Chapter 330: Into the Wilderness

After this happened so many times, Hwi no longer wanted to provoke Byeol.

Joo Joowon had naturally noticed what was happening, but he had no intention of interfering.

First, they had not reached the point where they wanted to kill each other. They had not even actually started fighting, so the situation was not serious. Second, if he stepped in to help, he might actually make the conflict between them worse.

A triangle was a very stable relationship. Leaning toward either side would not be good.

Byeol was extremely jealous, while Hwi looked like he had a carefree personality. However, one should not forget that he was still an emotionally unstable neurotic cat who could very likely go crazy at any moment. If things became serious, it really would not be easy to clean up the mess.

They simply had not found a new way to get along yet. Once they found one, everything would be fine.

After Joo Joowon finished washing up and putting on his equipment, he casually opened a package of bread with a short shelf life and began eating it for breakfast.

The moment Byeol saw Joo Joowon acting like this, he knew that Joo Joowon was about to go out. He hurriedly pulled Hwi aside and began giving him some emergency training.

Hwi pricked up his ears and listened seriously. From time to time, he even let out a cry as if asking a question, and the two of them went back and forth in conversation.

Joo Joowon saw this but did not pay much attention to it. Instead, he was very pleased, thinking that Byeol could still be relied on at critical moments.

By the time Joo Joowon finished breakfast, their conversation had also ended. Byeol knew that he could not help much with hunting for the time being, so he did not insist on going out with them. He simply sat at the door and watched them.

"We’re leaving now. I’ll leave the house to you."

Joo Joowon crouched down and rubbed Byeol’s head before taking Hwi and leaving.

Joo Joowon left the territory and entered Hwarim directly from the back mountain.

Before this, although he had lived in Sabi City ever since graduating from university, he had never come anywhere near this area. He did not even know exactly where the base of the Hwarim Nature Reserve was. He only had a vague general impression of its approximate location, but he was not sure where it actually was.

He was naturally someone who preferred quiet and disliked going out. Once the weekend came and he had time off, he was even less willing to go outside and make trouble for himself.

Therefore, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Joo Joowon had absolutely no idea what kinds of animals lived in the nature reserve or what he should pay attention to after entering the wilderness.

So although he was going there to uncover the map, he did not plan to travel too far in one go. He wanted to avoid encountering some kind of special situation that would prevent him from returning home in time.

The map within his field of vision was covered by a mass of fog. The blue dots representing allies overlapped with one another, like sharp swords cutting through the fog. They were deeply buried within the layers of mist, emitting a faint glow.

The markers displayed on this map were divided into four categories: party members (blue), allied forces (green), neutral forces (yellow), and hostile forces (red).

However, not every living creature would appear on the map. It only marked supernatural creatures. Therefore, if there were any lifeforms nearby that were below Level One, they would not be marked on the map.

In addition, if an enemy possessed some kind of special concealment item, or if they were simply very skilled at hiding themselves, they would also be impossible to detect on the map.

Joo Joowon had seen players on the Player Forum specifically designing anti-detection equipment for maps and other exploration tools. Therefore, he would not completely trust the information displayed on the map either. He only intended to use it as a reference.

The range displayed by the map was also not very large. It used the map’s owner as the center and covered an area with a radius of five meters. Although the map outside that radius would still be displayed, it would not indicate whether there were any enemies in those areas.

With this limitation, the map’s actual function was essentially reduced to helping him find his way, greatly lowering its importance.

However, Joo Joowon had also paid attention to the Lord Forum and learned that this kind of map could actually be upgraded. Its detection range could be expanded, but the cost was extremely high. It was considered a high-end product that could only be equipped on troops going out to battle when necessary. It consumed a huge amount of money, so it could not be kept active all the time.

Joo Joowon did not have many additional requirements for the map’s functions. As long as it could be used to find his way, that was enough.

The environment in the forest was complicated, and it was very easy to get lost without knowing the way. The map would always mark the location of the territory, so in the future, when he and Hwi separated to hunt, he would not have to worry about them getting lost either. Well... that was assuming they could understand how to read it.

The map was not a 3D model that recreated the real world scene exactly. Instead, it had a relatively realistic 2.5-dimensional style. For Joo Joowon, it was very easy to distinguish the mountains, the trees, the water, and the roads that was displayed on it, but for Hwi and the others, that might not necessarily be the case.

In fact, even until now, Hwi had never paid any attention to the game’s functions.