Leaving the Church's Safe Zone!

Ma Lou rubbed his chin. "So, boss... you mean we're heading out to run wild?"

"Exactly!" Ji Luo snapped his fingers. "First priority: while it's light and visibility's good, let's head out and reveal more of the map!"

"Find some monsters and level up first! Once we've earned enough to cover the Resurrection Coins, we can gather wood, thatch, and food out in the wild while we're at it."

"When evening comes and it's getting dark, we'll retreat to the church's safe zone and build stuff and turn in quests without worrying!"

[Ji Luo] summed it up. "Farm mobs and gold by day, head back to town and build outhouses by night."

"Safe and efficient. That's called maximizing returns!"

"Fucking brilliant, Ji!" [Passing Pure-Love Warrior] gave him a thumbs-up. "Flawless logic. Let's do it your way! I'm stripping this whole forest bare today!"

"Same here. I'll carry the wood." Bossy Guy nodded good-naturedly.

Just as the four reached an instant consensus and prepared to march proudly through the church doors.

"Hum!"

Without warning, the magic circle in the center of the church erupted in a pillar of light that shot skyward.

The intense white light blinded them all.

"Well, well, our Wall Street elite finally finished his remedial classes and logged in?" [Passing Pure-Love Warrior] whistled, stopping to look back.

As the light faded, an aloof, cold figure, with even a hint of broken fragility about him, slowly appeared in the center of the magic circle.

The instant they got a good look at the newcomer, all four sucked in a breath.

The ID [I'm Not Jiahao] floated above his head.

God only knew what this guy had done to the color sliders, but he'd pushed his skin tone to the absolute limit the system allowed!

His entire body was as deathly pale as something freshly fished out of formaldehyde.

His hair was a flowing, layered black curtain cut, clearly subjected to an utterly obsessive degree of pixel-by-pixel fine-tuning.

His long bangs fell at an anatomically impossible golden-ratio angle, precisely covering his left eye.

That half-hidden face instantly radiated the lonely melancholy of someone saying, "I bear a blood feud for my slaughtered family. You mortals could never understand my pain."

Then there were his features. His jawline had been sharpened to an absurd degree.

Lu Ziye swore that if anyone used that chin to cut a steak, it would draw blood with one slice.

Better yet, he'd used the system to painstakingly add a sesame-sized, melancholic tear mole beneath the exposed outer corner of his right eye.

His one visible eye was half-lidded, its gaze carrying the domineering CEO's signature expression: "thirty percent cold disdain, thirty percent mockery, forty percent indifference."

The only flaw was that he was still wearing nothing but the system-issued beginner's linen shorts.

Jiahao slowly opened his right eye and swept his unobstructed gaze over the others.

Then, just like yesterday, he habitually hooked both hands into the edges of his baggy shorts and tilted that razor-sharp chin slightly upward.

"Heh."

Jiahao gave a soft chuckle, pitching his voice extremely low. "The aesthetic sensibilities of my peers remain hopelessly shallow. Look at you, still mindlessly pursuing vulgar muscles and boring features."

He flicked the bangs covering his left eye, his tone full of the loneliness of someone standing above the rest. "What I've sculpted is a sense of fractured artistry, an aesthetic of withering beauty blooming alone in a world of despair."

"This is what you call a higher-dimensional aesthetic smackdown. It's very, you know... you get it, right?"

A deathly silence filled the empty church.

A full five seconds passed.

A full five seconds passed.

[Passing Pure-Love Warrior] finally lost it. Clutching his stomach, he dropped into a squat and howled with laughter:

"Pfft, hahahaha! Fractured artistry, my ass!"

"Dude, with that skin tone and those shorts, you look like a male escort who fucked himself half to death and just escaped the morgue!"

Ma Lou leaned closer and studied Jiahao's face with a mischievous look before asking in all seriousness:

"Mr. Jiahao, I just have one question. With those curtain bangs so long, don't they poke you in the eye? Don't you have to tilt your head just to walk around?"

"You don't know shit!"

Jiahao's icy expression instantly shattered, and he snapped back, red-faced, "This is my left eye, where I've sealed the power of darkness!"

"All right, all right, Mr. Dark Power."

[Ji Luo] fought back a laugh as he walked over and patted Jiahao's pale, scrawny shoulder.

"Get back in formation. The game just added a gold-farming system."

"If you keep posing instead of grinding, you won't even earn back the cost of your resurrection shorts."

Before Jiahao could fully grasp what was going on, Lu Ziye and Ma Lou grabbed an arm each and hauled him out through the church doors.

"Hey, stop pulling! You'll wrinkle my suit... wait, I'm not wearing one!"

On the altar.

The stone statue Lin En possessed quietly watched the backs of these five oddballs as they charged outside, shouting and hollering.

Although the system had only just gone live, and each of these Fourth Calamity players looked less reliable than the last, Lin En wasn't actually all that worried.

After all, these guys' trump cards were now "relentless persistence" and "unlimited resurrection."

Even in the worst-case scenario, if some high-tier eldritch creature wiped the whole party out there, they'd only turn into five piles of ash before happily lining up to respawn in the magic circle at his feet.

"As long as they don't tear down my base, let them do whatever they want."

Lin En looked away and began slowly sorting through the other mechanics of this "game world."

Below the statue, the young nun Sivir had no idea how thoroughly her god had calculated everything.

After witnessing the five believers' even stranger and more varied new forms, her faithful heart had surrendered completely.

She was now kneeling devoutly on a prayer cushion, murmuring prayers and supplying Lin En with a faint but unceasing stream of faith power.

Meanwhile.

When the five players officially stepped through the church's battered wooden doors and got a clear look at the world outside.

They all stopped dead, as though a mass paralysis spell had struck them.

There were no cheers, no snarky remarks, only deathly silence.

Before their eyes stretched a suffocating tableau of an apocalyptic wasteland.

The sky was a sickly grayish yellow, heavy clouds pressing overhead like slabs of lead, without a single ray of sunlight breaking through.

A thin gray mist with a faintly grainy texture shrouded the entire world.

The distant horizon held none of the plains or mountains common in online games, only an endless dark silhouette: the vast, boundless Black Forest.

Those trees were grotesquely tall, their dry, twisted branches resembling countless ghostly hands clawing desperately at the sky.

Deep within the Black Forest, faint crimson lights flickered amid bursts of low, indescribable roars.

Even from this distance, they could tell that some "major boss" capable of effortlessly tearing players apart must be lurking there.

A short distance in front of the church stood an abandoned village in the style of medieval Europe.

Broken walls and ruins filled their view.

The dried hide of some unknown creature hung from the blades of a collapsed stone windmill.

The gallows at the village entrance were stained crimson, their thick hemp ropes making teeth-grating creaks in the sinister wind.

Black vines crawled like venomous snakes over every crumbling stone house, and the air reeked of damp earth and dried blood.

More striking still, this "game world" wasn't merely "black and dark." It carried an oppressive sense of epic grandeur.

They could clearly see mutated insects writhing in the cracks between paving stones and hear the wind passing through broken rooftops, its echoes like a woman sobbing.

Utter realism brought utter terror and awe.