Chapter 1

The sky gradually darkened, and the setting sun shone obliquely, the overlapping mountains resembling silent, slumbering behemoths, shrouded in the rosy light.

The path through the mountain forest was rugged. Perhaps due to the rain that had fallen that morning, the dirt road was quite muddy, with scattered puddles of water.

The sound of hooves echoed as wheels rolled over the puddles. A spacious and luxurious carriage traveled along the mountain path. Inside the carriage, on a long wooden table, were stacked various books and a thick pile of newspapers.

"The Ferma Kingdom imports tulip bulbs, and prices soar;

The East Rhine Company expands its colonial business, and the stock price rises to forty times the issue price. Investors have great confidence in the company;

The new prime minister forms a cabinet, employing a goblin woman with a master's degree as the prime minister's secretary;"

Li Ang quickly flipped through the newspaper content. The newspapers in this world were made of poor-quality paper, the handwriting was blurry, and the printing quality was poor. The layout was also problematic.

The headlines on the large pages were all sensational and bizarre events, such as:

"Eighty-year-old woman living alone dragged from her home and kept in a cage"

"Mrs. Walpole seen embracing a man in the theater, while the Earl smiled calmly beside them"

"A man in Norfolk County becomes pregnant after using hair dye."

On the other hand, serious official news only occupied a small space, crammed into the corners of the newspaper like tofu squares.

And in the cracks between the two pages, there were also some hand-drawn lingerie advertisements featuring models (this part of the content had the highest printing quality).

The eighty-year-old woman being kept in a cage was actually a tortoise-shaped magical beast being cared for by a national animal protection organization.

The unknown man that Mrs. Walpole was embracing was actually her own two-year-old child.

The man who used hair dye didn't get pregnant, he just ate some kind of plant fruit that caused bloating and hadn't pooped in a week.

It must be said that even though this modified fairy tale world has been occupied by the PC trend,

The newspaper industry is still like the British modern tabloids in the real world.

It likes to pry into scandals, uses ridiculous headlines, fabricates content, and is far more unscrupulous and limitless than the "you'll regret it if you don't see it" and "shocking photos of all mankind" UC headlines.

Inside the carriage, Li Ang wasn't the only one reading the newspapers. Others were also reading related books and materials.

The real-world player forums had reached a consensus long ago, dividing the script worlds into two types.

One is closed, where players are placed in a closed and isolated space, unable to go out and explore at will, such as the Nisshima campus script that Li Ang had previously experienced.

The other is open, where players can freely explore within the script world, such as this fairy tale world.

Closed scripts are often shorter, and players can obtain less information, somewhat like escape rooms.

Open scripts are longer, and players have more diverse ways to clear the game, and can even explore at will within the time limit of the task.

The most important resource in the script world is not the clearance reward, nor the corpse of the script task boss, but the extraordinary power system and knowledge system contained in this world.

These things are completely priceless.

Driven by interests, the other players also had a positive attitude towards reading the materials. Julia also asked the lumberjack Frederick questions, asking him about the extraordinary power possessed by the Lema Kingdom in the past.

Frederick's answer was not satisfactory. According to him, all kingdoms, including the Lema Kingdom, only had conventional legions such as the Gryphon Knights, Heavy Armored Cavalry, and Wolf Cavalry a dozen years ago. The number of spellcasters was small, and the inheritance was obscure and scarce.

He has lived in the deep mountains and forests for many years, and knows almost nothing about why the extraordinary power of the outside world has been able to develop by leaps and bounds.

Okay, this down-and-out prince with a beard and a face full of flesh looks like a useless dessert with no value in him.

The players in the carriage continued reading the books and materials. Suddenly, there was a burst of noise from the mountain forest ahead.

Everyone raised their heads instantly. Among the noisy sounds, there were cries, shouts, the sound of metal colliding, and explosions.

There was a small-scale battle ahead.

The coachman hired from the carriage shop panicked, flicked his whip, pulled the reins, stopped the carriage, turned his head and said softly: "Monk, sir, it seems like there is a battle ahead, let's turn back!"

"No hurry."

Li Ang's calm voice came from inside the carriage. He glanced at his teammates, nodded, pushed open the car door and walked down.

The coachman was so frightened that he broke out in cold sweat, "Monk, sir, what are you doing?!"

"As an Eastern monk who upholds pacifism, what I can't stand the most is someone fighting in front of me."

Li Ang said calmly: "I'll go ahead and explore the road. You turn the carriage around and stop about a thousand steps back. We will come back to find you later. If no one comes to find you, you can go back to Hamelin Town by yourself."

The coachman, who didn't know the details of these people, was stunned as he watched the passengers walking out of the carriage.

Aren't these people afraid of death at all?

As the sound of fighting ahead became louder and louder, and the passengers had no intention of leaving, the coachman gritted his teeth, turned the carriage around, and left on his own.

The sound of hooves gradually faded away. Li Ang took out the Soul Shepherd Bronze Long Scythe from the void, tapped his toes on the ground, and leaped up nimbly, jumping into the mountain forest.

Stepping on the trunks of giant trees in succession, he sped towards the noisy place ahead.

The sound of weapons fighting came from a clearing in the forest, where two groups of people were fighting.

One side was forty or fifty burly men wearing uniform uniforms, all holding either wooden or metal sticks. Their uniforms had the words "Tiann Town Hornburg Paper Company" on them.

The other side was hundreds of oddly dressed people.

Their faces were painted with green and yellow paint, and they wore strange clothes (some were cloth, some were woven from vines, some were animal fur, and some had two pieces of hardwood draped in front of and behind them), and they held wooden sticks in their hands.

Most of these oddly dressed people were relatively thin young men and women, but there were also some middle-aged and elderly people.

Behind the crowd, there was a group of children holding stones.

The two groups fought each other. The burly men wearing paper company uniforms clearly had the advantage in body size and weapons, but when they actually fought, they seemed a little restrained and didn't dare to kill anyone.

They could only passively defend against the wooden stick attacks of the oddly dressed camp, and occasionally be hit by stones thrown remotely by the children wearing strange clothes, causing them to bleed from their heads and retreat steadily.

"Protect our forest!"

"How dare you ignore the scientific conclusion of global warming! Come and cut down trees?!"

"For the sake of environmental protection! You blasphemers of the earth and forest, go to hell!"

Seeing that the oddly dressed people shouting inexplicable slogans were about to completely surround the paper company employees, a ghostly figure sprang out from the forest.