After meditating for an hour and fully recovering his condition, Bai Qiu finalized his route and set out alone toward the six newly formed geomantic treasure lands.
Using a teleportation device, he traveled to the Safe Zone closest to the first treasure land.
Hidden beneath the Concealment Cloak, his movements went almost entirely unnoticed.
Over the past several days, the system had added new monster species and randomly teleported them into the world.
At present, however, only three new species were actively appearing around urban areas:
- Armored Porcupines
- Iron-Claw Saber-Toothed Tigers
- Giant-Tailed Rats
Bai Qiu only discovered this after leaving the Safe Zone and spotting an Iron-Claw Saber-Toothed Tiger that had just spawned while he was flying overhead.
After killing it, he opened the system log.
The system was actually being updated every day.
Whenever new monsters, features, or mechanics were added, the changes were recorded in the logs.
Unfortunately, Bai Qiu had been far too busy recently to take the time to read them.
One of the newly added features was a forum.
Out of curiosity, he opened it.
To his surprise, the forum wasn’t limited to Zones 2200–2250.
Instead, it covered Zones 2000–2500, a total of 381 active regions.
What happened to the remaining 119 regions?
Simple.
They were gone.
From Zone 2000 onward, there had originally been 501 Safe Zones.
Of those, 119 Safe Zones had failed to withstand the Tide invasion and had been destroyed.
That meant at least one million people had died.
As for Zones 2200–2250?
The entire cluster of fifty-one regions had survived intact.
For the moment, no one could find a second example anywhere else.
As a result, the forum’s top three trending posts all shared a similar title:
“Why Were All Players in Zones 2200–2250 Able to Survive?”
“Snort! Snort!”
Bai Qiu suddenly felt something slam into him.
Looking down, he saw a porcupine that stood nearly chest-high.
Its back was covered in broken quills.
Judging from the fragments scattered across the ground, those quills had originally been nearly a meter long.
Even worse, each one was lined with vicious barbs.
Getting impaled by those would undoubtedly be a miserable experience.
The Armored Porcupine itself was currently sprawled on the ground, dizzy and disoriented.
Apparently, crashing into Bai Qiu had hurt it far more than it had hurt him.
Armored Porcupine
Level 25 Elite
Strength: C−
Magic: E
Endurance: D++
Agility: D++
Skills: Omitted
“How careless of you.”
Bai Qiu crouched down and gently patted the Armored Porcupine’s head.
“Take a deep breath. Feeling dizzy is perfectly normal.”
The next moment— CRACK!
His fist slammed down onto its skull.
The ground shattered.
The creature’s head exploded into pieces.
The entire monster instantly dissolved into white light and disappeared.
“Ah!”
A female player dressed in mage robes cried out in shock.
The group beside her quietly took several steps backward.
Bai Qiu awkwardly rubbed the hood of his Concealment Cloak.
Someone had witnessed his spontaneous performance art.
Embarrassed, he quickly concealed himself again, found a secluded corner, and resumed browsing the forum.
The geomantic treasure lands could wait.
Right now, he was more interested in information about the other Safe Zones.
The forum was filled with every kind of discussion imaginable.
The most popular topic concerning Zones 2200–2250 remained the question of why every player had survived.
The consensus seemed to be: Because of a single person.
Bai Qiu’s eyelid twitched.
He had a bad feeling he already knew where this was heading.
Sure enough, the players from all fifty-one regions had long since sold him out.
On one hand, they enthusiastically praised his achievements.
On the other hand, they were making money by selling videos and photos of him.
Some of the promotional titles made him sound like a professional male model.
The descriptions were so exaggerated that countless young women apparently found them irresistible.
Reading them made Bai Qiu grind his teeth in frustration.
“Seriously…” He clenched his jaw.
“Can nobody sue people for violating image rights and defamation anymore?”
The thought made him even angrier.
He hadn’t earned a single coin from the online fan-culture craze surrounding him.
Meanwhile, those opportunistic little profiteers were making a fortune off his face.
Then, someone also brought up the matter of Bai Qiu being backstabbed.
This incident had always been kept secret by Bai Qiu himself, as it was not a particularly honorable experience for him.
However, after the military used thunderous measures to eliminate Fei Wu’s remaining faction, they exposed the incident publicly.
This immediately triggered widespread outrage among players, and Zone 2203 quickly gained a notorious reputation.
Fortunately, after it was clarified that everyone involved in the backstab had already been executed, and that Zone 2203 was now under military control, public anger on the forums subsided slightly.
As a result, many regions still suffering from monster invasions began @mentioning Bai Qiu, asking him to transfer to their zones once inter-zone access opened, promising to treat him like a god.
This blatant poaching attempt sparked dissatisfaction among players in other regions, and heated arguments broke out in the forums.
In the end, however, one comment from another region completely shut them down:
“What have you given him in return for working so hard to repel the monster tide? A backstab?”
That single line left the opposing side utterly speechless.
Eventually, players who had been hoping to make some quick money from posting news were forced to rapidly delete their threads, fearing that if the discussion continued, the military might actually come knocking.
At the same time, other players came to truly understand Bai Qiu’s importance.
They genuinely feared he might be poached by other regions.
After all, as long as Bai Qiu was there, it felt like even if the sky fell, he would hold it up.
Seeing all this, Bai Qiu was filled with mixed emotions.
Only now did he realize that other regions were still living in extreme hardship.
When a region’s monster tide breakthrough wasn’t fully sealed, the invasion channel remained open, allowing monsters to continuously pour in.
Under this butterfly effect, even regions that had successfully repelled the initial tide were still forced to endure constant monster harassment every day.
Some players were even trapped inside safe zones and unable to take a single step outside.
Meanwhile, the Hydra Serpent that had broken through the region had disappeared after devouring a large number of humans and Supporters.
The forum was full of speculation, but Bai Qiu agreed with one particular theory:
It had likely gone into hiding to evolve.
He had personally killed the Hydra Three-Headed Serpent on the 70th floor of the Tower of Heaven, so he knew exactly how dangerous that creature was.
Without the tower’s system-based healing mechanics, he might have been poisoned to death and forcibly ejected from the tower.
If a monster of that level truly appeared in the real world, the only players capable of defeating it would be those no weaker than Bai Qiu himself.
And if no such player existed in a given region, that area would essentially be on a path of slow death.
No wonder the system was introducing the Shattered Celestial Realm to accelerate player growth.
It wasn’t actually designed for competitive farming by Zones 2200–2250.
It was meant to help players trapped in besieged safe zones rapidly grow stronger, so that when monsters like the Hydra Three-Headed Serpent eventually appeared again, they would at least have some chance of resisting them.
After understanding the situation in other regions, Bai Qiu began browsing more popular threads to see if he could find any useful information.
Soon, his sharp eyes caught a rapidly rising post:
“Mysterious Cloaked Figure Murmurs Softly to Armored Porcupine Before Brutally Killing It — Suspected Yandere Behavior!”
“…No way it’s that coincidence, right?”
Bai Qiu clung to a final shred of hope as he clicked into the post.
— The end of the Chapter–
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