Brown had gone gray; even the lines were ground to powder. Great sheets of color fled at speed, as if a single beat’s delay would see them swallowed by that hollow gray-black.
In the whole Outer Library, only Wusu’s tottering white remained.
His white robe trailed the ground, dragging across the gray-white lines.
Sheen and color were devoured; only where the cloth had wiped was clean, bright, pulsing with brown.
Color, color…
That gust of wind stirred up a fishy stench.
Sharp hooks had already formed, and their speed in stabbing toward Wusu could hardly be called slow.
Bam!
Light, clean white, delicate pink, vivid red, calm blue, deep black… poured ceaselessly out of Wusu, like a tiny fountain. The visible light was like crystal springwater, running down his arms, down his knees, down his little feet, down his floor-length white robe, merging into the graying floor.
At the same time, a light shield formed and blocked that ferocious assault.
Little fountain Wusu kept his head down; he slowly pressed the handkerchief into the water basin, kneaded it twice, and went on wiping the bookshelf.
Bam bam bam!
The sounds of relentless assault rang right at his ears; the light shield was unbreakable, firmly swallowing every blow.
That twisted mud-shape cast from shadow froze for a few seconds; after devouring all the color, it seemed to gain quicker limbs. Besides that scythe-like great spike, its soft, rotten-mud body sprouted protrusions that clung and throbbed, rapidly drawing out into tentacles several meters long.
The tentacles were slick with mucus, sizzling as they dripped onto the floor; the mud-like creature gradually turned to slime, the fishy reek sliding off its heap of a body, and its lashing tentacles creaked as they whipped against the light shield. Two slender tentacles slipped past the shield’s protection and, enduring the searing pain, tried to coil Wusu away.
Vitality.
That massive vigor had addled the monster’s mind, leaving only the urge to plunder.
Wusu’s mouth turned down in a pout.
He was small, and the places he could reach were small too; after wiping everything within arm’s reach, Wusu had managed only the lower level of this one bookshelf.
The shelf was tall, built against the wall, climbing all the way to the dome. Its massive, stately edges were inlaid with understated, luxurious gems; where the handkerchief had passed, the original splendor showed, but far larger stretches of broken lines had yet to recover.
That was what the System meant by the place that needed cleaning.
Wusu turned his head.
The tentacle whipping toward him was almost fast enough to touch Wusu’s hair.
“Is it really okay to let an NPC wander around all by himself?”
Mina asked it while felling trees; the Bell-Chime Tree’s radiance reached only that one broad stretch of ruins.
The ruins were already plenty big; Hugo had roughly estimated them at no less than a small town’s area, and all of this should originally have belonged to the Divine Temple.
And to chop trees, they had to go far from the light.
Quite a few clown flowers were still buried in the ground, but first they couldn’t dig up the soil, and second the clown flowers’ glow truly wasn’t bright enough. Just as the players were fretting, I Don’t Eat Eggplant shined up his torch.
“Damn, before it absolutely refused to light, and now it works again?” the handsome-faced elf grumbled and swore.
“After the Bell-Chime Tree grew, this place no longer restricted light,” Alyosha said coldly.
Once that tree of light had grown, they had cast Appraisal again and again, and could identify only the tree’s name; everything else was question marks.
The orc had even gone offline specifically to search the forum, and come up empty.
Thunk!
Mina had long since stowed her hammer away and was swinging the axe she’d forged, felling trees. As a blacksmith she had strength to spare, and her chopping was even a notch faster than Alesu’s.
Raw strength alone didn’t guarantee a flawless win; technique counted too.
After all, as the tagline said, 《Continent of Divine Silence》 was a real world; someone who knew how to fell a tree, who had the technique, was bound to be far better at it than someone who didn’t.
Alesu, chopping trees beside her, heard Mina out and said in his simple, honest voice, “Hugo went to scout around. Doesn’t seem to be any monster spawn points nearby. Should be safe for now.”
Besides, they had all checked: Wusu had gone to the Divine Temple.
The temple lay at the very center, actually safer than their own need to sneak into the Secluded Forest.
Mina pressed her lips together, worry flickering over her sultry, mature face. “But he’s so small, and looks so delicate. What if he falls down again?”
The orc was taken aback, and at her words he grew troubled too.
True.
Wusu was tiny, tender, and clumsy.
What if he got hurt?
However fast the tentacles were, they couldn’t outrun light and color.
Little fountain Wusu was covered in light.
Radiance of every hue surged and swirled, like splendid rainbow light delighting across Wusu’s body; he reached out his hand ever so slowly, the motion looking slow to the very extreme, yet it was as if the tentacle were desperately shoving itself upward, stuffing itself into Wusu’s palm.
The Slime Monster fed on color; the moment it touched Wusu it shuddered in instinctive ecstasy, desire swelling and spreading, and more tentacles struggled frantically against the light shield, as if to coil around and swallow Wusu whole.
Wusu tilted his head.
The mucus’s fishy reek was right under his nose; measured against the three-meter-tall Slime Monster, little Wusu was tiny.
The little fountain kept surging.
Color, color, color…
Color was running, bursting forth.
More light shields wrapped around Wusu; the Slime Monster could not break through, and only the first two thin, little tentacles remained, pinched in Wusu’s hands.
Thin, gray-white tentacles; small, tender white hands.
A dead white.
A living white.
This Slime Monster was a chaos creature born of death; it could be every creature it had ever seen, and its mucus-mud form granted it endless plasticity.
It lived by devouring color.
All visible light was its food.
Black, red, green, white, blue, yellow, orange. All of it, every color, once adjectives attached: the white of the human body, the red of blood, the blue of hair, the brown of eyes… stripped of color, only withered, tangled lines remained.
Dead silence.
Wusu didn’t like this aura.
He wiped the lingering traces away very conscientiously, but the ceaseless, ceaseless stench kept creeping back up.
Wusu thought hard about it.
(Ah, this time, the thinking really was thinking.)
The stench flowed without end, and the slime-mud that devoured color kept expanding too.
It was nearly touching the dome.
Then cover it over, then.
Wusu lowered his head and looked at his hands.
Little fountain Wusu’s original colors all streamed from his body into the Outer Library; though at the edges and corners it was hard to see, the Outer Library’s dome was in truth already clothed in its former colors.
The resplendent dome hung with the night sky, stitched with stars of every posture, their glow exactly like blinking little night-lights.
The dried-out colors, the broken colors, came flooding back faster than they had fled.
From the small hands.
From the Outer Library’s dome.
From Wusu’s will, they trekked home.
The slime-mud slowly began to tremble.
Instinct made it covetous.
Desire made it ravenous.
And yet this goblin-sized creature before it, for no reason it could name, sent a belated dread crawling up into it, and it shrank back.
Stiffness crept up the slime-mud’s tentacles.
Color returned to the Outer Library, as if a brush dipped in five-colored splendor had swept across the heavens; the paint rolled over everything in a great wash. The jet-black, star-stitched dome, stars leaping with light; within the dark-gold window frames, gems glinted milky white; the dark curtains stirred without wind, red-gold tassels swaying, as if afraid the colors too might be shaken loose.
Wusu crushed the tentacle.
Congealing rigidity spread across the slime-mud; a hardness like carved stone robbed it of its throbbing vitality.
Pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat…
The fissuring spread wider and wider, across the whole massive lump of stone.
Like the sound of falling rain, on and on; not just here, but through the entire Divine Temple, movement and noise arose.
The great hall where the Bell-Chime Tree had taken root, the swaying walls along the corridor, the vast unknown stretches farther back, all of it, along with the slime lump crushed in Wusu’s hand, was as if a rain of stones had fallen.
Startled, several players darted out from every direction, staring in astonishment at the restless Divine Temple.
[Heh.]
A nameless chuckle flowed past Wusu’s ear.
A pleasant breeze brushed Wusu’s ears like an invisible caress; his small earlobes tinged pink.
“Wusu!”
Mina sprinted over and swept the little NPC up in her arms, patting his chest and back. “I thought the temple was coming down, thought you were buried in there…”
Wusu was buried against the soft chest.
He went still.
So soft.
“Where do those wandering paws think they’re going?” I Don’t Eat Eggplant couldn’t bear to watch Mina’s shameless groping; lip curled, he pulled the dwarven bombshell off.
Wusu stood there, a little lost.
Ever since he’d crushed the slime-mud, the chime of quest-completion notifications had not stopped ringing.
[Quest: Library Cleaning Progress: 0/10]
[Cleaning Progress: 10/10]
[Reward: 100 Points]
[Quest: Clean the Dome: 0/15]
[Cleaning Progress: 15/15]
[Reward: 150 Points]
[Quest: …]
Dozens of semi-transparent notices filled Wusu’s view, every one a completion window; the point counter in the upper-left corner multiplied several times over and settled at 5,500 points.
Instant riches.
Apparently the filth he’d been told to clean was that slime-mud; only, for some reason, once the Outer Library’s slime-mud was washed away, every other place seemed cleaned up too.
Could the slime-mud’s body be so vast that every patch of grime covering the Divine Temple had been it?
Mina was still quietly fussing over Wusu’s safety.
Wusu had never yet spoken in very long sentences.
He pressed his lips together, a little stammering and a little shy, held in Mina’s arms, answering at his own slow pace.
Pythia City.
A wide, murky river flowed through the city, past docks in unbroken rows, factories rolling with fog, figures looming and swaying in the mist. Quiet, unassuming carriages rolled over cobblestone streets; gentlemen in tailcoats rode in their carriages, noble ladies came and went from the jewelry shops, the aged, dilapidated signboards of the clock shops had faded. Under the dim sky, the air hung thick with a musty, rotting smell.
The wealthy quarters and the slums were divided as cleanly as two river channels, separated as if by nature itself.
The rich of the East District disdained to set foot in the West District; they even felt that living in Pythia City alongside the West District’s lowborn was a humiliation. The ordinary folk of the Central District left early and returned late each day, and what they earned was roughly enough to live on. It was hard, but it was still far better than the lot of the West District’s people.
Yet Pythia City was also the newest, most vigorous city of all; in recent decades a good number of alchemy factories had opened in the Central and West Districts, and those great factory owners were especially fond of the West District’s manpower.
Cheap, and plentiful.
East District.
Along First Street, wandering vagrants shivered and dodged the night watchmen, trying to find some snug, warm corner to see out the night.
Where wheels rolled overhead, the vibration carried through the stone layers and down into the sewers.
In the filthy, foul sewers, it was pitch black.
In a sunken hollow somewhere, beneath a tattered blanket, a gaunt figure clutched a divine statue whose shape could not be made out, muttering over and over: “…Forgiveness… I have sinned… kill them… kill them…”
The voice swelled.
A shrill hiss.
Agony.
“With my flesh, my soul, my mana, I offer sacrifice… kill them… kill them!”
A sacrifice composed in no devil script, no ritual tongue, no proper rite.
It should never have worked.
The divine statue flickered with light.
Squeak, squeak, squeak…
Who knew how long later, deep in the sewer, a plump rat scurried past; it had been rummaging under the blanket for a good while.
Bits of powder dusted its nose.
Its little black eyes abruptly flushed red; clamping the divine statue, gotten from who knew where, in its teeth, it shot away.
Prayers like this, wailing and despairing.
There were many.
Many.
Wusu, still being hugged and nuzzled by Mina, turned his head.
The tall, time-worn Divine Temple stood silent behind him.
The swaying flowers and grasses looked innocent.
As if nothing at all had happened.
