After a while, Zhou Jue, who was working his part-time job, popped up in the group chat:
[A Zhongde Dried Meat Wholesale]: "Whaaat?"
[Brother Kong Is Benevolent and Righteous]: "I'm asking if the game's any good?"
"Of course it is. I play every day. Mad?"
"Not really, but a video related to that game suddenly went viral today. Have you seen it?"
"Huh? I'm at work. I'll check it out after my shift."
With that, Zhongde disappeared from the gaming group, leaving only a bunch of people without closed beta access to backseat-game from the cloud.
World of Disorder.
Ed's eyes... er, eye had acquired a degree of night vision with Little Green's help.
Like an ordinary person, he actually couldn't see much, but because Little Green could sense the vitality of nearby plants to a certain extent, and the mutations around the castle were primarily plant-based, it could provide a filter akin to a special vision mode, enough for Ed to see those lambs awaiting slaughter at night.
In fact, Ed was currently hunting prey that belonged to the players. It was only because the current game map didn't display his movements that the prospective players peeping at the game online weren't exclaiming that an NPC was actually farming mobs on his own.
Ed farming mobs was all benefit and no harm, really. For him, it meant gaining levels; for the players outside clamoring to be fed, Ed leveling up could expand the Soul Webway; for public safety around the castle, Ed farming mobs could make the area safer. Only a few players who had already qualified for the closed beta had some choice words to say.
But in fact, this benefited them too. Only a small number of monsters needed to be kept for breeding experiments, and wiping out the rest could spark their interest in exploring farther afield.
Although the players' daytime exploration had just ended in failure, that was because they had gone in the wrong direction. If they explored in another direction, the potential trading opportunities in those three villages alone could keep them playing for a while.
Only... if he wanted to turn the villagers in those villages into NPCs, Ed still had a lot to do.
Even before today, Ed had wondered about something: whether sika deer or Vine Sheep, although they had gone from herbivores to omnivorous aberrations, none of them looked like creatures capable of standing at the top of the food chain.
And if an area lacked a higher-level consumer, the population of these animals, which still primarily ate plants, should have rapidly expanded until they were as dense as flocks of sheep on the grasslands. Yet that wasn't the case.
The players hadn't encountered any more dangerous creatures during the day either. That was actually another suspicious point, but Ed hadn't paid it any attention before.
Now, looking at the enormous sphere before him, Ed received a very practical answer to his question, though not in the way he had wanted...
A [Rat King] was a natural phenomenon that existed back in Ed's homeland. Specifically, a group of rats' tails became tightly tangled together due to freezing, congealed feces, or some other cause, forming the rats into a ringlike structure centered on a knot of tails.
The rats that joined a [Rat King], willingly or otherwise, lived together because they couldn't break free. Their tenacious vitality meant this could even continue for a long time. It could be called one of the most sanity-draining animal phenomena in Ed's homeland.
And the otherworldly [Rat King] Ed faced now took things a step further.
If a [Rat King] back home was merely a few dozen rats forming a circle, the [Rat King] before him now consisted of hundreds upon thousands of rats completely bundled into a ball.
This enormous ball of flesh was very soft. The side near the ground was flattened considerably by its own weight, and many of the rats bearing that immense pressure kept squealing, as though venting their physical pain.
The ball of flesh bore some traces of plants. Through the gaps between the still-crawling rats, Ed could see that their tangled tails had already formed a fused structure resembling grafted plants. The growth those plants produced to heal wounds had formed a rough skin akin to scar tissue, and those layers of wrapping had given the entire [Rat King] a truly spherical core.
The surrounding rats kept tumbling and tangling together. Their plant-based mutations seemed to have manifested in their tails. Whenever their tails were pulled, they automatically grew a little longer to prevent their bodies from being squeezed into the core by other rats and devoured.
Under the effect of this growth, the [Rat King] flesh ball was expanding at a rate visible to the naked eye, constantly devouring everything around it, such as the Vine Sheep Ed had just stabbed to death.
"Ratties, I think that's my prey?"
Ed called out rather discontentedly, but the [Rat King] before him paid him no mind. It merely crushed the dead Vine Sheep like the wheels of history rolling onward, as though it had run over a speed bump.
"I know you're all trying your hardest to live, but isn't this a little..."
Looking at the brazenly rampaging [Rat King] flesh ball before him, Ed was momentarily reminded of the equally brazen heavy trucks from his previous life, prompting him to ask that question.
But Little Green was very anxious now. He shouted inside Ed's mind:
"Do you actually have a way to deal with this?"
"Yes. At the very least, I can guarantee we can get away."
Little Green seemed to have no aspirations beyond staying alive, so after receiving that answer, it shut its mouth and waited for Ed's next instructions.
The flesh ball did slow down slightly after hitting the Vine Sheep, but not because it had run over something. Rather, the instant the hundreds of rats on its surface touched the corpse, they began gnawing at it as ferociously as locusts, not even sparing the bones.
A few seconds later, the flesh ball rolled over the Vine Sheep, leaving not a single bone behind.
Throughout the process, the upper surface of the flesh ball didn't even rise or fall.
The rats making up the [Rat King] seemed to have formed a collective consciousness and began advancing toward Ed, a living person. Their speed really wasn't fast, though; they could be avoided with just a little attention.
Watching the flesh ball draw closer and closer, Little Green asked again:
"What's your plan? What do you need me to do?"
"No need. Watch me!"
Standing seven or eight meters from the [Rat King], Ed confidently took a crystal ball with a leaf suspended in its center out of his pocket. It was none other than the vessel for the Barony of Tur's territorial secret pact, and Ed had personally plucked the leaf inside from Little Green's healthiest branch.
Keeping his eyes on the [Rat King], he aimed the secret pact vessel clenched in his hand at the enemy before him and commanded in a low voice:
"Command: [Hang Upside Down]!"