Outside the City

It was nearly four in the morning.

The night was thick as ink.

Dungeon masters still came and went through the city gate plaza. Many were bloodstained, having just returned from outside the city. Military guards checked everyone's identity information and level records, letting them through or questioning them. Everything was orderly, yet the atmosphere was grim.

Su Mu crossed the plaza and walked to the registration point outside the city gate, where he scanned his identity card.

A soldier in a gray-green uniform glanced at his information and looked up slightly. "Level six. First time leaving the city?"

Su Mu nodded.

"Sign here. Once you're out, don't venture too far. Stay within fifty kilometers. If you come across a nest with blood-red markings, don't go in. That's an extremely dangerous zone." The soldier handed him an electronic tablet, then added, "You're young. You'll have plenty of chances later. Don't die outside the city and give your family something to worry about."

Su Mu signed and smiled. "Got it."

He walked on.

The city gate's exit was shrouded in a pale blue barrier, with runes like those on the city wall flowing across it.

The instant Su Mu passed through the barrier, a chill flooded in from all directions.

The air outside the city was cold and damp, and the wind carried the smell of rotting leaves and a faint trace of blood.

Su Mu glanced back.

The city wall was even taller than he had imagined.

Standing outside the city and looking back, he saw that the hundred-meter-high wall was like an entire mountain range with its peaks cut flat, stretching away on either side with no end in sight.

The densely packed runes on the wall glowed a ghostly blue in the night. From a distance, it looked like a giant serpent, sleeping and breathing.

Then he noticed the marks.

Though the runes shone brightly, cracks of varying depths covered the wall.

Some were straight as knife cuts, as though enormous claws had slashed down from above; others formed dense webs of fractures that spread outward from individual impact points.

On a section of wall farther away, he could even see several obvious signs of repair... The newly poured concrete was darker than its surroundings, patched together with the mottled old wall like layer upon layer of patches.

Some of those patches had already weathered noticeably, showing that they had been there for quite a few years. Beside the more recent patches, newer cracks had spread over the wall again.

Layer upon layer, new wounds lay over old ones, and old wounds had been split open by new ones.

Su Mu's gaze followed the wall into the distance.

In the shadows beyond the reach of the searchlights, the soil at the foot of the wall was an unnatural dark brown, as though something had soaked into it again and again.

A few withered vines still hung from the wall, but their broken ends were charred black, as though scorched by intense heat.

The textbooks had never mentioned any of this.

They said only that the city wall was a barrier protecting humanity, that the runes were the core of its defenses, and that the defenders were dungeon masters above level thirty.

But the textbooks would not tell you how many times this wall had been torn open where you couldn't see, or how many times it had been repaired.

Su Mu looked away and turned toward the land ahead.

Outside the city wall was a world entirely different from the one within.

The ground beneath his feet was grayish black and hard underfoot, yet loose and crumbly, as though it had been churned up year after year.

A few hundred meters farther on, vegetation gradually grew thicker, but the grass and shrubs were an unhealthy gray-green. The edges of their leaves curled inward, as though they had been soaked in something for years.

In the distance, the silhouettes of a few dead trees appeared and vanished against the night at the horizon. Their trunks were twisted and their branches bare, like withered hands reaching up from the earth.

And across this desolate plain, he could clearly sense... something moving in the distance.

Su Mu lowered his eyes and silently invoked a skill. Soul Power poured from his consciousness, reaching into the distance like invisible tentacles.

[Appraisal]

His gaze locked onto the nearest moving target.

It was a small humanoid creature, no more than a blurry outline in the dark.

Hunched over, it carried a crude wooden club and trudged along a well-trodden path. Every few steps, it stopped, twitched its nose and sniffed the air, then continued on.

[Monster appraisal]

[Name: Goblin Skirmisher]

[Goblin Skirmisher]

[Rank: D]

[Level: 10]

[HP: 5500/5500]

[Attack: 180]

[Defense: 75]

[Agility: 85]

[Combat index: 1845]

[Skills: Crude Weapon Mastery, Night Vision]

[Notes: A wandering skirmisher from a wild goblin tribe, usually found patrolling or foraging around the outskirts of its nest. A well-rounded fighter with no obvious weaknesses or outstanding strengths. One of the most common types of basic monster in the wild.]

Su Mu withdrew Appraisal.

A well-rounded fighter.

Its attack, defense, health and speed were all above the standard for a level-ten monster, but none of them stood out in particular. That matched his assessment.

Its combat index was around eighteen hundred.

In a trial dungeon, that was already close to the level of the fifth-wave elite monsters in a hard dungeon.

But among monsters in the wild, this was just an ordinary wandering unit.

The monsters around each city were different. Goblins predominated in the western outskirts of Rongcheng, so most of the wandering monsters were Goblin Skirmishers.

Around other cities, they might be beastmen, undead, or even higher-level monsters.

The monsters around some cities were higher-level and more ferocious, which was also why dungeon masters from different cities started on such unequal footing.

And most importantly... this was just an ordinary monster in the wild, the lowest of the low.

Su Mu swept his gaze farther ahead.

Farther away, he could just make out several small figures moving in the night.

They were all goblins, scattered along their own patrol routes and keeping a loose distance from one another.

This was normal in the wild.

Monsters did not pour out wave after wave as they did in a nest. They scattered and wandered, each fighting on its own.

The advantage was that he wouldn't be surrounded; the disadvantage was that killing them was inefficient. He had to find, chase and kill them one by one.

Farming monsters was slower than in a nest, but it was safer and more controllable.

Su Mu withdrew his gaze and sent his thoughts into the Dungeon Space.

He prepared to make contact and summon Little Drill Wind.

Besides dragging monsters into their own Dungeon Space when they encountered them, dungeon masters could also summon creature cards from their dungeons into the real world.

But such summoning came with strict restrictions.

First, the number of summons was limited by level. At his current level of six, he could only summon one monster out of the dungeon. To summon a second at the same time, he would have to reach at least level fifteen and spend a large amount of Soul Power to create an additional "summoning slot" in the Dungeon Space.

Second, when a non-core card was summoned, its rank would drop by three major ranks. Its attributes would be suppressed accordingly. This was the fundamental reason core cards were more important than ordinary cards.

A core card was the dungeon's crystal core, bound to the dungeon master's soul, and could fully materialize. Ordinary creature cards, on the other hand, were rejected by this world when summoned and could not be brought out of the dungeon intact.