Free Web NovelTang Erda took a deep breath, hefted the sack over his shoulder, and resumed harvesting roses at high speed.
His movements were swift and efficient. Though there was still a trace of awkwardness in the way he picked the flowers, the roses piled into his sack far faster than Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi’s combined output.
After all, Tang Erda was a physically strong man accustomed to hard labor. There was an undeniable gap between him and a child like Liu Jiayi—or someone like Bai Liu, a corporate slave molded by endless 996 office work in front of a computer.
But when Tang Erda’s sack had nearly reached half capacity, a sudden rustling sound erupted from the surrounding flower fields.
It sounded like some kind of creature crawling rapidly through the mud, countless limbs stabbing into the soil before pulling free again as it closed in on him at terrifying speed.
The wet, dense sound of greasy appendages piercing the ground instantly put Tang Erda on alert.
He spun around sharply.
A silver revolver appeared in his hand out of nowhere, the barrel already raised.
Tang Erda circled cautiously around the source of the noise. His thumb flicked the cylinder with a soft click as he cocked the hammer, the muzzle fixed steadily on the violently trembling rose bushes ahead.
The lush, vivid flowers shook continuously.
Something hidden beneath the soil was inching closer alongside the trembling stems.
At the same time, a thick smell rushed toward him—a rotting scent like decayed leaves left damp for far too long.
The shaking bushes crept closer.
Closer.
Until they finally stopped less than half a meter away.
Tang Erda lowered his center of gravity, body half-crouched in a combat stance. With his free hand, he slowly pushed aside the rose branches concealing the approaching creature, while the revolver remained unwaveringly aimed at the exact spot where the movement had ceased.
The thing hiding there seemed to understand it was being threatened.
For several seconds, it remained perfectly still.
But in the end, it lost to the irresistible fragrance coming from the roses inside Tang Erda’s sack.
A humanoid monster suddenly lunged out of the mud with a guttural snarl.
Its body was covered in dripping scarlet sludge. Beneath the mud, one could barely make out a human silhouette. Its flesh had split apart petal by petal, curling outward like blackened withered leaves.
Its bones resembled the stems of plants.
The decaying flesh hanging from them had dried, cracked, and peeled away, while the remaining skin had turned the same yellowed color as dead leaves.
Every step the creature took caused the leaf-like flesh hanging from its body to tremble violently.
As the mud slowly dripped from its face, its true appearance emerged.
Its eyes were sunken and pitch-black. Half the flesh on the right side of its face had completely withered away, exposing bare bone. Yet along the cheekbone, rows of dense white bone spurs writhed like budding flower shoots, as though they might bloom at any moment.
The monster lifted its collapsing eyeballs.
Inside them floated a pair of nearly faded roses.
Its mouth—rotted all the way to the gums and nasal cavity—opened wide as it let out a hoarse, distorted shriek through exposed teeth.
“I want perfume!! Give me perfume!!”
The writhing flesh buds protruding from its bones suddenly elongated into pale, fleshy tentacles riddled with breathing pores, stabbing toward Tang Erda.
In an instant, every exposed section of bone across its body erupted with squirming tendrils, each roughly the thickness of a thumb.
Tang Erda did not retaliate immediately.
He had deliberately been waiting for the monster to attack first.
Only after the monster initiated combat would the Monster Book activate. frёewebnoѵēl.com
[System Notification: Congratulations to player Tang Erda for triggering the Monster Book.]
[《Rose Factory Monster Book》 Updated — Dried Leaf Addict (1/3)]
[Monster Name: Dried Leaf Addict (Refugee)]
[Monster Description: Refugees unable to obtain low-grade perfume gradually begin to wither away. However, before completely fading, these refugees fall into a state of frenzy brought on by perfume addiction. Within that madness, they hallucinate that they are omnipotent...]
[In pursuit of one final moment of pleasure before death, these desperate and lowly addicts sneak into the flower fields that cultivate dried-leaf roses to steal harvested flowers. Unfortunately, the overwhelming stench clinging to their bodies prevents them from directly touching roses still growing in the fields, so they can only steal roses already harvested by flower pickers. Dear flower picker, beware of thieves stealing your roses.]
[Weakness: ??? (To be discovered)]
[Attack Pattern: Rose Theft (A+) — Uses tentacles to attack flower pickers and steal the fruits of their labor.]
The monster’s tentacles were extraordinarily long.
Sweeping strikes came from every direction, forcing Tang Erda several steps backward.
Still, he did not counterattack immediately.
According to the worker who had guided him here, there was definitely more than one Refugee monster hiding in the flower field.
Tang Erda intended to observe several more attacks first and fully analyze the monster’s combat patterns.
His agility stat was extremely high.
Ordinarily, dealing with an A+ rank monster would not have posed much difficulty.
But that confidence lasted less than a second.
As the monster launched another attack, one of the tentacles lashed past Tang Erda’s face, missing his eye by less than two centimeters.
And in that brief instant, Tang Erda noticed something strange.
The tentacle resembled the root system of a plant.
Across its surface were intermittent scars, as though something had once been attached there before falling away.
Tang Erda immediately understood what those marks were.
They were identical to the scars left behind after dried leaves detached from mature dried-leaf rose stems.
Exactly the same.
Those tentacles—
—were structurally identical to the roots and stems of the roses he had been harvesting.
Tang Erda’s expression darkened.
He retreated several more steps as realization struck him.
Without hesitation, he raised his revolver and fired.
The gunshot blasted the monster backward with a shrill scream.
But it was already too late.
All around him, more and more rose bushes began to shake violently.
As Tang Erda retreated, his foot suddenly sank into something soft and writhing beneath the mud.
He looked down.
Countless root-like tentacles twisted together beneath his feet like a mass of mating pythons, spreading outward through the entire undulating flower field.
Throughout the vast rose garden, silhouettes of Refugees slowly crawled out from the mud.
Their bodies swayed unnaturally.
Tentacles covered their faces and torsos, stretching deep into the muddy ground below, while the writhing tendrils connecting them to the roses made the flowers under the moonlight appear even more grotesquely beautiful.
These Refugees—
—were parasites nurtured by the dried-leaf roses themselves.
They had survived beneath the soil for who knew how long, breathing weakly underground day after day, staring at the outside world through rose-filled eyes, consumed by greed and madness as they waited for fully matured flowers to be harvested.
Eventually, even their skeletons had been parasitized by the roots.
And they no longer cared that their bodies were covered in scars left behind by fallen dead leaves.
The flower field transformed before Tang Erda’s eyes.
The dark red soil became a swamp of decaying flesh.
The slick crimson mud coating the ground was not ordinary earth at all—
—it was formed from the accumulation of countless dead “Leaves” shed by these Refugees and trampled into pulp over time.
Only the overpowering fragrance of the roses concealed the stench of rot beneath it.
The Refugees dragged themselves upward from underground, eyes forever fixed upon roses at the moment of death.
Like grotesque marionettes hanging upside down, they staggered toward Tang Erda step by step.
Tentacles burst from the ground and wrapped around his ankles.
Beside his foot, a human face emerged from the mud.
Most of its flesh had already rotted away, replaced by wriggling tentacles. More tendrils protruded from its open mouth.
The tentacles inside its throat constricted around Tang Erda’s ankle and began dragging him downward into the soil.
Its voice bubbled wetly through the mass of tendrils.
“Give me perfume!!”
“Give me roses!!”
The voices echoed together from every direction like a chorus of ghosts.
Under the glaring moonlight, Tang Erda gritted his teeth and fired at the tentacles wrapped around his ankle.
The instant they snapped apart—
—the second petal of the rose within his eyes bloomed.
[System Notification: Player Tang Erda’s Mental Value has fallen to 78. Please restore Mental Value with perfume as soon as possible to prevent mutation.]
—
At the opposite end of the seemingly endless flower field, beneath the pale white moonlight, Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi lay flat on the ground like two salted fish.
Neither of them moved.
Aside from the rise and fall of their chests from earlier exertion, they looked almost like corpses abandoned by the roadside.
“I’ve already rested for five minutes,” Liu Jiayi muttered. “I should probably get up and keep picking flowers.”
Bai Liu replied calmly without moving:
“Do you think resting five minutes versus ten minutes changes the fact that we still can’t finish the task?”
Liu Jiayi fell silent for a moment.
“...No.”
After all, the two of them had only managed to gather six kilograms of roses so far.
There was no realistic way they could harvest forty kilograms before dawn.
“Then we might as well rest a little longer,” Bai Liu said lazily.
Liu Jiayi: “...”
What is this outrageous slacker mentality?!
“You’re unusually passive this game, Bai Liu.” Liu Jiayi sat up and crossed her arms, narrowing her eyes at the completely motionless man beside her. “Normally, you’d already be trying some insane high-risk strategy to clear the stage. I refuse to believe you don’t already have a way to break the deadlock.”
Bai Liu squinted up at her.
“And I refuse to believe you don’t have one either. Which means /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ the reason neither of us is acting right now... is probably the same.”
Liu Jiayi went quiet.
Bai Liu turned his head back toward the night sky.
“First, we’ve already confirmed that neither you nor I can realistically obtain forty kilograms of roses through ordinary labor.”
“Since this route can’t clear the game, continuing to work is low-efficiency, low-reward, and only speeds up the contamination process.”
“After calculating the results from our first hour of labor, we already know this approach won’t work.”
“So there’s no reason to keep doing meaningless work.”
