White Candle

Before long, Xiao Yang had nearly cleared out this section of the Zombie Prison. Only a few especially crowded rooms remained.

As he ground for levels, Xiao Yang couldn't help thinking about something. If this really was a prison, then where were the guards? Surely a prison wouldn't have only prisoners.

It didn't make sense. This couldn't just be an area God Game had thrown together as a special zone for players to grind against one type of monster.

But then again, the Prisoner Zombies hadn't respawned at all!

Xiao Yang wasn't the sort of player who obsessed over story, but he still paid some attention to the plot while playing.

While clearing out this prison area, he had found several doors he couldn't open.

Behind one of them, he'd spotted an iron shovel leaning against the wall. A faint blue glow clung to it, making Xiao Yang yearn for it. Unfortunately, he couldn't open the cell, which didn't even look particularly sturdy.

These rooms probably required some special method to unlock.

God Game was like a game, but not quite. At least when it came to these locked rooms, Xiao Yang had tried breaking the lock with the axe in his hand. After several blows, there had been almost no change.

A special protective layer surrounded the door. Xiao Yang didn't yet meet the requirements to open it. Maybe he wasn't strong enough, maybe he needed lockpicking skills, or maybe he simply had to find the key. There was no way to know.

As he continued exploring, Xiao Yang rounded a corner and came upon a huge crowd of zombies.

In the back half of the Zombie Prison, all the zombies who should have been confined to their cells had broken free. They crowded the corridor, letting out unintelligible moans now and then as they wandered aimlessly through the area.

There were a lot of Prisoner Zombies gathered here, packed together—at least twenty of them. It was a real headache. Xiao Yang was already being cautious around rooms with more than three Prisoner Zombies, not daring to provoke them. This huge group was an entirely different matter.

His leveling grind came to a halt, and by the end of the day, he had officially run out of food.

With nothing else to do, Xiao Yang had to stop grinding for levels. He was close to level five, thanks to all the Prisoner Zombies lying dead in their cells.

He couldn't help complaining: God Game was ridiculously stingy with experience.

One zombie only gave him twenty experience points, but the experience required to go from level four to level five had suddenly shot up to six hundred. That meant Xiao Yang had to take down a full thirty zombies just to gain one level.

And that was with him choosing to grind on Prisoner Zombies at least five levels higher than him. If he went after ordinary skeletons, he figured he'd have to rack up a thousand kills just to level up once.

That was hard enough already, but it wasn't even the limit of God Game's cruelty. The experience penalty grew more outrageous with every level. At level three, killing these Prisoner Zombies had earned him thirty experience points each. Now he only got twenty.

But when he thought about it, it made sense. After all, this was Real Life Online. Without such an outrageous experience penalty, every player in God Game would probably be inclined to become a terrifying world-destroyer.

It was always easier to bully the weak than challenge The Mighty. If Xiao Yang could gain experience by killing ants, he'd probably be eager to pour boiling water into anthills, too.

He didn't even want to imagine how chaotic and awful the world would become if all the powerful people trained by God Game were obsessed with pouring boiling water on ants. At that point, God Game might as well change its name to:

The Terrifying Demon God's World-Destroying Game.

While pondering what to do, Xiao Yang took two steps. First, he seized the chance to return through the hole the Bone Ball had smashed open and went back to the door he'd entered through at the foot of the slope. As expected, the room's door was firmly shut, and he couldn't pull it open even a crack.

Second, he followed the route the Bone Ball had rolled down and explored deeper into this hidden area.

It wasn't a complete waste of time. Along the way, he found several recesses in the walls that looked like shrines, and managed to explore a bit farther.

Yes, shrines. In these recesses in the walls stood bizarre statues. They depicted a figure sitting cross-legged on a meditation cushion, surrounded and clung to by countless arms, its face impossible to make out.

It was an unsettling sight. Whatever was being worshipped here was definitely no respectable thing.

He sprinted from shrine to shrine until he reached the last one in the passage. There were no more shrines beyond it; the wall was bare.

The path was a dead end. Xiao Yang looked ahead and saw a pitch-black rift stretching across the passage, its depths impossible to see.

Another dead end. Looks like he'd have to turn back. Just as Xiao Yang was about to leave, the corner of his eye caught the pile of ashes in front of the shrine.

Maybe it was his imagination, but there seemed to be less ash here than in front of the other shrines. He paused, then suddenly did something unexpected.

In front of the statue whose face was obscured by the countless arms surrounding and clinging to it, beneath its gaze, Xiao Yang began poking through the ashes. Sure enough, his player's instincts hadn't failed him. He found a candle buried in the pile.

White Candle

Quality: Unknown

Description: An ordinary white candle. But once lit, you'll catch a very peculiar scent: the smell of meat.

Just from the description, Xiao Yang could tell there was something off about the candle. But he still had no clue what it was for.

He put it away carefully. Once he'd done that, everything went back to how it had been before.

Not long afterward, with the Bone Ball roaring past in pursuit, the battered Xiao Yang once again made a desperate dive, hurling himself into the Zombie Prison. He was back here again. For now, it seemed he could only keep fighting the Prisoner Zombies head-on.

He'd already eaten all the bread. There was still a bag of black bread and a bottle of ale in his Personal Backpack. In principle, Xiao Yang was reluctant to eat the black bread—not because he couldn't get over the psychological hurdle, but simply because he felt the bag might have some other use.

But he had no choice now. When it was time to eat, there wasn't much he could do about it.

And so Xiao Yang returned to the back half of the Zombie Prison, stopping in front of the crowded passage full of zombies.

It had come to this, and there wasn't a better option. Might as well grind on some zombies for a while!