Chapter 1 The Beginning

After the system voice prompt, Feng Bujue checked the game menu again and found that the quest log 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. The structure of the scripts was very small, and there was not much room for choice in terms of plot direction, so the system did not bother to generate quests. But now the team survival mode has a large map with a high degree of freedom, so the system must provide a main quest to guide the ultimate direction of the game. Otherwise, players may not understand what to do in the big picture.

After expanding the quest log, Feng Bujue saw a new window covering the front of the menu, and the quest content was displayed in the frame. The text description of this main quest was very simple: 【Search the city and find the Devil's Gate.】

"Feels like a fantasy 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 looking for a needle in a haystack?" Wang Tanzhi said.

"The keyword the quest uses to prompt us isn't 'door,' but 'devil'," Feng Bujue said, walking to a nearby vending machine and looking at the subway line diagram printed on the machine. "This city's subway has a total of twelve lines, although they're represented by different colors, but..." His finger moved along the lines intertwined on the map, and finally stopped at one place. "Among these dozen intersecting lines, there's an area like this..." He opened his hands and pressed them on the map, obscuring the lines around that area, revealing only the middle part, "Five intersecting straight lines form a very standard geometric figure, a pentagram."

"Big brother, that's a bit of a stretch," 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 meant I had already looked carefully," Feng Bujue replied. He turned around and explained, "Before we came up to this floor, whether inside the subway or on the platform, we could only see the station names and diagrams for this line. There's no complete subway line map of the entire city like this on the floor below.

Before the system prompt sounded, we neither encountered monsters nor wasted much time, and had hardly taken any substantial action. But there must be a reason why the quest was triggered. If this quest didn't have any trigger conditions, we should have received it while sitting on the subway. Why did the system specifically wait for us to come up a floor before giving the prompt?

Therefore... the only possibility I can think of is that there's something on this floor that wasn't on the floor below, and the information it provides can point us to the Devil's Gate mentioned in the quest."

As he said this, he turned sideways and patted the subway line map printed on the vending machine with the palm of his left hand: "There are only twelve subway lines, but 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 that marks landmarks like the 'Devil's Gate'."

He took a deep breath: "In short, if no one raises a constructive objection that contradicts this deduction, or if their opinion itself doesn't have a valid basis to support it... please move with me to the area in this map. If I'm wrong, we'll reorganize our thoughts and discuss it again. If I'm right, I'll get skill points, everyone will clear the quest, and everyone will be happy."

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

Feng Bujue's reasoning ability is a derivative product of his refined reading habit. He is a very intelligent person. At the age of sixteen, his score on the Binet test at school was 138, with the left and right hemispheres occupying 69 points each, a balanced type of thinking. Compared with geniuses with 140 or more, he is still classified as a normal person, but his ability to observe, remember, understand, and reason can be described as well-trained, far beyond ordinary people.

As Mr. Conan Doyle said through the mouth of Sherlock Holmes, in addition to extensive knowledge and experience, the most important thing for an excellent detective is the correct reasoning skills. Sherlock Holmes in the book is always sparing no effort to promote his "deductive method," and Feng Bujue is obviously a loyal supporter.

His reading habit comes from another theory of Sherlock's: treat knowledge as reserves, manage the brain as a library, sweep out and forget unimportant things, put secondary things in the attic, and leave what you need at your fingertips.

This seems to be an idealized memory habit and way of thinking. In fact, it can be achieved through certain training, and 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 unconsciously becoming a muscle man, memorizing a few words every day and easily passing the CET-4 or CET-6 exams, writing a few thousand words of manuscript every day and becoming a great god, etc... If there were a ranking of self-deceptive thoughts of human beings, these sentences would definitely be in the top few.

Generally speaking, the probability of giving up halfway is extremely high when facing this kind of self-disciplined training. But as the saying goes, strange people have many talents since ancient times, and Feng Bujue is one of the few people who persevered, and eventually turned reading and reasoning into habits and hobbies...

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

"Ah... ah? Oh, okay... alright." Lonely Little Bro had just recovered. In fact, he didn't completely follow Feng Bujue's words and thoughts, but he had a feeling that "although I don't quite understand, this guy seems to be 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 surface and being responsible for pointing out the approximate direction after going up.

When passing through a wide safety passage, Feng Bujue actually found a seemingly easter egg 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, the crowd saw the exit diagonally above. This section of the slope had an upward escalator, but it had stopped, and there were two rows of ordinary escalators for walking on both sides.

They walked 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 lights in businesses, and the lights in residential houses were all dark. Only the streetlights were still working normally.

Although there were no vehicles running, the air sucked into the nose felt very turbid. There seemed to be a layer of mist lingering in front of them, 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 the crowd didn't feel anything. But after coming to the open ground, the indescribable eerie atmosphere around them... that abnormal stillness was simply suffocating.

The fear values of four of the five people had already fluctuated, and the stability values were between 5% and 15%. Various physical signs of facing 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. He quickly recognized several landmarks on the road and thought about the route.

Long Aomin nodded, holding his shield, and continued to lead the way. The other four walked behind. Everyone was silent, vigilant, listening, and trying to walk on the sidewalk near the streetlights.

From time to time, there would be sounds in the darkness that sounded like the breathing of wild beasts, whispers, and faint laughter. In any case, 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. It's difficult to hide fear, but Feng Bujue didn't show any fear even in his eyes. It could be seen that he wasn't pretending to be brave, but he 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, the professions that Feng Bujue claimed to be were generally two: artist and great writer. Regardless of which point of view one takes to look at his behavior, these two answers are very irritating...

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

"Then I can put it another way," Feng Bujue continued. "I am an artistic worker with a high level of aesthetic ability, skilled creative techniques, and engaged in artistic creation with certain achievements."

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

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

"It's clearly more arrogant, okay!"

Ji Mo laughed aside. Lonely Little Bro curled his lips and said to her, "If he doesn't play dumb, how can I complain?"

At this moment, Feng Bujue suddenly stopped and quickly took out Mario's Pipe Wrench from his knapsack. "Hmm... just when the oppressive atmosphere has eased a little, troublesome things have arrived."

Long Aomin saw two shadows flash past 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 monster.

"The size looks like deformed infants, with small sickles at the front of their arms. They're quite fast, and in terms of numbers... there should be more than one," Feng Bujue calmly narrated, and approached the darkness with the pipe wrench in hand. At this moment, he still didn't know that after saying these words, his Investigation specialization would be activated.