Chapter 146#

Free Hunt 03#

His gaze left the chat interface. Yu Feichen hung his trench coat on the rack at the head of the bed.

The candle on the holder had burned halfway down, shadows swaying in its light. He stared at the coat pocket for a long moment, then reached in and withdrew a white chess piece.

A horse-head shape — a white knight.

He hadn’t had this on him before, and his own attribute wasn’t White Knight but Black Knight.

So this piece must have quietly appeared in his pocket after he killed Luo Lan.

Luo Lan’s world had indeed been close in power to his Fortress world, but in terms of structural integrity, Luo Lan’s was far more scattered and disordered.

Yu Feichen placed the white chess piece back where it came from, let his consciousness sink into the grey mist, and faced those three clusters of world-force.

First, he drew out the fundamental forces — time, space, and logic — and fed them into the Fortress, to make its structure more stable.

Then he turned to the concrete forces. First, pure metallic force was separated out from those two worlds and channeled steadily into the Fortress world.

The Fortress, receiving this infusion, seemed overjoyed; even the turning of its gears quickened.

Within the other two worlds, time ground to a halt, space collapsed, causality broke down, and every metal blade, every machine, every mineral deposit vanished without a trace.

Then, in a corner of Luo Lan’s world, Yu Feichen spotted a clump of vivid green rabbit-ear grass.

He generously gave this clump to the Fortress as well, transplanting it to the windowsill of his dormitory room.

The disappearance of these things caused some chaos in those two worlds, but triggered no true disaster — they were chaotic enough to begin with. The beings living inside couldn’t even be called living creatures; they were NPCs who could only repeat one or two lines.

In the middle of transplanting the rabbit-ear grass, Yu Feichen noticed a blacksmith NPC. The blacksmith sat on a stump-stool, mechanically striking the air with a wooden rod, expression focused. Each strike was accompanied by the words: “The iron ingots I forge are of the finest quality.”

The Fortress welcomed such a dedicated worker. And so the blacksmith materialized on one of the Fortress’s assembly lines, hammering away at nameless materials carried along the belt, still saying: “The iron ingots I forge are of the finest quality.”

Finally, the two worlds — Luo Lan’s and the Black Suit’s — were stripped down to two utterly disordered grey masses of indeterminate substance. Yu Feichen merged them into one and withdrew from the grey mist.

With an influx of external force, he now had raw materials. It was time to think about what the Fortress should produce.

Of course, more immediately pressing was surviving “Free Hunt.”

The next morning, when the sky was just beginning to pale at the edges, the black slate closed its service and reverted to a painting on the wall.

Through the morning mist, Yu Feichen made his way to the top of a moored cargo ship.

He had barely taken in the full view of the street below when he saw a figure collapse in a nearby alley, a pool of blood spreading swiftly outward.

Nearby, a vivid crimson silhouette vanished on the spot.

The system announcement broadcast: “Good night, Pending Input.”

The dead man hadn’t had time to enter the grey mist and give himself a name.

Yu Feichen kept his gaze on that block of streets.

Five minutes later, the red silhouette flickered past behind a rubbish bin at a street corner. A moment later it vanished like a ghost, and reappeared in the middle of another street.

After several such flickers, not long after the red shadow disappeared, a man came walking steadily down the street — a mist crown drifting from his shoulders, eyes calmly sweeping his surroundings.

He looked newly arrived in the City of Mist, but his measured pace and unhurried stride made it plain he was an old hand in the Eternal Night.

Someone like this, entering an instance for the first time, would make cold observation their very first priority — assessing the nature and objective of the instance.

Yet very few people would immediately realize, right from the start, that this was a player-kills-player instance.

When the man reached the very center of the street, the red shadow appeared like a ghost directly in front of him. A blade slid with a hiss through his clothing and buried itself in his abdomen, twisting with violent force inside the cavity.

The dull sound of a body hitting the ground followed, and blood once again spread across the pavement.

The red shadow disappeared.

Yu Feichen stepped out from among the headless mannequins lining the row of tailors’ shops along the street, dressed in his black trench coat, a rabbit perched on his shoulder. A wisp of grey mist floated just above the rabbit’s head, making it look as though the rabbit were the one lost in troubled thought.

But its owner wasn’t looking at it. He was watching the dust on the ground, and drifted in a seemingly casual direction.

He pressed the gun barrel against empty air. The next second, it fired with a bang.

The shot was muffled — it had clearly struck something solid.

The red shadow materialized abruptly beneath the gun. Its temple had been hit; blood foam surged from its mouth. A moment later, it toppled to the ground.

“Good night, Three of Hearts.”

A hunter who reaps lives is itself a kind of prey.

Not far away, on the second floor of a cake shop, a man who looked somewhat unhinged was muttering to himself.

“He figured out so quickly that it wasn’t teleportation but stealth?”

“No wait — he fired without any hesitation or cover. Does that red thing lose the ability to see while stealthed?”

“Damn, why didn’t I catch on sooner. I spent so long watching that prey and now it’s gone… hiss, he seemed to glance over here for a second. Should be fine, right?”

“I have to get downstairs immediately — take him out while he’s picking up loot and reorganizing his forces.”

Down on the street, Yu Feichen’s figure vanished in place.

Inside the cake shop, a man with roving eyes and a slightly unhinged air descended the staircase. Just as he was about to step out the door, a black-coated figure materialized behind him like a specter, back turned.

A sharp, cold-gleaming dagger plunged instantly into the man’s throat.

“Good night. I don’t like to talk.”

Announcements rang out without pause.

The clock-face in the sky: more ticks backward than forward, rewinding to the five o’clock position.

Two hours later, as the sky shifted from grey-pale to fully bright, the announcements gradually grew fewer.

The small hours before dawn and dusk — those two half-darkened windows of time — were the best moments for hunting. In between, the night was too concealing to locate prey, and the day too exposed to avoid being spotted yourself.

A small inn.

In the room, a small mountain of items had accumulated on the table. Scattered around it were black and white chess pieces — sixteen in total, seven white and nine black. Most were knights, with a smattering of one soldier and two bishops.

“Sir, your drink.” A hotel attendant knocked, entered, and set the tray down.

Yu Feichen waited until the attendant had left before picking up the glass. The spirits were mixed with ice; swallowing them left his throat cold and scalding at once, but his thoughts sharpened.

His fingers rested on the windowsill. He looked down with cold eyes at the street below, which wore a mask of normalcy.

He hadn’t targeted newcomers. Every kill had been a hunter operating near the docks — that kind carried more force.

Newcomers who had just entered the City of Mist had an extraordinarily high mortality rate. Almost as soon as they appeared at the docks, someone would fix their sights on them and finish them off in some back alley.

Yu Feichen was turning over a question.

Given the City of Mist’s mechanics, where newcomers were so easily exposed — was the purpose to funnel force to the hunters who’d arrived earlier?

Perhaps not.

Under this kind of mechanic, most of the newcomers who survived were those who instinctively went into evasion and concealment the moment they entered an instance.

As long as you managed to lie low until nightfall, you’d find the black slate and receive an education from the chat — and become a hunter yourself.

In an ordinary Eternal Night instance, the relationship between players hadn’t reached the point of hair-trigger hostility. What sort of person would make “hide immediately to avoid being watched” their very first action upon entering?

Aside from someone like himself — a worker perpetually obliged to look after an employer and therefore forced into extreme caution — it was probably those who habitually killed and took from others.

After all, only people who killed often would fear being killed.

After the trials outside the city — those stages involving killing players or killing NPCs — this first stage inside the City of Mist was still filtering for the same thing: desperate, ruthless survivors who would stop at nothing.

During the day, the City of Mist was populated almost entirely by NPCs, which made it look like a real city.

Bustling. Peaceful.

Yu Feichen finished his spirits. The glass held only the not-yet-melted ice.

The cold, violent emotion rose again, beyond his control. Something in his subconscious told him to go downstairs. Walk out.

The whole city is your prey.

Even in daylight, it doesn’t matter.

Even if someone fixes their sights on you, it doesn’t matter.

After all… no one can kill you.

Meeting the rabbit’s red-and-black eyes, Yu Feichen thought, slowly: where does that confidence come from?

——Perhaps it’s because of the employer’s record of zero deaths.

The chill from the ice drifted through the room in thin tendrils. Yu Feichen shifted his gaze away from the street below and returned to the grey mist to strip the worlds harvested from his hunt.

When his consciousness came back to reality, the black slate had grown lively.

[Four of Diamonds]: Which great benefactor killed Three of Hearts? Four of Diamonds is eternally grateful.

[Four of Diamonds]: Unable to thank you in person — I suppose I’ll have to perform an act of charity myself.

[Four of Diamonds]: Six newcomer spawn points: the Duke’s Manor garden, the underground casino on Street 6, the canal docks, Casari Circus, the museum on Street 17, and the department store on Central Street~ I don’t know where the other two are — hopefully a kind soul will tell me. We’re all in the mist together, let’s look out for each other~

[Acri]: This good samaritan is here — the canal bridge, too~

[Doll]: …Are you two taking revenge on society?

[Red Doll]: Four of Diamonds, Three of Hearts — are those a couple’s names? Lover gets killed, you fly into a humiliated rage — truly a tragic romance.

[Four of Diamonds]: Don’t put my name next to that weakling’s. When I heard the good-night announcement for him, I laughed so hard I couldn’t bring myself to kill anyone all morning.

[Little Frog]: Doll, Red Doll — and what’s your relationship to last night’s Cloth Doll who got good-nighted?

[Acri]: A gentle reminder: don’t expose too much about your social connections, or it becomes very easy to guess your identity~

[Red Doll]: Oh? Has Eternal Night produced another paranoid note-taker in the tradition of Eila after Clarros?

[Acri]: My, everyone seems quite well-acquainted with each other~ How warm and lively the City of Mist is. I’m sure all the old friends will arrive one by one~

[Glass Bottle]: Idiot.

[Marionette]: Why do you all look like you know each other? Didn’t we each enter alone?

[Four of Diamonds]: You’re still young, little one.

[Eternal Night Is Mine]: The City of Mist has been scattering keys across so many eons — of course the major-domain deities each have one by now.

[Red Doll]: They’ve been wary of each other for years. Knowing one another well is only natural.

[Here Comes the City of Mist]: So even the deities have all been swept up in one net?

“Swept up in one net” — a remarkably apt phrase. So apt that the entire channel fell silent for five seconds.

Into the awkward silence, someone — nobody could say who — typed a single “hahaha.”

Then the entire channel began copying it.

——After all, the names were all made up anyway. Only death got announced. “Hahaha” wouldn’t get you hunted.

In the end it was Vincent who appeared and cut through the laughter.

[Vincent]: Since we’ve already said this much, why not discuss the City of Mist’s intentions?

[Acri]: Why, to give everyone a chance to deepen their bonds, of course~

[Red Doll]: Good heavens, finally a sane person among all these lunatics.

[Glass Bottle]: You all knew about the changes to that place before you came, didn’t you.

[Red Doll]: Yes. For all these years, the Eternal Day was perfectly stable — but this time it suddenly expanded outward on a massive scale. What’s stranger still is that the moment Eternal Day expanded, the City of Mist opened.

[Doll]: When I heard about Eternal Day’s expansion, I was so alarmed I fortified my own world all over again. Then I heard about the City of Mist opening, and came over to see if there was a way to acquire more force. I didn’t expect to step aboard this ship and find I couldn’t get off. The City of Mist deliberately opened during the chaos to harvest us, didn’t it?

[Red Doll]: When you put it that way — don’t you think you and the City of Mist are somewhat alike?

[Doll]: …So you’re saying the City of Mist was also frightened by Eternal Day’s expansion and wants to acquire our force to protect itself?

[Glass Bottle]: If that’s the case, our odds are grim.

[Doll]: But if your hypothesis is right, this key from the City of Mist has been lying in wait for an awfully long time. And yet, so far the City of Mist has shown no sign of intending to take our force directly — our force has only been circulating among ourselves through Free Hunt.

[Vincent]: There’s something I must remind everyone: if the next phase only unlocks once the second hand has advanced three thousand six hundred ticks, then the more people we kill, the more force the City of Mist ultimately consolidates.

[Red Doll]: …

[Acri]: Hehe, but what does that have to do with me~ The more old friends the better, of course~

[Four of Diamonds]: Best if it ends with only me left~

[Acri]: In that case, couldn’t I go head-to-head against Eternal Day directly~~~

The channel fell into another eerie silence.

The ordinary players lurking quietly all had the same strange thought rise to the surface.

Is the reason I never became a powerful deity because I don’t have enough tildes?