Chapter 16: I Want to Eat Chicken’s Party Goes Ash-White in an Instant

They never even got a second look at the screen; abrupt, vicious pain rent their minds, and a sky-swallowing green devoured them.

When the territory’s players got the quest and came sprinting, all they saw were four streaks of white light shattering apart inside the frenzied, heaving vines.

The territory had no resurrection point, and before the disappointment of missing the quest could even surface, a heartfelt “holy crap!” burst right out!

The once-calm territory seemed to rise in open revolt; rampant roots canopied the entire sky, and twisted, grinding stems and leaves wove into a dense net, until green and brown were all that filled the eye.

Surging vines, threaded with flecks of light, rolled themselves into a colossal green beast; the ordinary plants everyone had long taken for granted, gone berserk, awed every onlooker into keeping their distance.

And at the very heart of the raging greenery, guarded fast, hung a green cocoon.

They tried to approach, but the rampaging plants slaughtered without discrimination; one hit meant death. White light flared, and a few more drifted back to their set resurrection points.

Naturally, the commotion alerted everyone inside the Adventurers’ Guild.

Alana stepped out of the guild, her beautiful face carrying a thinly veiled fury; the red dress clung enchantingly to her, lending Alana Wolfe an all the more striking, otherworldly allure. A grand knight’s weight and power did not conflict with her feminine grace.

The adventurers on the road… no, the territory’s subjects, every one of them instinctively gave her three steps of clearance.

Perhaps because Alana had been burned before, she dealt with any offense ruthlessly. In the rooms behind the guild, three gentlemen already lay strewn, undone by beauty.

Even with alchemical potions, they’d be flat on their backs a few more days.

Alana’s strong feet pressed into the green, treading the flower-strewn path, and she knelt on one knee before the green cocoon. The lashes of the revolting plants’ vines naturally fell across her body too, but her resolute face showed no change; her warm, strong palm pressed flat against the cocoon’s surface, as if sensing the breath within.

Whoa…

The great cocoon, seemingly sensing safety, slowly split.

The green cocoon bloomed; the wild dance of vines slowly drained away, and there sat Wusu, curled into a small dumpling in the safest spot in the world, those clean eyes finding the grand knight at first glance.

“Alana.”

Wusu said it like spun sugar.

Not a shred of fear or lingering dread in his eyes; only something pure, clean, and crystalline.

The tension she had been holding finally eased a notch. Stern-faced, she said, “How could you let those attendants leave your side?”

Mina, squeezed into the onlooking crowd, who had wanted to rush up but dared not approach under Alana Wolfe’s dark expression: ?

Feeling an inexplicable chill down her spine, the dwarf lady shrank back into the crowd.

“Fucking hell!”

Somewhere in the city, a red-dyed young man crawled out of his gaming pod and, boiling over, delivered a kick to the sturdy pod.

In the game he’d been farmed down to a blank slate; three years of grind, gone overnight. How was he supposed to be happy about that?!

《Continent of Divine Silence》 had levels, but levels didn’t fence in a player’s growth. Take I Want to Eat Chicken: farmed to blank, yet every skill he’d ever learned stayed his. What was learned belonged to the player; same as real life, in-game combat couldn’t strip it away.

But a level drop came with a complimentary debuff, its effect like a grievous real-world wound, stacking by the percentage of the fall. Farmed to blank, I Want to Eat Chicken’s character now carried the critically-wounded, dying debuff, and without a divine art or a high-grade alchemical potion to heal it, his character was finished for good.

Once the world quest posted, I Want to Eat Chicken heard the notification too, naturally, and moved to log off on the spot; but inside a mandatory quest window, players cannot log off. Small mercy: he kept his pain sensitivity at 20.

Even pain at 20 was like being sanded by little knives.

One faint sting was nothing, but a thousand cuts, ten thousand cuts… added up to something far harder to bear.

Red-hair stared at the gaming pod, anger threaded with a flinching dread he couldn’t name.

He couldn’t swallow it. He circled the pod twice, fired off a phone call, then climbed back inside and tried to log in again.

[Your account has been locked. Access denied!]

[Your account has been locked. Access denied!]

[Your account has been locked. Access denied!]

Try as he might, however many times, the pod spat back only that line.

“Son of a bitch!” Livid, Red-hair kicked out inside the pod before he’d even scrambled free!

Offline, he went straight to the forum to hound customer service.

“What’s wrong with my game account?”

“Our apologies. Your account’s character met with natural termination after endangering ‘…’ and cannot be revived.”

Red-hair: ?

What kind of excuse is that?!

And no matter how he hounded them after that, the answer never changed.

Red-hair knew 《Continent of Divine Silence》 had gods, but no player’s level had come anywhere close to that point yet. Word had it someone had actually entered the Church and become a holy son, but actually touching a god? Flatly impossible.

I Want to Eat Chicken had been strangled out of nowhere, right as he moved to finish that NPC. That instant of a severed throat and a flood of green, he still remembered it… Could that NPC be divine kin?

NPCs in this game did not respawn; dead was dead. If that person was kin to a god, or perhaps some god’s avatar to begin with, then for an ordinary person (character) to die for offending a god was the most natural thing in the world.

Red-hair’s fists clenched.

[Do not look directly upon God]

His teeth ground together, close to cracking.

[Do not covet God]

What the hell kind of game was this, real enough to kill you?!

[Do not, touch God]

In the corner, a patch of air seemed to twist.

Unreal fog, uncanny colors.

Tap.

Tap tap.

The Bell-Chime Tree’s radiance swayed; the Divine Temple lay quiet and shadowed.

When Wusu wasn’t in the Divine Temple, no one, in truth, could set foot inside.

Shh. That was still a little secret.

From the temple came the sound of something massive sliding, a dry whisper, too faint to place, hovering somewhere between prying and watching.

Then all sank back into silence.