The day's testing soon drew to a close. The five players roasted meat around the campfire and reviewed their experiences, with an NPC tagging along like an accessory, before finally returning to the castle and logging off.
Out in the wilderness a few miles away, three wooden frames surrounded an empty tree hollow. These were the markers the group had left to distinguish this hollow from the others, allowing it to show up on the map so that nobody would accidentally destroy it later.
Meanwhile, the short length of Deadwood Vine slowly absorbing nutrients from the flesh inside the hollow had no idea that its future had already changed completely.
After seeing the players off, Ed returned to his resting room.
He had inherited everything Baron Tuer had left behind, which naturally included the man's bedroom.
But after the ravages of time, there was barely anything left here.
Even alchemical golems could not withstand a hundred years, let alone those expensive velvet textiles.
Although nominally a bedroom, the room actually contained nothing more than a makeshift bed assembled from wooden boards. Fortunately, Ed the plant man did not care about such things. Until he had thoroughly resolved the issue of survival, he had no demands regarding his quality of life.
At that moment, he felt like a haunted-house NPC who had just clocked out, wanting only to rest and switch from NPC mode back to living-person mode.
With a thought, his current stat panel unfolded before him:
[ID: Ed Adrian Level: 3 ---Basic attributes--- Strength: 7 Agility: 9 Constitution: 9 Willpower: 10 ---Special attributes--- Plant compatibility: 13 Animal compatibility: 10 Mechanical compatibility: 7 Psionic Energy compatibility: 8 ---Innate abilities--- [Vitality Touch Mark], [Verdant Crown], [Otherworldly Half]]
His previous level-up had given him five new basic attribute points, but their allocation did not seem to be something Ed could decide.
These things were essentially quantifications of facts, so Ed had recently gained a rough understanding of certain details. For instance, every player started at level 0 with a total of 20 basic attribute points, and each level-up granted five attribute points. However, since none of the players had reached level 1 yet, he still did not know whether these attributes could be freely allocated, were randomly assigned, or followed some sort of pattern.
But there was another matter that particularly concerned him: special attributes.
He had confirmed that reaching level 3 had given him two special attribute points, but he did not know whether this rule applied to the players.
As the creator of those bodies, Ed naturally understood that every player had one point of plant compatibility precisely because he had added something extra. But the question was, if even one special attribute point was so hard to come by, why were his own compatibility values already so high?
He could not figure it out no matter how he tried, just as he had absolutely no idea why he had transmigrated into this world.
Perhaps there would be an answer much later... Ed thought.
After looking through his current panel, Ed discovered another problem:
If the players wanted to recruit new players, he could naturally obtain enough offerings from them to level up, continually increasing his strength.
But if the players did not want to recruit anyone for the time being, they would not make sacrifices, making it difficult for him to obtain a steady stream of offerings from them.
Then how was he supposed to level up?
Damn it... Ed suddenly realized that he seemed to have been a little too optimistic. The situation he had envisioned required a certain player base to work, and there were simply too few players right now. Many of them were also indecisive fence-sitters, too (looking at you, [Good Times Don't Last]).
As a result, the players could easily all rush off to do the same thing instead of working tirelessly toward his grand leveling endeavor (though he had never brought it up).
In summary:
Ed needed to expand the player base to obtain offerings, but expanding the player base required players to present offerings (insert reaction image here).
Oh noes, the game's bugged!
At that thought, Ed Adrian, the foremost coder inside his own head, swiftly began considering countermeasures-something that would allow "World of Disorder" to operate smoothly until it could become self-sustaining.
Ed soon discovered, to his dismay, that there seemed to be only one solution to this problem: grinding monsters himself.
Another fact was that he had to watch over the players during the day and provide some assistance. Rashly stealing their monsters would not fit his current NPC persona, either.
And so, things ultimately slid toward an outcome Ed did not want to see...
Ed sat up on the bedboards and said in his mind, somewhat gloomily:
"Let's go."
"Go do what?" Little Green asked.
"Overtime."
As the words fell, Ed's hands transformed into different plants. A trace of amusement suddenly flashed through his lone eye, and he added:
"Of course, if you think that's too blunt, we could call it-'Solo Leveling.'
"But who cares what it's called? Anyway, the monster density around here does seem a little high."
In a secret chamber hundreds of miles away, over a thousand saplings were bathing in the last sunlight of the day.
This was a holy site for a group of "lunatics," while ordinary people called it the [Verdant Holy See].
The faithful of the Tree Worship Church called this place the Holy Soul Hall, but had Ed come here in person, he would only have exclaimed, "A greenhouse."
Every sapling here that never grew larger represented a member of the Tree Worship Church's clergy who had entered a soul contract with it. The church's secret rites bound their souls together completely.
When a clergyman fell ill, his soul tree would also weaken and turn yellow. When a clergyman died, his soul tree would die with him.
A few hours earlier, five saplings in the Holy Soul Hall had suddenly burst into roaring flames without warning. The flames seemed to have come across the void, blazing and dazzling, yet they had not affected any other soul trees.
The flames vanished as abruptly as they had appeared. In just a few seconds, the five soul trees had been burned to charcoal.
At that moment, an old man in dark green robes stood inside the Holy Soul Hall, carefully examining the plants that were now completely dead.
He reached out and gently pinched the blackened, carbonized trunk, breaking off a piece. Unfortunately, the soul tree was too thoroughly dead. Even as the presiding archbishop, he could no longer communicate with it, though he could still obtain some basic information.
For instance, the cause of death.
The old man looked at the middle-aged priest beside him:
"Roughly how long did the burning last?"
The priest responsible for watching over the Holy Soul Hall quickly recalled what had happened, then said:
"Less than three breaths."
"Are you certain?"
"Certain."
Having received his answer, the presiding archbishop lightly hefted the piece of charcoal in his hand and murmured in a voice only he could hear:
"For them to burn so quickly, there are only three possibilities. Either an elemental mage, a nature elf, or... a dragon.
"But nature elves and dragons no longer venture into the world, and elemental mages have now become elemental psions. Besides, most of them are lunatics..."
His reasoning had reached a dead end. The archbishop simply could not understand why five priests from a frontier diocese had suddenly died, so he leaned against the back of his chair and instructed the priest beside him:
"Bring me the latest reports from the Aduolin Province diocese."