Chapter 157#
The Hunt 08#
After leaving the inn, Yu Feichen hailed a carriage.
Mofei was thoroughly displeased: “It’s so close — what, did you forget you have legs?”
Did Mofei really think the chief god of their paradise enjoyed walking? Yu Feichen found himself questioning Mofei’s intelligence.
As the carriage passed through the streets, a gust of wind lifted the curtain, and Yu Feichen suddenly caught sight of words daubed in blood-red letters on the wall outside — none of this had been there last night.
The carriage rolled forward. On the wall closest to him, the words read:
“To the first person who obtained an advanced item: I suggest you be a decent human being.”
Rounding a corner, another message had been written on the black exterior wall of the café on the street corner.
“To the first person who obtained an advanced item — if you don’t have the habit of checking the blackboard, I hope you’re seeing this now. Would you please just go collect your item already?”
On another wall nearby: “No idea where you are, but it seems like you might already be dead.”
Yu Feichen: “What are they talking about?”
Bai Song: “Yu-ge, didn’t you check the blackboard last night?”
Yu Feichen: “No.”
Mofei, who had been listening from the side, seemed to let out a breath of relief — then immediately looked suspicious. “So what were you doing?”
Yu Feichen said flatly, “Don’t you people sleep?”
It wasn’t that they didn’t want to sleep — it was that the blackboard last night had been far too eventful.
Not only had there been Vincent’s breakdown incident, but a great many people had been furiously ranting and accusing a single individual.
That individual being — the first person to collect an advanced item.
“Here’s what happened, Yu-ge.” Bai Song began recounting the whole affair.
Killing a prey yielded an advanced item. So last night, those who had killed their prey came eagerly to the grey mist, ready to inspect their rewards.
The system, however, offered only a warm little notice:
“Advanced items are distributed in order. Please wait.”
Someone mentioned this on the black slate, and several others immediately chimed in — same thing happened to us.
One person experiencing this was one thing. Several people experiencing it was still manageable — but as everyone chatted on the blackboard, they gradually realized that in this vast Mist City, not a single person had actually received their advanced item.
The system said advanced items were distributed in order — meaning that if the very first person hadn’t collected theirs, the second person couldn’t receive theirs, and everyone after that was blocked as well.
Windsor’s mouth twitched. “In the end, they reached the conclusion that the first person to kill a prey and earn the reward still hadn’t gone to collect their item.”
There were only two possible explanations for why this person hadn’t collected.
One: they didn’t know they had an advanced item and hadn’t seen the blackboard chat.
Two: they were perfectly willing to go without it themselves, just to be a thorn in everyone else’s side — deliberately preventing anyone from receiving an advanced item.
If it was the second, there was nothing anyone could do. If it was the first, there was still hope.
If they’d been holed up in some obscure corner all night without seeing the blackboard, surely they’d step outside for a walk during the day?
— And so, between hunts, the others had written their warm reminders to this mystery person on the most conspicuous walls of every street: “I suggest you be a decent human being.”
Bai Song suddenly said, “Yu-ge, do you also have an unopened advanced item?”
But Yu Feichen had already quietly lowered the carriage curtain, cutting off every line of sight from inside the carriage to the words on the walls outside.
“Perhaps,” Yu Feichen said, “that person is me.”
Mofei wore an expression that said he was entirely unsurprised.
Bai Song: “……”
Even An Fei, who had been resting with his eyes closed, opened them to give Yu Feichen a mild glance.
An Fei: “You did this on purpose?”
“No,” Yu Feichen said.
Back in the department store, even with that hat muddying the waters, he had recognized this person the moment he first laid eyes on An Fei.
An Fei had clearly recognized him too, yet had acted as though nothing had happened and walked right past him.
After that, Yu Feichen’s attention had never once shifted from An Fei — which was how it came to pass that he killed that young man, earning the reward.
But after obtaining the item, he’d needed to deal with An Fei’s condition, and the whole thing had slipped entirely from his mind.
He looked at An Fei, his meaning pointed: “I didn’t have the time.”
— An Fei, for his part, showed no sign of considering himself the root cause of all this, and went back to resting with his eyes closed.
Yu Feichen entered the grey mist.
An unopened gift box had appeared in his item inventory, wreathed in faint wisps of fog.
Yu Feichen undid the satin ribbon on the gift box. The system chimed.
“Greetings, first recipient of the Bequest.”
“Please select your gift.”
Before Yu Feichen, several clusters of grey mist unfurled, each one arraying a dozen or so distinct power structures within.
He had studied the principles of power composition in the divine palace, and scanning them now, he had a rough understanding of what each structure did.
These were less items in the traditional sense and more a collection of special abilities — abilities that no longer relied on objects as a medium, but were instead bestowed directly upon the guest themselves.
Mist City had also appended written annotations beside each structure. They were divided into six categories: Healing, Perception, Guardian, Attack, Body, and Spirit — the last two set noticeably apart from the first four, as though they belonged to an entirely different system.
The abilities within each category were similar yet distinct. Under Healing, for instance, all the abilities concerned restoration, but spanned different domains — broadly divisible into physical healing, mental healing, and soul healing.
After looking through all of them, Yu Feichen returned to the Attack category.
If he was free to choose, of course he was going to pick attack.