Chapter 360: Verdant Covenant

This wasn’t the cheapest candidate Joo Joowon had found. However, after taking the price into account, Kang Taewoo was one of the most versatile options among the available candidates. Hiring it offered the possibility of getting several kinds of work done while paying for only one service.

It was difficult for Joo Joowon not to feel tempted by such a deal.

After eating his own terrible cooking for so long, he genuinely missed the takeout food he used to order and the delicious, affordable dishes sold by the little eateries he used to visit.

The recruitment interface contained not only some basic information about Kang Taewoo, but also a full body picture of it.

It could be said that Kang Taewoo seemed to belong to an entirely different art style from the vast majority of living creatures. It looked more like a creature that could only exist in a virtual world. To put it bluntly, it was an anime-style character.

Despite being a living creature that truly existed, its appearance was that of a stuffed toy.

It wasn’t like the people who wore mascot costumes in the real world before the apocalypse. Instead, it looked more like a teddy bear from an anime, with a distinct line of stitching running down the middle of its body. The colors on its left and right sides were sharply divided, with the stitching serving as the clear boundary between them.

It had the classic red and black color scheme, and it was also wearing a leather apron similar to the kind that butchers wore.

Although the apron itself was white, the dark brown bloodstains on it, combined with Kang Taewoo’s already bizarre appearance and strange color scheme, made it look perfectly suited to play a monster in a horror movie. No one would find that strange at all.

The most important thing was that, although it could be described as a fluffy creature, there was no visible fluffy texture to its body. It looked just like those neatly outlined, two-dimensional characters in anime.

This was especially true of its hands and feet. They were completely different from those of a real teddy bear. Instead, they resembled animals drawn in anime, where an oval shape or something similar was enough to represent a hand or foot. There were no paw pads or anything of the sort.

Joo Joowon could not help wondering whether this was a species created by the game itself, or whether such strange creatures actually existed among extraterrestrial lifeforms.

After thinking about it, he felt that it would be perfectly normal for such creatures to exist somewhere in the universe. They were aliens, after all. There was no rule stating that they had to look like "humans." Perhaps they really were some kind of "two dimensional" lifeform.

For all he knew, they might even think that humans were the ones with bizarre appearances.

With that thought, Joo Joowon stopped paying attention to these details and focused instead on matters that were more important.

The Verdant Covenant faction was not hostile toward the Astral Palace. Although it was not among the allied factions, it still maintained friendly relations with the Astral Palace, so recruitment was permitted.

However, this alone was not enough to put Joo Joowon at ease. After all, he did not know the Astral Palace all that well either, so he went to the major forums to search for information about the faction’s reputation.

After looking through the discussions, he gained a general understanding of the situation.

To put it simply, this faction only recruited transcendent beings who loved nature. It had a large number of Druids and other nature related professions, but its reputation was extremely divided.

The positive reviews were mainly directed at the laid back members of the faction.

They believed that everything in the world had its own natural laws of development. Aside from getting close to nature and farming, they rarely did anything else.

They did not care if forests were destroyed, nor did they care if rare natural treasures were harvested. Instead, they happily stayed in their own little worlds, farming and researching new species without interfering in anything.

They were somewhat similar to scholars from the past who enjoyed cultivating new species. Some of them also worked part time in medical care.

They could more or less be considered an absolutely neutral faction, and their professions usually belonged to paths such as the Life Path, which was useful for farming and other related activities.

The negative reviews, on the other hand, were mostly directed at the radicals.

As a fairly large faction, Verdant Covenant certainly did not lack combat power. It had its own armed forces to deal with external threats, known as the Verdant Covenant Order.

Most members of the Order belonged to the War Path, and many of them were radicals who believed that no one should be allowed to destroy even a single blade of grass or tree in the world.

However, even though they belonged to the radical faction, they did not actually kill living beings. Instead, they believed that everyone deserved to be "redeemed," so they would force people to farm, grow flowers, and experience the wonders of nature.

To many players, wasn’t there something wrong with these people?

They wanted to control everything under the heavens, and now they even wanted to control whether other people stepped on flowers and grass?!

Of course, when it was said that they did not kill living beings, this did not mean that they had never killed anyone. Even animals had their own food chains, after all, and they certainly would not interfere with those.

What this meant was simply that they would not kill people because of differences in their beliefs. They would only try to reason with others.

After all, there were plenty of people whose beliefs clashed so badly that they would actually draw their weapons against one another, wishing nothing more than to kill the other party as quickly as possible.

However, when the transcendent beings of Verdant Covenant could not win an argument, the laid back faction would choose to coexist despite their differences. They would remain carefree and refuse to get involved. As long as the other party did not come looking for trouble, they would not care.