much…

The pain was just like having his stomach pierced through in the real world. In that moment, Anqi’s mind started to drift.

From the demon’s point of view, though, this outsider who’d run over here for no reason wasn’t turning into white light and vanishing instantly like all the other outsiders he’d killed.

Instead…

Just like a Legendary existence, he kept his body even after death.

“What’s… going on?”

After Anqi died completely, the utterly baffled demon still stood there glaring blankly at Anqi’s corpse.