Chapter 176: The Rose Factory

Another player frowned as he approached Qi Yifang, interrupting his thoughts.

He was the player who had just been saved by Tang Erda after being unable to withstand the attack, and now spoke with a fearful gasp in his voice: " Brother Qi, I don't feel right ......"

Qi Yifang is the strongest player in the King's trio and is most likely to be in the King's core team. The other two players are more likely to talk to Qi Yifang about anything than Tang Erda, who is not familiar with them, and is quiet and nerve-wrackingly strong.

Qi Yifang withdrew her eyes from Tang Erda's side, turned to the player, and asked, "What's wrong? What's wrong?"

" Brother Qi, do you feel ......" the player's face was grave, "that the roses around us, little by little, are becoming less... ..."

Qi Yifang froze at these words, and the back of Tang Erda's attack behind him lurched, the gesture of withdrawing his gun pausing for half a second.

The two men glanced around in unison - the roses showed no visible signs of diminishing.

But this is not normal at all!!!

Because they had been attacking stragglers for three hours, the roses should have increased!

Qi Yifang's face also changed: "Did someone come to steal the roses? Bai Liu has come?"

They're patiently killing these crazy monsters in this space, waiting for Bai Liu to come and steal the exploding roses!

"Impossible, I have not seen any creature come near here except for the monstrous stragglers attracted by the smell of perfume. " Tang Erda retorted in one breath.

But after he had finished, Tang Erda's face turned a shade darker. He had been watching his surroundings, and if Bai six had really appeared to steal the rose, there was no way he would have missed it.

So who stole the rose?

In the distance, Bai Liu raised his binoculars and tilted the corners of his mouth as a mountain of dried leafy roses had built up around him, and was still growing, as people were transporting, or stealing, roses this way.

The people coming and going to help transport the dried leaf roses were ragged, but sane, stragglers!

The group of stragglers, by the look of their faces, was the same group that had attacked Bai Liu at the abandoned factory during the day.

The stragglers lurked silently in the ranks of the crazed stragglers attacking Tang Erda and the others, picking at the roses at the edge of the [Magic Space] with minimal movement, trying not to attract Tang Erda's attention or get within range of their attacks.

The rejuvenated exiles could remain relatively sober to the scent of the perfume and therefore did not attack Tang Erda in a confused manner.

While the four were distracted by the monster stragglers, the recovered stragglers unknowingly transferred a huge number of dried leaf roses to Bai Liu's side.

Bai Liu had previously considered using stragglers from the flower fields to help him steal from other flower pickers, but after talking to the stragglers at the factory and experimenting with them himself, Bai Liu realised that the stragglers who spent their days at the bottom of the flower fields were completely hopeless.

Even a higher concentration of perfume will not keep them awake anymore. The perfume stops their attacks briefly, their weakness, but there is no way to bring them back to their senses.

The group of stragglers that haunt the night have become outright dried-leaf rose symbionts, losing their souls as human beings - already full-bodied monsters, which is why they're in The Rose Factory's monster book.

But it's a good thing that Bai Liu found it at the factory, and that stragglers who are not deeply addicted to perfume can still recover their sanity - Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi guessed this too, otherwise the [perfume = mental bleach] setting would have been useless in the game.

The game does not make useless rule-setting.

" Mr Bai Liu, there are already 160kg of dried leaf roses here, may I ask if we have to carry any more?" One of the stragglers at the head of the group bent down respectfully, his face still violently wilted with lines, but his eyes were much clearer.

Bai Liu nodded as Liu Jiayi, next to him, was healing some stragglers who had been injured during the portage - these rose-stealing stragglers generally did not enter the heart of the battle, so their injuries were relatively minor and were basically fixed with a single drop of Liu Jiayi's antidote.

It was the healed stragglers who were terrified and overwhelmed by the fact that they could be healed - they hadn't been treated like human beings for a long time and the people in the factory called them pariahs.

The drifter who had reported to Bai Liu about the dried leaf rose hesitated for a moment, but looked up at him with a weak and hopeful face.

"I am grateful for your kindness in being willing to distribute free of charge the precious perfume to pariahs like us, who are going mad because we have no perfume, during the daytime in the abandoned factory, so that we can talk to you briefly with a human mind."

He pursed his lips, took a step forward, and inquired softly, apprehensively and nervously, "Please, if you will turn out to be abrupt and verbose, I would like to ask again in all sincerity, is it true what you said about being able to make perfume available to all our exiled exiles?"

"Of course it's true." Bai Liu put down the binoculars and turned without a moment's hesitation.

With the kind of smile that would give Liu Jiayi goosebumps, Bai Liu promised, "If you are willing to work with me all the way and support me to become the factory manager, I promise to make sure that all the stragglers will stop falling and live a normal life."

"Tomorrow I will also continue to distribute the perfume I have earned to you, so just wait for me at the usual location." Bai Liu said.

This dreamy promise caused a stir among the roses being carried, but they soon quieted down under Bai Liu's gaze and stared at him with disbelief.

"Of course there is one more thing to ask of you." Bai Liu said, "Please try to gather the stragglers around tomorrow and draw them in."

Bai Liu smiled and held out his hand, "I will also do my best to help them regain their sanity as well, and then we will all work together."

The roses in the leader's eyes were about to wilt as he looked at Bai Liu's outstretched hand, his skinned eyes wrapped in tears after the robbery.

He wiped his hands several times on his tattered clothes before carefully reaching out with a dry hand to take Bai Liu's.

"We believe in you!" He said, choking with tears and somewhat incoherently, "I, we would do anything we could for a good man like you who selflessly rescued us, we could give our lives!"

Bai Liu smiles with a holy light: "No need to thank me, we are working together, it's what I should do."

The drifter shook Bai Liu's hand, tears streaming down his face: "No, you, you only have so much perfume, and you've worked so hard to earn it yourself, and you've given it all to help us, it's really, you're such a good man!

Liu Jiayi silently looked at the 160kg of roses being carried over by the stragglers risking their lives in front of him, and then glanced far away at the four players still fighting in the distance, trapped in place by [Magic Space].

Eventually her numb eyes fell on Bai Liu, who was smiling with a spring in his step but had done nothing tonight.

"It's not very hard either." Bai Liu waved his hand and sighed as if in sympathy with the exiles, "Working for the capitalists and being sucked out by them, it's the same everywhere, and there's no time to enjoy it, so you might as well use the perfume you earn for a good cause."

Moved beyond words, the stragglers: "Woo-hoo! Mr. Bai Liu, a great man!"

Liu Jiayi: "......"

Bai Liu, really scary.

--------

As the day dawns, the roses in the flower fields gather their petals, the waves of stragglers that keep attacking finally stop coming in a steady stream, and the invisible transparent wall disappears at some point.

Qi Yihang fell to his knees in a weakened state as the last straggler was dismantled by a shot from Tang Erda.

His arms and legs were spasming and he couldn't stand upright at all - after hours of non-stop, fast-paced attacks, intense muscular and mental exhaustion could not be relieved by the best physical restoratives.

Even Qi Yihang, who has been trained by the Hearts devil in the [game pool] for some time now, struggled with the intensity of the battle overnight.

The other two players were also limp in the mud with vegetable faces.

Only Tang Erda, after retrieving her gun, was able to remain firmly on the ground, seemingly accustomed to such intense wheel-to-wheel combat.

Tang Erda lowered her head, gathered some roses, packed them in a few sacks and then carried them over her shoulder with one hand, saying coldly, "I'll take these, you'll share the rest, and the factory workers who counted my roses will be waiting for me in the flower field over there."

Then he walked away without looking back.

Qi Yifang watched Tang Erda's back as she left, dumbfounded. He reached out to stay but opened his mouth without knowing what to say.

He felt as if he should say thank you to the powerful hunter who had protected them all night, but the fact that Tang Erda had left coldly had made it clear that he didn't need "Qi Yihang's thanks".

This mysterious hunter gentleman's all-night protection of them seems to be simply out of a habitual, protective nature for the teammates fighting together around him.

The player next to him saw Tang Erda taking some of the roses away and quickly climbed up to count the number of roses.

Halfway through the count, the man turned to Qi Yihang in a bit of a daze: " Brother Qi, the number of roses we hit last night didn't reach eighty kilograms each, did it?"

"...... No, I counted halfway through and it's not even close." Qi Yifang propped himself up on the ground and sat up straight, rubbing his temples tiredly and asking in return, "What's wrong? Did that hunter take a lot of roses?"

"But it's also true that people played the most last night, more than eighty percent of the troop line was resisted by him, and it's only right that people take the rose weight that will finish the job ......"

What Qi Yifang was thinking was that the three of them probably didn't hit enough roses last night for 80kg, and with roses still inexplicably missing, the final tally was that the three of them on the King's Guild side had hit 80kg of dried leaf roses combined overnight.

So Qi Yihang thought that the only person who might be able to complete the mission would be the hunter.

" Brother Qi ." This player interrupted Qi Yihang dully as he held up the rose, "...... That hunter seems to have left enough dried leaf roses for each of us to finish the day, all of us."

Qi Yifang: "?!"

Qi Yifang was now genuinely shocked and sat up straighter, aghast: "With roses disappearing all the time, this hunter left us each with 80kg of roses?!"

The player replied to Qi Yifang in a bit of a trance: "Yes, yes."

"This hunter, just how many monsters did he fight alone ......" Qi Yifang muttered incredulously.

It was only after the three men had left Bai Liu's field of flowers and returned to their own that Bai Liu belatedly emerged from the shadows with Liu Jiayi.

Although the two of them stayed away from the flower fields last night to reduce the rate at which their spirits were contaminated, Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi did not wear perfume to restore their spirits last night either, which has left them both on the low side now.

But this problem soon became a non-issue.

The processors who came to Bai Liu's flower farm to settle the bill were shocked by the roses Bai Liu brought out.

He weighed the pile of roses three times in disbelief and then repeatedly looked at Bai Liu and Liu Jiayi, who were standing straight with innocent expressions, with a suspicious look.

"200kg of dried leaf roses?!" The processor looked incredulous as he raised one eyebrow in question, "You picked it in one night?"