"Brother Xun, do... do you want to take a break?"
Zheng Xun was bending over to pull down his pant legs when he heard someone speaking to him.
"You're... Xiao Wu?"
He didn't pay much attention to the people accompanying him. He would have to rely on himself in the end anyway. After thinking for a moment, he finally remembered the young man's name.
"Yes."
Xiao Wu seemed extremely introverted. For someone with a personality like that to approach someone he barely knew, it seemed he greatly admired Zheng Xun.
Zheng Xun shook his head.
"It's fine. I'm not tired."
He was telling the truth. As long as he was in a dungeon, he had boundless energy.
It was in the real world that he tended to feel drowsy.
That was why he wanted to enter the dungeon as soon as possible.
"Zheng Xun," Xiao Jun said, stepping forward as well, "do you have any leads?"
Zheng Xun said a little more than usual to Xiao Jun. After all, with the guild leader absent, the vice guild leader was in charge.
He was still waiting for Songbird's terms for the exchange.
"This dungeon isn't particularly difficult. If anything, the hard part is triggering that hidden side quest," Zheng Xun said frankly. "I'm really curious which unlucky bastard on your team had so much power that they managed to lead all of you into a ditch in a single run."
It wasn't as though Zheng Xun hadn't studied the video footage of the Singing Sparrow Second Team's dungeon run.
But no matter how he looked at it, he couldn't tell which action had triggered the side quest.
Zheng Xun suspected there was a hidden mechanism on the rooftop. He had run many tests in the simulated dungeon, and it seemed that stepping on a certain tile would take him into that corridor.
But the tile was random, and despite repeated attempts, Zheng Xun couldn't find a pattern.
He found it strange.
As he understood it, a hidden side quest like this should have fixed trigger conditions.
But it seemed some force was stopping him, like a protective mechanism that kept players from falling into a more dangerous situation.
Now, that "protection" had become the greatest obstacle.
"I might have to try a lot of times," Zheng Xun told the other four. "You don't have to stay here. If you have something to do, go ahead and leave."
"How can we do that...?" Li Shuang said worriedly. "At least one of us should stay with you."
"No need." Zheng Xun shook his head. "There's not much point. The team member who triggered the side quest before is probably gone. If that person were here, things might go a little faster, but now I can only keep trying on my own."
With that, Zheng Xun looked at Xiao Jun, the only person there who could make the decision.
Xiao Jun thought for a moment.
"We're already asking a lot of you by having you run the dungeon alone. If we left you in the tower by yourself as well, there'd be no justifying it, no matter how you looked at it."
Xiao Jun knew Zheng Xun's method benefited Songbird, but leaving a newcomer alone in the White Tower would give other guilds something to criticize. It would also give many players a bad impression of Songbird and damage the guild's image.
As vice guild leader, Xiao Jun had to consider such things.
"Zheng Xun, you don't need to worry about us. If you need anything, we'll be here to help right away."
"All right." Zheng Xun didn't want to waste his breath. "I'm going in, then."
Zheng Xun had been in a good frame of mind at first. After all, as a player with extensive experience running the same dungeon repeatedly, he hadn't been tormented by those thousand runs back then, so a dozen or even several dozen runs now certainly wouldn't bother him.
Yet he had still overestimated himself.
In the simulation, Zheng Xun had triggered the side quest on his tenth run, but the hidden boss had been too strong, and he had failed to clear it.
It had taken roughly another twenty runs to trigger the hidden quest a second time.
By the time he triggered it a third time, Zheng Xun had been able to bring the hidden boss down to a sliver of health.
But Zheng Xun was a thorough man. To fully grasp the boss's fighting style, he had pushed on until he had cleared the hidden stage twenty times before stopping the simulation.
But once he started running the actual dungeon, the hidden side quest refused to appear, and he didn't know why.
It was already his twenty-ninth run, and Zheng Xun hadn't seen a trace of the hidden boss.
This wasn't scientific.
: Twenty-nine runs?
: Holy shit, Erchui's patient.
: What's his fastest time so far?
: Twelve minutes and thirty-eight seconds.
: That fast? What's the current leaderboard record for A-rank dungeons?
: Over half an hour, I think. Erchui broke that record ages ago.
: Awesome, God Zheng.
: He's this strong even solo?!
: The thing is, he doesn't look impatient at all.
: If it were me, I'd be ready to tear the tower down.
Zheng Xun's expression remained calm as he cleared monsters again and again. After each run, he tossed the gold coins the White Tower rewarded him onto the floor.
After half a day, the gold coins had covered a corner of the White Tower's first floor.
On his fifty-sixth run, Zheng Xun still failed to trigger the hidden boss.
: I just finished eating. Is Erchui still at it?
: Yep. He's done over fifty runs.
: Holy shit, is he even human? Forget the physical strain-anyone else would've gone crazy by now, right?
: Looks to me like Erchui's already halfway there...
When Zheng Xun came out of the dungeon this time, he didn't rush to start another run. Instead, he sat down in the corner piled high with gold coins.
Xiao Jun handed him an energy drink and some food.
"How are you doing? Can your body still handle it?"
Zheng Xun neither nodded nor shook his head. He didn't react at all.
Standing close by, Xiao Jun could see his eyes moving slightly, as though he were thinking something through at high speed.
He was like a machine running at full speed, with no thoughts beyond clearing the dungeon. Xiao Jun put an unwrapped energy bar in his hand. He took half a bite, then held it between his teeth without chewing.
"Zheng Xun?" Xiao Jun called to him.
Zheng Xun seemed to finally reconnect with the outside world. His eyes focused, and after taking a big bite of the energy bar, he slammed his fist hard against the floor.
The coins piled into a small mountain behind him came sliding down with a clatter.
The bullet comments erupted in laughter.
: Erchui's finally getting frustrated.
: Hahahahaha, holy shit, he's leaning against a mountain of gold and pounding the floor. That's hilarious.
: Someone's fabulously wealthy, but unhappy [doge]
: Erchui-he's never suffered such injustice in his life.
: I'm exhausted just watching, never mind doing it myself.
: I'm going to tell my son to put the same energy Uncle Erchui puts into gaming into his studies.
The viewers might have been joking, but Xiao Jun and the others were quite worried about Zheng Xun.
They gathered around Zheng Xun as he sat in the corner.
"What's wrong? You really don't need us to take over for you?" Cheng Jie asked, bending down.
"Why don't... why don't you let us try?" Li Shuang suggested. "Maybe a change of person will make it appear."
Zheng Xun made it clear he disagreed.
"Even if it appears, you won't be able to clear a 3S side quest."
"Hey, you-"
Cheng Jie was about to argue, but when he saw Zheng Xun's sincere expression and realized he wasn't lying, he swallowed everything he'd been about to say.
"Where do you think the problem lies?"
Xiao Jun was calmer.
"There's a force stopping me," Zheng Xun said. "Statistically speaking, I've made enough attempts that this quest should have appeared by now. As for whether it's an NPC or a boss stopping me, I don't know, and I don't know what its purpose is either."
"How could that happen?" Li Shuang was slightly taken aback. "Going by how White Tower dungeons are designed, there shouldn't be a 'will' deliberately obstructing players."
Zheng Xun was troubled by it too. He pressed his temples.
"Could it be a dungeon NPC?" Xiao Jun said. "Li Yuechu and Xiaoyin are NPCs who don't attack people. Teacher Xu, Security Guard Feng, and Student Liang are bosses. The hidden boss's identity is unknown. Those are all the NPCs in the entire dungeon."
"I've tried them all. Nothing worked," Zheng Xun said. "Talking to those NPCs, threatening them, or killing them outright-none of it triggered the hidden quest. I haven't touched Student Liang. She's the boss of the third scene. Once she's killed, the dungeon will close forever."
They fell into thought.
They were trapped in an enormous mystery, and every path they took led to a dead end.
In the end, it was Zheng Xun who came up with a solution.
"How about this? I'll take part of your advice. Starting with the next run, I'll bring one person with me each time. If the hidden quest appears, remember to keep yourselves safe."
Zheng Xun held nothing back and made the danger clear to the others.
"I can only guarantee that the boss will be killed. I can't guarantee that you won't be killed by the boss.
"Think it through before you come with me."