Chapter 1 The Beginning

After the system voice prompt, Feng Bujue checked the game menu and found that the quest bar had finally been unlocked. This was the first time he had officially received a main quest. The previous training mode and single-player survival mode were basically completed in closed buildings, and the structure of the scenarios were very small. There wasn't much room for choice in terms of plot development, so the system didn't bother generating quests. But now, the team survival mode has a large map with a high degree of freedom, and the system must provide a main storyline to guide the ultimate direction of the game. Otherwise, players may not understand what to do in the general direction.

After expanding the quest bar, Feng Bujue saw a new window covering the front of the menu, displaying the quest content. The text description of this main quest was very simple: [Search the city, find the Demon Gate.]

"Feels like a magical setting," Feng Bujue said, glancing at the quest and closing the game menu.

"This city is so big, wouldn't finding a door be like searching for a needle in a haystack?" Wang Tanzhi said.

"The keyword the quest uses to prompt us isn't 'door,' but 'demon'," Feng Bujue said, walking to a nearby vending machine and looking at the subway line diagram printed on it. "This city's subway has a total of twelve lines. Although they are indicated by different colors, but..." His finger moved along the intertwined lines on the map, eventually stopping at one place. "Among these dozen or so intersecting lines, there is such an area..." He opened his hands and pressed them on the map, covering the lines around the area, leaving only the middle part exposed. "Five intersecting straight lines form a very standard geometric figure, a pentagram."

"Big Brother, that's too far-fetched," Lonely Little Bro said. "Look more carefully, you might be able to find many other geometric figures in that tangled mess of lines."

"The second my finger stopped, it means I've already looked carefully," Feng Bujue replied. He turned around and explained, "Before we came up to this level, whether inside the subway or on the platform, we could only see the station names and diagrams for this line. The complete city subway map like this, wasn't on the lower level.

"Before the system prompt sounded, we neither encountered monsters nor wasted much time, and had hardly taken any substantial action. But the quest was triggered for a reason. If this quest had no trigger conditions, we should have received it while sitting on the subway. Why would the system specifically wait for us to come up one level before giving the prompt?

"Therefore... the only possibility I can think of is that there are certain things on this level that weren't on the lower level, and the information they provide can point us to the Demon Gate mentioned in the quest."

He said, turning sideways, tapping the subway line map printed on the vending machine with the palm of his left hand. "There are only twelve subway lines, while there are thousands of roads on the surface. If this subway line map is meaningless, then the city map is even more meaningless, unless we can find a tourist map marked with landmarks like 'Demon Gate'."

He took a deep breath. "In short, unless someone puts forward constructive opinions that contradict this deduction, or their opinions themselves don't have a solid basis to support them... please move with me to this area in the map. If I'm wrong, we'll reorganize our thinking and discuss it again. If I'm right, I'll get skill points, everyone clears the quest, and everyone's happy."

Feng Bujue finished speaking in one breath, leaving everyone dumbfounded. Wang Tanzhi seemed quite calm at this time, because he had seen many scenes like this since he was a child.

Feng Bujue's reasoning ability was a byproduct of his refined reading addiction. He was a very intelligent person. At the age of sixteen, his score on the Binet test at school was 138, with his left and right brains each accounting for 69 points, a balanced type of thinking. Compared to those "extraordinary" geniuses with 140 or more, he was still classified in the normal group, but his ability to observe, memorize, understand, and reason could be described as well-trained and far beyond ordinary people.

As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said through Sherlock Holmes, an excellent detective needs not only extensive knowledge and experience, but more importantly, correct reasoning skills. The Sherlock Holmes in the book is always tirelessly promoting his set of "deductive methods," and Feng Bujue is clearly a loyal supporter.

His reading addiction comes from another theory of Sherlock: treat knowledge as a reserve, manage the brain as a library, sweep out and forget unimportant things, put secondary things in the attic, and leave what is needed within easy reach.

This seems like an idealized memory habit and way of thinking, but through certain training, it can indeed be done. Feng Bujue is a typical example of self-taught success.

There are many things in this world that are easy to say but difficult to do, such as doing dozens of push-ups at home every day and unknowingly turning into a muscle man, memorizing a few words every day and easily passing CET-4 and CET-6, writing a few thousand words of manuscript every day and becoming a god-level author, etc... If there is a list of human self-deceptive thoughts, these few sentences are definitely at the top.

Generally speaking, when faced with this kind of self-disciplined training, the probability of giving up halfway is extremely high, but as the saying goes, freaks are often geniuses. Feng Bujue is one of the few who persevered, eventually turning reading and reasoning into habits and hobbies...

"Uh... Brother Feng is absolutely right. Following this line of thinking is better than us wandering around the city after we go out," Long Aomin said, the second half of his sentence directed at Lonely Little Bro.

"Ah... ah? Oh, good... okay." Lonely Little Bro had just come back to his senses. In fact, he didn't fully follow Feng Bujue's words and thoughts, but he had a feeling that "Although I don't quite understand, this guy seems very powerful."

The five people then set off. Long Aomin walked in the front, and Feng Bujue followed closely behind, telling him which exit to take back to the ground, and was responsible for pointing out the general direction after going up.

Passing through a wide safety passage, Feng Bujue actually found a seemingly Easter egg-like setting. Among the advertisements on the walls of the passage, there was actually a Thriller Paradise game advertisement mixed in.

After walking through the passage and turning right, everyone saw the exit diagonally above. There was an upward escalator on this slope, but it had stopped, and there were two rows of ordinary escalators for walking on both sides.

They climbed up the steps and came to the surface of the city. The moonlight was hazy, the city lights were sparse, and there were many cars parked on the street, but they were all turned off. The billboards on the roadside buildings, the businesses, and the lights in the residential buildings were all off, only the street lights were still working normally.

Although there were no vehicles moving, the air inhaled into the nose felt very turbid, and there seemed to be a layer of fog swirling around, making it difficult to see the distant scenery clearly.

When they were in the subway station, they had a roof over their heads and walls around them, and it was an underground environment, so everyone didn't feel anything. But after coming to the open ground, the indescribable weird atmosphere all around... that abnormal stillness, it was simply suffocating.

Four of the five people had fluctuations in their scare value, and their stability values ranged from 5% to 15%. Various physical signs in the face of fear had gradually appeared on them.

"Walk along this road, turn left after four blocks, and then go straight ahead," Feng Bujue's tone sounded very normal, completely unaffected, quickly recognizing several landmarks on the road and thinking of a route.

Long Aomin nodded, holding his shield, and continued to lead the way. The other four walked behind. Everyone didn't speak, being vigilant, listening, and trying to walk on the sidewalk close to the street lights.

From time to time, there would be sounds resembling the breathing of wild animals, whispering rustling sounds, and faint laughter from the darkness. Anyway, no matter which one, people could hear it, but they couldn't hear it clearly.

Long Aomin would look back every few dozen meters. The more he looked, the more he felt that something was wrong. "I say, Brother Feng... you should be in a high-risk profession in reality, right?" Long Aomin asked. He had leveled up to level ten, and he had never seen a player like Feng Bujue. Fear is difficult to hide, but Feng Bujue didn't show any fear in his eyes, which shows that he wasn't pretending to be brave, but was really not afraid... Combining his sharp reasoning just now, Long Aomin even suspected that Feng Bujue was a professional SWAT or something in reality.

"Artist," Feng Bujue replied lukewarmly, as if he was telling the truth.

Wang Tanzhi was too lazy to interrupt. As far as he knew, Feng Bujue generally claimed two professions: artist, great writer. No matter which point of view you look at his behavior, these two answers are very annoying...

Long Aomin never expected to hear this kind of answer, and didn't know how to continue the conversation for a while. Lonely Little Bro spoke up again from behind: "Who would 'call themselves' an artist?"

"Then I can change my wording," Feng Bujue continued. "I am an art worker with high aesthetic ability, skilled creative techniques, engaged in artistic creation labor, and have achieved certain achievements."

"Isn't that just explaining the three words again!"

"Compared to directly saying those three words, it seems a little more modest, doesn't it?"

"It's clearly more arrogant, okay!"

Jimo laughed aside, and Lonely pouted, saying to her: "If he doesn't play dumb, how can I roast him?"

At this moment, Feng Bujue suddenly stopped and quickly took out [Mario's Pipe Wrench] from his bag. "Hmm... just as the depressing atmosphere was easing up, troublesome things are coming."

Long Aomin saw two shadows flash by in the darkness almost at the same time as Feng Bujue, but he only saw a rough outline, and didn't know what those things were. Anyway, they were probably some kind of monsters.

"Looking at their size, they resemble deformed infants, with small sickles at the front of their arms, and they're quite fast. As for the number... there should be more than one," Feng Bujue narrated calmly, and approached the darkness with the pipe wrench in hand. He didn't know at this moment that after saying these words, his investigation specialization would be activated.