Chapter 192: The Great Swordsman (9/10, Autumn Subscription)

It was daytime, and they were outside the village.

Twenty people stood in formation, facing a strange creature with black blood oozing from its eyes, staggering toward them.

The creature had a fresh knife wound on its chest—not severe, but clearly injured.

From this position, one could see the village's wall; behind them lay rice fields.

They were all members of the Guard Team, responsible for patrolling the rice fields during the day, and they had encountered the strange creature.

When the creature in the video roared and charged forward, the original voice immediately shouted: "Power Control Group, attack!"

Ten men with long spears stepped forward and thrust their spears as the creature arrived.

5!

1!

3!

7!

Various touching damage numbers immediately appeared.

But they did not lose heart; they kept attacking repeatedly, and when the creature struck back, they didn't even dodge—they continued attacking with blank expressions, as if willing to trade their lives for its death.

But it didn't work.

"Deflection Group, attack!"

Ten shadowy figures with shields dashed out, each matching a spear-wielder; whenever the creature attacked, they immediately blocked and deflected its force.

After deflection, the creature's damage was no longer terrifying.

The group formed a circle, surrounding and trapping the creature.

Although the damage was touching, the Deflection Group blocked every attack, and the creature couldn't kill anyone for a long time.

The woman shouting orders had also joined the battle.

She was a woman wielding daggers, moving like a ghost around the creature, but her damage was even lower than the spear-wielders'.

Yet occasionally, she unleashed a Martial Technique—her dagger would glow, and her damage would suddenly spike into double digits.

They slowly wore down its health, second by second, until the team suffered its first casualty.

One Deflection member died; the others faced even greater pressure.

The creature seemed to sense hope and increased its assault—another Deflection Group member died.

They had taken pills; otherwise, they couldn't have held out this long.

The Power Control Group also began suffering casualties, but fortunately, the creature seemed nearly spent, growing increasingly frenzied.

"No retreat! Give it everything! Kill it!!"

The woman roared, striking with both daggers, frantically scraping away health—luckily, her attack frequency was high, and the scraping looked impressive.

At the cost of seven Deflection members dead and five Power Control members dead, the woman severed the creature's head.

This was the first time on the forum, besides Fang Yue, that anyone had seen someone kill a strange creature without relying on NPC power.

Though it relied on group effort, they had truly forged a path.

But it was a bit wasteful…

"Meigui Nüwang!"

"Meigui Nüwang!"

"Meigui Nüwang!!"

The survivors, seeing the system notification and receiving attribute rewards, shouted excitedly.

Finally, the video faded, and several large characters appeared.

"Baiyou Guild, Meigui Nüwang, waiting for you to fight!"

This was a recruitment ad—it looked like too many had died.

But this video did provide a method for ordinary players to kill strange creatures.

The Deflection Group protected the Power Control Group; the two worked in tandem—one dealt damage, the other defended.

All it needed was a healer—it would've been the classic warrior-priest method. Damn, no healing.

In this game, no one's ever heard of combat healing; recovery relies entirely on HP restoration, pills, and poison pills.

Even An Shenyi only heals after battle—he doesn't restore HP mid-fight, otherwise he wouldn't be frantically swallowing pills.

Fang Yue didn't believe he was the only one who received a powerful lucky package and rose to prominence overnight.

There must be others who had similar experiences and grown stronger.

They were just quiet enough, preferring to play the fool and ambush the unsuspecting.

Too bad this game had no power ranking system—if it did, I'd see a dozen anonymous players vying for rank with me.

Below this post, many people marveled at the strange creature's strength; Baiyou Guild also published the attributes of these people below, stating that anyone meeting the attribute threshold could fight strange creatures like them—casualties aside, at least they could fight.

Fang Yue checked—they were mostly around 10 points. Meigui Nüwang had higher attributes, but her dagger weapon dealt less damage; fortunately, her Martial Technique compensated.

The game had been open for nearly a week; following the conventional path—Guard Team route—regular training plus basic Martial Arts should allow a normal player to reach Official Member rank with six or seven points.

Martial Technique training grants minimal attribute gains, but once a small realm of Martial Technique is advanced, attributes jump significantly—so the increase is still substantial.

With extra diligence and intense day-and-night cultivation, reaching ten points is certainly possible.

Fang Yue hadn't heard of Baiyou Guild, but it must be a powerful guild—otherwise, how could twenty guild members be assigned to the same village? This wasn't a cross-village deployment; it meant the guild had enormous numbers, and even when scattered, luck had aligned perfectly to place twenty in one village.

But Fang Yue thought the more likely scenario was… Meigui Nüwang had directly recruited people in the village, then subjected them to intense training to raise their attributes.

Don't think it impossible—money can make ghosts turn millstones.

If Fang Yue hadn't had Bai Xiaoya's ten million, and the events that had occurred in reality…

He'd still be a gold-farming professional player—if someone paid him, he'd do the job well.

By the same logic, if other players were paid enough, why wouldn't they obey? Why wouldn't they join a guild?

Calming his thoughts, Fang Yue continued browsing the forum.

Then he discovered that, as some had said, many villages had indeed been wiped out by the eerie.

Some people had entered the game directly into fleeing for their lives, and when their lifespan ended, they died outright.

This was undoubtedly a hellish starting scenario; the man had gone berserk in the post cursing the game developers' families, and was then banned.

Those villages, when attacked by the eerie, had no way to handle it and could only flee.

Yet those who spoke up online were all people whose villages had been wiped out; those whose villages remained intact were still playing the game normally and never popped up to say, "My village is fine, not plagued with your village's problems."

Sometimes, those who stayed silent were the true norm of ordinary people.

Among many posts, one post once again caught Fang Yue's attention.

It was a video post, and the video content was brief: a place blanketed in snow.

A man wielding a great sword clashed blade-to-blade with an eerie wielding a black-blooded blade, and in the end, the eerie stabbed him through the chest, while he severed the eerie's head.

At the end of the video, the man with the great sword slowly knelt, collapsed onto the ground, seemingly mortally wounded, his blood staining the snow-covered earth.

The video was extremely shaky, making one dizzy, and the battle was very brief, but the uploader said the man with the great sword on his back was a player named Dajian Chuixiongxiong.

"This guy… his stats must've been around 20 points, but his Martial Technique was poor, with low bonuses."

(End of Chapter)