Special quest: ???'s farm

The little farmhouse looked just like a building from a fairy tale.

It had a sloping tiled roof with moss growing in the gaps, walls built from wooden planks and stone, and a little chimney on top.

Through the window, he could see the fireplace inside.

With the owner away, the fireplace was unlit.

Zuo Cheng'an planned a route from the ground, then lightly leaped up and caught hold, supporting his entire body with just his fingers like a rock climber.

Strength maxed out at ten points was already the theoretical limit of what the human body could achieve.

Any more, and the body simply could not bear it.

But the game seemed capable of giving humans strength far beyond the limits of their species.

With enough stat points added, a human body of flesh and blood could withstand gunfire and slice through refined steel barehanded.

Ordinary viruses would no longer pose any threat to humans, and their lifespans would increase dramatically.

In a sense, the game was not a catastrophe, but an opportunity for humanity to evolve.

By then, Zuo Cheng'an had easily climbed to the edge of the roof. Without incident, he entered the house through the chimney.

The first thing he saw was an enormous white rug on the floor.

As Zuo Cheng'an walked past, he caught a faint sheepish odor from it.

It was a sheepskin rug, too.

Zuo Cheng'an: "..."

Zuo Cheng'an: "!!!"

Wait, sheepskin!??

Zuo Cheng'an had already walked past it, but he backed up.

He seemed to have... already found the twenty-first sheep Wang Guangfei had been desperately searching for.

Quite a few eyeballs were following Zuo Cheng'an, so this discovery immediately sent the audience into an uproar.

[Holy shit! Holy shit, holy shit!!]

[Red-Eyes is as nasty as ever. When you're told to find sheep, most people instinctively assume they mean live sheep.

But who besides Red-Eyes knew the twenty-first sheep had already become a rug? Hahahahaha!]

[Exactly. If you didn't come inside the cottage, you could turn the instance upside down and still never find it.]

[The best part is that the cottage is locked, and the players who come to the Ladder Tower are all old hands, each more cautious than the last. They're afraid poking around, touching things, or looking where they shouldn't will get them killed, so they won't readily risk wandering into unfamiliar places.]

[Do you think this player will do a good deed and tell the guy searching everywhere for sheep about the clue?]

[Probably. People from lower-level worlds love that whole helping-others-for-fun routine. If it were me, I wouldn't give away a clue I'd risked myself to get for nothing.]

Zuo Cheng'an noticed something.

Although the eyeballs following players could ignore physical obstacles and fly all over the instance, passing through walls and into the ground,

they did have limits. For example, they seemed unable to stray too far from the players.

Since no player had stayed near the cottage for long, they had been unable to enter and explore it.

Naturally, they had not seen its interior.

Otherwise, they would not have been flooding the chat with discussions about the twenty-first sheep, which had already become a sheepskin rug.

The dense barrage of comments somewhat obstructed his view, so Zuo Cheng'an had to lower the comments' opacity a little more.

Only then did he examine the cottage's interior.

The first floor was very bare, with little sign of anyone living there.

Using the fireplace he had climbed out of as a reference point, an enormous white-fleeced sheepskin rug lay directly in front of it.

On the rug stood two finely crafted red-and-black wooden chairs, decorated with relief carvings of skulls and tomatoes.

That was all the furniture on the cottage's first floor.

The Eye of Truth's annotation said they were the work of Pipi, the finest carpenter in Ladder City.

Although the audience could not see the annotation, they recognized who had made the two chairs from a distinctive marking.

[I didn't expect to see something made by Pipi here, too. The color of this wood is really good. It must have soaked in specially prepared blood plasma for ages, right?]

[At least two years, I'd say. Someone tried making furniture using Pipi's methods. They soaked the materials in treated blood plasma for half a year, and the color still wasn't as good as this.

Of course, it could also be because Pipi uses pure human blood, while the imitation used pig blood.]

[But why does Red-Eyes have furniture made by Pipi?]

[Based on my eight thousand hours of watching livestreams, Pipi and Red-Eyes actually get along pretty well. You often see them hosting instances together and running circles around the players.]

[Bullshit! Pipi only sucks up to Red-Eyes to get free tomato sauce to drink!]

While the comments kept arguing, Zuo Cheng'an finished exploring the first floor and headed up a narrow spiral staircase to the second.

The second floor was half the size of the first.

Its only furniture was a bed and a bedside cabinet, both covered in dust, as though no one had used them in a long time.

In contrast to the pitifully sparse furniture,

rows of framed photographs hung on the second-floor walls, almost filling the entire room.

The photos showed the farm's animals and thriving, high-quality crops-not just tomatoes, but wheat, cucumbers, and yardlong beans as well.

The old hens and tomatoes in the photos were normal, too, without hooked beaks or meme faces.

They looked just like the normal animals and vegetables he remembered.

Some of the photos on the walls showed the flock of sheep.

Since the comments kept flooding the screen,

Zuo Cheng'an grew curious and counted them. There were twenty pure-white sheep in all.

Every one had snow-white fleece, like great clumps of cotton candy crowded together, gathered around a figure whose face had been scratched out.

He could be certain it was a person, not a rabbit.

The same figure also appeared frequently in the other photos,

holding an enormous pumpkin big enough for two people to sit inside, carrying a basket of tomatoes, herding sheep alongside a tall, powerful, pure-black sheepdog, milking a cow...

But without exception, the figure's face, and even parts of their body, had been violently scratched out.

As though to conceal some secret.

After looking through the photos, a jumble of phrases suddenly surfaced in Zuo Cheng'an's mind: a cuckoo in another bird's nest, usurping power, the farmer and the snake...

But... why was there never a black sheep in the photos?

Zuo Cheng'an had visited the sheep pen, where the twenty sheep Wang Guangfei had already herded back were kept.

There were nineteen white sheep and one black sheep.

If the twenty-one sheep Red-Eyes mentioned were the ones in these photos...

Then how had a black sheep appeared among a flock of white sheep? Had Red-Eyes bought it later? Or had one of the sheep become pregnant and given birth to it?

--

[Ding! Congratulations on triggering a special quest!]

[???'s farm]

[Quest objective: correctly write the text represented by "???"]

[Quest reward: the recipe for the tomato sauce that has taken all of Ladder City by storm. P.S. Chance of incurring Red-Eyes' hostility.]

--

A special quest?

Ignoring the shitty reward, Zuo Cheng'an looked at the lines of golden text appearing on the panel and felt as though he had stumbled upon something extraordinary.