Frozen on the bed, Euri's mind raced as he compared the facial features of the girl on screen with the girl he had tried so hard to save. Other than the slight cartoonishness, this avatar was ninety percent identical to her.
Even the hairstyle was the same!
A text bubble appeared near the girl's mouth while he concluded this. Unable to bury his curiosity, he read the whole thing.
[ I am Sol-wa, the priestess of this sacred ground. I am the last layer of defense our pitiful sacred ground has. With your arrival, hero, I am sure this sacred ground can flourish once more! If you are sincere, the sacred ground shall reward you generously! So please, accompany me and take a look! I promise that you won't regret it. ]
With a click, Euri agreed to visit this sacred ground in this strange game. He had nothing else to do at the moment anyway. He had to wait for a nurse or a doctor to come to the cabin and explain the aftermath of the robbery and murder before he could decide his next course of action.
It wasn't like anyone in his home would be worried. Both of his parents were hooked on whatever the hottest drugs of the season were. His older sister, who lived in a different district for her studies, barely kept in touch.
The scene on the screen transitioned into a simple, colorfully designed grove filled with trees and shrubbery. The art style was vibrant and detailed, refreshing Euri's assumptions about the game.
At the center of the grove, a well could be seen emitting puffs of green gas. Not sure what to do, Euri clicked on the icon of the well, and a task bar popped up.
[ Sacred Ground Core: Vitality Gas Well ]
[ Property: Emits a gas that improves the constitution of beasts chosen for nurturing ]
[ Level 1 ]
[ Upgrade? ]
Although the upgrading option was grayed out, Euri clicked on it to see the upgrading conditions. There was only one.
[ Beast Cores sacrificed: 0/100 ]
In real life, beast cores were the hottest commodity on the planet since the day dimension divers had figured out how to use them. Kill a bronze-grade Rank-1 beast without damaging its core, and you can sell it for enough money to live lavishly for a couple of weeks.
And bronze-grade beasts were the least powerful ones. The silver-grade mutated beasts, the gold-grade nightmares whose core could sell for as much as a million credits...
Euri shook his head and shifted his focus back to the game. Since the well needed beast cores to level up, the game should have some functions through which he could earn these cores.
However, he looked for a long time and clicked on every little icon on the screen, from the trees and shrubs to even the dark borders of the grove, but nothing gave him a pop-up related to any beast cores.
In fact, the game was almost devoid of anything interesting save for a function he discovered while furiously tapping on the trees around the well.
When he long-pressed on any of those trees, a popup would ask him:
[ This tree is a part of the sacred ground's protective formation. Removing it from its original position will break the formation and allow evil creatures to invade and rob the sacred ground's resources! Beware! ]
After analyzing the setup for a bit, Euri realized that utilizing this function could be the key to unlocking the mystery of this game. There could only be two endings.
One—the sacred ground gets destroyed, and the game comes to an abrupt end. He could then consult a tech expert about this whole thing and perhaps remove whatever malware his device might have been infected with.
Two—the evil creature's invasion might not succeed, and its death could lead to unlocking deeper mechanisms in the game.
Since he couldn't see any point in continuing to fiddle with the featureless game, Euri repositioned one of the trees by a few units of distance in the game. The result was immediate!
[ The heroic administrator has chosen to hunt his first beast! Priestess Sol-wa shall assist him! ]
A tiny, cute animation of the familiar girl crawled out of the well and ran around it on all fours, touching the trees nearby. Every tree she touched turned red, and the puffs of green gas coming out of the well began to be sucked into those red trees.
[ Sacred Ground Status: Hunting mode ]
This message took up half the screen. But nothing else happened. After staring at the still image for more than a minute, Euri was forced to put it under his pillow in a hurry, because the noise of several footsteps was approaching the door to his cabin.
A senior doctor who looked frail enough to be riding a wheelchair entered the cabin accompanied by two policemen. They were elated to see that he was awake.
The old doctor proudly said, "See! I never need machines to predict the status of a patient. Told you two that he's fine. Back in my days, we got a concussion like that every week! That's why we grew up so tough! But these new generations....tcheh!"
While he prodded the back of his head gently to check the stitched area, the two policemen fed Euri a story about how they were trying their best to catch the criminals by analyzing the video call's contents. There was a really intriguing detail that had evaded Euri's attention until now.
"What do you mean the girl was unidentifiable? There was nothing in the database that matched?!"
The population of Planet Nen might be large, but the apocalyptic events in the past fifty years had ensured that few communities could stay out of touch from certain government policies. Identification was one such policy. Not to mention, everyone had digital footprints.
"Yes. There is no trace of her existence in any network or database. We've just checked the monitoring cameras near the crime spot. She didn't appear in any of them. The thugs, however, were caught entering the alley in a couple of feeds. Unfortunately, they took a more secretive routes while escaping."
The two policemen stayed in the cabin for a while, recording Euri's account of the whole incident while interrogating him about more subtle details. Before leaving, one of them shook his hands with an appreciative look.
"You may have failed to protect the girl, but you did the right thing. That was very brave of you."
The other guy snorted in derision. "I'm of the opposite opinion. If you aren't certain of a high chance of victory, never interrupt a scene like that. That's just committing suicide with extra steps and a bit more pain. I know that this advice conflicts with my uniform, but we all know how the world works, don't we, kid?"
This triggered a bickering between the two policemen as they left Euri's cabin. The doctor handed him a prescription package and informed him that he could leave after the next checkup in three hours.
"Er...What about the bill?" Euri asked hesitantly. The old man chuckled.
"One of the officers paid it off for you. Now lie down and relax. Your mini was going off the whole day from messages. Inform someone in your home to come over."
Relieved, Euri laid back on the bed and took the miniscreen out as soon as the doctor left. The frozen screen now had a set of statistics on it.
[ Invasion attempts: 2 ]
[ Success:Failure: 0:2 ]
[ Core depleted. Hunting mode has been closed ]
Sol-wa appeared on the screen and gave a little dance, pointing at the Sacred Ground's blurred image in the background.
[ We have hunted two creatures today! Let's check the spoils, Administrator! ]