Chapter 3: The Typhoon Strikes

Chapter 3: Chapter 3: The Typhoon Strikes

[Shelter: A precarious Level One shelter. (Your shelter is dilapidated and pathetic. I didn’t even want to grant it Level One. If I may be so bold as to ask, where’s your door?)]

[Congratulations, Player 138138, for unlocking the first skill, Level One Architect. Reward: Treasure Chest x1. It has been placed in your backpack.]

[Architect (You’re a joke of an architect. And again, if I may be so bold... where’s your door?)]

Shi Zhile: "..."

’How bold!’

’Asking once would have been enough, but it had to ask a second time.’

However, she didn’t plan on changing it for now. She would deal with it after the typhoon passed.

Her stamina had dropped to 72.

There were nine minutes until the typhoon’s arrival.

She drank some water, ate about half a compressed biscuit, then opened [Chat] and waited quietly for the typhoon’s arrival.

The message count was still 99+, as if the feed had never stopped scrolling.

[Player 4567: What do I do? I still haven’t found a place to hide from the typhoon. I can feel the wind picking up, and the sky is getting overcast.]

[Player 2333: Don’t we still have a few minutes? The wind is picking up over here, and it’s starting to drizzle. It’s a barren island with no houses, so where are we supposed to hide? This stupid game just wants us to die right from the start.]

[Chosen One: Wait, everyone’s saying there’s wind, but what wind? I huffed and puffed my way across the whole island and finally managed to build a shabby Level One shelter, and it’s still calm and sunny out. Are we even in the same game?]

A flood of question marks appeared in the channel.

Immediately after, many people reported that their islands were also calm and sunny.

Shi Zhile stood pressed against the giant rock. She looked up at the sky; not only did she feel no wind, but she was actually sweating buckets from the sun’s heat.

Three minutes until the typhoon’s arrival.

She continued to study the chat feed.

[Wenwen Wennuan: Calm and sunny? Calm and sunny my ass. My island is covered in hills and valleys. I’m standing on a peak right now, and you know what I’m seeing? Huge waves... no, it’s practically a tsunami. They’re crashing ashore one after another. It’s terrifying.]

He posted a video. In it, the sky was blanketed with dark clouds, so gloomy it looked like it was about to collapse.

The waves were enormous, crashing against the hillside and washing away piece after piece of loose rock.

It didn’t look like a typhoon; it honestly looked like a tsunami.

Once one person posted a video, all sorts of other videos quickly followed.

Some showed rain, some showed snow, and others showed bright, sunny skies.

Soon, she noticed a pattern.

The players who weren’t experiencing any wind were the ones who had built a shelter. Even if the system deemed the shelter shabby and broken, it was still capable of blocking the wind.

Meanwhile, the players whose weather was turning bad were all out in the open—on flat ground, in trees, on mountaintops, and so on.

It was one thing not to have a shelter, but they were being so conspicuous it was as if they were afraid the typhoon wouldn’t be able to see them and blow them away.

’The typhoon warning is real. The system wanted players to panic and hastily build their shelters anywhere they could.’

’A shelter is a matter of a player’s survival. Are they trying to cause a massive number of deaths?’

With one minute left until the typhoon, a player finally pointed out this discovery.

But it was too late. The pinned system message had changed.

[Novice Period Warning: The typhoon is here! The typhoon will pass in two hours. Players, do your best to survive!]

The number of messages in the chat instantly dropped by half. Many people slowly started typing question marks, asking where the typhoon was.

Shi Zhile hadn’t encountered the typhoon either, but she cautiously remained inside, sitting down against the giant rock to rest.

Her panel appeared on its own, unsummoned. It was broadcasting live footage of various islands being battered by the typhoon.

The howl of the wind mingled with the torrential rain as seawater surged inland, destroying everything on the islands like a stampede of beasts.

Trees snapped, and beneath one, a player was pinned, bleeding profusely.

Shi Zhile watched with a blank expression, her fingers curling into fists. Her mind raced. ’If that were me, how would I save myself?’

Before she could come up with an answer, the panel went black.

[Player 138138 detected conducting a mental simulation. Would you like a real typhoon to assist?]

"No, no, no! I don’t need that!"

’What kind of masochist would I have to be to need a typhoon’s help?!’

[Island is free of natural disasters. Shelter has been detected to have no door. Player is advised to...]

Shi Zhile got up and walked expressionlessly to the western stone wall.

Following the edge of the giant rock, she dismantled about a meter of the stone wall to create a doorway she could walk through.

The moment the opening appeared, the system seemed to choke, instantly falling silent.

Now that there was an opening, Shi Zhile could see what was happening on the rest of the island.

The island was far from calm. On the contrary, the wind was howling, and a small tree near the edge of the island was torn from the ground, roots and all.

The seawater surged, dragging the tree into its depths.

The calm weather was just an illusion. The only windless place was inside the shelter!

She backed away into a corner and quickly sent a message to the chat channel.

’Why would the system provide false information? Was it trying to get players killed?’

If the system hadn’t taunted her about the island’s safety and the lack of a door, she wouldn’t have created an opening, and she would never have known a typhoon was actually hitting the island.

’Was the system using this as a chance to tip her off?’

’Wrong!’

’It was indirectly telling her that it was a total troll!’

’A veteran troll who specialized in messing with *her*.’

She didn’t know if other people’s systems were like this, but hers had, without a doubt, always had a snarky, annoying tone.

She remembered that it hadn’t finished what it was saying.

"System, you were saying?"

[...]

She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, but Shi Zhile thought she heard a faint "Hmph!"

’What a classic tsundere!’

Her body wasn’t tired, but she was mentally exhausted. The pinned message in the [Chat] channel hadn’t changed, so she wasn’t in a hurry to go outside.

She sat leaning against the giant rock, closing her eyes to rest and think.

As the sun began to dip toward the west, a long-awaited notification arrived.

[Novice Period Warning: The typhoon has passed. The natural disaster has ended!]

Shi Zhile breathed a sigh of relief. She glanced outside, and only after confirming the wind had died down did she open the chat again to check the messages.

The messages were flooding in again.

Or, to be more precise, the people who hadn’t experienced the typhoon had never stopped sending messages in the first place.

[LifeFuckedByADog: Thank god that expert gave us a heads-up, otherwise I’d have been blown away for sure.] ℯℯ𝘭.

[SpringEye: My shelter has a spring. Any players who need water can contact me for a trade. Food is what’s most needed right now. On a side note, all the trees on my island are protected, so I can’t chop them down. I’m not here to be a player; I’m here to be a lumberjack on strike.]

[Frozen: Help, help, help! My Ice Island has mutant penguins! I built my shelter right in their nest. If I hadn’t run fast enough, they would’ve insta-killed me. My Life Value is down to fifty-one! Does anyone have medicine or weapons? I’ll trade ice blocks for them!]

[BigWindmill: You can use wood to build houses and upgrade your raft. My island is covered in pre-chopped lumber. PM me if you need any.]

[VolcanoEruption: [Image] [Image] It’s a volcano! See the lava? It’s scalding hot! Even the typhoon winds were warm. Thank god it didn’t erupt. If it had, I would’ve been a goner!]

Many people posted messages making fun of his unlucky Constitution, but Shi Zhile didn’t see it that way.

A volcano meant a source of fire, and if lava existed, it surely had its uses as well.

As long as you could build a good, fast boat, a volcanic eruption wouldn’t necessarily be a death sentence.