Information About the Lost Land
In a secluded village, Lister sat in the courtyard of a larger, unoccupied house.
He warmed himself by the fire, quietly leafing through a book.
He had picked it up from the Poly Merchant Association a week ago, along with the potions.
At the time, the wooden chest had contained thirty to fifty books stacked alongside the potions.
"Another useless travelogue about love."
Lister shook his head and tossed the book straight into the fire before him.
"Whoosh!"
Flames shot up from the faintly glowing coals, swiftly engulfing the book.
Lister picked up another from beside his feet, no longer holding out much hope.
Over the past week, he had cleared out the cyclopes on the outskirts. To save time leveling up afterward, he had simply stayed in a village on the outskirts.
His experience had naturally risen rapidly as well, and he had kept his level at 26 for the time being.
He had spent most of his experience on the Saber Mastery passive.
It was now LV12, nearly catching up to the Meier Breathing Technique passive at LV14.
The higher these passive skills rose, the more experience they needed, so there was no rushing them.
At the very least, compared with people in his original world who improved through actual training and cultivation, his speed was absolutely unimaginable.
Between slaying monsters, Lister had not forgotten his next objective: the Great Chu Imperial Dynasty.
That was why he had the Poly Merchant Association collect geographical records and personal travelogues.
Every night when he rested, he took them out to read.
"Whoosh!"
The fire flared again, and Lister picked up the last book, Milo's Lost Travelogue.
The author, Milo, was a bard, and the first page contained one of his rambling poems, which was difficult to recite.
Lister patiently read on, only to find that an entire half of the book consisted of awful trash poems, some of them rather explicit.
He quickly flipped to the second half and finally found the travelogue.
"September 10, year 1181 of the solar calendar. Day 312 of my travels south from the Kingdom of Yating."
"Desert still stretches before me. I haven't seen a human village in a long time, and even plants and wild beasts are scarce."
"September 12. I discovered a great canyon, unimaginably deep, with a vast dry riverbed at the bottom. I suspect the far side is the new world I've been searching for, so I've decided to go down and explore."
"September 13. I finally reached the bottom of the canyon, but this riverbed is enormous! I will reach the other side."
"September 15. I reached the other side, only to find more boundless desert. It looks endless as far as the eye can see. I want to turn back."
"September 16. I've decided to return for now and assemble an expedition party before coming back to explore."
"I'm certain I was the first to discover this place. In that case, I've decided to name this region, which seems cut off from the world and untouched by visitors, the Lost Land."
"The Lost Land!?"
As Lister read this, his brow gradually smoothed.
He had not expected the last travelogue, the one he had held out the least hope for, to give him a pleasant surprise.
"That should be right. I've finally found it!"
He went over Milo's notes again and again, recalling what he knew about the Lost Land.
The Lost Land was the setting for the game's third-act expansion, and the main battlefield where the two great nations of the east and west fought in the third act.
The entire third-act expansion concerned the Great Chu Imperial Dynasty's contact and war with the Lucian Empire.
According to the game's progression, the war ended with both sides ceasing hostilities.
The main reason they stopped led into the fourth-act expansion, which concerned the exploration of the Lost Land.
Beneath the Lost Land lay the remains of a vanished alchemical technology civilization.
Lister knew the broad background of every expansion, including the general future course of the world of Divine Revelation.
But he really was not familiar with the actual locations on the world map.
As a player, he had a minimap and teleportation arrays, and for extremely long distances, he would even kill himself to return to town and save time.
After Lister actually entered this world and became a native, he naturally lost those advantages.
Although he had taken part in the war between the two countries back then, the actual process had been to teleport to Lost Canyon, die, and teleport back again.
He only knew the positions of the eastern and western nations relative to the Lost Land, including the location of the central battlefield.
He had no idea which direction to travel from the Kingdom of Lucian to reach the Great Chu Imperial Dynasty.
Now, however, Lister had detailed information.
At least the Great Chu Imperial Dynasty lay on the other side of the Lost Land, so he finally had a definite direction.
Lister continued reading the rest of the book.
Unfortunately, there was no further mention of the Lost Land after that entry.
In the travelogue, the bard Milo said he would assemble an expedition party, but in the end he lingered in other kingdoms and never returned to the Lost Land.
Of course, this information was already enough for Lister.
He had not heard of the Kingdom of Yating yet, but since it was a kingdom, there were bound to be records of it.
Lister would search for those records once the cyclopes had been wiped out.
There was no hurry to seek out the alchemical technology from the fourth-act expansion, and he could even leave it alone, but he had to visit the Great Chu Imperial Dynasty. His grand undertaking with passive skills depended on it!
Early in the morning, Lister had packed everything and set out for the core area again.
Only the cyclopes in this area remained to be eliminated.
But when he actually arrived, Lister still found himself at a loss.
While clearing the outskirts over the past few days, he had visited the core area and even tried probing it.
But there were too many cyclopes here. More than forty of them constantly roamed around the badly damaged baron's castle.
They swarmed any enemy they saw, then returned to their posts once they went beyond a certain area.
Facing forty cyclopes at once, Lister really had no way to deal with them alone.
Under the immobilizing effects of more than forty laser eyes, no one had a chance to fight back.
They gave him no opportunity to pick them off one by one, either.
When Lister had actually played the game, he could at least form a party, but now he could only solo it.
Faced with the situation, he thought for the first time about training professionals within his family or recruiting them from outside.
Just as Lister was preparing to return and devise a long-term plan, a tremendous noise suddenly came from inside the castle.
"Boom!"
The entire baron's castle collapsed outright, and the surrounding wall, already broken in places, also toppled to varying degrees.
The whole area inside seemed to sink several meters into the ground at once.
The cyclopes roaming outside, however, paid it no mind and continued wandering about idly.
Lister could finally see what was happening inside the castle through several collapsed sections of the wall.
To be honest, he had long since noticed something odd about this group of cyclopes.
Normally, monsters like these lived in natural surroundings. Even though cyclopes lived in groups, they would not be suited to human dwellings.
Even the enormous baron's castle was not really suitable for this group of giants to live in.
Yet the fact was that this large group of cyclopes had invaded the entire Rai Territory and occupied the baron's castle in particular.
Lister had a guess as to why this had happened.
There was probably something inside the baron's castle that was unknown to others, or rather, something the cyclopes had taken a fancy to.
From a distance, he looked through a large collapsed section of the wall and saw that the garden, pond, and everything else inside had sunk along with the main castle.
Amid the central ruins, the ground in one spot kept writhing outward from within.
Before long, a pair of enormous, dry, hard gray arms thrust out of the rubble at once, followed by another commotion.
A huge one-eyed head emerged after them, and the cyclops climbed all the way out of the rubble.
Unlike the giants outside, who averaged three meters in height, the cyclops that had crawled out of the castle ruins was at least five or six meters tall.
Even from far away, Lister could feel the oppressive presence of its size.
But what truly caught Lister's attention was a green crystal in the cyclops's other hand!
Happy New Year!!!