Authentic! Fantasy! Adventurers!

"Adventurer codename?" "Death Frenzy Sword Princess." "Gender?" "Male." Giving a brief pause, the camp registrar's expression remained unchanged. "Please read and confirm whether you agree to abide by the '430 Adventurer Agreement' and the 'Non-Disclosure Agreement.' Here is the printed copy..." "Accepted." "Please present your adventurer badge." Masked, Yaxiu pulled out a round badge and swiped it across the check-in device's glass screen. The screen illuminated green. The registrar nodded. "Mission registration complete. Please enter." With virtually no obstacles, Yaxiu stepped smoothly into the Observation Point 53 camp. A coarse earth wall thirty meters high sealed off the inside from the outside. In the exact center of the camp stood a tall tower, and at the tower's summit was a deep-blue vortex—the objective of Yaxiu's journey: a Level 2 Void Realm turbulence passage. All vegetation inside the camp had been leveled, replaced by rows of benches. Many adventurers gathered in groups, chatting casually, pulling out flasks they carried with them to talk grandly about the world before popping a pill of moon sugar and convulsing all over—booze plus sugar was better than heaven. From time to time, loud shouts rang out: "Flame Troupe over here!" "Hungry Wolves, assemble by me!" "Falga, Falga! Has Falga from the Pallbearers still not arrived?" Apart from these rowdy people, there were also quite a few lone wolves like Yaxiu—cloaked in standard-issue mantles, wearing masks, watching coldly and mysteriously from the sidelines. This chaotic spectacle was the panorama of warzone adventurers. When he had looked up information on adventurers on the Curtain, Yaxiu had practically wanted to applaud the Blood Moon Country for its sublime mastery of exploitation—under a social atmosphere of 'human rights and freedom' and 'racial equality,' the military expenditures required for conscription were simply too exorbitant. So after running the numbers, the Blood Moon Country had decided to scrap the military altogether! Three hundred years ago, the Blood Moon Country had disbanded its armed forces, transitioning entirely to the warzone adventurer system. The so-called adventurer system meant the warzone issued missions, adventurers undertook and completed them, and then received compensation from the warzone. The relationship between the warzone and the adventurers was merely one of commission. Adventurers came and went freely, and theoretically, they could indeed shoulder a portion of military functions. The greatest advantage of the adventurer system, naturally, was that there was no need to pay for training, no need to handle logistics, and no need to provide pensions. If an adventurer died, it had nothing to do with the warzone. If an adventurer felt like working, they worked; if not, they could beat it. There was an endless line of people behind them eager to take on missions. The warzone had no reason to care about 'human rights' in the slightest. After all, it wasn't even an employment relationship—just a temporary, consensual commission. To put it simply, forming an army was too expensive because soldiers had to be treated as human beings. Hiring adventurers, on the other hand, only required treating them as tools, completely avoiding wasted money on extraneous factors like 'race' or 'human rights.' As a result, costs plummeted dramatically. In the first year the adventurer system was implemented, military expenditures dropped by eighty percent. And the most delightful part was that converting from conscription to the adventurer system had virtually no negative fallout for the Blood Moon Country. The underlying reason was that the Blood Moon Country had no rigid collective military needs such as quelling rebellions, defending borders, or conducting disaster relief. There being no rebellions went without saying. Setting aside the 'Forbidden Love Education' enforced by the Blood Moon Country, the chips implanted in the back of everyone's necks alone guaranteed that a large-scale rebellion could never possibly occur. The absence of natural disasters was equally normal; the Meteorological Bureau resolved everything long before any disaster could strike. As for Void Realm disasters triggered by sorcerers, those naturally had to be solved by sorcerers anyway—an army wouldn't be of any help. As for the borders, according to the Curtain, 'the Blood Moon Sovereign has already repelled foreign enemies for us,' meaning there was no need for an army stationed along the frontiers either. Matters such as maintaining public order, hunting down criminals, and preventing cults were the responsibility of the Sin Hunting Hall. Thus, only two functions remained for an army: serving as an emergency force, and suppressing the various Abysses across the realm. These duties could be entirely borne by adventurers. Therefore, after the military system transformed into the adventurer system, while efficiency did not increase, it did not decline either, and adventurer organizations stepped onto the stage of history. As organizations of violence, the adventurers' composition was extraordinarily complex. There were combat sorcerers dedicated to protecting the Blood Moon and honing their craft, opportunists seeking warzone resources, and even wanted criminals who came to the warzones to earn a living while evading warrants. Indeed, warzones were willing to shelter wanted criminals, and the Sin Hunting Hall would not enter warzones to make arrests. For desperate scoundrels who had committed heinous crimes in the cities, a warzone was practically their only sanctuary. For example, the Woodpecker Gang controlled by Xilin had a Woodpecker branch in the Lake View Warzone specifically meant to take in members who had brought about trouble. If 'Gold Beak' Ronald hadn't happened to be captured, he likely would have gone to Lake View to become an adventurer as well. Back when Yaxiu was in prison listening to Igola describe the adventurer system, he had also asked whether it would be possible to make a living in the warzone after breaking out—embarking on a glorious adventurer journey, earning merits while clearing their names, steering this bizarre cult-leader start back onto the orthodox path of a fantasy adventure. Yet Igola had coldly shattered his fantasy—the warzone didn't care whether you were a heinous villain or a pathetic brat guilty of racial discrimination due to bad breath, but the premise was that you had to possess a chip. Without a chip, a wanted criminal couldn't even enter the 'safe rest areas' provided by the warzone—as the name implied, this zone activated the 'attack prohibition' within an adventurer's chip, forbidding everyone in the safe area from attacking. Leaving aside the fact that Yaxiu was unwilling to implant a chip in himself, even if he were willing, there was no avenue to do so. Chip implantation was a monopoly of the Supreme Love Church; even the underground black market only provided purification services, never implantation. Consequently, for the five great villains who broke out of prison, there was no turning back once their chips had been removed. Moreover, the life of an adventurer was far from the idyll Yaxiu had imagined. Because warzones only accepted transactions using merits, no matter how much money you had, you couldn't live comfortably in a warzone; in fact, you would be fleeced to the bone. In the end, you would inevitably have to take up missions and kill monsters in the Waterway Abyss just to scrape by. According to statistics, novice adventurers had only a twenty-five percent chance of surviving their first year in a warzone. Even though the majority among them were those who couldn't endure the hardships and fled back to the cities to work, that survival rate was still horrifying. To accommodate an adventurer demographic with such complex origins, the warzones had also introduced the 'adventurer merits' system. All mission rewards were paid in merits, which adventurers could use to exchange for any reward within the warzone, including but not limited to sorcery spirits, miracle sorcery procedures, faction knowledge, and so forth. And best of all, merits were not registered to the chip, but rather to the portable adventurer badge. Adventurer badges were anonymous. As long as you could produce an adventurer badge, the warzone would redeem merits for you just the same, whether the badge was your own, found on the ground, or... taken by murder. When Yaxiu discovered this mechanism, he finally understood the Blood Moon Country's calculated intentions in promoting the adventurer system—with this single rule, it was impossible for cohesive adventurer factions to emerge in the warzones, fundamentally dismantling large-scale violent organizations at the root. As long as the warzone offered merit redemptions, suspicion would perpetually fester among the adventurers. How could the Blood Moon Country, which sought to extinguish even the basic unit of the family, ever permit the existence of a violent syndicate like an army? Although large organizations did not exist, small adventuring parties of five or six were countless; there were seven or eight in this camp alone. Seeing names like the 'Flame Adventure Troupe,' 'Hungry Wolf Team,' and 'Gale Brigade,' Yaxiu couldn't help but feel a pang of misty-eyed nostalgia—he truly had a bit of a yearning for such a fantasy adventuring life. To form a party with a few close, like-minded friends, set out on an unknown journey, experience epic tales, and then retire before thirty-five to marry and live peacefully in the countryside. Ideally, he hoped he could meet a beautiful and sexy lover, a virtuous and considerate wife, an intimate female confidante who truly understood him, and a vibrant, adorable girlfriend. And if they never met one another, that would be even better. Now that was an authentic fantasy story. Instead, what he got was arrest → prison break → fleeing across the border. How could this be called a fantasy story? This was clearly a cops-and-robbers crime story! There hadn't been any need to transmigrate at all; he could have experienced this exact same sequence just by embezzling company funds back then! Just as Yaxiu lapsed into another bout of adult melancholy, a commotion seemed to break out among the adventurers. A masked adventurer cloaked in a mantle claimed he had lost his badge, suspecting that the three men who had just walked past him had stolen it. The three naturally refused to admit it, even offering to let the masked figure search them. Just as the masked figure searched the first person, the man held his hands high, holding the adventurer badge in his right hand and tossing it to the second person right out of the masked figure's line of sight. Everyone around witnessed the scene, but nobody said a word; all watched the spectacle unfold. Malicious onlookers went without saying, but even the kind-hearted would never lend a hand—if someone could lose something as vital as a badge to theft, they would be better off giving up their adventurer career right then and obediently returning to the city to be cogs in the societal machine. The masked figure moved on to search the second person, who also raised his hands high and threw the badge to the third person. By the time the masked figure moved to the third person, the third threw it back to the first. The badge had effectively completed a full circuit among the three, prompting stifled chuckles from the surrounding crowd. The three simply wanted to make sport of the masked figure. In the end, having found nothing, the masked figure could only resign himself to bad luck and walk away. Just when Yaxiu thought this was merely a routine dose of worldly beatdowns, sharp cries of shock suddenly erupted from the three men. "Where's my badge? How is my badge gone?" "Mine is missing too! Damn it, it must have been that goblin bastard just now!" "Where did he go?! Find him, quick! My badge held the merits saved up to buy a sorcery spirit!" Beside themselves with rage, the three frantically searched for the masked figure from earlier. But there were far too many people wearing cloaks and masks here; once the masked figure slipped into the crowd, he melted into the sea of people. How could they ever find him? They even glared at Yaxiu, who stared back at them without the slightest fear. "Hahaha, I'm dying of laughter! I saw him swipe you idiots' badges while he was searching you earlier, but I deliberately kept my mouth shut! Hahaha!" "What are you glaring at? You couldn't even out-steal someone else, and you're still embarrassing yourselves here? Looking for a fight?" "We've had our laugh, so you can scram now." Members of nearby adventuring parties mocked them loudly, bursts of laughter echoing all around. The three men shook with fury, on the verge of tears from sheer grievance. In low voices, they could only mumble a few harsh words nobody could hear, before slinking off to the camp's fringes in disgrace. Just then, a goblin dressed in formal attire stepped onto the elevated platform. He was tall and handsome, with a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles resting on the bridge of his nose, and a top hat covering his hairless head. At a sudden glance, he looked almost like a fluorescent green elf. A mere goblin exuding an aura of elegance (Yaxiu was completely oblivious to his own casual racism)—who knew whether it was cosmetic surgery or natural? In any case, the Blood Moon Country's genetic optimization technology was peerless under heaven. "Good evening, adventurers. I am the recording officer for this mission, Gibot Mantras," the goblin said calmly. "There are only ninety minutes left until midnight. Entry and exit from the camp have been closed. We will now proceed to the combat preparation phase." "Being put in charge of an extra-realm invasion operation—such a risk-free, resume-padding achievement—it looks like this goblin is a candidate for parliament." From beside him, Yaxiu suddenly heard a remarkably familiar piece of armchair-political commentary. Puzzled, he glanced sideways at the cloaked adventurers around him, but could not tell who was speaking.