Chapter 181
After ending the entire mess with a single in-game screenshot taken beside the Saintess, Do-Jin went right back to his usual routine. Although it was practically a basement-dweller lifestyle full of dungeons and monsters right now, this was still infinitely better than living as a fugitive on the run from a religious order.
The newly started tour of the various Floating Continent dungeons was streamed live. Originally, only Theresa streamed, but now Theresa, Do-Jin, and even Tanto were all streaming together. It was their way of flipping the middle finger at the anti-fans who’d tried to report him.
└ Do-Jin, man, you went through a lot!
“Thanks.”
Naturally, once the streams went up, questions about the recent drama and the Floating Continent flooded in nonstop. A lot of fans even sent big donations while asking. Do-Jin expected that, so he waited for a moment when he had breathing room to check chat, then answered.
“Since we’re taking a short break, let me talk about the Floating Continent. First, the reason I’m not sharing the route is simple. I don’t want to increase the number of victims. If a path is meant for one or two people to sneak through quietly like they’re infiltrating a secret base, what do you think happens when a whole crowd rushes through it?”
Everyone who came into the stream screaming that he should “reveal the route” suddenly shut their mouths.
“And there’s another reason. Even if you somehow reach the northern edge of the Central Continent, there’s still a high chance you won’t make it into the Floating Continent. Even if you manage to fly, you still can’t get in. Without Grand Duke Tirund’s permission, no human can set foot up there.”
The Elders no longer roamed around freely hunting humans, but that didn’t mean humans could wander the Floating Continent without restrictions. If warm-blooded humans roamed freely, it’d probably stir up the vampires’ bloodlust that Tirund barely kept in check.
At that moment, someone donated a thousand dollars and asked, “Then can’t you get Tirund’s permission for us?”
“I don’t know if he’d allow it or not, but I’m never doing that. My fans are fine, but am I supposed to gamble with a bunch of people who report others to the Celestial See? What if they cause trouble up here? Do you want to see a war break out with vampires?”
└ Facts. After watching the crap people pulled this time, Do-Jin’s judgment is right.
└ If those idiots go up there, they’ll just wreck the relationship with the vampires.
└ They’d trigger human-hatred mode on the spot and turn a ceasefire into a full war hahaha.
The fans immediately agreed. Given the chaos the hardcore anti-fans had already caused, public opinion was firmly on Do-Jin’s side.
└ But don’t you think the people who got flagged by the Celestial See are gonna have a rough time playing now? Maybe you should be merciful? You’re a public figure, so being forgiving could help your image...
Among them was a warm-hearted viewer who suddenly discovered global compassion. He wanted Do-Jin to forgive the ones who got banned from the temples after reporting him to the Celestial See. Unfortunately, Do-Jin was the opposite of a philanthropist. If anything, he was an unapologetic favoritist.
“I think the break’s over,” he said, not even bothering to respond.
***
Do-Jin’s party kept up a hard march across the Floating Continent for a while. The grinding was brutal but peaceful in its own way, and by the time that stretch of farming ended, he managed to push past his original goal of Level 150.
Do-Jin wanted to stay longer and farm at a slower pace, but he still returned to the Central Continent. There were too many things he wanted to resolve as quickly as possible: meeting Bella face-to-face, becoming the Star’s Apostle, and dealing with the vampire curse issue.
It felt like his quest window had been cluttered with way too many dangling threads, so he decided to jump into tracking the Cult of Ruin earlier than planned. The problem was figuring out how to hunt down a group that stayed curled up in the dark.
They would start blowing up half the world years down the line and leave a trail everywhere, but that was then, and this was now. Even knowing what would happen in the future didn’t help. Going to a future incident site now would only show a normal piece of land with nothing happening yet. All he had to rely on were the memories he brought back from his past life.
He took every major disaster tied to the Cult of Ruin and broke it down from every angle he could. Eventually, he came to one conclusion. Some of the incidents they caused couldn’t have been pulled off with short-term prep.
The Cult of Ruin usually stepped in and amplified naturally occurring disasters, but not all of them worked like that. A few had to be long-term projects that they had built from scratch. He removed anything related to dimensional rifts.
Rifts involved too many variables and never worked the same way twice, so they didn’t belong in the list. He removed all the one-off terrorist events, too. While he sifted through memory after memory and crossed out dead ends, one case snagged his attention.
Poisonfang Dragon Galante. Do-Jin tried to remember. Four years later? No, maybe five.
Somewhere in that range, long after the current timeline, Galante showed up as the central figure of a world-boss raid. He was the first boss in the entire game whose destruction level wasn’t listed as a city or a kingdom. The official record described the damage as affecting part of a continent. Even after the raid killed Galante, the region poisoned by the dragon became a land of death. It was something that would happen years down the line.
A world-tier event had its own timing, and he planned to prepare for it once the event cycle got closer. But something stuck out. Galante was the first monster from this world that stepped onto the stage as a true world boss.
Galante had returned as an undead. People speculated much later that the Cult of Ruin might have been involved, and the suspicion had at least some weight. He wasn’t revived like a simple zombie, skeleton, or anything else a careless necromancer might try.
If that was the case, then the undead creation was closer to a lich, and the target wasn’t a human but a dragon. That level of undead conversion wasn’t something anyone could pull off within a single year or two. It required a timeline where preparations had already begun long ago. Someone like Duke Tirund could probably do it, since death magic was his specialty, but a figure like that didn’t appear twice.
Do-Jin accepted that he might be barking up the wrong tree, but it was worth checking. Even if he didn’t catch the Cult of Ruin, he could still reduce the scale of the disaster Galante would cause, and that alone would be a massive gain. With his direction set, he headed for the region that still looked green and alive, although it would eventually rot into a land of death under Galante’s poison.
***
The Vallis Mountain Range, despite the name, was an enormous region with stretches of plains mixed between the ridges, and it sat in the Empire’s northwest. For now, it looked peaceful.
Do-Jin spent several days wandering across the Vallis region. He was crossing a quiet plain when he spotted a shepherd tending a flock far below. It was a sight he could never have imagined in the past.
This place looked like a postcard from the Alps right now, but once Galante appeared, it would become worse than Fukushima or Chernobyl. Back then, anyone who entered needed a full set of poison-resistance gear like someone suiting up to walk into a radioactive hotspot.
He let out a long breath. “Galante first crawled out somewhere around here.”
He took a piece of bread from his inventory and bit into it, but the whole situation felt hopeless. There were too many mountains and plains in sight. Trying to find the dragon’s buried remains somewhere in this massive area felt almost ridiculous.
“HEY!! Hehe!”
When the shriek rose from below him, Do-Jin choked on the bread and hacked out a cough.
“What the hell was that?”
When he turned his head, he found a tiny kid standing there, giggling. The child had a pretty face that made it hard to tell whether they were a boyish girl or a delicate boy, somewhere between six and eight years old. That little gremlin was the one who startled him.
“This little...” He almost snapped, but he held it in.
Getting genuinely angry at a kid over a prank felt pathetic, so he forced a smile and asked as kindly as he could manage, “What are you doing out here? Why’re you alone in a place like this?”
Then, he paused. He hadn’t noticed the kid walking up to him at all. A little uneasy, he activated Superior Vision to check again. There was always a chance a monster could disguise itself. However, it was just a perfectly normal human child. The monsters in this region were far below Do-Jin’s level. There was no way a doppelganger-class creature capable of slipping past his scouting would be hiding here, anyway.
“I’m just here to play!” the kid declared confidently.
He showed zero fear toward a grown man in a sharp robe with a cold stare, which surprised Do-Jin more than anything.
“You don’t find me scary at all?” he said, letting out a small sigh.
“Why? Are you a bad person? Even if you are, I’m fine. I can run away really fast.”
He bounced up and down in place to show off, and Do-Jin’s eyes narrowed with sudden interest. No wonder he didn’t notice the kid approaching. It wasn’t only that the child moved fast. The movement barely made any sound. It was the level of a trained ranger, thief, or assassin. In other words, this child was a natural talent.
“What’s your name?”
“Orfen!”
Do-Jin didn’t recognize it.
If the kid grew up in this region, well...
A wave of irritation hit him out of nowhere, and he ruffled the kid’s hair. Even though his hand was rough, Orfen laughed as if it was pleasant.
“I’m fine, but you shouldn’t walk up to strangers. The world’s dangerous.” He pulled a snack from his inventory and handed it over.
“Are you a good person?” Orfen asked.
“I don’t know if I’m good, but at least I’m not a bad one.”
“Oh. Then you’re a good person. My mom said bad people say they’re good, and good people never say they’re good.”
“Sure.”
If the mother was that wise, she should’ve also drilled into him not to wander near strangers. Well, she probably did, and the kid just ignored it.
“You’ve got a smart mom. You shouldn’t make her worry. Eat that and go ho...” Do-Jin trailed off in thought. Sending the kid back alone in a place like this didn’t sit right with him.
Suddenly, Orfen’s expression drooped. “I’m actually looking for my mom. None of the adults in the village will tell me where she went. So I’m trying to find her.”
Do-Jin froze. For one absurd moment, he thought he would’ve preferred Galante resurrecting right in front of him. He didn’t know what to say.
Before he could force out a response, Orfen looked up at him. “Mister, can you help me? I want to find my mom.”
Do-Jin had come here to find clues about the Cult of Ruin and Galante. Instead, Fate slammed an unexpected quest straight into his face.