Midway up the mountain.
Ning Zheng was climbing the mountain, preparing to take the Crow King's body away and make a Meat Field, while enjoying the joy of a bountiful harvest.
To be honest.
At first, he hadn't thought much of these lunatic-like blacksmiths, but they kept surprising him more and more!
The Meat Field alone could become an enormous cultivation aid for a novice cultivator like him.
He had enough Magic Coins on hand.
With the Meat Field added, and Spirit Rice if he had the ability to obtain it, all three resources would be in place. Given the astonishing cultivation speed granted by his Heavenly Spiritual Root, the next minor realm might not be far away!
He had heard that the sons and daughters of certain holy lands had already reached the Four Organs Realm in their twenties. He felt that he might as well make a push for it himself.
Now that he was going to ask them for the Crow King's corpse, it was going to be another wonderfully satisfying day!
Crash.
The mountain wind blew.
Although this great mountain was lofty and precipitous, standing over four thousand meters tall, to cultivators it was like walking four thousand meters across flat ground. Climbing the slope wasn't strenuous.
Every trip up or down the mountain took only a little over ten minutes.
That was only because the mountain road was rugged rather than straight.
But soon, Ning Zheng saw Travel Frog—"Eye God"—who had already reached the mountainside. He was pulling weeds from the ground, squatting down to collect materials everywhere, and muttering:
"This game really has a map outside! It's not fabricated! As expected, this open-world sandbox has the garbage-picking gameplay too."
As he picked things up, he stuffed them into the basket on his back. Clearly, he was taking the Mountain Villa's mountain-gathering quest very seriously.
Ning Zheng, who had just been praising them for being sensible, fell silent at once.
???
It seemed he had still been too careless.
They really didn't spare even themselves.
This was the first time he had seen people so utterly lacking in virtue! Were they even human?
And how was it that after escaping prison, instead of running farther away, you had merely come to the mountainside to secretly pick up garbage?
Not a shred of ambition.
These blacksmiths never disappointed him when it came to disappointment.
Ning Zheng's gaze fell on "Eye God." "Still, you actually made it out of the Mountain Villa."
Without a doubt.
The mist array was a type of soul-confounding formation.
What it confused was naturally the soul.
And without a soul, one naturally wouldn't be affected and could walk straight down the mountain.
Embers had a particular characteristic.
Regardless of their strength, they were immune to soul charm and all kinds of illusion formations.
That was because they fundamentally had no souls.
To be fair, Embers were normal. But the one before his eyes was anything but!
An awareness that only appeared after death meeting a version of oneself that had come back to life—this was simply unprecedented!
Take Ning Jiaojiao, for example.
The current Ning Jiaojiao was an Ember produced after her death.
But what if a living Ning Jiaojiao who hadn't died suddenly appeared outside the door and stared face-to-face at her dead self? How bewildering would that be? How incomprehensible?
I haven't even died yet. How did my Ember appear?
It was even more absurd than coming home from work one day to find that one's grave had already been built—and one's own corpse was lying inside it.
"Something's wrong!"
Ning Zheng said, "There's something seriously wrong with this Server! The blacksmiths who can revive inside the Server can produce Embers too?"
Nothing like this utterly outrageous event had ever been recorded in the books. His place was probably the first case in this world, and certainly wouldn't be the last.
His Mountain Villa was going to become a bug-ridden Mountain Villa!
And "Eye God" was currently thrilled, thinking the exact same thing: he had indeed exploited a bug.
Not only had he exploited the sleep-and-log-out bug, he had also exploited a bug outside the Manor Map and reached the outside world.
He walked around, looking at everything.
The scenery here was even more enchanting, giving him the carefree feeling of a fish leaping wherever the sea was broad and a bird flying wherever the sky was high.
It was beautiful.
This definitely wasn't a small-map management game with only a few scene maps.
This was a gigantic sandbox world, boundless and endless, filled with infinite possibilities!
This wind!
This breathing!
This smell! He drunkenly licked the mushroom he had picked.
"Not bad." Soon, he walked beneath a large tree and continued picking mushrooms. Suddenly, he saw a pair of shoes. He looked up and saw Old Steward staring at him without blinking.
Old Steward looked as if he wanted to speak but stopped himself. In the end, he resignedly exhaled a breath of stale air. "Come on. Accompany me up the mountain."
"Oh."
"Eye God" felt that Old Steward's mood wasn't particularly good. He silently adjusted the materials in his basket, thinking that he had collected just about enough.
It really was time to go back and brag about the map outside.
He would flaunt it fiercely before those other idiot blacksmiths!
Ning Zheng soon brought Eye God back to the Mountain Villa's gate and stepped inside. The entire Mountain Villa had already changed drastically. Tower after tower stood in rows.
But they hadn't been demolished after all.
It seemed they planned to modify these Defense Towers into various shops and workshops.
They were even reinforcing the Defense Towers and underground facilities, and metalizing the walls to replace the original rubble-and-mud walls.
This idea wasn't bad either.
In peacetime, they could use the Defense Towers to run shops and create an underground commercial street. In wartime, they could transform them back into tower defenses and quickly repel external enemies.
After all, given their temperament, even a noncombat Sword Forging Manor had to be built into an iron-barrel fortress. Who knew when the next beast tide would arrive?
Who knew whether bandits or robbers would attack the Mountain Villa?
Having years of experience with all kinds of games and a clear understanding of triggered events, these old hands had taken precautions early, lest they be caught completely off guard.
Ning Zheng was observing a building, feeling conflicted. "Sometimes they go completely wild, and sometimes they're so cautious that even I find it astonishing!"
And now.
Because it looked so much like Stormy Mountain Villa, the blacksmiths, who always felt that a murder case was bound to occur, had already begun hiring professional detectives to prevent any homicide.
Things had been fine before, but now that Embers had appeared, the Mountain Villa was no longer safe.
At any moment, they might trigger the other party's taboo.
Another problem was that some of these blacksmiths were all "Lü Bu among men"—midnight murderers who specialized in stabbing their adoptive fathers.
The Embers formed from their minds retained their personalities from life.
Who among modern office workers didn't have some kind of mental illness?
Their true selves suppressed it, but their Embers might let it explode, causing their antisocial subconscious personalities to emerge.
For example, some enthusiasts who had watched too many detective dramas would feel the urge to commit a locked-room murder and show off their alibi.
Something like that could very well happen here.
Jiu Cai Rong was terribly worried. Could this Mountain Villa murder mystery game really be coming?
In the future, everyone might have to vote on which Ember was the murderer. After all, these Embers might all have been hardcore fans who had watched over a thousand episodes of Detective Conan and mastered hundreds of locked-room murder methods! They might not even be caught!
In short, the situation was far too complicated.
Ning Zheng, of course, knew nothing about these "Mountain Villa public security management" concerns. In any case, they had nothing to do with him. After walking around, he also saw Jiu Cai Rong.
"Old Steward." Jiu Cai Rong was still very respectful. "We defeated the Crow Calamity and achieved a great victory. We didn't let you down."
"Where's the Crow King's corpse?" Old Steward asked.
Jiu Cai Rong's heart leaped. Was this the proof of quest completion being turned in?
What kind of main quest reward would they receive after handing it over?
They had made a huge profit for the Mountain Villa!
Soon, Old Steward took over a large chest and opened it to inspect it. The head and body, which had been separated and tied up in a strangely erotic manner, were both still hopping around full of life.
Seeing the heat in their eyes, Ning Zheng couldn't help laughing.
Naturally, Xiao Ai had already told him what they wanted. He smiled and said, "What do you want? You contributed to the Mountain Villa, so I'll give you two choices. You may choose one."
"First, you can search for your relatives. The Mountain Villa is willing to provide food and lodging and hire another hundred blacksmiths."
"Second, I believe you were originally human. You were probably cursed by the Demon People while fleeing famine at the foot of the mountain. We can use soul-shifting Gu arts to help you escape your current weak Money Boy bodies and become human again."
Jiu Cai Rong naturally understood what that meant.
Choose reward one: increase the number of internal testing slots by 100.
Choose reward two: unlock a new race—humans.
"You can think about how you want to choose." Old Steward carried the chest around, looking at things here and there, in no hurry to make him answer.
In reality.
The first option was meaningless to Ning Zheng.
That was because he could only log in a maximum of 1,000 people. Nine hundred people were Queuing to Log In, and those 900 people would still provide him with harvested destiny.
Letting the 100 spectators in wouldn't increase Ning Zheng's benefits. It would only increase the Mountain Villa's operational burden.
Ning Zheng hadn't been willing before, after all, they were far too capable of causing trouble.
But now that they seemed somewhat capable of operating the Mountain Villa properly, Ning Zheng didn't mind letting another hundred people in to earn cultivation resources for himself.
The powerful beings of this world were unbelievably heaven-defying, but the resources they required were beyond imagination as well. Behind every powerful being, there was inevitably a powerful sect.
He would try turning them into the resource-supply team behind him.
As for the second choice, the human race required the flesh and blood of human experts to serve as their shells.
The tank of Demon People flesh and blood he had obtained earlier was still there.
Now there were two flesh tanks: Money Boy and humans. That meant there were two racial choices.
Of course.
He also had the Crow King's new corpse in his hands. He could turn it into a flesh tank, split it to breed crows, and unlock a third race for them—crows.
But Ning Zheng wouldn't waste it like that.
The Crow King was too weak. It couldn't split many times, and he had to eat it himself too. Why would he let them have it for nothing?
As for using the Money Boy flesh tank to eat the Money Boy Meat Field?
Could that thing even be eaten?
Not all demon-beast meat was edible, and not all demon beasts had flesh.
Besides, even if it could be eaten, he still wouldn't touch it. The Money Boy flesh tank was already close to drying up.
That was the foundation of operating the Mountain Villa!
He was still thinking about how to obtain another high-tier Money Boy.
It was also the fault of those Demon People. Before dying, they hadn't made a new Money Boy to replace the old one, leaving him so troubled now.
"I've decided."
At that moment, Jiu Cai Rong finally spoke. "My choice is to give us the chance to become human."
Before you continue