Chapter 10: The White Candle

Unnoticed, Xiao Yang had nearly cleared out the zombie prison, leaving only a few densely packed communal cells.

During this process, while grinding for experience, Xiao Yang couldn't help but ponder a question: if this place were truly a prison, where were the guards? It seemed impossible for a prison to contain only inmates. It didn't make sense; surely this area wasn't just a dedicated grinding zone cobbled together by the "God's Game" specifically for players to level up on a single type of monster. Yet, the prisoner zombies never seemed to respawn.

Xiao Yang wasn't a hardcore lore enthusiast, but he did pay attention to the narrative during gameplay. While clearing the prison sector, he had discovered several doors that wouldn't open. Behind one of them, he had spotted an iron shovel leaning against the wall, glowing with a faint blue light that made his mouth water. Unfortunately, he couldn't open the door, which didn't look particularly sturdy. These rooms likely required some special method to access.

This "God's Game" felt like a game, yet not quite. At the very least, regarding these locked doors, Xiao Yang had tried to force the locks with his axe, but after a few strikes, there was almost no change. The doors were wrapped in a special layer of protection; Xiao Yang hadn't yet met the conditions to open them. Perhaps his strength was insufficient, or perhaps it required lock-picking skills, or maybe he simply needed to find the key. It was maddening.

As he continued his exploration, Xiao Yang turned a corner and encountered a massive horde of zombies. In the latter section of the prison, the zombies that should have been confined to their cells had all broken free. They were densely packed in the corridor, letting out unintelligible roars from time to time and wandering aimlessly through the area.

There were quite a few prisoner zombies gathered here—dozens of them, at least. It was a thorny situation; currently, Xiao Yang had to be extremely cautious even when facing rooms with more than three zombies, let alone a crowd of this size. His leveling progress hit a stalemate, and on this same day, his food supplies officially ran dry.

Driven by necessity, Xiao Yang had to pause his "grinding" session. He was nearly level five, thanks to the prisoner zombies lying in the cells.

I have to complain—the experience gain in this God's Game is simply harsh. A single zombie only granted him twenty experience points, yet the requirement to level from four to five had skyrocketed to six hundred. This meant Xiao Yang would need to take down thirty zombies just to gain a single level. And that was assuming he chose to target the prisoner zombies, which were five levels above him. If he were to switch to those ordinary skeletons, he felt he would need to rack up a "thousand-skeleton kill count" just to level up once.

The situation was already difficult enough, but that wasn't even the limit of this God's Game. Each level up brought increasingly exaggerated experience decay; at level three, he could still earn thirty points per prisoner zombie, but now it was down to twenty. Still, upon reflection, it seemed logical. After all, this was "Reality Online." Without such extreme experience decay, every player in the God's Game would likely trend toward becoming a terrifying destroyer of worlds. After all, bullying the weak is always easier than challenging the strong. If Xiao Yang could gain experience by killing ants, he would probably become quite interested in pouring boiling water into ant hills.

He didn't even want to imagine what the world would become if the powerhouses cultivated by this God's Game were all obsessed with pouring boiling water into ant hills. In that case, the game might as well change its name to "Horror Demon World Destruction Game."

Seeking a new path, Xiao Yang did two things. First, he seized the opportunity to return through the hole smashed open by the bone sphere to the main entrance where he had first stepped onto the slope. As expected, the door was locked tight, not even providing a sliver of space to pry it open.

Second, he explored deeper into the hidden area along the path where the bone sphere had rolled. He wasn't entirely without success. Following the path, he found a series of alcoves resembling shrines and managed to explore a fair distance forward.

Yes, shrines. Inside these hollows in the walls sat strange statues, depicting a figure sitting cross-legged on a cushion, surrounded and clung to by countless arms, its face obscured. It was an unsettling image; whatever was being worshipped here was certainly nothing wholesome.

He sprinted past these shrines until he reached the last one in the corridor. There were no more shrines; the path had come to a dead end. Xiao Yang looked ahead to see a pitch-black fissure, an bottomless crack stretching across the road.

Another head-scratcher. It seemed he had to turn back. However, just as Xiao Yang prepared to leave, his peripheral vision caught a pile of ash in front of one of the shrines. Perhaps it was his imagination, but this pile of ash seemed smaller than those before the other shrines. In the silence, Xiao Yang suddenly made an unexpected move.

In front of the statue of the figure obscured by countless arms, under its watchful gaze, Xiao Yang began to sift through the ash. Sure enough, his "player intuition" hadn't failed him; he unearthed a candle from the pile.

[White Candle]
[Quality: Unknown]
[Description: This is a white candle, ordinary in every way, except that once lit, you can smell a very specific scent—the scent of meat.]

From this description alone, Xiao Yang knew there was something wrong with the candle. He tucked it away carefully. After that, things returned to the status quo. Soon after, a disheveled Xiao Yang was forced into a frantic dash by the pursuit of the bone sphere, once again diving headlong back into the zombie prison. He realized that, for now, he really had no choice but to grind it out with these prisoner zombies.

His bread was gone. Although he still had a bag of black bread and a bottle of ale in his inventory—and while he was, in principle, resistant to eating the black bread, not out of psychological barriers but because he felt it might have another purpose—he had no other options left. When it was time to eat, there was simply no choice.

And so, Xiao Yang returned to the latter section of the prison, appearing once more before the crowded zombie corridor. With things as they were, there was no better way forward. Time to grind some zombies!