Free Web NovelNot to mention a child like Liu Jiayi—even an adult like Bai Liu had his shirt soaked through with sweat. Squatting down to catch his breath, he wiped the perspiration dripping from his right cheek before lowering his head to estimate the amount of flowers inside their burlap sacks.
“Less than thirteen hundred blossoms.” Bai Liu lifted the sack and gave it a shake. “At roughly two grams per flower, even with the two of us working nonstop for an entire hour, we’ve gathered less than three kilograms.”
Liu Jiayi had originally been leaning back with her hands braced behind her, resting, but the moment she heard Bai Liu’s estimate, she sat bolt upright.
“At this rate, wouldn’t we have to work fifteen straight hours without sleeping or resting just to exchange for one bottle of low-grade perfume?!”
She had cleared quite a few Level 3 games before, but this was the first one that had truly reduced her to manual labor.
In previous games, Liu Jiayi had always been the team’s treasured healer, protected and pampered by everyone else. Her role had mostly involved tactical thinking or high-level combat support—in other words, she had always been the nurse, the support unit.
Never in her dreams had she expected that her very first game with Bai Liu would throw her into such a brutally hardcore, soul-crushing laborer plotline.
Liu Jiayi collapsed backward in despair and stared blankly at the night sky.
“When the fuck is this ever going to end? We even have to work our way up to becoming Factory Managers! At this rate, how many damn years will that take?!”
“When I had a real job, I asked myself the same question every day,” Bai Liu replied in a ghostly tone. “Later, I discovered there’s only one ending to work: death. Or worse—getting laid off.”
Liu Jiayi: “...”
Bai Liu, exactly how much trauma did corporate life leave you with?
She silently sat back up and let out a weary sigh.
“So what do we do now? If we can’t get the perfume—and it’s obviously a key item—we’re definitely going to run into trouble later.”
“I don’t think we need to wait until later.” Bai Liu removed the black gauze mask from his face.
Inside his right eye, a gorgeous budding rose slowly unfurled its green stem and leaves.
“We were already contaminated while picking the roses.”
Liu Jiayi froze, then immediately lowered her head and pulled off her burlap gloves to inspect her hands.
Her clouded gray eyes couldn’t clearly see whether roses were blooming inside them, so she couldn’t judge the contamination that way.
But there was another method.
The instant she removed the gloves, Liu Jiayi sucked in a sharp breath.
Black cracks resembling fractured stone had spread across the backs of her hands and fingertips. They crawled past her wrists, connecting together like overlapping flower petals inside her palms.
“I thought we wouldn’t be contaminated until after using the perfume for the first time.” Liu Jiayi pressed her lips together. “We kept the masks on the entire time while picking and never touched the roses directly. Aside from that moment inside the factory, we didn’t even smell any strong fragrance. And when we first left the factory, we weren’t contaminated yet.”
She frowned deeply.
“So the contamination definitely happened in the flower field. But the scent there is nowhere near as intense as it is inside the factory.”
Liu Jiayi pulled her gloves back on, covering the cracks that continued spreading through her flesh, then looked up at Bai Liu.
“But why? Isn’t the contamination supposed to spread through scent?”
“Based on our current condition...” Bai Liu said quietly, “it might not spread through scent at all.”
The rose inside his right eye continued to bloom in silence. Thin black cracks spread around the socket, yet his left eye remained completely normal.
Liu Jiayi stared at him, brows furrowed.
“That’s the strange part. Your left eye is perfectly fine, but your right eye has a rose growing inside it. What does that even mean? Halfway contamination through a transmission vector? Meanwhile, both of my hands are already starting to wither.”
Bai Liu lowered his eyelids slightly, hiding the budding rose within his right eye, and answered softly:
“I don’t know. Let’s wait and see.”
—Do not let your right eye bloom with desire.
That was what Tawil had warned him.
And Tawil had also told him to beware of roses.
Bai Liu’s gaze drifted toward the endless sea of blooming roses stretching across the flower field.
Bathed in pure white moonlight, the roses swayed gently in the night breeze, as though willingly offering themselves to be picked. There were no sharp thorns on their stems. They looked delicate, elegant, entirely devoid of aggression.
Aside from being the raw ingredient used to create that soul-bewitching perfume, these roses appeared utterly harmless—beautiful enough to intoxicate anyone who looked at them.
By all logic, they should have been the least dangerous thing in the entire dungeon.
And in a sense, they were.
Bai Liu and the others had harvested roses for so long, yet the flowers had neither triggered the Monster Book nor actively attacked them.
Bai Liu put the dirt-stained black mask back on and turned toward the field.
“At this contamination rate, we probably won’t even survive fifteen hours before we start withering.”
“It’s not just withering. We’re being alienated.” Liu Jiayi opened her system panel.
Both her Health and Mental Value were steadily dropping—and the Mental Value was falling far faster.
The two exchanged a silent glance before simultaneously taking out bottles of Mental Bleach.
Just as they were about to use them—
[System Notification: Within this game, Mental Bleach cannot restore Mental Value.]
[Within the game “Rose Factory,” only the perfume brand “Dried Rose Leaf Gas” can restore a player’s Mental Value. If the player fails to complete the task within the designated time and obtain Dried Rose Leaf Gas perfume, they will gradually develop perfume addiction as their Mental Value decreases, eventually transforming into a monster incapable of rational thought~]
Liu Jiayi’s expression darkened.
“Our Mental Value is being forcibly capped.”
The rose inside Bai Liu’s eye trembled slightly as its first petal unfurled completely. The cracks around his eye socket deepened, but his voice remained calm.
“So the perfume really is a critical item.”
—
Elsewhere in the flower field.
Tang Erda crouched inside a dirt pit, breathing heavily as he rested. He had already discarded his mask. Roses had bloomed inside both of his eyes, their petals slowly opening, while gray-black cracks resembling dried earth spread petal by petal across his face.
At first, Tang Erda had believed the mask could slow the contamination.
But after discovering it was fundamentally incapable of blocking the fragrance of the dried-leaf roses, he had simply thrown it away in order to increase his picking efficiency.
Bracing both hands against his knees, Tang Erda tilted his head back and drained a bottle of Stamina Recovery Agent. He wiped his mouth and looked toward the bulging burlap sack # Nоvеlight # beside him.
It looked enormous, but it only contained around eighty jin—roughly forty kilograms—of roses, yet the sack was already stretched to bursting.
If he wanted to gather more, he had to unload them at the small tent nearby. The workers had already explained that flower pickers wouldn’t have their harvest weighed and settled until the following day, so once a sack was full, they had to temporarily store the roses elsewhere.
The worker stationed there had specifically told Tang Erda that the unloading point was the tent in the middle of the flower field.
At the same time, he had warned him to beware of refugees stealing roses at night.
“The roses stored in the tent aren’t necessarily safe,” the worker had said with obvious disgust. “There are always greedy, filthy poor people driven mad enough to come steal them.”
But Tang Erda, a veteran player with extensive Level 3 experience, already had a solution for situations like this.
A massive inventory of items.
As a player who had traveled through countless timelines, the quality and quantity of Tang Erda’s Level 3 item stockpile surpassed nearly every major guild in the game by an entire tier—with the sole exception of the mysterious inventory possessed by Killer Sequence.
Relying purely on the reward items accumulated across all the timelines he had cleared, Tang Erda possessed enough strength to overwhelm the majority of low-level guilds outright.
That was precisely why so many top guilds were willing to pay exorbitant prices to recruit him into their battle teams.
It wasn’t just because of Tang Erda’s terrifying personal combat ability.
It was also because of this near-unmatched item inventory.
Tang Erda emptied the roses into the small tent, bent down, and stepped back outside. Then, without hesitation, he tossed down a Rubik’s Cube.
Ripples like flowing water spread outward from the ground, rising on all sides before connecting overhead, sealing the entire tent inside a perfectly enclosed tetrahedral barrier.
[System Notification: Player Tang Erda has used the item “Magical Space.” This space is currently under the player’s control. Only individuals authorized by the player may freely enter or leave.]
After setting the barrier, Tang Erda turned and walked away without another glance.
Although this item had failed to trap Bai Six in reality, Tang Erda was absolutely certain that, aside from monsters on Bai Six’s level—people capable of forcefully finding loopholes in game mechanics—ordinary Level 3 monsters would never discover a way inside.
Ever since entering the game, Tang Erda had been searching for Bai Six.
But within this map—sixteen thousand acres of endless flower fields, countless nearly identical tents stationed around the edges, and scenery repetitive enough to drive people insane—finding a player skilled at hiding and exploiting mechanics to escape pursuit, especially someone like Bai Six who delighted in toying with his opponents, was far from easy.
After all, Tang Erda still hadn’t even managed to regroup with the other three members of the Kings Guild.
The map was simply too massive.
And with every structure looking almost identical, it was absurdly easy to lose your sense of direction.
Especially while your Mental Value was plummeting with no reliable way to recover it.
Walking through this map felt like downing two bottles of ninety-six-proof vodka before stumbling into a spinning crimson kaleidoscope—dizzying, nauseating, disorienting enough to make anyone want to vomit.
The visual pollution alone was practically psychological warfare.
Tang Erda had encountered similarly designed games before.
Aimlessly wandering through maps like these was extremely dangerous.
The moment a player strayed outside their assigned work area and wandered into a monster’s territory, finding the way back became incredibly difficult.
And more often than not, the player would lose their mind from endless wandering before they ever returned.
Clearly, this was a game specifically designed to attack Mental Value.
Tang Erda understood perfectly well that he could never beat Bai Six at a game of hide-and-seek.
So he decisively gave up trying.
Instead, he chose to focus on completing the task first and wait for Bai Six to eventually enter the factory as well.
Finding someone inside the factory would be far easier than locating them in this endless flower field.
As for whether Bai Liu could flawlessly clear the game—
Tang Erda had never doubted it for even a second.
In fact, he might have trusted Bai Liu’s ability to clear this Level 3 game more than Bai Liu himself did.
Especially because this game—Rose Factory—was connected to the Rose Gas from reality.
Tang Erda lowered his gaze toward his palms.
The skin there had already cracked down to the bone, yet not a single drop of blood flowed out.
Inside his deep ocean-blue eyes floated pale roses that continued slowly blooming.
The second petal unfurled.
And the base of the first petal gradually darkened into crimson.
[System Notification: Player Tang Erda’s Mental Value has fallen to 89...]
—
Author’s Note:
2 (thinking deeply): Bai Liu will definitely finish the task. I have to work faster and complete it before him!
(furiously picking flowers while gasping for breath)
6: Liu Jiayi, do you think we can finish this? ƒrēewebnovel.com
+1: Probably not.
The two of them immediately sit down at the sidelines, sipping tea while watching poor laborer No. 2 work himself toward insanity.
2: ???????? Aren’t you afraid your sanity will drop?!
6 (firmly): Nothing in this world destroys my sanity faster than working.
+1: ...
Good children, don’t learn from No. 6 and slack off at work.
