Chapter 2: The Strange Little Town
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Following the direction indicated, after walking about 1 hour, a desolate little town appeared in the distance before Su Ling's eyes. He swallowed hard, gritted his teeth and picked up the pace, walking for roughly another 10 minutes before finally arriving at the town's entrance.
How to put it, the town gave Su Ling the feeling of those small towns you'd see in Western cowboy movies. It was clearly the middle of the day, yet not a single soul could be seen on the streets. Every household had its doors shut tight, and the shops showed absolutely no signs of being open.
Had this town been abandoned?
Filled with doubt, Su Ling was about to head in for a closer look, but the very moment he lifted his foot, a chilling gust swept past the back of his neck from behind. He shuddered, and almost on instinct pulled back the foot he had been about to step forward with.
What just happened? That unease, like something had grabbed his heart and squeezed, was even stronger than the feeling of having a sniper rifle trained on him. As if the moment he took that one step, he would be reduced to nothing but scattered bones.
Instinctively, Su Ling glanced at the difficulty rating of the main quest again. His gut was telling him that the capped difficulty might not be pointing to a clue about the White Saintess, but rather to the eerie town standing right in front of him.
3 days on the clock, a town that might be hiding clues, and an unsettling sense of dread. Su Ling narrowed his eyes. He was certain the World Tree wouldn't throw him into a guaranteed death scenario, which meant there had to be some way to slip past whatever danger the town was hiding.
Did he need some kind of token? That seemed unlikely. If he really needed a specific token to safely enter the town, then he, with absolutely no leads to go on, would essentially be walking into a death trap, and that didn't line up with the World Tree's logic.
The system hadn't given him any extra information, and the minimum difficulty for the first stage quest was only Lv3. That most likely meant he didn't need any additional intel to complete this task. So what kind of mechanism could be solved without any clues at all?
Su Ling looked up at the sky. The setting sun had already painted it red. Maybe the very time he had been dropped into this world was itself a subtle hint. After all, a mechanism tied to the passage of time wouldn't need any extra clues.
You'd just have to wait, and eventually the mechanism would lift on its own.
Su Ling stood quietly outside the town and waited. He waited until the sun sank below the horizon, the moon climbed up into the treetops, and darkness blanketed the land.
The town in front of him changed.
Shop signs lit up, doors that had been shut tight swung open, and all kinds of people emerged from their homes and filled the streets. The liveliness and energy of it all, it was as if, for these people, the night was their daytime.
Su Ling thought about it for a moment, then lifted his foot and prepared to walk into the town again. This time he didn't feel any unease at all. That feeling of being one second away from death was completely gone.
He walked into the town and naturally drew some attention from the locals, though no one moved to stop him and no one came up to question him. He seemed like just another outsider, nothing particularly worth making a fuss over.
The locals were watching him, and he was just as busy watching them back. Their clothes were something like the cotton-and-linen garments people wore in ancient times, while he, in his modern clothes, stuck out like a sore thumb by comparison. He also noticed that every single resident of the town seemed to be carrying some kind of weapon.
Some had swords, some had daggers, and there was even one person with a whip coiled at their waist. Different types, but they all had one thing in common, every single one was a melee weapon. Still, he didn't sense any hostility from them. Those weapons probably weren't meant for him, the outsider.
After wandering around for a bit, Su Ling ended up at the entrance of the town's only tavern. If you wanted information, a place like a tavern was not something you could afford to skip, but his biggest problem right now was that he had no money.
Or more accurately, he had no money that worked in this world. He had been dumped into this place with essentially nothing to his name, so the only things on him that could serve as a substitute for currency were...
Su Ling patted himself down. His phone was obviously out of the question. Cash would probably be worthless paper in this world. The only thing that might work as a universal currency seemed to be the gold bracelet his mom had bought him for his birthday last year.
Thinking about his mom, who was off traveling to every corner of the world with his dad, Su Ling rubbed his chin and mulled it over for a bit. As they say, lose money and you can earn it back, pawn a bracelet and you can buy another one later, but lose your life and it's really gone for good.
He shoved everything else back into his pockets, took the gold bracelet in hand, and walked into the tavern. Perhaps because it had only just opened, the tavern was still fairly quiet. A few tables already had people drinking, but the atmosphere was calm, and even the conversations stayed within each table rather than filling the whole room.
Su Ling walked straight to the bar counter, pulled out a stool and sat down, then set the gold bracelet on the surface in front of him.
The owner, who had been washing glasses, glanced over. He didn't reach for the bracelet right away. Instead he unhurriedly set down the glass and asked in a flat tone, "What are you drinking?"
"Just give me whatever the house special is." Su Ling rested his cheek against one hand and answered with an air of casual indifference, then followed up with, "And there's something I'd like to ask about."
The owner gave a nod, reached out and picked up the gold bracelet to examine it. Satisfied it was genuine, he casually tossed it into the cash register beside him, then grabbed a clean glass and dropped a large ice cube into it. "What do you want to know?"
"The White Saintess, have you heard of her?" Su Ling didn't beat around the bush. His gaze stayed fixed on the owner's eyes. He might not have studied psychology in depth, but picking up on whether someone was lying was something he could still manage.
Of course, if this bartender happened to have acting skills on par with a seasoned professional, then Su Ling had nothing to say about it, he'd just have to accept the loss. After all, he didn't have many leads to work with, and not asking would mean searching for a lifetime with nothing to go on.
The moment Su Ling's question landed, the owner's hand paused for just a beat. He picked up the bottle beside him and poured it into the glass. "Saintess, can't say I have. But behind the town there's a church, and there's a young girl living in it who's quite fond of wearing white dresses."
He set the glass down in front of Su Ling and added, "Though she's got a bit of an odd temperament. Plenty of people have gone to find her before, but none of them ever ended up seeing her. If you're going to look for her, you'd better mentally prepare yourself."
Su Ling gave a nod, picked up the glass and downed the drink in one go, setting it back down with nothing left inside but ice cubes. "Thanks."
The owner shook his head. "Just a transaction."
With that word of thanks said, Su Ling turned and headed for the exit. The owner watched his retreating figure, and from those slightly parted lips came a sigh, barely audible.
After leaving the tavern, Su Ling moved quickly in the direction of the church. About 30 minutes later, he arrived at the entrance of the church the bartender had mentioned. A worn wooden door hung crookedly half-open in the air, letting out a creaking sound that made his skin crawl.
Vines had crept up the outer walls, a thick layer of dust had stripped the stained glass windows of their former beauty, and cobwebs hung freely in every corner the eye could reach. This place looked like it had been abandoned for many years. Could anyone really be living here?
Su Ling was skeptical, but this was the only lead he had, so he had no choice but to steel himself and investigate. If there was nothing here, or if it turned out to be some kind of trap, then he'd just have to accept whatever came.
He gently pushed open the teetering wooden door, and to his surprise, the inside of the church was not pitch dark. A soft light illuminated the interior, not exactly blazing bright, but more than enough to see by.
Su Ling steadied himself, took a deep breath, and walked inside. The front hall appeared to have originally been a place where worshippers came to pray. The worn wooden pews were still arranged in neat rows, though they too were blanketed in a thick layer of dust, testament to the fact that no one had been here in a very long time.
His gaze shifted from the pews to the area directly ahead. A statue of a goddess, immaculate and pristine, stood upon a pedestal. She was the source of light illuminating the front hall, and cradled in her arms was an ancient, rust-covered longsword that she held firmly against herself.
Her eyes were closed, a gentle smile resting on her face, she looked exactly as if she were sleeping.
"Draw the sword."
"Pull the sword out."
"That sword belongs to you, it is your sword."
"She has waited for you, far too long. She is waiting for you to awaken her."
An increasingly vivid murmuring echoed in Su Ling's ears. It was a language he had never heard before, the sounds as jumbled as random syllables strung together, and yet he could understand it. He could grasp exactly what that voice was trying to say.
He began walking toward the goddess statue, one step at a time, like a puppet being worked on strings. His mind went blank, leaving nothing but that murmuring voice echoing on and on.
Closer and closer. Su Ling had almost reached the base of the goddess statue. He extended his right hand, reaching to grab the hilt of the sword, and right at that moment, a sharp and urgent voice rang out from his right. "Stop!!"
The sudden sound shattered the murmuring. Su Ling's vision gradually cleared, and his consciousness slowly came back to him. The whispering in his ears grew fainter and fainter, until it vanished entirely.
Coming back to his senses, he broke out in a cold sweat. The state of being controlled like that shook him badly. One more inch, just one more inch, and he would have been made to draw the sword. That state was anything but normal.
After a short moment to recover, Su Ling turned his head toward the source of the voice that had snapped him out of it. Standing there was a young girl dressed in a white dress. Her snow-white long hair was tied up in a clean, sharp high ponytail. Her violet eyes carried an air of nobility and mystery, and her flawless face held exquisite features, she looked like a work of art painstakingly crafted by the gods themselves, leaving Su Ling with one single impression: beautiful.
But her beauty held no fragility. Encasing her long, slender legs were knight's boots forged from steel, rising up past her knees to her thighs like a pair of thigh-highs, meeting the hem of her skirt at the very top of her thighs to form that tantalizing absolute territory.
Her left hand was also wrapped in a gauntlet. Her right had no adornment at all, perhaps because that hand needed to grip a sword and had to remain completely free and flexible. The longsword hanging at her waist left no doubt that this guess was correct.
Su Ling was studying the girl, and the girl was just as busy sizing up Su Ling. Seeing that he hadn't touched the rusted sword, she let out a genuine sigh of relief from the bottom of her heart, then smiled and walked toward him.
"That sword is a little unusual. If you touch it while under its influence, you'll be turned into its sword slave." The girl came to stand in front of Su Ling, glanced at the sword cradled in the goddess statue's arms, and explained with a smile.
Su Ling's expression twitched hard. "That dangerous, huh?"
Faced with that question, the girl shook her head, the smile on her face taking on a touch of helplessness. "Not exactly. After all, this is just the unconscious pulse it gives off. Under normal circumstances it shouldn't affect people."
Su Ling wasn't entirely convinced, given that he'd very much just been affected, and pressed with a skeptical look, "Really?"
"Really." The girl looked at Su Ling again, studied him carefully a second time, and her helplessness deepened. "You were only affected because you're too weak. It shouldn't be like this, you look like a perfectly normal adult, so why do I get the sense you're so much weaker than a regular person?"
It was like a sharp blade stabbing straight into his heart. Su Ling's expression froze almost instantly. Being told point-blank by a beautiful girl that he was weak, that was a blow to his dignity with nowhere to hide, even if what she said was nothing but the truth.
He took a deep breath to settle himself, shook his head to throw out the cluttered thoughts, and shifted his gaze from the girl back to the sword. The murmuring had gone silent, but that urge to draw the sword hadn't completely left his heart.
【Main Quest (Stage 1) Complete.】
【Main Quest (Final Stage) Lv10~Lv59: Eradicate the Source of Corruption.】
【Time Limit: 7 days.】
【Quest Reward: Official Contractor status.】
【Failure Penalty: Loss of Contractor status.】