Chapter 5: 【Random Quest: Please help answer Wusu’s questions.】

【Quest Reward: Free Skill Point +1】

I Don’t Eat Eggplant’s eyes went wide.

He accepted the quest in a heartbeat, and the next instant, the elf’s figure was gone.

He had logged off.

“Everyone get online, NOW! Quests going out wholesale!”

You couldn’t blame I Don’t Eat Eggplant for being worked up.

Did you think this was easy?!

Two and a half years of playing, and he had run into exactly eight quests, three of which he’d gotten from this tiny little NPC.

I Don’t Eat Eggplant shot the above message to all his teammates on the forum, then shot himself back online, the whole operation taking less than a minute.

Arthur didn’t seem to notice anything odd about it.

NPCs in the Continent of Divine Silence basically never registered players logging in and out.

But Wusu glanced at him.

Expressionless as ever, and yet I Don’t Eat Eggplant could have sworn he read a flicker of innocent curiosity in it.

The elf paused, suddenly a little suspicious that Wusu had noticed him logging out just now.

Wusu said nothing.

The white-robed youth slowly walked up to the elf, and then crouched down.

The standing elf hesitated for a few seconds, then crouched down too.

What was this, a secret handoff?

The elf might have looked like the prickly type, but he was really rough on the outside, careful within. Shaking off that flash of suspicion, I Don’t Eat Eggplant gave serious thought to the quest requirements and started explaining for Wusu’s benefit.

“Smiling is when someone’s happy on the inside, really happy, and the corners of their mouth lift up. It’s a…” The elf rummaged desperately for a better way to explain it, but before he could finish, Wusu’s sudden movement startled him.

Crouching there in front of I Don’t Eat Eggplant, Wusu reached out with pale, tender fingers and carefully touched his face.

There. A tiny dent pressed inward.

“Does it hurt?” Wusu said, very quietly.

The elf froze. On his face… oh. That was where his dimple was.

“It doesn’t hurt.” For the first time in his life, I Don’t Eat Eggplant found himself at a loss for words. “That’s… a dent some people get in their face when they smile. It’s a happy thing too.”

“Ohh.”

Wusu’s voice was soft. His fingertips stroked over it lightly once more, gentle as if he were afraid of hurting the elf.

Then he drew his hand back, entirely satisfied.

His eyes curved.

“So that’s a smile.”

Hearing that soft, faintly cool voice, the elf swallowed twice in quick succession.

He could have dodged.

He could easily have dodged.

I Don’t Eat Eggplant instinctively touched his own face.

So he had been smiling just now, too.

When the elf smiled, a deep dimple showed on his left cheek. It was the reason a man with such a vile temper still had any popularity at all. After all, when a hot-tempered lion suddenly goes soft, the contrast is simply impossible to resist.

And the elf wasn’t bad-looking, either.

The elf gazed at the NPC inches away from him, that curious, unknowing look strangely fused with a face that had no business belonging to the mortal world, the two of them together forming the exquisite, beautiful white-robed youth called Wusu.

Ah.

A familiar aura.

Before his brain had even caught up, the elf looked down.

Flowers.

Tender grass.

Vivid, fresh colors.

Clump after clump, cluster after cluster, crowding tight around his feet.

No, wait.

I Don’t Eat Eggplant studied the ground where all that life was spreading.

It’s Wusu.

From the milky-white building to the newborn teleportation array, a thin, winding path of flowers and grass traced everywhere the white-robed youth had walked.

Overflowing with life.

I Don’t Eat Eggplant’s race was elf, and by racial instinct he could sense that surging vitality as naturally as breathing. Even in a game world, looking at this fairytale of a scene, even the most hot-headed elf alive went quiet for one moment, perfectly fitting for his race.

Coldly elegant. Exquisitely serene. The forest’s darling.

The elf studied the Wusu before him, earnest and wary.

He is…

For one instant, a word slid through I Don’t Eat Eggplant’s mind, but before it could leave his mouth, four figures popped up at the edge of the clearing.

The moment his teammates appeared, the elf saw Wusu rise to his feet.

The chime of another quest completion rang in his ears.

The newly arrived players stared at the enormous changes in front of them, momentarily unable to process what they were seeing.

I Don’t Eat Eggplant stayed half-crouched, hands braced on his knees, slouching with easy, unbothered grace. “You’re all too slow.”

Hugo came pacing over, hand resting on his sword. “What happened here?”

While the elf explained to the team, Arthur was silently watching Wusu.

In his eyes, Wusu was someone powerful and unknowable. The Adventurers’ Guild he had built seemed to hold some uncanny power; every time Arthur stood at its door, chills ran down his spine and he wanted nothing to do with setting foot inside. And yet Wusu’s behavior and reactions were as guileless as a newborn cub’s. His eyes were clear and clean, his voice soft and calm. Arthur couldn’t sense a trace of malice.

No.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t sense it.

Arthur slowly drew his own vigor potion from his robes. He hadn’t taken it out earlier only because he’d been too drained to move. The elf’s potion had recovered a little of his energy, that was all. This obedient, quiet quest-giver simply did not have that kind of emotion in him at all.

He was like… a blank sheet of paper.

The thought crept into Arthur’s heart without a sound.

Meanwhile, the players across the way had gotten the gist of things from I Don’t Eat Eggplant’s few words, and they couldn’t help glancing toward Wusu.

From the look of it, this NPC was an absolute treasure.

Their little treasure Wusu gazed earnestly at the teleportation array, pitch-black eyes clean and docile. “When will people come?”

The question was stubborn and adorable, and it settled some of that eerie dread in Arthur as well.

“This place of yours is too…” Only now did Arthur properly take stock of his surroundings.

This had to be somewhere deep in a vast, gloomy forest. Tall, thick trees blotted out every scrap of sunlight, and the dense branches let slip not even a sliver of broken light.

The only source of light lay at the very deepest point.

Arthur’s eyes followed that gentle light source without thinking.

They went wide.

Broken, desolate rubble and shattered tiles lay before him. That sprawling temple, if not for the Bell-Chime Tree holding it up and lending it light, had no grandeur to speak of at all. And yet it was precisely those ruins, battered and crooked as split melons, that wrenched a measure of dread out of Arthur all the same.

He looked down.

Fresh, dewy flowers spread beneath his feet, unfurling along the exquisite, picture-perfect youth, as if he possessed infinite vitality, surging with boundless life like the Mother of Earth, like a god of plenty, filling in this desolate, dark Secluded Forest…

Arthur shuddered.

Of course.

Even if this patch of ground underfoot seemed to brim with soft, velvety green.

Beyond these ruins and this clearing, the depths were dark enough to swallow your own hand in front of your face. The jungle pressed in, thick and deep.

This was the Secluded Forest.

This was the Secluded Forest!

The Godforsaken Land.

Arthur trembled from head to toe, shaking like a leaf, and his palm crushed the vigor potion bottle to pieces.

His shivering pulled every player’s attention over at once.

“You…” The elf, who had crossed paths with Arthur before, took a step forward.

Arthur gritted his teeth and sidestepped the elf’s outstretched hand, staring at the finished teleportation array with a dazed look.

What have I done?

What have I done!

The players traded looks; I Don’t Eat Eggplant, whose help had just been refused, went dark-faced for an instant. His temper had never been good.

Mina held him back. “Don’t poke at him yet,” she said crisply. Mina had worked as a nurse once; she could tell what had rattled the NPC.

The dwarf bombshell swept her gaze around and picked up where she’d left off with her teammates earlier. “Couldn’t find a shred of information. The officials never opened a content patch for this place.”

Their location had always shown up as “?” on the map, with no information to be found anywhere; all they had managed to dig up was intel on Wusu.

Asimi Village was one of countless newbie villages, but without question the most beautiful of them.

It bloomed with flowers.

Mina had no idea why Wusu had suddenly appeared here. Clearly this was a quest hook worth mining, but one thing was plain to see.

The dwarf bombshell looked at the delicate flowers jostling and rubbing up against Wusu.

The flowers had come for Wusu.

Wusu watched Arthur quietly.

The mage’s brows were scrunched up, his nose scrunched too; the bottle had gashed his hand, and blood dripped down.

Wusu’s delicate brows knotted.

Is this “angry”?

Wusu had learned a new word.

“Why are you angry?”

Arthur heard that soft, stubborn voice, clean to the point of being too much.

It felt like a rough stone had lodged itself in his throat.

He wasn’t angry.

He was… terrified.

“This place is the Divine Forbidden Land,” Arthur rasped. “Everyone who ends up here is despised, punished, cast away. The wicked without a single good deed to their name, the born killers, the blood-hungry fiends…”

“This is where the Fallen end their road.”

A grave for those who deserve to die. Only those spat upon by the gods were thrown into this Secluded Forest, and the horrors inside were nearly beyond imagining. Legend had it that everyone who prowled the Secluded Forest had lives on their hands, stained with blood hateful to behold.

For hundreds of years, the occasional adventurer had tried exploring the Secluded Forest, and most of them had died here. Those who made it out mostly kept their mouths shut forever after, preferring a long detour to ever setting foot inside again.

A place this terrifying…

Arthur’s thoughts drifted.

And he had strung a passage between this Godforsaken Land and the outside world.

The weight of what that meant nearly crushed him.

Behind Wusu, the Divine Temple stood in silence.

It had stood like this for tens of thousands of years, and worn smooth by the long river of time, it would go on standing just the same.

Whoever threw me here, Wusu thought blankly, did they want me to “die”?

What does “die” mean?

Wusu looked down.

Then he touched his chest.

A dull, heavy feeling.

The five players watched from the sidelines.

“What’s going on?” orc Alesu whispered, in a voice every single person could hear.

The dwarf bombshell kicked him, exasperated. This guy was forever spooking the prey.

Hugo eyed the spatial mage calmly, fiery red hair spilling over his bare shoulders. “This place is probably cursed.”

For players, a place like this was exactly the kind where quests were most likely to spawn; naturally, they were itching to stay. Arthur was another matter.

His face still looked terrible.

Wusu tilted his head at him and said slowly, “If you don’t like it, you can leave.”

Arthur had completed the quest. Leaving again would be perfectly normal.

“Here. For you.”

Wusu’s every movement was slow. He walked up to Arthur and drew out a healing scroll like the ones he had stuffed into Arthur’s arms earlier. “Hand. Hurt.”

Arthur hadn’t known Wusu long, but he had already learned that the boy spoke in simple, clipped words. Hearing him out, Arthur glanced down at his own fingers without thinking.

He hadn’t even noticed the vigor potion had been crushed to bits in his grip.

Arthur was silent for a moment. “Are you planning to invade Lakeside Town?”

“What does ‘invade’ mean?”

Wusu pressed his lips together.

Pop, pop, pop.

The plants grew with a sound that was almost audible.

Once more, flowers and grass closed in around Wusu.

Arthur: …

However you looked at it, he was a pure, innocent, squeaky-clean little dummy through and through.