Chapter 68 - 64: To Wear the Crown, One Must Bear Its Weight

Chapter 68: Chapter 64: To Wear the Crown, One Must Bear Its Weight

On the night of their return, the system still gave all Players twenty-four hours of rest. A new batch of invaders would enter Ancient Abyss in twenty-four hours. However, the stragglers from before were just like them; at this moment, they had already begun to move about in the Ye Se of Guan City.

The sound of a helicopter flying over the residential complex drifted into Yin Zhen’s home. A black silhouette, identical to Yin Zhen in shape, walked to the window and pulled the curtain open just a crack to peek outside.

"Go wash the pot and take out the trash," Yin Zhen ordered.

Hearing the command, the Shadow Servant froze by the window. It craned its neck and pointed a finger at itself. "Me? Me?" it wondered.

"Yes, you."

The Shadow Servant stood with one hand on its hip, scratching its head with the other, utterly confused. It was a Shadow Servant, not a maid. Why did it have to do chores?

Yin Zhen shot a glance at it. Instantly, the Shadow Servant vanished from its spot and reformed by the table in the blink of an eye. It nimbly gathered the bowls and chopsticks into the pot, picked it up, and scurried to the kitchen to wash them.

While washing the dishes, it absorbed other shadows to extend two more pitch-black arms from its body to gather the kitchen trash. Its movements were highly efficient and skilled.

Watching this scene, Yin Zhen muttered to herself, "It really can do chores."

The Shadow Servant was bound to her true body, so there was no issue regarding Assimilation Degree. As long as her energy and stamina were not exhausted, the Shadow Servant could remain active continuously wherever shadows existed.

This was simply an all-natural, zero-consumption workhorse. It truly lived up to its reputation as a Golden Item handpicked for villains!

Speaking of Golden Items, Yin Zhen thought of Plot Kill, the Golden Item rewarded from Overture of War. In the past, Item rewards would directly display their Effect, but this one did not. It felt like a clumsy trick by the author to deliberately create suspense—bah!

However, just by looking at the name, Yin Zhen felt this was very likely the key to killing the protagonist, and using it would certainly consume a massive amount of word count. Therefore, she had to complete this mission. She also deeply coveted the Duplication Card and the single answer included in the manual kill reward.

And the Team-up Card? What kind of garbage was that just to make up the numbers!

Her goals for the next seven days were already clear; now came the preparation phase. There were only nine bullets left in her gun. They had to be used at the most critical moment.

Completing the Guardian Night City and Slaughter events had yielded a total of 20 attribute points. Yin Zhen distributed them between agility and Strength. Now, her attribute stats were:

Strength: 15

Constitution: 10

Wisdom: 23

agility: 14

Luck: 2 ℯℯ𝑙.

This was already at an athlete’s level. She wondered if the system had been scared off by her barrage of questions earlier, as it surprisingly didn’t mock her next to the stats this time. It was very quiet.

With her Luck Value, finding that member of the Blood Clan definitely wouldn’t be easy. But there was still Bai Qiang. Bai Qiang would certainly seek Nan Jiamu’s help. With the protagonist’s intervention, this Blood Clan member wouldn’t be able to escape.

All she had to do was familiarize herself with the Blood and Flesh Ascetic Method as quickly as possible before Bai Qiang and the others found their target.

She had just checked. The Skills column on her Character Card displayed the Blood and Flesh Ascetic Method, and its Level was Basic. She also had a Skill Upgrade Book on hand. As long as her true body learned it, she could use the Skill Upgrade Card to enhance it. During combat, it could provide an instantaneous boost to various bodily attributes depending on the situation, and long-term cultivation could permanently increase all stats. It had great potential.

This way, even if her Assimilation Degree triggered a warning and forced her to unequip the Character Card, she would still possess combat abilities of her own.

Aside from these preparations, she also needed to find a handy blade. In fact, she currently preferred Lucia’s Hand Axe; that feeling of violent hacking and slashing was quite a stress reliever. However, the Item was too conspicuous and would easily make people associate it with Lucia.

Things in the forum were still just in the speculative stage. As long as she didn’t admit it, they could only ever guess. If they dared to rush up to Lucia to test the waters, she would let them properly get to know Lucia!

Finally, there was one last issue: the Black Gold Card for Dark Destiny had indeed faded a little. The system couldn’t tell her the reason, but Yin Zhen guessed there were two possibilities.

One was that because she had chosen the human faction and stood alongside the protagonist of Ancient Abyss, she was gradually losing her qualification to become a villain. The other was that the system was cultivating a new villain for Nan Jiamu. This card wouldn’t remain on her side of the table forever; once the system’s newly cultivated villain fully matured, she would lose this card entirely.

Her hem was tugged by a hand reaching out from the shadows. Yin Zhen saw that the Shadow Servant, having finished cleaning the kitchen, was standing beside her with its hands clasped together. Its pitch-black face lacked any features, yet she could somehow make out a weak and pitiful expression.

"Go play by yourself. Don’t leave this room, and keep a lookout for me," she said.

The Shadow Servant cheerfully flashed an OK gesture, then ran off to play with her wheelchair. Sitting on it, it mimicked her usual posture—spinning the wheels to roll forward, reverse, and spin in circles.

Yin Zhen calmed her emotions and thoughts. She equipped her Character Card, activated the Super Sensing State, and listened to the echoes of blood within her true body for the first time.

The night was still very long.

*

Guan City Information Center.

After receiving the private message from Heavenly Dao Rewards Diligence, Nan Jiamu furrowed her brows. She was intensely curious about what this intel concerning the survival of Ancient Abyss could be, but the new message she sent to Heavenly Dao Rewards Diligence went unanswered.

The seven o’clock check-in had concluded, yet the big data screening still hadn’t found anyone suspected of being Blossoming Prosperity or Heavenly Dao Rewards Diligence. Among the first batch of Players, only these two individuals remained unfound.

"Is Heavenly Dao Rewards Diligence Adeline? And could Blossoming Prosperity be Lucia?" Nan Jiamu wondered, resting her chin in her hand in deep thought.

During the previous round, her entire squad had worked hard, but in the end, their total team points were still ten points short of Blossoming Prosperity. As the captain, she took the word count deduction penalty on behalf of her team members, but the cost of doing so was that everyone faced a double deduction. With five members plus herself, a total of sixty thousand words were deducted.

As the protagonist, the word count she possessed from the start was the total completed word count of the entire book. This book wasn’t long—only six hundred and sixty thousand words in total.

If Blossoming Prosperity continued to be so dominant and kept acting as a lone wolf, her word count wouldn’t last much longer. Moreover, using many Items also required consuming a massive amount of words. Once any Player accumulated a word count that surpassed hers, she would lose her Identity as the protagonist and be reduced to a supporting Character.

Now, a Black Domain Walker had emerged, giving her a deep sense of danger. Furthermore, over in the Red Corpse World, she was being targeted by the male protagonist, Ian. Ian usually never left his laboratory, so she had no chance to kill him even if she wanted to.

"Isn’t this negative buff of the protagonist’s halo a bit too strong?" she complained.

[To Wear the Crown, One Must Bear Its Weight]: Before achieving a massive harvest, you must inevitably experience a matching set of tribulations. Persevering through them is the key to your ultimate victory.

Nan Jiamu was exhausted, but she couldn’t rest. Since she had decided to join this game, she had to make it to the very end.

"Wang, buy dinner for everyone. The whole team is working overtime tonight. We need to quickly find the Blood Clan stragglers from the first two rounds, as well as the newly joined Players this time—especially the Black Domain Walker.

"Also, notify the research department to hold a meeting. I’ll share the few Medicine formulas and mechanical blueprints I memorized this time. My backpack capacity is limited, so I only brought back one bionic prosthetic limb. Send it down for disassembly and analysis."

*

At this moment, in a pitch-black alleyway somewhere in Guan City, a starving Blood Clan man dropped the corpse of a drunkard he had just drained dry. Hearing the BUZZING of a drone overhead, he immediately fished the drunkard’s phone from the body and smashed it viciously onto the ground.

The phone screen shattered, but it didn’t power off. Just as the Blood Clan man was about to stomp on it, a sentence flashed across the screen.

"Need help, Quentin Archer?"