Chapter 20: A Follower of [Chaos]
"Amnesia Doctor?"
Fang Shiqing looked at Cheng Shi with keen interest, smiling as she picked up the pocket watch from the table.
The others picked up their watches in turn, but the expressions on their faces were each more colorful than the last.
Their gazes bounced back and forth between Cheng Shi and Xu Lu as they thought to themselves that the pinched-voice girl had good reason to be afraid.
She had already assumed such a defensive posture, yet this person named Cheng Shi still dove right in face-first, practically afraid that others wouldn't know he stood opposed to the cutesy girl.
Xu Lu clearly didn't dare accept anything from Cheng Shi. She used the pocket watch to calibrate her time, then pushed it back.
"An Amnesia Doctor is not a good answer in a [Memory] trial. Cheng Shi, I hope you'll refrain from acting against the NPCs. Over-accelerating them will cause memory collapse, and we could become trapped in the memories, unable to escape."
Cheng Shi shrugged indifferently, picked up the pocket watch, and walked away.
He needed to find a spot with no people to perform his [Rite of Communion].
The tavern was very large, two stories high.
The style resembled medieval Northern Europe: wooden furnishings adorned with wild beast pelts, rugged through and through.
Dozens of tables dotted the space across both floors, and nearly every seat was taken.
Clinking glasses and boisterous shouts filled his ears. Before he had walked very far, he could no longer hear his teammates' voices.
A void design ringed the bar counter at the center. The entire second-floor railing formed a loop, and leaning over it, one could easily take in the full layout of the first floor.
Cheng Shi quickened his pace, rounded a corridor, and in a corner where no one could see him, produced his "Die of Fate."
The [Rite of Communion] concluded smoothly. He felt the favor of "Time" upon his fingertips and walked out with a smile.
Time to begin the investigation.
[Memory] trials were countless times more "civilized" than [War] trials. Combat moments were rare, and even when they occurred, they were generally confined to a small area and resolved quickly.
In a [Memory] trial, every scene was someone else's memory. If the imagery of the memory was distorted too much, the memory could collapse, causing the person to be lost forever.
The trial's objective was to continuously search for the "Memory Subject" within each act of memory, meaning the true owner of the memory.
In the current scene, the memory's owner must have come here and stayed for a long time, which was why they had such vivid recollections of the tavern's layout and its patrons.
However, a person's memory had focal points. In the areas they paid attention to, the "NPCs" would be more active, their behavior and logic approximating that of real people.
In the areas they overlooked, blurry fragments would often appear.
The "NPCs" reconstructed from these fragments would exhibit various "errors." Though these "errors" were not always obvious, players who wanted to clear the trial had to find them.
The simplest and most brute-force method for finding errors was… canvassing.
In other words, chatting people up one by one.
But chatting people up required finesse. If a conversation failed and triggered other complications, the memory could warp, causing the trial to fail outright.
Cheng Shi wasn't great at chatting people up, but he was excellent at deceiving them.
He spotted several tavern waiters emerging one after another from a small side room. Seizing the moment when no one was watching, he slipped inside the room, quickly stole a waiter's uniform, changed into it, and slipped back out.
The moment he stepped out the door, he saw Fang Shiqing leading the cutesy girl, tiptoeing in his direction.
He smiled knowingly. What a coincidence, they'd had the same idea.
Seeing that Cheng Shi had already changed into a waiter's uniform, Fang Shiqing's eyes lit up. She praised in a low voice:
"Smart!"
Cheng Shi basked in the praise and grinned. "The heavyweight's commendation is my motivation to improve."
Xu Lu, hiding behind Fang Shiqing, stared with eyes full of wariness and muttered under her breath: "So fake."
Fang Shiqing smiled:
"I imagine you know my Lord's [Rite of Communion] as well. Share one piece of knowledge with me, and the radiance of [Truth] will illuminate your path forward."
The [Rite of Communion] for [Truth] was the pursuit of knowledge. Any unknown pattern or piece of information could bring a follower of [Truth] closer to the "Truth."
And for followers of [Truth] who possessed support or defensive skills, receiving His protection required sharing knowledge with His followers.
Cheng Shi's eyes darted as he quickly shared a nugget of knowledge.
"Inserting a finger into the rectum and performing rotational massage for thirty seconds can effectively suppress hiccups."
"?"
"?"
The moment Cheng Shi finished sharing, both women before him froze in place.
The cutesy girl's expression was spectacular, hard to tell whether it was fear or revulsion. Either way, having a player of opposing faith be this much of a pervert was genuinely a threat to personal safety.
She shuffled two steps sideways, pressing closer to Fang Shiqing.
As for Fang Shiqing, she sensed the radiance of [Truth] surging toward Cheng Shi, which meant he hadn't been making things up. This was genuinely real.
"How… did you discover this?"
"Ah, I'm a doctor. Empirical knowledge comes from practice."
"A doctor in real life?"
Cheng Shi didn't bat an eye. "Don't I look like one?"
Though Cheng Shi's implication was that he had practiced on others, Fang Shiqing's gaze still couldn't stop drifting toward his backside.
"…Thank you. Most educational."
She forced a smile and, taking the cutesy girl with her, disappeared into the changing room without a backward glance.
Cheng Shi laughed and left to begin his own investigation.
The players had roughly divided the tavern into zones. Cheng Shi was assigned the entire eastern section of the first floor, about a dozen tables.
Chatting up strangers was an incredibly tedious endeavor, especially for someone as socially anxious as Cheng Shi.
He grabbed a serving tray, swiped several bottles of wine from the tables of patrons who were dead drunk, and launched his own wine-delivery service.
At each table he approached, he delivered the same earnest pitch: this was today's promotion, complimentary wine from the boss. Then he'd ask the patrons how their drinking was going, whether they were having a good time, and if they were, could they share a juicy piece of gossip as payment for the free bottle.
Truth be told, Pilus wine was anything but cheap. Seeing the house treat them to a round, the patrons were delighted and eagerly shared every scrap of hearsay they'd heard.
After all, they were already bragging anyway. Spinning one extra tale in exchange for a free bottle was a fantastic deal, too good to pass up.
And so Cheng Shi became a gossip vacuum, sucking up information wherever he went.
In no time at all, he had absorbed every piece of gossip this town called "Brooks" had to offer.
"The town started out as the fiefdom of the Duke of Brooks. Later, as refugees poured in, it grew into an administrative township. But word has it the town mayor wasn't appointed by the King at all. He's a refugee impostor. Don't ask me how I know, that's a secret."
"Even the town's Chief Justice is a refugee impostor."
"They even impersonated strippers. The noblemen didn't realize the dancers were all men until the clothes came all the way off and the equipment was on full display."
"They were still very popular, though. At least more popular than the original dancers."
"How come your boss has suddenly gotten so generous lately? Could he have been replaced by an impostor too? What, you're going to report it? Come on, friend, isn't generosity a good thing? At least you're making money too."
"The refugees flooded in from Gasmela. Word has it that subterranean faiths were spreading through the Tower of Reason. They started a civil war and expelled the faith heretics, and then those people fled to Pilus. That's old news from ages ago, why are you asking about that?"
"There are more refugees than citizens now. The Duke is troubled, but at least the nobles like them. Quality goods at bargain prices."
"Gossip? What gossip? Does York buying the services of an orc girl count? Word is, after that night, York even called out her name in his dreams. You ask who York is? He's the Duke's stable boy. Sits at that table right over there, see him? The most pathetic-looking one…"
"Strange, isn't it? York suddenly has money for women and booze? Doesn't he still owe your boss a fortune?"
"…"
An hour passed. Cheng Shi had gotten so absorbed in listening that, were it not for the pocket watch chiming, he would have kept right on going.
This was fascinating. Way more interesting than a trial.
What's that? You ask why a socially anxious person like me enjoys communicating this much?
I'd argue that a social terror should also count as socially anxious, right?
But a trial was, in the end, a trial. Having found nothing abnormal, Cheng Shi had no choice but to return and regroup with his teammates.
When the six players gathered around the table once more, everyone's face was etched with gravity.
Except Cheng Shi.
He was having the time of his life.
"Why the long faces? Did anyone spot anything wrong?"
A Ming shook his head with pursed lips. Fang Shiqing frowned in deep thought. Even Huang Bo, who had been scratching his scalp nonstop, had gone still this time, head hanging as he brooded over something.
"Based on past experience, within a single memory scene, there should be some errors that aren't very obvious yet still leave detectable traces. But this time, Xu Lu and I listened in on virtually every table, including the second floor, and found no NPCs with 'overly stiff' logical gaps. They all seem perfectly normal, normal to the point of not feeling like people in a memory."
"Same here. I even used my talent to sense their inner states. Very calm, very orderly. Not at all like people in a memory."
"You can read minds?" Cheng Shi blinked, suddenly intrigued.
A Ming quickly shook his head: "No, no, just a vague feeling. I can't go into specifics."
Cheng Shi nodded and turned back to Fang Shiqing. He suspected this curly-haired teacher had a similar ability, and a stronger one at that.
Seeing Cheng Shi's gaze, Fang Shiqing deflected with a question of her own: "What about you?"
"Me? No discoveries. But I did collect a mountain of gossip. Want to hear it?"
"…" Recalling the trivia he'd shared earlier, her mouth twitched, and she turned to the others instead.
"Brother Huang?"
"Mm… headache… nothing! And there shouldn't be!"
Both Fang Shiqing and Cheng Shi frowned at these words, the same thought rising in their minds:
Oh no. This old man is a follower of [Chaos].
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