Chapter 6

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation

Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

On the other side of the cave, Meng Yang saw the four people enter the cave again. He suddenly became watchful and he stretched his hands out of the cage, waving at them frantically.

The pig-headed monster was asleep. With those four people and his strength combined, they could push the heavy wooden door of the cage open.

However, after waving for a long time, Meng Yang realized with a shock that those people seemed to have turned a blind eye to his actions. Instead, they were all staring at the pig-headed man who was asleep on the ground.

“Your mission is to save me, not fight the monster!”

Meng Yang watched their actions and smacked his head in frustration. “How stupid are the people I summoned? Do you guys not read the mission details when you play games? It’s a rescue, a rescue, sir! The pig-headed monster is fast asleep and you want to provoke it?”

“Then I’ll do it!”

Zhuang Dafa, whose body resembled a 200-jin oil barrel, glanced back at them and felt like something was off. Under their encouraging gaze, he swallowed his saliva and approached the pig-headed man sleeping on the ground silently.

The pig-headed monster had its arms and legs splayed out as it slept. He could see the monster’s dense, black fur that grew across its coarse skin, remnants of blood and flesh seemed to cling to the insides of its protruding mouth and fangs. 

“This looks so realistic!”

Zhuang Dafa felt cold sweat falling breaking out on his forehead. The closer he got, the smell of rotting flesh got stronger, the smell wafting towards him every time the monster exhaled.

“This is a game, this is a game.”

Zhuang Dafa pepped himself on silently. As he watched the pig-headed man who was lying on the ground, he felt fear prickle his heart and turned to look back at the others.

“All the best!”

Xu Zhe, Sun Shuai, and Liu Chuanfeng were watching from behind while they held their breaths. When they saw Zhuang Dafa turn around to look at them, they held up their fists up and mouthed words of encouragement at him silently.

Zhuang Dafa nodded solemnly, then looked back at the snoring, pig-headed monster. Suddenly, his voice came out like a little girl’s:

“Ah!! Kill you, kill you, kill you, I’ll beat your chest with my widdle fists.”

At that moment, the three other people at the scene froze.

“What kind of style is this?”

They watched as Zhuang Dafa squatted beside the monster, his head turned away, not even daring to look at the monster. His fists struck against the pig-headed monster’s dense, black fur-covered chest softly, as if he was giving it a massage.

“At least now I know what this guy does.”

Liu Chuanfeng stared at Zhuang Dafa, and that loli’s voice too. His eyes shone, and he seemed to recall some memory of the past.

Xu Zhe and Sun Shuai, who was standing at the side, nodded together. In their long gaming lives, who would not have some kind of story to tell?

Meng Yang, who was even farther away, slowly lowered his hands that were gripping onto the wooden cage. He cast a complicated look at the scene before him.

“If you want to fight the monster, then fight the monster. Can’t you be a little more serious…?”

With Zhuang Dafa’s 200-jin oil-barrel-shaped body, if he were to perform a sneak attack, he could have used his big butt for a violent “sitting attack”. So, even if he did not kill the pig-headed monster then, at least he would have taken half its life.

“Roar…”

The snoring pig-headed monster was finally awoken by Zhuang Dafa’s “widdle fists” and loli voice. Its giant copper-bell eyes first fell upon the large-sized human that was hitting its belly with his fists, slightly confused. Then, it was followed by the sound of lips smacking echoing through the cave. Zhuang Dafa was struck onto the ground by the pig-headed man who had suddenly gotten up.

“Charge!”

Xu Zhe, Sun Shuai, and Liu Chuanfeng saw that the pig-headed monster had gotten up and struck down Zhuang Dafa. At that moment, they realized that they had no other choice, and they each let out a battle cry as they charged towards the beast.

After a moment, a huge cloud of green mist dissipated into the air.

The pig-headed monster stood in the middle of the cave, confused. It had been awoken from its slumber and saw prey that had delivered themselves to its front door. However, after it struck them down, they turned into mist in the blink of an eye and disappeared.

“Grunt-”

The pig-headed monster looked around in confusion, shook its gigantic head, then fell onto the ground again. After a while, the sounds of its snores started again.

At that moment, a timid and pretty figure walked into the cave. When she suddenly saw the bones littered across the ground and the purgatory-like scene, she immediately let out a sharp scream and turned to run away frantically.

However, her foot slipped beneath her, and she fell onto some creature’s rib bones protruding from the ground, and it pierced her through the heart. She immediately turned into mist and dissipated into thin air.

…

“You successfully summoned them!”

After the pig-headed man went back to sleep, in the wooden cage next to Meng Yang, the old man in long robes who resembled a corpse until then suddenly got up.

“Ever since the dimensional barrier connecting the abyss had been sealed off, in the past hundred years, summoners have left the stage of history. I never expected that you would succeed in summoning.” The old man’s stared at Meng Yang with cloudy eyes that shone with disbelief.

“What’s the use? It’s just a bunch of regular humans.” Meng Yang shook his head and slumped onto the ground with a hopeless expression.

The old man’s bright eyes dimmed with his words. “Too bad the ones you summoned were too weak. Even though the pig-headed man was not a high ranking creature from the lowest levels of the Land of Despair, it’s still not something that ordinary humans can defeat.”

“Yeah, they’re not just weak, they’re dumb too.”

Meng Yang sighed and called upon the Summoning Pixie in his mind. He hoped that the few players that he had summoned would not quit because of their poor gaming experience.

When the players died, Meng Yang suddenly remembered something important which he had forgotten.

“Summoning Pixie, I want to add a new function. Pain, I want to adjust pain levels.”

…

“It hurts…”

“F*ck, I don’t want to play anymore. It’s way too realistic.”

“I thought I was about to die.”

In the wilderness, at the point of birth and resurrection.

The five illusory figures started solidifying, and slowly appeared once more.

“The 100% realistic simulation is amazing! Can someone tell me where’s the pain setting?” Liu Chuanfeng shook his head, he could still remember the slap from the monster that made his head turn 180 degrees.

“Yeah, it hurts so much.”

Zhuang Dafa sat down on the ground, his breathing ragged. Even though he had been resurrected, the expression on his round face seemed to be frozen with the fear that he felt in the cave.

Even Xu Zhe, who was a seasoned gamer, felt a sense of lingering fear. In the fight with the pig-headed man, he had felt an indescribable sense of realism. That strong pain had momentarily dazed him.

Ma Xiaoling looked like she was about to cry. She did not even know how she died. Even just thinking about the purgatory-like scene she witnessed in the cave made her want to vomit.

As their minds were filled with negative thoughts about the “game”, they were even thinking about quitting the game, a voice suddenly snapped them out of those thoughts.

“It’s so fun! It’s so interesting!”

Sun Shuai’s face was flushed, and he was skipping around the resurrection point excitedly. It was the complete opposite of the air of cold arrogance he had when he first entered the game. He looked at the confused expressions of the others in the group and said earnestly, “Don’t you guys think that kind of experience was unprecedented? It’s all-new! It’s thrilling, it was so thrilling! It must be some kind of new interactive nerve-sensing technology, and created realistic reactions inside our brain.”

“Er…yeah, I thought it was exhilarating too.”

Xu Zhe went quiet for a moment, and then he nodded. That experience was truly exciting. It made him recall the feeling he had when he first joined a 40 man raid. No, it was even more exciting than that.

Liu Chuanfeng and Zhuang Dafa snapped out of their thoughts, and they agreed. Even though they were crushed, it was still really exciting, perhaps even too exciting. After waking up at the resurrection point, they now knew that they would not die, and the horror that they felt when they first entered the cave had dissipated.

Even Ma Xiaoling nodded repeatedly along with them. Even though she had been scared half to death, but as a horror film enthusiast, after that paralyzing, shuddering fear, and after she slowly returned to her senses, it was a feeling that she could become addicted to. It was a highly immersive experience, and she felt like the female protagonist of a horror film.

“But…it hurts!”

When they heard those words, they did not deny that they felt the same too. Even though they could not die, the pain which they had felt was not something that an ordinary person could endure.

“The system released a patch!”

At that moment, a soft voice sounded in their ears.

“All players’ pain sensitivity reduced by 80%!”

At first, they were stunned, then they started shouting all at once.

“D*amn it, why didn’t you do that in the first place?” Liu Chuanfeng was the first one to stand up and curse angrily. They were unsure if he was cursing at the sky or the wilderness.

“Why didn’t you introduce such an important function earlier? Is the development team stupid?”

“So you guys know how painful it was?” The others yelled along with him.

After they shouted for a while, Sun Shuai finally spoke calmly, “I’d reckon that they wanted us to experience it at 100% first, to show us how realistic it is, and to show us how advanced their technology is.”

“I think they were trying to show off their technology too.” Xu Zhe nodded. “However, beta testing is usually perfected bit by bit. Alright, I think pain reduction by 80% is enough. But I still think it’s better if they can create a pain setting that can be manually adjusted by the players in the future.”

“Most development teams are quite rigid. I think it’ll take a few more rounds of maintenance and updates before that kind of function can be introduced.”

They had all played all kinds of games, so they were no strangers to the updating processes of the planning and operating coding peasants1.

“Then let’s investigate this for a moment. Even though we won’t die, it still hurts.” Xu Zhe noticed that most of them already calmed down, and he seemed to regain some of the mannerisms he had when he used to be the leader of a black-handed1 team. “We don’t even have any starting gear, so we can’t just rush in blindly. We need to adopt some strategies.”

“How do we do that?” The others turned to look at Xu Zhe together.

“I have an idea.” Xu Zhe unintentionally glanced at Ma Xiaoling, who looked baffled the entire time. He cleared his throat. “That…let me just say this in advance, I’m not being a creep…”

“People who say that are usually creeps.” Sun Shuai automatically chimed in.

Xu Zhe coughed a few times before he slowly opened his mouth again, looking at them. “Did everyone notice that the pig-headed man resembled a certain character that we know of?”

“Bajie.1”

“The Second Disciple.1”

Liu Chuanfeng and Zhuang Dafa said simultaneously.

Xu Zhe nodded slightly and smiled in satisfaction. “Throughout the years of my working life and the time I spent watching movies, no, in all of my gaming experience, this kind of big-headed, thick-necked creatures are usually like this….”

“Go on!”

The few boys pondered for a moment, then followed by them smacking their thighs, calling out excitedly. Their gaze fell upon Ma Xiaoling.

“What?”

Ma Xiaoling, who had been daydreaming, suddenly felt a malicious aura. Under the male players’ gaze, she could not help but to bring her arms up to hug her chest. “Why are you all looking at me with such perverted expressions?”