The players' forced logout

"Holy shit, he's actually eating it! Quick! Pure-Love Warrior, put him out of his misery with that door!"

Watching the five bald men scramble to "humanely euthanize" their teammate, Sivir, the young native nun who had been hiding in a corner, felt her entire worldview shatter.

She stared blankly at the Mutated Corpse on the floor, the creature that had once terrorized the entire town and could easily tear through its walls.

Now, that terrifying monster had been hacked to pieces, its intestines spilled all over the floor.

And these worshippers summoned by her god... not only did they show no fear of the darkness, they even... they were even tasting the monster's brains and venom?!

And they were shouting excitedly while foaming at the mouth?

What kind of monsters were these, crazier than the horrors and crueler than demons themselves?!

Sivir began trembling violently, not out of fear of the corpse on the floor, but from overwhelming awe.

She turned toward Lin En's cracked stone statue and dropped heavily to her knees with a thud.

If her earlier prayers had carried despair, now her eyes held nothing but fervor and boundless reverence!

"O great Lord... please forgive my earlier ignorance and cowardice!"

Sivir pressed her head against the cold stone tiles, her voice trembling with excitement:

"What terrifying servants have you summoned from the deepest reaches of the abyss! Faced with such foul evil, they take pleasure in toying with it and devouring it raw!"

"So you are the most ineffable supreme ruler of this world!"

"That hypocritical Church of Light is utterly insignificant before your servants!"

Listening to the young nun's wild misconceptions spiral into some unknown dimension, Lin En, seated atop the altar, could not find a single thing funny about it.

Ineffable, my ass!

Supreme ruler, my ass!

Though the stone statue's surface still put on a show of majestic, shimmering light, inwardly he was bleeding and frantically wiping away sweat.

Because in the mere half minute he had spent listening to Sivir's prayer, the five idiot players, seeing that there was no equipment to loot, had started going after the church's furnishings!

[Passing Pure-Love Warrior] had his backside sticking out as he tried to wrench the solid silver candlestick off the front of the altar.

[Ji Li] was prying iron nails out of the church doors with a plank, muttering, "These are definitely important early-game materials for smelting iron."

Even [Even Monkeys Have Dignity], who had just succumbed to the poison and been "saved" by his teammates through respawning, was now sprawled on the floor, frantically scraping moss off the tiles.

"Shit, Pure-Love Warrior, stop fighting me for it! Once I pry this silver candlestick off, I can take it to the smithy and melt it down for equipment!"

"Bullshit! What does a broke bastard like you know? Take this to a pawnshop and it'll definitely be our first pot of gold! Come loose!"

Inside the dilapidated church, the scene had completely shifted from hardcore Cthulhu survival to bandits raiding a village!

[Passing Pure-Love Warrior] had one foot planted on the altar and both arms locked around its only remaining untarnished solid silver candlestick. His face was red with strain, and he looked ready to rip the whole thing out by the roots.

Meanwhile, the expert player [Ji Li] held a plank with a sharp, splintered end, sweating profusely as he pried at the few iron nails left in the doors.

He kept muttering, "In most survival games, iron ore is way too scarce early on. These nails have to be key crafting materials..."

As for the straightforward [Kindergarten Boss], he was trying to dig out the plump white mutant woodlice beneath the floor tiles with his bare hands.

And [Even Monkeys Have Dignity], who had just been "humanely euthanized" with a door by his teammates to save him and had emerged from the respawn point again, was now lying beneath a stone pillar in the corner, frantically scraping its moss with his fingernails.

"Guys, I figured out the taste just now!"

"This moss is a little sour and astringent. The system classifies it as a low-grade herb, so we can definitely make it into bandages to stop bleeding!"

Hiding behind the altar, the young nun Sivir clamped both hands over her mouth, terrified that she might scream.

Inside her severely malnourished little head, an utterly explosive brainstorm was underway:

Heavens! Do these worshippers of my god spare nothing, not even stones and iron nails?

And at that moment, Lin En finally could not bear to watch any longer!

"These goddamn menaces! That silver candlestick is the only thing left giving my wreck of a temple any dignity, and you bastards want to steal even that?"

If he did not stop these Fourth Calamity players, they would dismantle the church within five minutes without leaving a single intact brick!

"System! Start server-wide maintenance immediately! Kick all five of them offline first!"

Lin En gave the order without hesitation.

Ding!

A blinding blood-red screen suddenly covered the center of the five rampaging players' vision, and a line of large text popped up:

[Server-wide emergency hotfix/scheduled downtime announcement]

[Dear players, due to the First Closed Beta reaching data capacity (players currently online: 5/5), the server requires underlying logic restructuring and the loading of new classes.]

[All players will be forcibly logged out in 10 seconds. Please find a safe area and wait.]

[Countdown: 10, 9, 8...]

"Shit! Maintenance already?"

[Passing Pure-Love Warrior] howled in frustration. "No! I'm about to get this candlestick off! It's only got a tiny bit of durability left!"

"Wait! I haven't filled my bag with moss yet! Ah, no, this game doesn't have an inventory system. I haven't stuffed my underwear full of moss yet!"

[Even Monkeys Have Dignity] panicked, both hands clawing frantically at the ground like an excavator.

[I'm Not Jiahao] stood nearby with both hands tucked into the waistband of his baggy underwear and sneered. "Hah. My peers are still making a fuss over a few bits of scrap metal, while I've already seen through the underlying logic behind the game company's control of item output. This is called scarcity marketing. It's very... you get it, right?"

"Get it, my ass! Come help me pull these nails!" [Ji Li] was so frantic that he abandoned even his expert-player composure.

"3, 2, 1... forced logout!"

There was no room for negotiation.

The players, who a second earlier had been bounding around the church like five old macaques from Mount Emei, instantly turned into five clouds of grayish-white ash and dispersed into the air, leaving not even a speck behind.

Deathly silence instantly returned to the entire church.

Only the howling wind outside and the foul-smelling remains of the Mutated Corpse on the floor proved that everything that had just happened was no hallucination.

"Phew..."

Lin En let out a long sigh of relief. Those little tyrants were finally gone.

Once his surroundings quieted down, Lin En finally had time to sort through the jumble of memories in his mind.

The process of transmigrating and binding with the system had been so overwhelming that only now did he truly understand what a hellish starting situation he faced.

In this world, humans could not survive alone in the wilderness.

Because the darkness teemed with ineffable evil gods and the endless bizarre monsters they unleashed.

The moment ordinary people left a safe zone, they would be devoured within minutes without even a scrap of bone remaining. Even their souls would be dragged off into forced labor.

And the so-called "safe zones" were areas sheltered by gods.

Towns had to rely on divine power to maintain protective barriers. Inside those barriers lay sanctuaries where people could barely scrape by; outside lay a true hell of flesh and blood.

The gods, too, had a strict hierarchy of contempt.

The orthodox chief gods controlled the most fertile lands at the center of the continent and the largest populations of worshippers.

Meanwhile, fringe stray gods like Lin En had been ruthlessly squeezed out by their peers to the very edges of the continent.

His worshippers had died until only the scrawny young nun before him remained. Even the church he lived in let wind in from every side, and his divine core could shatter into fragments at any moment.