When Fellow Countrymen Meet

After reading the comments for a while, Zuo Cheng'an was already planning to make himself a mask.

Although the viewers did not know what the fragrance was either, they knew that inhaling too much would cause blood-red air sacs like the Mountain Monkeys' to appear on the body.

In any case, it was nothing good.

During the fighting that followed, Zuo Cheng'an deliberately held his breath briefly whenever he pierced a Mountain Monkey's air sac, inhaling as little of the unknown gas as possible.

But he could not spare a moment right now. The Mountain Monkeys' attacks were too relentless for him to message the two inside the vehicle.

Judging by how Zhang Zhuang and the others had brought ropes but not the more important masks,

they did not know there was anything suspicious about the fragrance. Otherwise, they would never have come unprepared.

After all, this was a dungeon that had only dispatched vehicles six times. Split among the guilds, the Wavebreaker Guild could not have attempted it many times.

Unless there were higher-level players with keener powers of observation, it would be difficult to connect the fragrance coming from the monsters' air sacs with the abnormalities in their bodies.

Even if someone made the connection, they might not manage to pass the information on.

Zhang Zhuang probably knew that players' bodies would mutate, but did not know why.

All he could do was cautiously avoid food of unknown origin and water of unknown composition.

This time, the Mountain Monkeys' assault was particularly fierce. Five minutes passed, yet they still showed no sign of retreating.

Inside the vehicle, Mo Dou had grown sheep horns on his head, but his feet were still dog paws.

Sheep hooves did not have the powerful grip of goat hooves. On the vehicle's smooth floor, they would easily slip and fail to gain purchase.

So he simply used dog paw pads, which offered better traction.

He worked with Li Yueqiu to defend one direction.

Whenever Li Yueqiu kicked a Mountain Monkey's body apart, Mo Dou would let out a "howl-baa," throwing all his strength into ramming out its body, limp from having every bone broken.

Working together, they did not let a single Mountain Monkey break through their defenses.

Li Yueqiu could even find openings to throw her Little Flying Stone and support Zheng Ren, who was guarding the other side.

Zheng Ren had become a violent god of cooking, swinging his Spatula with a whoosh as he stir-fried nonstop.

But instead of vegetables, he was stir-frying the Mountain Monkeys' skulls.

"Let me gently open up your skull!!"

In other words, he was cracking their heads open.

As the Spatula swung, one or two lively flies could be seen being summoned by the item.

Zheng Ren had been fighting just fine, but the flies annoyed him so much that he waved them away in disgust.

"Shoo, shoo! Stinking flies, stop buzzing in my ears! Who wants you around?"

The flies: "..."

Today you give me the cold shoulder; tomorrow I'll be out of your league.

Just you wait!

Who knew how long the battle had lasted? Zheng Ren's wrist ached from swinging his Spatula, while Li Yueqiu's Little Flying Stone went from cleanly punching through the Mountain Monkeys' bodies to barely stopping their movements.

Clearly, everyone's stamina was nearing its limit.

Fortunately, the Mountain Monkeys had noticed the heavy casualties among their kind and were beginning to consider retreating.

On the roof,

because the Mountain Monkeys' air sacs continued releasing fragrance after they died,

Zuo Cheng'an never let a Mountain Monkey's corpse linger after killing it. He would rather take a hit himself than fail to throw the body over the cliff beside them.

He had heard so many notifications in his head announcing kills of hostile creatures that he had gone numb to them. He no longer knew how many he had killed.

Yet not a single item had dropped! Although killing a hundred Steel-Toothed Rats in a row and coming away empty-handed had already robbed Zuo Cheng'an of any hope in the game's drop rates,

the odds were still far too low.

No wonder the game guaranteed an item drop for a dungeon's first kill. Otherwise, if players had to rely on killing monsters alone, they would drive item prices up to more than two or three times as high.

Before long, the Mountain Monkeys retreated.

Everyone finally had time to clean up the aftermath.

Zhang Zhuang and the others first hauled up their teammates, who were dangling in midair and rubbing intimately against the cliff face, then cleared away the remaining monster corpses on the vehicle.

No one on Zuo Cheng'an's side had fallen off, so they were all tending to wounds left by the battle.

After this round of attacks, both teams had suffered injuries of varying degrees, though most were only small scratches or minor bites.

For players, those hardly counted as injuries. They did not even warrant using medicine; left alone, they would heal in a little while.

So Zuo Cheng'an did not take out Ketchup to distribute again. Even with four liters of it, he still had to use it sparingly.

This disappointed Mo Dou, who had been waiting eagerly for quite some time. He silently withdrew his paw, which had lost quite a few hairs.

The comments remained quiet for the next stretch of the journey. The viewers chatted about ordinary things, without discussing anything special.

Zhang Zhuang's team did not do anything unnecessary either.

Zuo Cheng'an finally breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed they had made it past this hurdle on the way into the village.

A cave appeared ahead on the road. Barring any surprises, the sightseeing vehicle would soon enter it.

The cave was damp and chilly, with a scent exactly like the fragrance stored in the Mountain Monkeys' air sacs.

But as though out of concern that it might be discovered, this fragrance seemed to have been diluted countless times over.

Without sniffing carefully, or having smelled the fragrance from the Mountain Monkeys' air sacs before, one would probably mistake it for the normal scent of vegetation and soil.

Having read the comments, Zuo Cheng'an was highly sensitive to any unusual smell.

He therefore noticed something amiss as soon as they entered the cave and secretly messaged the other two to warn them.

In the darkness, Li Yueqiu and Zheng Ren exchanged a glance and silently held their breath.

Then Zuo Cheng'an put his night-vision glasses back on to examine the cave.

He had taken them off earlier to keep them from being knocked off by a passing scrape, not expecting to need them again so soon.

Once he put on the glasses, his surroundings instantly became clear.

He had expected to see ordinary rock walls, but instead, winding, rootlike vines covered everything around them.

They even seemed to be alive. On closer inspection, they appeared to expand and contract, as though breathing.

The smell was released with each expansion and contraction.

But the sightseeing vehicle moved fast. Often, before Zuo Cheng'an could examine a spot for long, it had already carried him away.

And because he had put on the glasses a little late, he had not observed much before the sightseeing vehicle left the cave and drove toward a village in the mountain gully.

The sightseeing vehicle gradually slowed, finally stopping at the village entrance.

The village chief had long since gathered all the villagers to welcome their tourists. The dense crowd looked to number over two hundred.

Strangely, although it was still light out, every one of them held a torch.

Before he even got out, Zuo Cheng'an heard the village chief's distinctive, airy local accent.

"Welcome to Sunny Village! We've been waiting for you for a long time. Please experience our Smoking Ceremony."

The Smoking Ceremony consisted of the villagers waving the torches in their hands around one's body,

bathing one's entire body in the smoke coming from the torches.

Faced with villagers dressed in familiar clothes, Li Yueqiu's eyes brimmed with tears.

She even spotted a familiar brand's logo on a child's shoes!

This was her first time seeing humans in a dungeon since being pulled into the game.

If Zheng Ren had not been holding her back, she would have rushed over to borrow a phone and call the police.

She therefore readily accepted this strange Smoking Ceremony.

Scientifically speaking, it was simply that outsiders arriving from far away might carry unknown viruses, so they were fumigated with torch smoke.

Although it would not kill every virus and bacterium, it could still prevent the spread of disease to some extent.

But... there did not seem to be any need for "science" in the game.

Zheng Ren understood Li Yueqiu's excitement perfectly, because he had been just as excited the first time he saw fellow humans in a dungeon.

As the saying went, when fellow countrymen met, tears filled both their eyes.

But in reality, fellow countrymen were precisely the ones who preyed on each other.

He had poured his heart out to the head chef in the dungeon, and the head chef had been thinking about his heart, liver, and lungs too.

If he had not been ruthless with himself, he would have become bun filling long ago.