Chapter Ninety-Four: A One-Time Instance, Changing the Game World

“You’ve already gone to the trouble of talking so much, and we still haven’t taken a proper look at what we gained.”

At that moment, Night Feather very directly steered the conversation away, clearly unwilling to let Old Hu keep pressing him.

By now, Night Feather already had a rough understanding of the custom skill talent he had designed this time. The custom skill talent was currently divided into three stages for players to design.

Level 1 to 60, the first stage, defined as the early stage.

Level 61 to 80, the second stage, defined as the middle stage.

Level 81 to 100, the third stage, defined as the late stage.

The official version of God’s Ruin had not yet revealed what came afterward, but everyone could guess that something beyond this might require special conditions before it could be designed.

Night Feather and the others opened the loot interface, and in an instant, dazzling golden light burst forth from every member of the team, blindingly radiant.

Level 40!

The six members of Night Feather’s fixed party all reached Level 40. In God’s Ruin, leveling in the early and middle phases was not particularly difficult, but once the later phase began, the process would become simplified, even what might be called a kind of ease within difficulty. For from that point on, every single level-up required challenging one’s own mirror image. If one failed, the level could not rise, the current level would be reset to zero, and the benefits of that level would be halved.

That was why, on the old servers of God’s Ruin, only a handful of players stood at the high or top end of the level rankings. These players were not only formidable in strength, but could even be said to deserve the title of experts.

God’s Ruin had a particularly thrilling style of play. The game’s challenge was not something that became easier the longer players spent with it; rather, the more time one spent immersed in it, the more its difficulty revealed itself. It would not grow simpler because the player had grown accustomed to it.

Mu Hun’s death brought everyone a purple weapon, and each one matched the direction of their own class. Without doubt, it was a true windfall.

“Hm? What is this? A new quest?”

Night Feather looked at the special consumable that had appeared in his item list.

“‘Mu Hun - Guide’? What in the world is this?” he murmured, frowning slightly.

Then he shrugged and directly opened the special consumable, whose icon resembled a scroll.

A fresh breeze surged out from the scroll, but when that breeze brushed Night Feather’s face, it abruptly left him with a chill as though ice had scraped across his skin.

The item suddenly erupted with radiance, and a figure faintly emerged before his eyes. An old man in a gray cloth robe appeared there, his face gaunt to an extreme. Beneath the old man stood a crocodilian turtle, its body marked with golden patterns, clearly a creature that had already attained spiritual awareness.

Because the Ancient Heaven and Earth map had appeared, Night Feather now understood the ferocious beast before him, and basic information about the crocodilian turtle also surfaced.

On the old man’s right shoulder perched a desolate ancient eagle, likewise originating from Ancient Heaven and Earth.

At that moment, Night Feather looked at the old man’s gaunt face. On that pallid skin, a pair of eyes shimmered with a starlike brilliance, carrying an air of mockery. The corners of his mouth curved faintly into a sinister smile as he said in a low voice, “Heh... I’m very much looking forward to seeing whether you can keep such good luck to the very end, Lonely Night.”

When the old man’s words fell silent, his figure gradually dispersed. Yet the special consumable did not vanish with him, as though it were an endlessly usable bugged item.

The others saw it all, but none of them could make sense of it. Even Old Hu wore a baffled expression. Seeing this, Night Feather guessed that Old Hu had no idea what he had obtained either, so after scratching the back of his head, he temporarily stored the Mu Hun - Guide in his bag.

Just as the group was excitedly discussing equipment attributes and levels, everything concerning Mu Hun slowly faded away. The corrosive stench around Mu Hun’s heart gradually receded, and in its place came a verdant vitality. Just by closing one’s eyes, one could feel the breath of life growing thick and abundant to an extraordinary degree.

Rings of life-like ripples spread outward, then surged in all directions. The shattered, lifeless forest around them began to recover under wave after wave of that life-bearing aura. What had been utterly depleted of vitality reignited in an instant and returned to its fullest vigor.

Then, a system announcement appeared in the game world channel, followed immediately by an uproar across the world channel.

System Announcement: Congratulations to the players Lonely Night, Love, Big Brother One Rest, Smart Smart Smart Brother, Dark Night, Qu Xiao Zheng Dang A Dang, and From Warm Long Ago for successfully restoring the Ancient Ruins Stone Forest, which had been polluted into a dead land, to its original state. The area of the Ancient Ruins Stone Forest has now been changed. It will become an independent region within the map, a zone that can be occupied by guild forces. Since the players’ guild belongs to the Purple Void Illusory Realm, the Ancient Ruins Stone Forest will now belong to the Purple Void Illusory Realm.

“What’s going on? I never saw an introduction about this in the official information for God’s Ruin.”

“I don’t know either. I never ran into anything like this on the old servers. The Ancient Ruins Stone Forest has always been a deadly forbidden zone. I didn’t expect something like this to happen.”

At that moment, Night Feather received a related explanation sent by God’s Ruin.

When he finished reading it, the corner of his mouth twitched slightly. Clearly, the instance the group had just experienced was a one-time instance—in other words, only they had been able to go through it. No other player would ever have another chance to experience it on the Heavenless server.

A map-scene story campaign, a one-time instance. Both clearing it and failing to clear it would cause permanent changes to the world within the entire server, and the resulting impact could swing in either direction. It would completely alter the storyline that players would face afterward. That was what shocked Night Feather most of all. In other words, some of the strategy guides he had seen on the God’s Ruin forums might very well be changed and overturned.

“The official line for God’s Ruin has always been that it lets players change the world of the game, so they created this kind of map-scene story battle. Of course, before you clear it, you can’t tell which ones are ordinary instances and which ones are one-time instances. You only find out what type of instance you ran after the players have finished it.”

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