Jay immediately sent Red towards the knights territory to begin its scouting operation.
He thought he would have sent more skeletons, but it was safer to have his skeletons with him; he was in a dungeon after all.
Anything could happen.
Thankfully, Red had found no enemies in the surrounding forests so far.
Not even any animals - still no exp.
Jay didn’t know if this dungeon was meant to be this desolate, but it was odd - a thick forest like this one having no animals. It was only comparable to the blood-vine bear’s territory.
Jay went back to the stone hut that the villagers let him use.
It was the only hut with a wooden door - yet none of the villagers looked at him with jealousy; it was more like a look of suspicion that he received.
Inside the hut was a pile of wood covered in some sort of long grass in one corner.
And that was it. A sorry excuse for a bed.
There was nothing else except dirt.
It seemed that nearly everything had been removed, not that it looked like there was much anyway; the brown sacks the villagers had carried out looked mostly empty.
A nice touch was that there were no gaps in the stone-mud walls, and no windows either, which was surprising as the other houses seemed like they would blow over in a slight breeze.
With the wooden door shut, hardly any light made it inside.
All things considered it was quite a study construction, but Jay thought it was strange at how air-tight it seemed. It was nothing at all like the other houses.
Sick of carrying the black cube around, he stashed his bag there, as he realised the information gathering was going to take a while, and that he would have to stay here for the night anyway since even reaching the edge of the knight territory would take a day.
It was no wonder there was time dilation in this dungeon.
In the dungeon it was already midday, so he quickly left to question the two other people that the village leader, Grundel, had pointed him to for information.
Apparently the next one had experience fighting a knight, but barely escaped with his life.
Approaching the man, Jay was surprised as he was even skinnier than most of the others.
As for wounds, it seemed like there were none on his body. Jay already doubted the story about him.
“Hello, I’m Ja-”
“I know who you are. Come with me, I haven’t had a visitor in a while.”
“Ah. Okay.” Jay followed him.
The man led him inside his hut and began talking with him about numerous topics - in fact, he talked so much that hours had passed.
Some of the information was interesting, some was annoyingly irrelevant, and finally, Jay got frustrated enough to ask directly.
“Look. I just want to know what level the knights are? What weapon do they use? Magic? Any armour?”
“Level - what’s that? Weapon? Well, if you need a weapon I’ll give you a spear but you have to do some digging for me.”
The man gave Jay a toothy grin, eyeing a spear in the corner.
“What weapons do they use?” Jay asked directly and sternly, stressing each word slowly.
“Ah,” he scratched his chin, “swords mostly, and not wooden ones either.”
“Finally,” Jay shook his head, almost laughing maniacally.
Something was wrong with this guy. He was purposely avoiding Jay’s questions and not even doing it tactfully.
The stress and tension Jay felt from this one man dodging his questions and rambling on made him want to stab him to death, and then kill himself as well.
“Now, you don’t know what a level is?” Jay questioned.
He shrugged his shoulders.
Jay was getting more and more annoyed, and he soon remembered an experiment he planned: what would happen to a dungeon-human if you told them they were in a dungeon?
Would their minds explode? Would they go crazy?
If there was ever going to be someone to experiment on, Jay decided it would be this guy.
Jay began to cut loose, describing the man’s current situation with as many devilish details as possible.
He left nothing out. He really wanted to ruin this guy’s mind and leave him as a convulsing mess of existential dread on the ground.
“...You’re in a dungeon. A fake reality connected to the real world. You’re nothing but a puppet in a fake world. If I leave and come back, your entire life and memories will reset, and you will forget even meeting me. You’re trapped here unless someone like me, from the real reality, can somehow break you out. I enter your world to kill things and get stronger, sometimes getting rewarded by my deeds in these dungeons. You’re nothing more than a plaything to me.”
The man’s eyes glazed over and his jaw dropped, but Jay ruthlessly continued, his evil grin growing more with anticipation.
“Your entire life is a lie. You’re probably not even real. If I kill you, then leave this dungeon and come back again, you will come back to life as if nothing ever happened. Even the sun in this sky here is fake. I could torture you a thousand times and you wouldn’t know. Everything you know up until this point is probably a lie, all the memories you have are lies, implanted in your mind. There is no past, and there will be no future. You’re caught in a never-ending loop of hunger, whittling a fucking wooden spear, and digging up soil. Everything is an illusion and you’re acting out a never-ending play. You probably don’t even have a conscience.”
“...Also fuck you.”
Jay added one last remark, hopefully right before the man went crazy.
The man still looked at Jay dumbly, but his sunken and starved eyes looked like they were staring into an abyss.
After a moment though, he suddenly shook his head.
“Huh?” he asked, snapping out of it as if nothing ever happened.
Jay raised a brow, wondering what just happened to him.
“Never mind.” Jay shook his head, smiling at the pitiful man and leaving his pathetic stick hut.
“Seems like there’s a mental barrier or something.” he shrugged, and continued his information gathering.
“That guy probably talked the knights to death. I don’t see how someone so deluded would survive the knights, especially since he looked weaker and skinnier than everyone else. The story is probably made up since all he does is wag his fucking jaw.”
Next, Jay headed to the last person.
The last person seemed as uncaring and indifferent as the first guy; silent and stoic.
He didn’t even get any new information from him.
All three of them had something in common though - they seemed to have a problem answering questions, but they just had different tactics.
Jay couldn’t help but feel like he was being hindered from learning anything.
The villagers also watched him suspiciously, a few following him around with some jagged stone daggers fastened to their tattered clothes.
Jay was already suspicious of the villagers at this point, but he made an effort not to show it.
He decided to try something different and approached a random villager who was carrying a basket of dirt.
“Excuse me, do you know anything about the knights?”
The villager seemed frightened and gazed at Jay as if he were meeting a king. They backed away, looking around at the other villagers.
All eyes were on them as they placed their basked down and ran off into the huts.
Jay frowned as he watched.
“Why does he seem so scared…” he wondered.
It was afternoon now, and Red had still not found any prey in the forest as it ran towards the knight’s territory.
Of course, it was a day’s journey and Red had only been travelling for a few hours - it wouldn’t reach the knight territory early in the morning.
Jay walked towards his stone shack, planning to use the host skill on his skeleton, but just before entering, a sweaty-looking villager approached him, blocking his path.
“Jay, you are invited to a feast with our leader, Grundel.” he panted and pointed away, almost seeming desperate.
He really didn’t want Jay to refuse, it seemed.
More odd behaviour.
It was clear that something was wrong with this village, and Jay believed there was probably a knight spy or someone pulling the strings and making the people live in fear - though he didn’t think these weak, starving villagers would have the balls to attack him.
The most they would do would be to hinder his mission, even though he was trying to help them.
Jay guessed the spies were hoping to stall him long enough to have the knights mount an attack on the village, or to prepare some sort of ambush in the forest when he would set out tomorrow.
“Alright. Let’s go.” Jay sighed.
He glanced at the stone hut, sighed, and followed the sweaty man who now looked somewhat relieved.
Jay wondered though, if someone was a spy, who could it be? To him, all the villagers seemed suspicious, unhelpful and untrustworthy.
He couldn’t help wondering: What would they do tomorrow when he would try to leave?
