Impersonating an NPC is not as easy as it seems.
After two days of acting, Samantha's biggest thought now is that pretending to be someone else is such a troublesome thing.
Even someone as cautious as him sometimes misses some details, let alone having to suppress his natural instincts and look at and solve problems from a completely different perspective.
If it weren't for maintaining his persona as a leader with exceptional intelligence but mediocre combat skills, Saman would have already used his abilities to keep that player in place. Could he really just stand by and watch him leave so easily?
For Saman, whose fighting prowess was considerable, the ability to capture his opponent but not his was nothing short of self-torture.
"Fortunately, it wasn't all for nothing," Samantha thought to himself.
Two days were enough for him to learn the specific work of these soldiers and civilians: they collected the black cubes and put them into the defrosting device. The small black cubes would expand and turn into supplies.
They could be food ingredients, crudely processed industrial products, or even the 'luxury goods' used by nobles.
Without exception, they all bear the marks of modern industrial civilization.
It may be precious to the people here, but to Saman and the other players, it's just a cheap thing.
"Offer the heart of the King of Chichen, and the gods will bestow blessings." This is from the myth. Saman had never understood what the 'heart of the King of Chichen' meant before, but now he does.
The sincere heart refers to the blue liquid, and the blessings are the resources in the black cubes.
He had reviewed the laboratory records and found that the number of black cubes harvested each day followed a periodic curve.
The yield of Black Cubes fluctuates approximately every seven days. The first day yields the most, then it declines in stages until the seventh day, before surging to its peak again on the eighth day.
This is very interesting data, and it can illustrate a lot of things.
For example, the frequency of Black Cube deployment, its specific deployment time, and approximate deployment quantity. According to this algorithm, the next deployment should be on the seventh day, the last day of the instance.
Therefore, Saman remained calm. He knew that to resolve this issue, he had to wait until the seventh day, when the 'true hand' controlling the course of this world would appear.
Once you know the result, it becomes much easier to trace back the process and the reasons.
Saman speculated that something in this world attracted that hand, and the Black Cube was a form of exchange. Moreover, it was an unequal exchange, similar to exchanging candy for a gem of equal size.
Now he knew that the gem was the blue 'liquid' on the queen upstairs.
But what's with the Queen calling for 'food'? Shouldn't there be someone specifically responsible for feeding the Queen, but that's suddenly stopped these past few days?
"Hmm?" Samantha recalled a certain habit of the ants.
On the second floor, in the soldiers' and civilians' nest, Ren Yifei was also thinking about this question: Why was the Queen starving?
However, he immediately used ants and bees as comparison objects and found a clue.
Superindividuals do not have true classes; each category fulfills its own responsibilities. Sick, weak, and unable-to-work worker bees are abandoned; but what about a sick, weak queen?
The same applies.
Take bees as an example. There are special worker bees around the queen bee to monitor and observe her. These worker bees lick the secretions on the queen bee's body every day to determine her physical condition.
If the queen bee becomes sick or old and can no longer lay eggs, or if the rate and density of egg laying decrease, then the worker bees will intentionally reduce or even stop feeding her royal jelly. They will then focus more on raising the princess bees until a new, young, and healthy queen bee is born.
After that, the old queen had only one choice: to lead a portion of her people away from the old hive and establish a new hive.
Either they are eliminated or abandoned.
If something is useless, it must be abandoned. This is the survival of the fittest, the way to ensure the vitality of the entire group.
Humans, bound by moral constraints, will abandon the sick and the elderly; what's so strange about animals doing the same?
Old queen bees are abandoned because they can no longer meet the reproductive needs of the super-individual. Will the queen bee here be the same?
Her constant cries for "food" indicate that she has entered a state of hunger and weakness. Was she abandoned because of illness or old age?
Ren Yifei guessed it was old age, not for any other reason than the age of those nobles.
The age of adulthood for workers is eighteen, and it's probably around the same for soldiers, so why can't it be the age of adulthood for nobles?
Aside from the unexpected newborn, all the princess ants and male ants on the fifth floor have just turned seventeen or eighteen. Tomorrow is even the unified coming-of-age ball, and they are already capable of taking on their responsibilities.
A new queen is about to be born, and the old queen, whose output has decreased, will be eliminated, which is normal.
"Hmm?" Ren Yifei took out his personal card. The information had been updated?
[Second Night: The Thoughtful One.]
A thoughtful person is someone who is good at thinking, someone who thinks a lot and ponders deeply. Connecting this to the previous mention of the 'male ant'...
He slapped his forehead and immediately remembered the nobleman's room on the fifth floor, filled with books.
The preferences of other nobles did not match the information about the 'thoughtful person'; only the owner of the house with many books and signs of being read could match it.
However, he only glanced at it once, and many details were still unclear.
Should he go up again? He thought of the patrol teams everywhere outside and decided to give up on the idea.
Not only tonight, but I doubt I'll have a chance to go up there in the next two days either.
"Thinking about it is pointless, let's talk about it tomorrow." Ren Yifei lay on the bed and closed his eyes.
The instigator is already asleep, but the work of the soldiers and civilians is far from over.
The player who had escaped earlier has been captured. It seems that he was struck by lightning while fleeing into a remote forest, and his body was charred black and he was unconscious there.
However, the other person was not caught; all they found was a cloak that originally belonged to a nobleman, which the intruder had stolen.
"Is it the punishment for leaving the instance area?" Upon hearing this news, Saman had already stood up thanks to the special medicine and insisted on returning to his post.
The unconscious player was still alive. Because they wanted to know information about the other escaped intruder, the soldiers and civilians did not kill him immediately, but instead captured him and threw him into prison, preparing for interrogation the next day.
"Tomorrow…" Samantha frowned; he had a feeling something unexpected was going to happen.
Saman's intuition was correct; shortly after, the card displayed an update: [One player has died; one-eighth of the Demon Seal has been unlocked.]
Judging from the timing, it was done by a 'ghost'.
"Who is it?" The NPCs were more surprised than anyone else. They were guarding the door, so how did the other person get in and kill the prisoner?
The prison guards, while informing their superiors, led a thorough search of the cells for clues, but naturally found nothing. Only the corpse of a player remained, eyes wide as if he had seen something horrifying, and it was now disappearing.
A few minutes later, the player's presence disappeared, and the small bug he left behind was automatically fixed.
The NPCs only remember that an uninvited guest broke into the fifth floor, blasted a hole, threatened the laboratory director on the fourth floor, and even broke into the sixth floor.
In the end, he left behind a cloak and made his escape unscathed.
"Damn it!" The patrol captain slammed his fist on the wall that night. "He got away."
"Achoo!" Ren Yifei, who was fast asleep, sneezed.
The next day, the aftermath of the intruder's actions was still ongoing, but it didn't affect Ren Yifei's normal routine of getting up, eating, and going to work.
I'm working at the school today.
The basic education school for soldiers and civilians was a small place sandwiched between two soldiers' and civilians' nests. The teachers mainly taught combat skills, because the soldiers and civilians had the advantage of being stronger. Their main jobs were patrolling, guarding, and watching over.
The group of soldiers and civilians who were particularly different from those in the laboratory should have had a different kind of education, such as a one-on-one mentorship, because this basic education school was the only education that soldiers and civilians participated in together.
After taking the opportunity to chat with another guard and getting some information out of him, his guess was confirmed.
Mediocre people who go straight into the workforce after graduating from basic education, like Gu Cheng, can only do guard or management jobs.
Those whose combat skills are recognized join the patrol team, while those whose intelligence is recognized become researchers, doctors, etc., and are taught by teachers.
The guards didn't have any special job; they just needed to stand at the entrance and prevent the students from coming and going at will.
Ren Yifei, using the excuse of being bored, went to the bookshelves and found some books of mythology. The other technical books weren't very valuable, but these mythological stories offered many useful clues.
Sure enough, after reading through seven similar mythological stories, he found the information he was looking for.
"There's actually an era before the descent of the gods?" Ren Yifei asked, resting his chin on his hand.
The records before the divine descent were very ordinary and normal records of the development of primitive society. In just a few sentences, it was mentioned that their ancestors had given their lives to obtain food, clothing and other things from the land, forests and lakes.
Because Ren Yifei had accepted the premise that the workers would find the Black Cube and obtain supplies, he hadn't considered that this world used to be able to provide them with food and other things.
Why did this survival ability disappear?
Because of 'divine intervention'.
The NPCs saw it as a blessing, but Ren Yifei felt it was a form of slow, insidious genocide or domestication. The inhabitants of the anthill probably didn't realize that they had gone from being wild to domesticated, and that they couldn't survive without their master (the god).
Absolutely terrible, as bad as it gets.
So what is the price? Myths also mention it.
Upon reaching adulthood, God's children choose their partners and bear God's offspring. The chosen one dedicates her sincere heart to God, and the children she leaves behind will continue her path.
A sincere heart comes at a price.
"Where are the others?"
After giving birth to children, 'she' was offered to the gods. What about the nobles of her time?
Will it be like the ant world and the bee world, where the princess ants fight amongst themselves to determine a winner, and then the winner gains the right to mate? As for the males, will they die after mating?
If a nobleman were standing before him, Ren Yifei would want to crack open his skull to see what was inside. How could he be so useless that he doesn't even know anything about his parents' generation? At least try reading a book…
Book?
He then thought of that aristocratic house filled with books, which had a very different painting style.
Ghosts are thinkers, male ants.
Suppose that this male member of the nobility discovers his destiny through some of the books, would he take a gamble?
Is this desperate gamble his obsession with achieving a certain outcome?