Underworld Player

[ Quest Complete ]

[ Calculating Rewards... ]

[ Your rating for overall performance is: B-rank. Experience and Coin rewards are 100% of base value. ]

[ You have received: 100 x 8 = 800XP and 100 x 8 = 800 Coins ]

[ Total monsters eliminated: 25. Additional XP and Coins shall be awarded based on individual contribution. ]

[ You have received an Additional Reward of 1500XP and 1500 Coins]

[ You have received Random Item (Rare) x1. Item has been automatically added to the Inventory, please inspect it at your own convenience. ]

[ Level Up! You are now Level 6. You have 1 unused attribute points. ]

[ Player Level: Level 6 (1200/2400) ]

[ Coins: 3000 ]

Bai Zhi, sitting at the back of the bus as was his habit, carefully read each line of the notification screen that only his eyes could see.

So, I got B-rank overall... Understandable, since I did force the second reload. Better than I expected, honestly...

On the whole, this Mandatory Quest should not have been a difficult one. Under normal circumstances, Players should have been able to clear the quest without reloading once. The difficulties Bai Zhi and his companions had encountered had most likely been the fault of that member of the party who was secretly a Fallen.

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Bai Zhi had forced a reload as part of his plan to expose and eliminate the Fallen, then lead the team in destroying all the supernatural entities in the building. Success would have come with hefty rewards, but he had been too clever for his own good, and nearly been undone by his own conceit.

The number of monsters eliminated in total confirmed Bai Zhi's suspicions about the course of events that had occurred during the Mandatory Quest.

It was highly likely that the very first reload had been triggered during a period of darkness, when the sudden increase in supernatural entities would have caught enough of the other Players off guard. Thus, when enough of them fell, the whole team had been reloaded.

Those who had been alive before the reload would have quickly realized what was going on and shared the information with the team. If not Traveler, then certainly Bai Zhi would have spoken up.

However, during the first reload, whether it was because they inadvertently avoided any Players-turned-monsters or because the condition did not apply during the first reload, he had not realized that dead Players would come back after the reload as supernatural entities—that was his biggest mistake.

Instead of splitting up like they had in the first run, after the reload, the Players must have banded together and eagerly hunted down as many supernatural entities as they could, bolstered by newfound confidence in the knowledge that they could not "die" per se.

Of course, he wouldn't have been the only one to realize that there would be additional rewards based on the number of monsters they destroyed. Someone like Traveler, for example, could have easily worked it out.

Twenty-five was a staggering number of monsters to have eliminated, and Bai Zhi reckoned that most of that would have been achieved during this first reload. Sure, they may have set fire to the whole sixth floor during their final, dramatic escape, but it had not been enough to take down even one of the monsters coming after them at the time.

"High risk, high reward", as they say. Once "death" was no longer a concern, we must have gone all out... Probably.

The additional rewards Bai Zhi had been able to get from this quest spoke for themselves. Despite his plan falling through, those additional rewards were nothing to scoff at—nearly double the amount of experience and Coins that he got as his main reward, and well worth the effort.

However, tragedy must have struck at some point, taking out most of the Players and triggering the second reload...

There was a possibility that eliminating so many supernatural entities had summoned some sort of Boss monster which overpowered the Players, but Bai Zhi was inclined to believe they had been sabotaged by a traitor.

His Perfect rank skill, Shadow, may have been lacking in offense, but its defensive capabilities were top-notch, which was key to his ability to survive every reload.

With the power of a Perfect skill, which should normally have been beyond the Players' reach at their current levels, he could have saved the other Players, too. If not all of them, then at least one or two, since reloads could be successfully triggered even with more than one Player standing.

Unless... there was something wrong with those Players.

In fact, he had formed a rough idea of all this when he walked into the orphanage to find the other six players already inside the compound.

Things had played out just as they had before the first reload.

This time, he did not intervene when the Players split up into groups, as he hoped that this would help him expose the traitor more easily. The plan was to swiftly unmask and dispose of them, then reveal the truth to the rest before leading them through the building while eliminating as many monsters as they could... That had been his plan during the second reload.

Alas, the discovery of the dead "Player" when they joined up with Traveler and Viridescent had alerted him to a serious flaw in his plan and forced him to change tack. Instead of going for a high score, he aimed to complete the quest as quickly as possible, instead. This also meant that he gave up on all other opportunities to learn more about the strange events that were behind the supernatural incidents.

It was a classic case of "one error leads to a thousand more" and "even the greatest mind is not infallible".

The old orphanage director must have something to do with the events at the orphanage. There's no doubt that he's the person I saw in the window at the very end... Besides, if the diary is any indication, the strange incidents began a few months ago…

Bai Zhi gnawed on his thumb as he gazed out the window with creased brows.

If my deductions are correct, the director must be a Player too, perhaps even an OG Player... If that's the case, that explains a few things, such as where he got the money to pay for "Bai Zhi's" education...

The thought made Bai Zhi frown even harder.

He had grown up in the orphanage, and it had been poorly-maintained for as long as he could remember. If the old director's money had come from some retirement fund, Bai Zhi was sure he would have spent some of it on repairs for the orphanage.

Coincidentally, three months ago was also when supernatural entities and Players had started showing up.

"Wait, if that's what..."

A thought occurred to Bai Zhi, and he hurriedly started searching on his phone for information centered around the children at the orphanage.

Eventually, he learned this: before the orphanage collapsed under mysterious circumstances, the children living at the orphanage had been sent to a camp elsewhere for the weekend, and thus avoided a tragic fate.