Qin Guan was a big streamer with millions of fans. Although his gaming skills were not impressive, his interpersonal relationships were excellent. He could coordinate the internal conflicts within his own blood alliance and keep things fair. Many old and new players, especially female players, hung out with him.
For example, the first group of players in the second batch who participated in "Fire of the Night" (the mining area map expansion mission) all joined Qin Guan's Blood Alliance.
So the night watchman Belt saw names such as "I'm a Super Good Boy", "Sunfish", "Report King", "Xiu Thirteen", "Snow in July", "Winter Melon", "Green Beans" and so on on the registration form.
Most of the undead with these weird names had clear and pleasant young female voices...
Belt completed the registration for this group of undead with an expressionless face, then took out a few black leather folders and lined them up in a row, indicating that these undead who might have brain problems could choose their own tasks.
The undead were not polite at all and gathered around the counter to pick and choose.
"Hey, this mission is good, investigating a haunted house, so exciting!" A nurse with the ID "I'm Super Good" flipped through the black leather folder she had snatched with shining eyes, "Xiaoxue, look, four of the six people in the big house are missing and one is dead, and only one escaped. Doesn't it feel like a man-eating haunted house?"
Qiyuexue shook her head like a rattle: "No, this kind of mission looks scary."
"It's not easy to complete a pure investigation mission. Huahua hasn't come online yet. It's better to find a mission with combat content. The benefits will be higher." Give me Medicine said.
"Let's do this, 'Mist Shadow Forest'. The reward is 2,000 copper coins, and there is also equipment to choose from. It's quite generous." Qin Guan flipped through several black books and kept only one of them. He said to his friends, "This mission investigates outdoor scenarios. I feel that there is a greater possibility of combat content outdoors. What do you think?"
Even without combat content, the reward of 2,000 copper coins was enough to make the players' eyes light up, and many people agreed immediately.
"Okay." a player put down the black book in my hand with regret, "I'll take this haunted house mission next time."
"Then let's take this task." Qin Guan shook the black leather book in his hand towards the NPC.
The night watchman Belt quietly took away the other black leather books, took out a gold coin church night watchman badge and handed it to the leader Qin Guan.
"Badge of the Night Watch" "Obtained when accepting an Exorcist team mission, held by the team leader." "When you hold this badge, you can enter the non-restricted area of Indhal territory to conduct investigations. You must return it after completing the exorcist mission. If you lose it, the holder will be deducted 20 copper coins."
Qin Guan looked at the information on the badge, then looked down at the task bar which was motionless, and was surprised. "Is that all? The task was received? There is no task interface popping up?"
Belt did not know what the task interface was. He just followed Yang's "service standard" and said, "After completing the task, please bring back the file and badge. We will send someone to check them and settle the reward."
Qin Guan looked at the NPC in confusion, then looked down at the task bar which was motionless again... There was no yellow text and no task interface, which made him feel very lost!
Qin Guan had no choice but to mutter, "Why is the exorcist's mission so weird?" and leave with his friends.
After the group of undead left, Belt inside the counter let out a sigh of relief.
When hiring exorcists, one had to try to be slow and steady to avoid having the exorcists die too quickly and waste cheap cannon fodder. Since they wanted to hire this bunch of undead, the Gold Coin Church was not polite at all and brought out all the unresolved cases piled up in the archives.
For example, the "Mist Shadow Forest" files taken away by this group of undead was about the strange events that occurred in the Mist Shadow Forest privately owned by Baron Korf's family half a year ago.
The Korf family had fallen into poverty, and the only property left was the logging camp in the Misty Forest. After the incident, the Baron was anxious and turned to the church for help.
After several days of careful investigation, the organization's investigators confirmed that there were unknown dangers in the Misty Shadow Forest. Because the baron, who had fallen on hard times, could not pay the high commission (solving incidents on owned land was a paid service), the investigators advised the Korf family to seal off the Misty Shadow Forest and prohibit anyone from entering it.
Baron Korf was extremely dissatisfied with the passive handling of the Night Watch, so he hired someone to eliminate the hidden dangers in the Misty Shadow Forest. The result was... the hired wandering wizard quickly left the Misty Shadow Forest as soon as he stepped into it, and even threw the ten gold coins deposited in advance in Baron Korf's face...
The Misty Forest became a notorious place of danger, so the Korf family could no longer operate their logging camp, and their finances became increasingly stretched. The desperate baron could only leave a file with the Night Watch, post a reward of 20 gold coins, and wait for a brave young man to save his middle-aged ass...
The Night's Watch did not expect to make much profit from handing the file over to the Undead. It cost ten gold coins just to exchange it for Undead Coins, and they also prepared some extra mercenary equipment with a unit price of around ten gold coins for the Undead to choose from – twenty gold coins were barely enough to hire a wandering wizard, so if the Undead could solve this problem, it would be considered as solving a problem that had been bothering them for barely any money.
Of course, the biggest reason was that Bishop Gene could no longer tolerate Baron Korf's endless complaints...
Before Belt could calm down, another large group of undead came into the hall in a bustling manner.
The bounty hall next door mostly posted miscellaneous tasks such as finding cats, dogs, lost items, people, collecting certain special plants, catching certain special animals, running errands and delivering things, etc. It could not attract large groups of online players. Originally, Lahong and his gang, who were squatting in the wilderness of the Tarantan Wasteland to kill monsters, had come to the Night's Watch Hall.
So Belt was forced to admire the naming methods of the undead again - "Brother Lahong", "Underworldly Wind", "Phantom", "Addicted to Learning", "Pull Out a Leg of Hair", "Nine-Lived Cat"... and so on.
After completing the registration, Brother Lahong flipped through the black leather notebook displayed by the NPC and picked out the task with the highest reward.
Students like Tang Jia, En Bu Zeng, and Jia Luo did not come online until the lunch break. Yang Ying, who had been waiting for a long time, immediately pulled them into the team and told them about the opening of the secondary combat positions. Then, the group of people hurried to St. Joseph Street in Indhal City.
It was already late at night on the main street of Xinfeng District. Tang Jia was stomping at the closed door of the Night Watch Hall. "What a psycho! The NPCs in the main city are also going off duty when it gets dark!!"
Fortunately, they joined the Blood Alliance, and the Blood Alliance still remembered them. Upon learning that Enbulzeng's team of girls had missed the mission, Qin Guan called them over.
Ten minutes later, En Buzeng and his companions met up with Qin Guan's large group in a mountainous area about ten kilometers west of Indhal.
It was also thanks to Rex that after he became the new lord, he not only abolished the access control in the central city but also stopped closing the city gates – he only collected business taxes and not city gate taxes, so he was not afraid that anyone would dare to enter the city at night to cause trouble.
Misty Forest was a mountain forest covering an area of about 2,000 acres. There were two villages around it, and the nearest village was five or six kilometers away by mountain road.
Because it was once developed into a logging site, there was a dirt road that could accommodate a horse carriage and led to the depths of the forest. However, it had been abandoned for more than half a year, and a lot of weeds had sprouted on the dirt road that had not been run over by wheels for a long time.
As soon as they entered the forest, Jia Luo was surprised and said, "Hey, I didn't see anything outside, why is it so foggy inside?"
"Yes, we also discovered this." Qin Guan turned around and said, "It's normal from the outside, but once you come in, you'll find that it's all foggy, and you can't even see a dozen meters."
"No wonder you had to come out to pick us up. If we had come in by ourselves, we might have missed you." En Buzeng nodded in understanding.
The undead could all see at night, so darkness was no obstacle to players, but thick fog would still affect players' vision.
Tang Jia scanned the team list twice and said curiously, "I feel like someone was missing. Huahua isn't here?"
"She's working on her manuscript. She was so busy with the weekend activity book that she didn't type a single word." Give Me Medicine said casually, "Qingyue, do you think the fog here is a scene setting, or is there some kind of mission hint to it?"
The ID "Entropy but Growth" was not very nice to call out, and most of the players who were more familiar with her called her Qingyue.
En Bu Zeng was flipping through the black leather mission book Qin Guan handed her and said, "There's a lumberyard in there, right?"
"Well, just go along this path and you will reach the end," Qin Guan said.
"The original name of this place was the Fog Shadow Forest, so it should have had the characteristic of fog." En Bu Zeng said, "But since it has been developed into a logging site, it means that the fog was not as severe as it is now. Otherwise, the workers would easily make mistakes in operation, and the money earned by the logging site owner would not be enough to compensate for the losses."
The background setting of this game was highly similar to the Western European society from the 19th to the 20th century. Players had seen electric lights in Weisshem and after opening the main city map of Indhal, they could also see NPCs making landline calls. Some blocks had electric poles, and some buildings had gas pipelines. In the high-end residential area in the midtown area, you could occasionally see "cars"...
In addition to these symbols of the birth of industrial civilization, players also captured all the police officers of the city of Indhal with their own hands, and some players were bored and went to the prison in the west of the city to watch the excitement... In other words, this game with a setting close to modern times did have laws, and no matter how much the owner of the logging camp despised human life, he could not be like a real slave owner and just ignore the deaths of his workers.
"That is to say, the heavy fog here must be related to the cause of the incident." Give Me Medicine nodded.
En Bu Zeng suddenly stopped, holding the opened black leather book, frowned and looked at Qin Guan. "Xiangcao, have you read the contents of this file?"
"I've seen it. The reward is 2,000 copper coins and equipment of your choice." Qin Guan said as a matter of course.
En Bu Zeng didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and held up the black leather book. "I'm not talking about the reward... There's no task bar for the Exorcist quest, right? Then the quest text is on this file given by the NPC in the Night Watch Hall. To complete the quest and solve the puzzle, you must read the text carefully."
Qin Guan uttered "uh" and his eyes wandered... It's not that he didn't want to read it, it's just that the information on the file was all over the place and there was no focus. It was like reading a pieced-together work report. He wanted to play with his phone after just two pages...
Tang Jia, who only came over to En Bu Zeng and took a look at him before losing interest and running off to chat with Yang Ying, said angrily, "Does it take so much to complete a mission as an exorcist? Why not just tell us where to go? This combat secondary job is so poorly designed."
Everyone nodded, and Give me Medicine especially agreed with what Tang Jia said. He was not even interested in reading the plot text carefully designed by the copywriter, let alone a plain text file without any focus made by NPCs.
Entropy could only shrug. "...Okay, then I will summarize the contents--"