MoP: Ch. 179

---Third POV---

"What?!"

Several voices cried out in shock at the same time, startling Lux into looking up.

At some point, several familiar faces had gathered around her, crowding the steps until they were packed full.

NineTails clicked her tongue. "I didn't expect Viktor to be that kind of person."

Child shook his head and sighed.

"A perfectly badass villain boss. How did he end up as a skeleton that falls apart every day?"

NeverShowOff was deep in thought.

"We've already got plenty of blame dumped on us. Could there be some misunderstanding here?"

Listening to the discussion around her, Lux's initial surprise turned to numb resignation.

"Where did you all come from?"

It was like a random spawn in a game. How did they all appear at once?

Child's gaze shifted guiltily. "You're not the only one who took the consolation task. I just happened to be nearby."

NineTails said, "You mentioned Domie was looking for me, so the moment I respawned, I rushed over."

NeverShowOff added, "She couldn't find the way to the church. I brought her along since I was passing by."

Domie's head turned back and forth among them.

"What are you talking about?" She couldn't understand a word.

"Nothing," Lux said through gritted teeth.

Everyone's explanations were reasonable enough. She could only accept it as coincidence and continued pressing for the explosive secret the feline beastman had revealed. Faced with everyone's eager gazes, Domie couldn't refuse. She slowly recounted the version she knew.

At the beginning of the Divine Era's end, the destructive power of monsters had not yet fully manifested. The world back then was far less fractured and closed off than it was now. It was the last era of prosperity for all races. And so, five hundred years ago, the races carried out their final cooperation.

They prepared to capture alive the black mage Viktor von Vinesse, who had not yet earned the title "Butcher of Flesh and Blood," the 251st heir of the von Vinesse family...

"Stop!"

NineTails couldn't help interrupting.

"Can we skip these redundant titles and get straight to the point?"

What she hated most were these long, stale titles that could fill several pages. Given how afraid the beastman was of Viktor, she had no doubt Domie was about to recite every single one.

Domie nodded good-naturedly.

"Unfortunately, the operation's outcome was far from satisfactory. One could even call it disastrous. The black mage led the First Generation Watchers, bypassed the encirclement set up by all races, and within ten days annihilated 75% of the main force of the Holy Tribunal Army. This was also one of the major reasons why the races later became increasingly closed off and stopped communicating with one another."

Back then, the Holy Tribunal Army had been a massive force, said to number over a million soldiers in total. Yet it collapsed so easily. Mutual suspicion between races, combined with countless minor frictions, gradually caused their ties to fade away.

"But at that moment, we stepped forward!"

Domie clenched her fists. There was displeasure on her face, but even more worry.

"Even during the prosperous Divine Era, the status of beastmen was still low. Before the battle, no one had faith in us as a race. They only allowed us to join to make the participant numbers look better. Beastmen of the cockroach, mosquito, and fly clans used a type of trap The Watchers had never anticipated, trapping three demigod-level Watcher members, including that one!"

At some point, more spectators had quietly joined nearby. Everyone listened with great interest to the dark history of their faction leader. Someone even urged her on.

"And then? How did The Watchers fall into the trap, and how did they escape?"

Domie lowered her head, as if unable to bear the memory. Her voice dropped much quieter.

"The trap only held The Watchers for one day. But the price was that all the beastmen races who took part in the plan completely disappeared. No survivors, and no new offspring were ever born."

Sharp intakes of breath rippled through the air.

"Brutal."

"That's ruthless. Literally not a single one left!"

"If you really can't find any new cockroach beastmen, then this story does sound pretty credible."

"Even though I hate cockroaches."

"Same here. I also hate mosquitoes."

"Ahem!" NineTails coughed heavily twice, her ears twitching uncomfortably. "That's kind of messed up, you know."

Even if the NPCs couldn't understand, talking so lightly about the tragic history of someone else's race was going too far.

Some players couldn't help asking, "So what kind of trap was it exactly? We're not really working for some irredeemably evil NPC, are we?"

"Yeah! This game doesn't look like a genocide simulator!"

Domie clutched the hem of her clothes.

"Well, my inherited memories don't record the details. But I've heard that the beastmen who died all worshipped the God of Fertility."

Everyone fell silent.

Insects. Fertility.

Did a bloody story suddenly take a disturbing turn?

"Wait a second!" Lux slapped her burning cheeks, trying to stay rational. "Viktor should've already turned undead back then, right?"

NeverShowOff nodded with difficulty.

"He said before that he became undead around the same time the Divine Era ended."

Child rubbed the goosebumps on his arms.

"That's even more disturbing. Doing that to a skeleton... uh, I'm just discussing the possibilities from a scientific standpoint."

A player in the crowd spoke up darkly:

"But weren't there two other people at the scene?"

Everyone fell silent.

The church that morning was eerily quiet. Seeing the atmosphere grow increasingly awkward, and with no new information to dig out, Lux could only send Domie back first.

A bunch of players squatted on the cold stone steps, contemplating life.

Lux let out a long breath.

"Trying to win over the beastmen is probably a lost cause."

NineTails nodded in agreement. "Genocide. Not even sparing children. I don't even want to imagine what Viktor looks like in their eyes."

She finally understood why Domie had looked at her so strangely earlier when she spoke up for The Watchers.

"But Viktor doesn't seem like the type to slaughter innocents indiscriminately," Child said. "Unless..."

"Unless there was something wrong with those insect races, something that had penetrated down to the genetic level," NeverShowOff picked up the thought.

Lux's interest was piqued. She straightened up.

"Go on!"

"I'm just proposing a possibility."

NeverShowOff put up a layer of mental armor for himself first, then took a deep breath.

"When we enter the game, we all go through a story sequence that lays out the main quest of saving the continent and introduces the key NPCs. Even though we're still in the wilderness survival phase, we all know that the continent of Aeltia will be destroyed by monsters, and Viktor knows this too."

Lux nodded repeatedly.

"Right, it's literally the first line in the forum's info dump."

NeverShowOff continued, "But Viktor's setting is that he's a player who arrived on the continent six hundred years early. He knew the cause of the world's destruction six hundred years in advance, before monsters even appeared, yet he still didn't stop the apocalypse or the birth of monsters. After that, he created The Watchers, but there's no record of him actively exterminating monsters either. Is it possible that the destruction of Aeltia wasn't caused by monster expansion alone?"

NineTails tried to argue, "That's still no reason to wipe them out completely. She said there'd be no newborns, not that the whole race would be exterminated on the spot. Sterilization is still better than extinction."

Child tilted his head back with his hands clasped behind it and shot her a sideways glance.

"Or do you want to experience what it feels like to be a cockroach beastman?"

Lux added, "Mosquito or caterpillar would work too!"

NineTails covered her fluffy, fiery red ears with both hands.

"Let's forget it then. Who knew insect races could count as beastmen too!"

Other people's special races were thriving.

Why was it that when it came to her, there were only drawbacks and not a single benefit?

NeverShowOff said, "I'm really just guessing. If we want to know what happened back then, we'd have to ask Viktor."

"Forget it, he definitely won't say," Child pouted. "Otherwise he wouldn't have brushed us off when we asked about the cause of the world's destruction."

Lux said, "Even if we know the truth now, it's still useless. We'll still be hauling bricks like always."

After all, they were just a bunch of newbies under level 30, nowhere near qualified to take part in saving the world.

Several pairs of eyes turned toward her in unison.

Lux hugged herself nervously. "Why are you all looking at me?"

Child murmured, "That really hits home."

One after another, they left their designated slacking spot. Talking about the main storyline was completely useless to them right now, but earning more contribution points wasn't.

---

Elsewhere....

Domie quietly returned to the room and set Rami's breakfast on the ground beside the bedding. The church had enough space, but not enough rooms.

So the beastmen used resilient grass cloth distributed by the players to prop up small makeshift rooms and slept directly on the floor. It was summer now, and with a mattress underneath, sleeping on the ground wasn't much different from sleeping on a bed. It was far better than the auction house's open area with no privacy at all, nothing but hard packed dirt.

Just as she finished putting down the bread, the blanket shifted.

A beastman with the same pair of heterochromatic eyes crawled out from under it.

"Did you go looking for those humans again?"

"Didn't I tell you not to stay under the blanket?" Domie scolded. "Your illness can't handle heat!"

Seeing her get angry, Rami quickly pulled a small round disc out from the blanket.

"No, earlier, a lord gave me a wind-blowing magic device. I was testing how to make it blow cold air."

"A magic device?"

Domie's expression immediately tightened.

She turned the disc over and over, inspecting it several times before finally relaxing.

"Good. It's just ordinary sheet metal. The only special parts are the few magic runes on it. It's probably just a practice piece from that lord."

Even if it hadn't been given to them, in a few days it would've turned into scrap metal anyway. It wasn't anything valuable.

Rami scratched his head and chuckled.

"If it were too valuable, I wouldn't have accepted it. By the way, you still haven't answered my question. You know their background is suspicious. There might even be ties to that organization. So why do you still take the initiative to get close to them?"

Domie traced the runes on the disc a couple of times, then stuffed the magic device back into Rami's hands.

Then she said seriously, "Don't be rude. They're our great benefactors. They saved us... And they gave us food and clothes!"

Rami interrupted. "I know, you've said that a lot already. But other beastmen benefited from them too. Why don't they do the same thing?"

Domie's gaze slowly drifted out of focus.

Of course she knew. Right now, just like the other beastmen, keeping their heads down and not declaring a stance was the wisest choice. They were beastmen, in a human nation, dealing with human organizations. Caution was essential.

"Maybe it's because they really do try to see things from our perspective."

Those humans from unknown organizations carried a very unique kind of presence. Clearly mages, yet they thought from the perspective of the weak. From the bottom of their hearts, they believed that mages and commoners possessed equal intelligence, and that beastmen and humans alike deserved respect.

Take the history of the cockroach beastmen, for example.

What she heard most often were mockeries, claims that beastmen really were half-civilized beasts, that their lack of intelligence and excessive greed was what ruined everything. Yet those people never mentioned such things. They earnestly asked about the details and never labeled it as a matter of "beastly nature."

Then there was the magic device in Rami's hands.

Though it was only a practice piece, the fact that someone remembered a beastman's illness and sent a bit of convenient help anyway was already something rare. It was precisely because of this temperament that Domie, among a whole group of newly arrived beastmen, was able to accurately single out NineTails and seek her help.

The result proved she hadn't chosen wrong.

---

It wasn't until noon on the second day after the siege ended that Viktor finally freed himself from the overwhelmingly detailed player contribution weight calculations.

"Combat, medical aid, signaling, hostage protection... finally done."

Looking at the hundreds of listed rules for contribution calculations in his hands, Viktor let out a heavy breath.

"Not being on site meant I could only slowly sift through player records using divine power. Seriously... When all this is over, the very first thing I'm upgrading is the reward settlement system."

With everything prepared, he took the new version of the decree along with several assistants and headed straight for Nary Town.

Creak.

He opened the door to the grain storage warehouse. What met his eyes were stacks of grain filling nearly the entire space, with cured meat hanging on the walls.

He stepped inside first, swept his gaze around, and couldn't help but sigh.

"It's clearly just a small border town, yet the food reserves are unexpectedly abundant."

He even found, in a corner, a sizable pile of decent quality grape wine. Looking at the fully stocked granary, Cobb, returning to his homeland as an assistant, felt extremely conflicted.

"There are two more granaries like this in town. This one should belong exclusively to the mayor."

Viktor picked up a jar of dried fruit to inspect it carefully, then looked up when he heard that.

"Oh? Is there also a granary that belongs to your Redstone Auction House?"

Outside, beneath the city walls, corpses of the starved lay everywhere. Yet inside the mayor's granary, there was enough food for the entire town to eat for more than a decade, enough to require a dedicated warehouse.

How ironic.

Cobb guiltily averted his gaze.

"More or less. One granary's worth of food is reserved exclusively for life in the underground city."

Hearing this, Viktor felt no surprise at all. He set down the dried fruit in his hand.

"Move the sugar and wine I set aside to the granary you mentioned, and then prepare several large cauldrons."

Cobb nodded to show he understood. Taking stock of the spoils was only natural. After all, leaving this food here wouldn't put it into the bellies of commoners anyway. It was better to bring it back and use it to improve the mages' meals.

But preparing large cauldrons was...

"May I ask how large the pots need to be? If you're planning a victory banquet, the underground city has enough tables and chairs."

"No, I'm going to distribute bread and soup."

Cobb froze for a moment before repeating, "Bread and soup?"

Was it really what he thought it meant?

Viktor nodded.

"Spread the news widely. Tell everyone that before the city gates close tonight, The Watchers will be distributing food at each of the main gates. Whether they're city residents or refugees outside the walls, anyone can come and receive it for free."