At seven in the evening.
After Yanhua and the others died and logged off, they had dinner on the bustling University Street. Then, all of a sudden, Yanhua received a message from a group friend they had added in the "Sword Forging Competition":
"You actually tricked me. You're not dead at all."
"Who tricked you? How boring." Yanhua felt utterly speechless. What on earth was that supposed to mean?
What did he mean, I wasn't dead?
My four brothers and I had lived and died together, all right?
We had died in neat formation, with our corpses laid out together.
"You obviously faked your death, then came running back all pitifully. I opened the door for you, and you're still pretending to be stupid, aren't you?" The other person was furious and sent several angry emojis.
?
You opened the door for me?
Was the door you opened the Gates of Hell or something?
What a lunatic!
Yanhua felt that the two of them were simply on different wavelengths. He had logged off directly! How was his "self" still chatting with this guy?
Are you telling a ghost story? If you're chatting with me, could I possibly be a ghost??
Too lazy to bother with him, Yanhua closed the chat window and opened another friend's chat:
"Boss, did you finish organizing the map information of the area around Sword Forging Manor that I sent you?"
While the four of them had been mining, they had discovered several special translucent crystals. They had melted and polished them at the Blacksmith Shop, turning them into lenses and manually making a crude telescope.
Taking advantage of this round of Defense Tower construction, the four of them had gone to the Defense Towers of various players and climbed high to survey the surroundings.
They had continuously photographed the scenery and terrain below and in the distance.
They hoped to make a 3D map that encompassed the area surrounding the Mountain Villa.
The other person replied:
"There's plenty of information in the various pictures. After all, your Mountain Villa is on the highest peak. According to our calculations, it's over 4,700 meters high. From up there, all other mountains look small. None of the several hundred nearby mountains are as high as yours, so the photos are quite comprehensive."
This boss worked for a map-navigation company. With these images from multiple angles, he could make a holographic map.
The other person said, "But I noticed that the terrain organized by the software seems a little strange."
Yanhua was somewhat surprised. "Strange? What's wrong?"
"It seems that a ring of villages surrounds the foot of the Mountain Villa's mountain. There are signs of habitation, but we only captured the corners of some buildings, and they weren't very clear. The main problem is that the woods are too lush."
"Still, it seemed like I saw some lanterns and lively streets. Were people setting up stalls? Were they preparing for a festival? It looked a bit like people rushing to a market during the New Year."
There were villages beneath Sword Forging Manor?
Yanhua thought this information was crucial.
No wonder the Old Steward had left. So he had retired and settled at the foot of the mountain, reuniting with his wife and children and enjoying his life to the fullest—going to the market and joining in the festival celebrations?
But they couldn't get out, having been cut off by the maze formation.
All the liveliness belonged to them. We had nothing.
But perhaps after this Crow Calamity dungeon ended, they could try lighting a rocket and launching it into the distance, setting the mountain ablaze.
Burn the middle and foot of the mountain bare, and their field of vision would suddenly open up. Then they could see the area below.
Since it was the New Year, setting a roaring fire to usher in good fortune for the coming year and celebrate a little should be pretty good, too.
Of course, this was only a theoretical plan.
The map in the distance was more likely a false image used as a backdrop wall. It might not even exist.
The other person continued:
"Secondly, the map of the entire Mountain Villa—no, rather, the terrain map of the entire game—is very strange."
"The nearby mountains and landforms look like a keyboard. Each keycap is a mountain peak, arranged into crooked tic-tac-toe patterns. They aren't very neat."
Yanhua froze for a moment. Only after a while did he react. "You mean the terrain is too orderly, as if it bears traces of human construction?"
The other person said, "Yeah. It's a bit like someone combed through it once horizontally and once vertically, forming those tic-tac-toe mountain peaks."
"A person? How huge would that person have to be? Why not say Zhu Bajie raked through it with his nine-pronged muckrake?"
Yanhua mocked him. "That's right, that giant god Zhu Bajie was merely farming at Gao Laozhuang, while we little blacksmiths are just tiny pests in the fields of Gao Laozhuang, interfering with his farming, money-making, and marriage to Gao Cuilan."
Although he was somewhat surprised that the mountain ranges were artificial, how could a modern person like him be shocked?
He had seen it all!
He had read enough novels to know.
When these mighty beings fought, they casually shattered mountain peaks and filled in oceans.
After so many years, the original terrain would certainly have disappeared long ago. Someone had come to clean up the mess and rebuild the terrain so mortals could live there. Wasn't that normal?
One could only say that the mortals of such a high-energy world were truly miserable!
It could even be said that this "artificial terrain" was an inevitable stage of historical development. As time accumulated, wouldn't powerful beings fight wherever they went?
With each place reshaped, this was bound to be the result.
With that thought, Yanhua felt rather happy.
He could finally produce some real content of his own. He could take the 3D terrain map out, post a guide, ride the trend, and rake in traffic.
The other person said, "Actually, I have another guess about the terrain. It wasn't made by someone combing through the land."
Yanhua was a little excited. Could the boss have even better intelligence? "It wasn't combed through? Then what was used to wash it? Was it washed with water?"
The other person said, "It looks like palm lines."
Yanhua fell silent for a moment.
The other person sent over a video.
The table was covered in exquisitely fine flour.
The person suddenly pressed one palm down horizontally, then another vertically. The interwoven palm lines imprinted delicate, intricate, micron-sized mountain peaks and main rivers into the flour.
"A terrain like this."
The other person typed a line: "It's like observing the lines on a palm. The palm lines pressed out towering mountain ranges and broad, long rivers."
Yanhua was completely dumbfounded, his mind buzzing. "It's that huge? Then how are we blacksmiths supposed to sell it weapons?"
The other person: "."
What was wrong with this guy?
The people living in the mountain peaks squeezed out between palm lines were all this inflated?
Just imagine the scene: a bacterium raised a flagellum and asked humanity whether it wanted to buy it.
Hmph, blacksmith, you've successfully piqued my interest.
Did he think that being would say something like that? It wasn't some domineering CEO's delicate little wife.
Yanhua was thick-headed and genuinely didn't care:
"Relax. There's a divine ability called Dharma Form Manifestation. For example, are Sun Wukong and Erlang Shen's techniques really that strange? There's also a technique called Buddha's Palm. That's not bizarre either, is it?"
"In a xianxia world, if those moves weren't used to clean up after the mortals, it would only qualify as a wuxia world! After mighty beings fought, were the yamen runners supposed to carry mops over to wipe up the blood? Would that make any sense?"
After dinner, Ning Zheng returned to his room, took off his shoes, lay down on the bed, and held a frog with intense concentration.
He took a needle and stabbed it.
One stab.
Two stabs.
Ten stabs.
A tiny Ning Zheng, no bigger than a fingernail, suddenly appeared beside the frog.
After the frog underwent a round of parasitic splitting, it immediately became much more listless.
"Still unstable."
He sighed.
Inspired by the battle that day, he had begun trying to develop a spell belonging to his own Spiritual Root system: Shadow Parasitism.
The spell worked like this:
A parasitic clone hid inside the target's body. When it was about to dissipate, it secretly struck ten times, then a new clone would appear to replace it and continue secretly parasitizing the target.
The cycle continued endlessly, achieving perpetual parasitism!
This spell demanded extremely precise control over his own power.
The ten attacks had to be extremely light. He had to control the amount of toxin injected and form a microscopic parasite of a suitable size so it could hide inside the target's body.
Even so,
the target's mental consciousness would be continuously seeded and torn apart, causing their spirit to wither.
It was just like being infected by a virus.
And it truly was poison.
Ning Zheng's poison worked on the mind. Like a virus, it lay in ambush, absorbed the host, spread outward, and ultimately swept through every corner.
"Even if this perpetual parasitism succeeds, the host body of the parasite can't be too weak."
Ning Zheng mused, "If the host body is too weak, then even if I maintain the split using the lowest possible energy consumption, the other party's mind won't be able to endure it. They'll slowly progress toward mental exhaustion and die, their soul thoroughly drained by me!"
This move wasn't very useful in a head-on battle.
But it was incredibly versatile!
For example, it could provide protection.
If he parasitized Ning Jiaojiao, it would continuously absorb her mental energy. But if danger arose, his clone could attack, begin reproducing wildly, and help Ning Jiaojiao fight.
At the same time, he could leave hidden traps inside other people.
For example, he could come into contact with an enemy, chat with them, and secretly plant the toxin. Then, once he returned home, he could trigger it.
He could use it for a surprise attack, kill the people around the enemy, trigger an outbreak of the toxin, produce clone after clone, and infect everyone around them until it swept through the entire place where the enemy lived.
Before you continue