Chest Monsters Are an Essential Part of the Player Experience

If Cheng Tian and the other rookie newcomers to Demon Village had any advantage, it was undoubtedly this dungeon spawn point, which stood roughly five meters above the ground below.

Since it was an isolated, raised hill-like cemetery, there were only around a dozen gravestones on top. The zombies had indeed crawled out from beneath those gravestones, but afterward, they only left behind empty pits. More zombies did not simply appear out of nowhere.

Clearly, zombie resurrection required reasonable conditions. The common rule of one corpse per grave naturally limited the number of zombies that could respawn.

Demon Village was indeed a high-difficulty dungeon aimed at newcomers, but Chosen Evolution Space had a core rule that rookies did not yet know.

The Space would never design a dungeon or mission that guaranteed the players' deaths. No matter how dangerous or difficult it looked, there would always be some way for players to exploit it and clear the challenge.

Cheng Tian had already noticed that empty graves would not spawn monsters, and he immediately abandoned his original plan to break out while the other unlucky fools were being eaten.

Clearly, what they faced now was the dungeon's show of force. In more game-like terms, it was a "monster tide." Put simply, monsters would surge toward the players like a tide and surround them.

Anyone who had played games like Left 4 Dead, Vermintide, or Darktide should have understood the meaning more clearly.

But a tide had to rise and fall. That meant that if they could endure this first ferocious monster tide, they would most likely gain some breathing room afterward.

Thus, the easily defended hill was obviously the more advantageous choice under the current circumstances.

Among the rookie players, only Cheng Tian and the awakened One-Ear had any fighting ability. Everyone else was either injured or dead.

Even those who had panicked and fled into the cemetery below failed to serve as bait. Once their screams vanished beneath the horde, the zombie tide they had triggered in succession turned and surged toward Cheng Tian and the others, who had adopted the mindset of, "If I kill one, I break even! If I kill two, I profit!"

It could not be helped. The intense fighting had made the vitality and blood energy around Cheng Tian and One-Ear flare up. To zombies saturated with dark magical power, they were as conspicuous as torches, drawing the creatures over by scent alone.

At this moment, the terrain advantage of the hill's elevation became apparent.

The zombies of Demon Village did have an advantage in straight-line pursuit, but their stiff, unbending rotten joints inevitably made them sluggish when faced with obstacles, slopes, and steep ladders.

They clearly could not recreate the corpse-piling spectacle of World War Z. Even if they managed to climb the hill by stepping on corpses and poke their heads over the edge, Cheng Tian's whip would be waiting for them from a safe distance.

One lash was all it took to kill and purify a zombie with holy power.

Although the Demon-Slaying Whip was a melee weapon, its attack range far exceeded that of ordinary swords, spears, and axes, allowing him to strike melee enemies while keeping a safe distance.

Then there was the hidden enhancement brought by the Simon Template, which made his whip nearly unerringly accurate.

However, there was a highly counterintuitive key point here. The reason Cheng Tian could instantly kill a zombie with every lash was entirely because he had not equipped a proper weapon and was using only the whip that came with his template gear.

The armaments that came with a template were, in some ways, like cosmetic outfits in online games. They were bonus attributes separate from normal equipment. The real key to Vampire Slayer was its additional holy damage; its mere 1–1 weapon damage was barely worth mentioning.

If Cheng Tian equipped One-Ear's one-handed axe, Vampire Slayer's "additional holy damage on every hit" would also stack onto the axe. However, because the weapon types differed so greatly, the original ten points of additional holy damage would likely be reduced to a pitiful one or two points. If the one-handed axe then rolled its minimum weapon damage, it might take two or even three axe strikes to kill a zombie.

On the contrary, because Cheng Tian used only the cosmetic whip, the ten points of holy damage suffered no reduction. It was just enough to kill a full-health zombie with slight damage overflow, requiring no follow-up strike. This greatly conserved stamina while also avoiding the danger of counterattacks during consecutive attacks.

Zombies that struggled to climb the slope, efficient low-consumption precision kills, One-Ear occasionally filling gaps, and proper repositioning—the zombie tide, which represented both a show of force and a brutal screening mechanism, visibly began to diminish. In its place stood grave after grave that had been emptied.

However, this did not continue until the zombie tide ended. An accident finally occurred.

Sweat-soaked, Cheng Tian cracked his whip once more. As expected, the zombie's head exploded, but then a metal chest with a faint glow and a black-iron sheen bounced out of the headless corpse and rolled down the slope.

A chest dropped!?

A game where people could die naturally also had rules for monsters dropping items. As the weakest and frailest creatures at the bottom of Demon Village's monster hierarchy, the zombie horde had finally dropped its first chest. This was one of the basic manifestations of Chosen Evolution Space's item-drop rules.

However, this lowest-tier Black Iron Chest did not have any rules such as drop-pickup protection.

This was one of the methods Chosen Evolution Space openly used to encourage conflict between players.

The "Newbie Trial" tag explicitly prohibited players from killing one another, but actually doing so merely reduced their rewards. It did not truly strip them of the right to kill.

And as their strength increased and their evolution accelerated, exactly when players would begin thinking, I don't eat beef... well, that truly varied from person to person.

Cheng Tian remained calm. He merely glanced at the rolling chest and paid it no more attention. Safety was clearly his higher priority. Even if he were to open the chest, he would only do so after clearing all the monsters.

Furthermore, Cheng Tian recalled a certain setting from Demon Village, and a warning bell rang in his mind.

One-Ear also saw that the chest had rolled to the outer edge of the remaining zombie horde, somewhere it could be picked up with a little effort. Yet he had no intention of taking it. His thought process was simple and direct. With his accurate understanding of game drops, he believed Cheng Tian had killed the monster, so the chest rightfully belonged to Cheng Tian and had nothing to do with him.

Yet at that critical moment, someone actually slid down the dirt slope!

It was One-Ear's roommate, Phone Guy. Although he had no weapon, he had made the right choice and survived by cowering beside Cheng Tian and One-Ear.

He feared the zombies, resented himself for being dead weight, envied Cheng Tian and One-Ear, and saw that neither of them seemed interested in picking up the chest. After hesitating for around five seconds, the kid finally moved.

Phone Guy wanted to slaughter enemies like Cheng Tian too!

At the moment, most of the zombie horde's attention remained on Cheng Tian and the others, while the crows had temporarily been wiped out by the whip. Thus, when Phone Guy landed, no zombies came after him. He successfully touched the Black Iron Chest, but...

With a bang, the Black Iron Chest that Phone Guy had already touched automatically sprang open, releasing a cloud of gray-black smoke.

When the smoke quickly dispersed, a humanoid creature emerged. It wore a Blue Swallowtail Coat and a blue top hat, draped itself in a red-lined cloak, carried a Gentleman's Cane, and had the face of a stereotypical hook-nosed vampire. It frightened Phone Guy so badly that he froze on the spot, shuddering from head to toe.

But the creature in the swallowtail coat did not hesitate at all. It spread its cloak and waved its cane, firing a magical missile formed from a six-pointed star.

Phone Guy could not make any evasive movement and took the attack head-on.

In an instant, smoke enveloped his entire body.

But when the smoke dissipated, Phone Guy was gone. In his place stood a white duck with an extremely humanlike expression.

"Quack!?"

Phone Duck's feathers stood on end.