Chapter 1

Unfamiliar ceiling.

Roland opened his eyes and saw a huge female statue above his head, with a black rocky surface that seemed to have a faint green glow, but upon closer inspection, nothing could be seen.

He sat up and found himself lying on a blue stone platform, which resembled a medieval sacrificial altar, with a cold and rough surface.

The air was filled with a peculiar fragrance. He looked around and noticed that under the statue of the goddess not far behind him, a bundle of strange herbs was burning, which looked a bit like mugwort, but the edges of the leaves had additional serrations.

Wait... fragrance?

Is there really a fragrance? And a sense of touch? Roland touched the sacrificial altar again, feeling its rough and cold surface, and sniffed hard. This time, he not only smelled the strange fragrance of the burning herbs but also the slightly astringent stone scent in the air.

Is this really a virtual online game, not a hypnotic state? And it feels so real... Roland looked at his hands, which were white and delicate, fitting the image of a spellcaster.

He pinched his arm, feeling a slight pain... but it wasn't obvious. This wasn't surprising, as the official announcement before entering the game had already stated that the pain in the game was only one-tenth of that in reality.

Roland stood up on the stone platform and looked around. This was a stone building with a statue of a goddess, a sacrificial altar, and several rows of neatly arranged stone seats in front. From the layout and furnishings, it appeared to be a small chapel.

Jumping off the sacrificial altar, Roland examined his body. He was wearing a rough, gray-brown linen outfit that was very uncomfortable. His feet were in ugly linen shoes with extremely thin soles, and he could feel the cold and piercing stone beneath them.

So real... Roland sighed, touching the sacrificial altar. The real stone texture, the grains on the surface that his fingertips could feel, were no different from reality. He hadn't expected the game to be as real as the company had advertised, not just a VR inferior product that deceived the senses.

When did our country have such exaggerated black technology... and it was the first to be applied to games by the company. Roland was deeply impressed. The 50,000 yuan virtual cabin was worth it.

He was about to continue observing the surroundings and adapting to his new body when the old wooden door of the chapel opened.

With the creaking sound of old wood, an old man with a hunched back walked in. His eyebrows were white and long, hanging down to his thin cheeks, and his eyelids drooped almost covering his pupils. He wore a white robe with a large green tree emblem in the middle.

Before entering the game, Roland had reviewed the basic knowledge of this game world on the official website. If he remembered correctly, this outfit was the standard uniform of the Church of Life, typically worn only by priests of the Temple of Life.

The old man was first surprised to see Roland, then showed a relieved expression.

The brief change in expression, whether the muscle movements on his cheeks or his eyes, was indistinguishable from a real person, not at all like a game NPC.

In previous VR games, no matter how realistic the characters were, the change in expressions was always a weakness of NPCs. Even with muscle texture capture, the expressions of NPCs, no matter how rich, would give a sense of the uncanny valley when switching.

But now, Roland felt he was facing a real person... it couldn't be another player.

He quickly dismissed this thought. He was among the first to enter the game, and it was impossible for players to become priests so quickly. Most importantly... players could only enter the game as young humans, not as an elderly person.

But the old man was so lifelike that even without speaking, just standing there and looking at him, Roland felt he was a real person.

The eyes, the posture, the tightness of the skin when the muscles moved, the age spots, the yellow and dry skin, and even the faint pulsing at the temples due to blood flow.

Roland was not a professional in game development, but he had played many games, from the Pac-Man of old to the current high-quality VR games. Even though modern games could make NPCs look lifelike, they still lacked the most crucial element.

Soul!

Just standing there, the old man gave the impression of a living person with a soul, not a cold and lifeless data NPC in a human-like shell.

Is this a guide NPC? The official website didn't mention any guide NPCs... Roland, with his doubts, took the initiative to speak to the old man: "Hello, old man, where is this place?"

The old man, upon hearing Roland speak, was stunned for a moment, then waved his hand and slowly spoke in a language Roland had never heard before.

Even though he couldn't understand, Roland could tell from the old man's expression that he was saying: I don't understand what you're saying!

Damn! Roland felt a toothache and cursed the game developers in his heart. They were too perfectionistic, even setting different languages for the NPCs in this world? If the official website's introduction was correct, this game world had dozens of human countries and dozens of different races. If each country and each race had its own language, how much work would that be?

If that was the case, what game companies like Blizzard and Ubisoft would be mere newbies compared to the giant penguin.

Despite his inner curses, Roland thought of a solution. He remembered that when creating his game character, he had pre-learned a level two spell: Comprehend Languages.

Because he had played many sandbox games before, in which, despite everyone using the same language and script, due to the game's settings, players from different countries or factions would see gibberish and hear "beep beep beep" if they didn't know the other's language or have a language comprehension skill.

His rich gaming experience came in handy, making Roland feel lucky. He called out the system in his mind, a bit awkwardly at first since virtual games were different from VR games, but he quickly found the magic book option, opened the magic skills, found Comprehend Languages, and locked it with his mind.

Then a strange number line diagram appeared before his eyes, with many blue nodes.

A blue node similar to a starting point began to glow, then emitted a red light, shooting towards another node. The speed was very fast, almost instantaneous.

Is this a spellcasting route diagram?

Just as Roland was thinking this, he saw the red thread between two nodes suddenly tremble, and the frequency of the vibrations increased rapidly. As the vibrations sped up, Roland felt his head becoming increasingly painful.

What's happening?

Roland had been playing games for twenty years, but this was his first time playing a virtual online game, and he had no experience. He didn't know how to handle this situation.

A few seconds later, the red line finally broke in intense vibrations. By then, Roland's head was already in excruciating pain, as if needles were piercing his scalp.

At the moment the red line broke, Roland's consciousness was ejected from his game body. He then saw, with a loud crack, his game character's head explode.

The headless corpse fell heavily to the ground, and the screen was splattered with "mosaics" everywhere.

Roland's consciousness, like a transparent soul, stood beside the corpse, his face numb with shock, unable to react.

The old man's hair, face, and clothes were covered in "mosaics," his toothless mouth wide open, looking utterly bewildered.