He Wuning lowered his eyes and thought for a moment before speaking. “System, open the communications interface.”
Q-chan immediately responded, “Coming right up—who does baby want to chat with?”
He Wuning stared at it in silence for a moment. “Just in case, let me ask first. Is there no way to get the old mechanical female voice back?”
“Hehe. After Awakening, all the things the original System handled are now taken care of by me…”
Before Q-chan could finish, He Wuning suddenly frowned. “Quiet.”
He pressed Q-chan down and looked toward the city in the distance. Monsters did not actively invade the city, so the urban area was also known as the “safe zone.” Someone was now walking out of it.
They appeared to be a group of teenagers, boys and girls alike, carrying weapons such as metal pipes and baseball bats. The yellow-haired boy at the front had a gun tucked at his waist.
He Wuning narrowed his eyes. He had a gun.
Once it became clear that the people trapped inside the white fog could not evacuate, the authorities posted numerous guides on the Spectator Forum to improve everyone’s chances of survival. There were wilderness-survival guides, crash courses in grappling, encyclopedias of prey weak points, and all sorts of other strange things. In addition, the troops sent in to protect civilians brought weapons with them in the hope of increasing everyone’s chances of survival, including firearms.
Of course, dangerous weapons like those were not simply handed out for free. A person had to make a meaningful contribution—for example, publishing detailed information on a particular monster’s weaknesses and how to defeat it, or supplying food and other resources.
He Wuning owned a gun, which he had received in exchange for providing intelligence about monsters.
He had always been an independent player on the frontier-clearing front line, allowing him to obtain monster intelligence faster than most people. He had no interest in hoarding it, either. At regular intervals, he passed the information along through an intermediary, and before long the corresponding guides would appear on the Player Forum, with the other party dutifully adding, “Intelligence provided by He Wuning.”
He had no idea how that kid had gotten hold of a gun.
He Wuning gave the group a quick once-over. Player levels were publicly visible inside the game-occupied zone. Most of the teenagers were somewhere in the teens before Awakening; only the yellow-haired boy and the girl had already Awakened. The yellow-haired boy was at a higher level, while the girl was only Level 1, clearly having Awakened very recently.