"Why do I feel like they're holding some kind of evil sacrificial ceremony?" Cold sweat broke out on the leather-armored assassin's back, and his hair stood on end.
"Something's wrong. Something's wrong with this place." Another teammate kept trembling.
The adventurer party leader glanced at his status bar. Besides "Immobilized" and "Poisoned," another debuff called "Fear" had appeared.
The next second, gusts of chilling wind howled past them.
He raised his head and saw a cloud of vapor rise from the well, merge with the wind around it, and gather ten meters overhead into an enormous, indescribable mass of mist.
Rustle!
Behind him came the sound of dozens of people dropping to their knees at once.
The sound was frantic, as though something terrible was happening in the mountain village.
The Kobold Priest leading the ritual hurriedly knelt as well, pressing his forehead to the ground as his body trembled.
A second later, the wind stopped. The hazy mist shifted above the well, and an invisible, oppressive atmosphere spread outward from it.
"You are being affected by an unknown entity."
All three players received the system notification at the same time.
They had thought that since this was a game, nothing could happen to them. Yet for some reason, their whole bodies shook and their teeth chattered, as though they were about to die.
The leather-armored assassin stared fearfully at the indescribable mist overhead and said in a trembling voice, "Why do I feel like I'm getting more and more scared?"
"How about we turn our sensory settings all the way down?"
The party leader was trembling all over too. It felt as though something utterly terrifying was passing through the mist overhead. Before he had even seen its form, his body was already so frightened he wanted to die. He wished he could sprout ten legs and run away; he didn't want to stay another second.
Yet this very intensity made the three players even more certain that this was the opening of an epic story quest. Staying to accept the quest was the wisest choice.
The party leader opened the virtual game interface with a thought and lowered his sensory settings to the minimum.
This was a virtual reality game, so sensory feedback could be set to zero. However, doing so meant losing the ability to feel the wind, smell the air, sense blood flowing through the body, perceive temperature, and so on. Their combat ability would plummet.
At that moment, none of the three players felt any relief after setting it to zero.
"I've changed it, but... my body still feels so cold." To his horror, the leather-armored assassin discovered that he still felt freezing.
The temperature hadn't dropped.
Or rather, the sensory settings might have stopped working!
He had tested it before. With sensory feedback set to zero, he could touch a torch without feeling any heat, or touch ice without feeling cold. Even when struck by a companion's ice or fire magic, he still felt neither heat nor cold.
But now, faced with this cultists' ceremony, the system's sensory settings had failed. The cold pierced every pore of his skin like sharp knives, sank into his blood vessels, flowed through his aorta into his heart, and spread to every part of his body.
"Damn it, another bug! First the immobilization timer, now the sensory settings are broken too. I'm filing a complaint against the game company when I get out!"
"I'm filing one too. Fuck!"
The three cursed nonstop, furiously hurling insults at the game company's entire family and eighteen generations of ancestors in the party chat.
Despite feeling so miserable they wanted to die, they still had no intention of logging out.
Anyone who logged out now would be an idiot.
"Great Cthulhu... slumbering god of R'lyeh... Great Old One..."
Ke Meng sat in the center of the underwater city, bored out of his mind, when he suddenly heard faint whispers.
They were the whispers of fanatical worshippers, chanting his divine names.
Someone's summoning me, Ke Meng thought.
Since he was bored here anyway, he might as well see who was summoning him.
Ke Meng focused his attention as best he could and listened carefully to those indistinct voices.
As he concentrated on catching those elusive chants of praise, the voices in his ears grew clearer and lost their rasp.
Suddenly, the image of a small mountain village appeared in his mind.
It was a gloomy little village. Dozens of figures in black robes knelt prostrate on the ground, not one daring to raise their head and look at him.
No, wait. There were five people without black robes beside the well. Two were unconscious, while the other three were looking up at him.
Interesting. No one else dares to look at me, but there are actually three here who do, Ke Meng thought.
The instant Ke Meng looked at them, the three players saw two flashes of red light within the mist. Then terror overwhelmed their entire bodies.
An unspeakable horror descended upon the three.
"An unknown entity is looking at you!" "All stats reduced by 90%!" "Your mental resistance is too low. Full-body suppression!" "You have died!"
Notifications flooded the screen.
Bang!
A muffled sound came from the party leader's head. Blood streamed from his eyes, and he died with them wide open, unable to utter a word.
His two remaining teammates fared little better.
"You have fallen into madness!"
The two screamed, feeling as though their brains were about to split apart. Endless images flashed through their minds, all scenes from their past lives.
"Brain trauma detected in players. Forced logout safety protocol activating!"
The instant one player's brain burst and the other two went mad, all three portraits in the party list dimmed. They had been logged out together.
The moment they logged out, the two players screaming in madness were no longer in the game. Their characters fell quiet as a result, closed their eyes, and lay sleeping on the ground like two silent, slumbering corpses.
The black-robed figures nearby were terrified by the adventurers' brief screams.
Sure enough, not raising their heads to look at the "Indescribable Mist" had been the right choice... The kobolds felt thankful for their own good sense.
Deep beneath the sea, in R'lyeh.
"Huh, they were players."
Ke Meng looked at the three fallen players as notifications about attacking players popped up on his side one after another.
Because he had looked at them, Ke Meng also happened to see the usernames above the five players' heads. They were:
"Clear," "I'm No Longer Human," "Hair-Raising Rage," "Sweetness Everywhere," and "White Milk."
"They couldn't even withstand a single glance. What weaklings. How are they any different from the seafood down here?" Ke Meng muttered.
He had merely looked them over out of curiosity, without any intent to kill. He hadn't expected them to fail to last even a second.
Once they had been forcibly logged out and their characters had fallen asleep, Ke Meng noticed a skill light up in his skill bar.
Dream Invasion
He had plenty of skills, but he had never used Dream Invasion before.
The creatures in underwater R'lyeh spent all day fighting one another and showed no inclination to sleep, so his dream-related skills had remained unavailable.
Now, the five players' characters had fallen asleep because they had logged out, giving Ke Meng an opening.
Ke Meng glanced at his other two dream-related skills. One was "Dream Distortion," and the other was "Dream Propagation." Both could only be used while Great Cthulhu was using Dream Invasion.
"Let's see what you players have in your dreams."
Ke Meng was so excited that he paid no attention to the Kobold Priest's offering. The dream-related skills had captured his entire interest.
The cover will soon be updated to version 2.0, mainly with a redesigned font for the book title. The background image of the girl will remain unchanged.
Before you continue