It used to be a hundred people doing the work. Fun to watch, sure, but even a low wall took ages. Now there were five hundred more, all quiet, tight-lipped types willing to labor, and no matter how troublesome the system’s construction quests got, everything began running smooth as silk.
Crops were being tended, trees felled, mines dug. Things that needed building were getting built. Business at the tavern picked up, and even the Council Hall for the young lord was finished.
Adventurers had griped before about this remote wilderness, but to build a proper-looking territory with their own hands, nearly from nothing at all!
That kind of satisfaction was rare.
And the tree-felling crew kept growing.
The row houses Wusu had built with points were merely a template; the few hundred extra people were still awfully hard to squeeze in.
Couldn’t squeeze them in? Time to start building houses, then.
The original adventurers remained fiercely wary of the Fallen, seemingly refusing to believe they had turned over a new leaf at all.
The players, on the other hand, had no such scruples; they worked both sides and got along swimmingly, even coaxing the reason for the Fallen’s corruption out of the newcomers.
One of the reasons, anyway.
With that many people, the ways a person could fall were surely endless and strange.
Knights, mages, warlocks, every class there was: the higher one climbed, the greater the danger.
Supposedly, it was because one faced the trials of the gods in the course of one’s cultivation.
In the players’ own words: grind too hard and you’ll lose your mind!
Only twenty-some players were helping fix up houses, while the transformed group spent every day building traps, felling trees, farming fields, and so on; finding time to build their own homes was always a hassle.
After half a month of silence, someone among the adventurers finally stepped forward.
Where there’s a first, there’s a second.
Where there’s a third, there’s a fourth.
The house that had stood as nothing but a frame for over half a month finally made major progress with the other adventurers’ help.
House-building was skilled work; those who botched it got cussed out by the adventurers, too!
Cold Autumn just grinned and didn’t mind a bit.
Mina did a loop around the area and found Wusu in the Adventurers’ Guild.
The newly finished Council Hall was squeaky clean, but the lord who was meant to preside there, Wusu,
flatly refused to stay penned up inside.
The black feathered snake wound itself happily around Wusu’s body.
Wherever it wanted to coil, Wusu never stopped it.
Having found something it liked, the black feathered snake lost all interest in terrorizing(?) everyone else.
It would gladly have drowned right there beside Wusu.
The real feathered snake, for its part, wanted nothing more than to keep far, far away from the black (fake) feathered snake.
It adored that tiny, adorable former master, truly it did, but the current master wasn’t bad either.
At least he didn’t make it feel, every waking moment, like it was off to meet the Death God.
“Wusu, when you said last time that we didn’t need to do anything, was it because of this?” Mina leaned on the counter, all excitement.
Wusu was studying a map.
“Yep.” His voice was soft.
Sesame Flatbread with Fried Dough Stick had come to Wusu about this very thing a while back.
The game wasn’t just a game; it was a genuine society, and interpersonal matters like these were the biggest hassle of all.
“But why?” Mina asked.
Wusu tilted his head. “Because it isn’t their fault.”
He looked at the many subjects across his territory and showed a tiny smile.
A toothy one.
Wusu looked at the black feathered snake sprawled on the counter, eyes for no one but him.
He thought:
They had simply forgotten.
Do not look directly upon a god.
Wusu ambled slowly through the Divine Temple.
A little bad snake still coiled around him.
Two big tails trailed behind him.
Mina and Wild Fox.
Mina was a chatterbox; Wild Fox was the quiet type with a lot simmering underneath.
Between the two of them, one motion and one stillness, it balanced out.
With his petite, exquisite looks, plus the placid way he’d been learning things, Wusu always gave people the feeling of a porcelain doll in need of sheltering. Inside the corridor, where nameless light flickered and flowed, the black feathered snake wound around Wusu’s fair white neck, tongue flicking, while its red eyes locked tightly onto the two players.
Somehow, Mina’s mouth went dry; a jolt of tension raced up her spine and knocked her heartbeat several beats faster.
This suffocating feeling, as if she’d known it once before, left her hazy, as if from far away she could faintly hear Wusu’s tender little voice drift over: “Wait.”
What were they waiting for again?
Wusu ran his hand along the temple corridor wall, lips pressed together, and said, very quietly.
“It’s protection.”
The faint glow of the Fallen Corridor spread along the patterned floor and up the temple walls, lighting wherever Wusu’s fingers drew near.
Wusu puffed out his cheeks.
The Divine Temple’s protection wasn’t confined to its interior; it extended beyond the temple walls as well.
Following the low walls, slowly, gently, it wrapped around the entire territory still being opened up.
Like a great beast cradling its prey against its chest.
A good thing.
But Wusu pinched the snake’s head, and the little tongue-flicking snake obediently coiled about his wrist.
So good.
As if it had done nothing at all.
The cause behind this “good thing,” however, wasn’t necessarily good.
The Young Lord Wusu walked every corner of the territory.
In truth, it was only the stretch enclosed by the low walls.
The Divine Temple’s inexplicable presence had indeed extended all the way to the low walls.
The Fallen Corridor, which had once shielded only the temple, had, rather grudgingly, swept up its little neighbor next door as well.
Wusu thought.
Not angry, not angry.
Don’t!
Wusu huffed.
Wusu pouted.
Wusu was still angry.
Wusu “threw out” the black feathered snake, then toddled off on his short little legs back to the Yellow Mushroom House to sleep.
A warm, toasty yellow blanket covered Wusu’s little face, and curled up in the soft covers, he drifted sweetly asleep.
Deep in the night… oh, wait, the Gloomy Forest had no such thing as “dead of night.”
The bell-chime trees swayed, their silver-white petals shattering at the slightest touch.
Their lush canopies hung heavy with countless delicate petals like a vast sky, drifting down as light as the wind.
Faintly, a strange, uncanny melody drifted through, seemingly delighted yet seemingly disgusted; listened to closely, it was in fact an achingly beautiful movement, like the most wondrous, most sublime of descents upon the world.
In her sleep, Alana frowned, as if caught in a nightmare.
Second floor of the Yellow Mushroom House, outside the bedroom window.
Some strange metamorphosis seemed to be underway, and it had begun with one furtive black feathered snake.
That odd, adorable piece of music carried on, as if some cunning musician were performing, or as if a small child were plucking at strings and making restless noise.
Within the bell-chime tree’s glow, the secretive shadow cast on the Yellow Mushroom House’s wall slowly condensed into a human figure.
At first there were two heads.
Then the left one knocked the right one clean off.
The extra arm was twisted off.
And once more it was one clean, tidy person.
The figure stepped out of the void and leaned against the wall, its posture a little odd, but it watched only the inside of the Yellow Mushroom House.
The bell-chime tree’s light scattered across his face.
Ah!
It was a devastating, absolute beauty; in the instant one looked upon him, it was as if all creation fell silent, yearning to prostrate itself at his feet, to live or die by his slightest whim.
And when he saw the tiny Wusu nestled in the great big covers,
that beautiful creation, so unlike anything mortal, smiled.
