Super Righteous Player
Chapter 34 - 33 Cunning and Sly Annan_1

Chapter 34: Chapter 33 Cunning and Sly Annan_1

Players opened the "forum" and saw a slowly popping up LOGO.

[Frostwater Harbor Council Hall]

Once the loading was complete and the florid text gradually faded, what appeared before the players was a very clean forum layout.

There were only two threads, both posted by the super administrator of the forum "Annan," and they were both stickied and highlighted:

"What You Need to Know About the Mist Continent"

"The General Rules of the Frostwater Harbor Council Hall"

First, thread management provisions:

1. Muting, with mutes lasting three days, one week, or one month, no permanent mutes are set.

2. Players shall not actively use the topic hide/delete function, if needed, mention @Annan

...

First, look at the rules of the forum.

Players read through everything and found that there wasn’t much to pay special attention to. Although the game seemed very high-tech, the forum rules were not much different from those of other forums, simply prohibiting flooding, repetitive posting, profanity, necroposting, advertising, and other statements that violate local laws and regulations.

The only thing to pay special attention to was that the forum did not set permanent bans...instead, the corresponding most severe punishment was changed to "disbandment."

Disbandment meant deleting the game "Mist Continent" and forbidding to log in again.

That is to say, players could warn newcomers in the future, "Say one more word, and your account is gone."

Another thing was, for safety reasons, players were advised not to announce or share chat groups in the forum and not to organize offline activities. If discovered, they would be hidden or deleted, but not muted.

Thus, the players couldn’t wait to click on the other thread.

In this thread, they could see Annan’s user avatar.

It was the silhouette of a Tan Juan, reading intently with his head down.

"...Is it Tan Juan Geraint?"

Lin Yiyi let out a light exclamation, tentatively trying to download the picture—unfortunately, it was not possible.

She clicked her tongue, and then continued to read on.

First: Try to choose a short and catchy name. When addressing each other or introducing names, it will not be translated into the language of this world but will be called phonetically.

Second: Treat the whole world as a real world. Do not try to exploit or spread any form of bugs.

Third: ...

This thread was very brief compared to the other, mainly concerning what players could and couldn’t do in the game... but basically, there wasn’t much substance.

For example, "this game uses the Genesis engine, which applies 99% of the physical rules," "there are air walls set up in the beta version, please do not try to leave the area of Beihai," "in later versions the ability to travel to heaven and earth and new maps will be opened," and so on.

The important part was threefold.

The first point was that players must be careful with naming, job changing, and attribute points allocation since there are currently no items for name change or stat resets.

Although Lin Yiyi felt that this statement might be a bit late here. After all, players needed to create their characters first in order to see this forum... meaning they had to set their attributes and choose their names.

Was this to warn the players who would come later?

Lin Yiyi also saw in the thread that these forty people were the first batch of testers.

Since the game used a completely dynamic quest distribution mechanism, the batch of players in the second beta would inevitably have different initial quests. Because by then, the plot would have certainly moved forward a bit in time. And all of the subsequent missions were also not guaranteed to have a valid walkthrough.

The act of completing missions in itself would greatly change personal storylines or the world storyline. Therefore, Annan specifically warned—please pay attention to the timeliness of walkthroughs.

The second point was that the game’s instance mechanism would contain elements of Twisted, deformation, and psychological horror. Moreover, dying too much in instances could lead to irrevocable consequences.

And if you happen to have heart disease, high blood pressure, epilepsy, neurasthenia, or other illnesses...

...that’s not a problem.

You can enjoy the game without worry.

By the way, while Annan was fiddling with the players’ attributes, he discovered another thing:

He could, in fact, clear the players’ Erosion Degree.

He found the "Reset Erosion Degree to Zero" function in the player system management backend interface. Although he couldn’t adjust it incrementally, he could reset the player’s Erosion Degree to zero with one click.

Unfortunately, Annan couldn’t reset his own Erosion Degree for the time being...

But even if Annan could do this, it didn’t mean he would go ahead with it.

If it were treated as just a natively existing feature, players would be more careless when raiding dungeons. Moreover, it could distract Annan from his focus by being a task without any reward — and if Annan was not timely in dealing with it, he could even be criticized for no reason.

However, if approached in the reverse, there would be no problem at all.

Annan planned to place it in his reputation store, which was not yet open, as an extremely expensive special service option — requiring a significant amount of reputation points to access a "Purification Ritual."

If players got used to the idea from the beginning that dungeons were always high-risk, high-reward, and challenging mechanics, they would actually perceive them as more hardcore. And if someone were dissatisfied, other players would stand up to attack them instead.

How to make players unconsciously develop a sense of superiority is profound knowledge.

With mastery of this knowledge, one could please... or build up and then crush someone without leaving any trace.

Thus, if there really were players whose corruption level was too high and it led to problems, Annan could even offer a credit service — deducting their future favor in advance to purify them first.

As a result, the purified players would be very grateful to Annan, voicing Teacher Fan’s words: "Thank you."

It was the same task Annan had to deal with either way — he would purify the same people he planned to before. Yet, by simply repackaging what was previously freely available and putting a clear price tag on it, he would be perceived as "generous" for something people would thank him for...

The techniques of heart control are intricate enough to be called a spell.

And in this post, there was the most important part, marked in red to catch all players’ attention:

"Please make every effort to stay in character and do things that fit your identity. Do not attempt to incite or attack any faction leader on your side. Because each faction leader equally possesses the right to ’dismiss’ players (see Frostwater Harbor Town Hall General Rules), even though they might not know they have this power.

"After all the faction leaders are dead, the game will permanently shut down."

And the current sole faction leader is Tan Juan Geraint.

Frostwater Harbor is also the only faction players can currently choose.

That meant Tan Juan Geraint was like the players’ own father. They had to do everything they could to ensure his survival...

In fact, the faction leader setting was actually a fallback Annan had left for himself.

Only Annan knew that there was no such template as "faction leader" in the original system. He specially created this title...

...for his own alternate accounts.

The identity of Tan Juan Geraint might not last very long. Once exposed, he might have to leave Frostwater Harbor. So how could he ensure his control over the players?

That was by labeling the uniqueness of "Tan Juan Geraint."

It was not about the players obeying the commands of "Tan Juan Geraint" but rather respecting and protecting these "faction leaders."

Even if one day Annan switched to another alternate account, he could still control the players. He just needed to bestow his new identity with the title of "faction leader" to inherit what "Tan Juan Geraint" had established.

In other words, it was the players’ job to play the game.

It was Annan’s job to play the players.

This could also be considered a kind of asymmetric gameplay...

To ensure peace, players started various threads and vented in chat on the forum. The outward appearance was them following behind Annan at a leisurely pace toward Frostwater Harbor.

Annan left only two or three militiamen to protect himself. The rest were sent back to fetch people for work.

They had to move the captured Black Fire outside the city to where Annan’s ship was. Soaking the Black Fire in water and covering it with leaves could at least prevent it from exploding in the sun.

And then, they would look for people to put out the fire.

Although Annan had roughly contained the fire, his magical power was limited. There was no need to exhaust his magic on something ordinary people could do.

Since the area was far from the forest and Annan had set up a firebreak, there was little worry about a forest fire breaking out. Still, it was better to have some people keep an eye out and completely extinguish any remaining flames.

It was always better to be cautious.

— After all, he didn’t have to work the night shift himself.

Similarly, Annan didn’t tell them that he could actually extinguish the flames himself. When the militiamen arrived and saw that the fire had not spread, they would instead thank Annan for his pre-handling, which prevented the situation from worsening...

After Annan himself had just been forced to work overtime, seeing others running around frantically to work the night shift brought a strong sense of pleasure to his heart.

Let them work overtime, all they could.

"I need to arrange a place for you to stay."

Annan looked at the good-looking guys and pretty girls following him and was in a great mood, inwardly praising his own setup that allowed for "only upward beautification."

As they were nearing Frostwater Harbor, Annan cheerfully whispered to Lin Yiyi, who was closest to him:

"Do you have any specific requirements? Where would you like to live? I’ll keep an eye out for you."

"...I would like to ask, Master Tan Juan, are you living alone at the moment?"

Lin Yiyi fell silent for a while before asking in a low voice.