William Harper walked over and saw dozens of cards scattered in the swirling white mist. He grabbed them all, picked up the spear that had fallen to the ground, then snorted coldly and said unceremoniously, “Never turn your back on an engineering guy—he just might... shoot you from behind!”

William Harper gave the middle finger, grinned slyly, and his whole demeanor exuded an indescribable sleaziness. It was only after a few minutes that he suddenly sensed something was off.

That line just now was way too “off-key”—not something a proper straight guy like him should say.

William Harper scratched his head and thought to himself, “Good thing no one heard what I just said.” Just then, he heard a system prompt: Your heroic feat of killing the enemy has been recorded by the system and saved as an achievement...

William Harper was stunned for a moment. He really hadn’t expected that this alien-tech game would have such a considerate feature. He hurriedly found the recent achievement record and deleted the clip of himself proudly saying, “He just might... shoot you from behind!”

He wiped his sweat, still unwilling to give up, wanting to return to the village to take a look, muttering, “Maybe the people are gone, but the quests are still there. I could pick up a few more newbie quests!”

William Harper finally managed to climb over half a mountain again and saw the now silent village.

Not long ago, this place had been quite peaceful, with villagers coming and going. Now, it was completely deserted—not even chickens, dogs, or livestock remained alive. This made William Harper feel a twinge of sadness, even though he knew that those who died here might not really be dead, and those who died might not even be people. But because this world felt so real, it was still hard to accept.

Following the prompts on the light screen, William Harper walked around the village. To his surprise, he actually picked up seven newbie quests and completed them easily. However, when he saw the remaining twenty-eight newbie quests on the light screen, he couldn’t help but sigh deeply. The seven quests he could complete didn’t require interacting with villagers, but the remaining twenty-eight all required talking to them.

Now there wasn’t a single living person in the village—not even any corpses. They had all dissipated into white mist.

Chapter 9: The New Village Chief’s Trial

William Harper frowned, thinking to himself, “I wonder when the villagers will respawn. Am I supposed to just wait here? I have to work early tomorrow, so I need to rest soon. I can’t waste too much time here.”

William Harper went in and out of every house in the village, hoping to find more clues. After two or three hours of busywork, he hadn’t made any progress on the newbie quests, but somehow he had triggered four hidden quests, one of which was even a chain quest.

While searching for clues in the village chief’s house, he didn’t know what condition he had triggered, but a prompt popped up on the light screen: “The village chief has disappeared. Would you like to accept the trial for the new village chief?”

William Harper didn’t think much of it and accepted it offhand.

When he checked this hidden quest, he realized that the new village chief’s trial overlapped heavily with the newbie quests, including all of them, plus more than a dozen hidden quests not listed in the newbie quest list—a total of forty-nine sub-quests.

Another quest was triggered when he had searched the entire village and entered the last household. The light screen displayed: Huangjia Village’s layout is not in accordance with feng shui. If you can redesign the village layout to bring favorable weather and good harvests, the population can double. Are you willing to help the villagers?

Reward for this quest: The newly reborn Huangjia Village can provide free healing for players. When players return to Huangjia Village, all negative statuses, serious injuries, poisoning, curses, etc., can slowly recover without any medicine.

There were two more quests: one was to open a private school in the village, where you could serve as the teacher yourself or hire an outside instructor; the other was to build an escort agency in the village, which would allow merchant caravans to come and do business. Both quests offered generous rewards—the former could increase the innate constitution of a character card, while the latter allowed you to hire escorts for half price to protect your goods.

Innate constitution is one of the main attributes of a character card and a decisive hard metric for card quality.

Take the shrew Mrs. Thompson as an example. Her main stats are as follows—

Character: Shrew (Mrs. Thompson)

Quality: Commoner

Star Level: ☆

Level: 1/10

Constitution: 5.8

Martial Arts: 3

Lifespan: 38

Card Slots: Martial Arts (1) Item (1) Special (0)

As a standard commoner card, her lifespan is thirty-eight, meaning that if she isn’t killed, she can live for thirty-eight more years. Her total innate constitution is only 5.8, which is quite low even among commoner cards, though the maximum for a commoner card’s innate constitution never exceeds ten.

She has only one martial arts slot and one item slot, with no special slots.

This set of Eighteen Shrew Techniques, Mrs. Thompson has already mastered to the peak, which gives her three martial arts points. Since she has no equipment, the martial arts value provided by equipment is zero.

Innate constitution affects the performance of martial arts. The same martial arts equipment can have vastly different combat effectiveness depending on the character card.