"I won't be able to sleep tonight because of your evaluation of me."

"That's all." Sheh ended the conversation cleanly, withdrawing his praise very quickly. "Don't look at me, look at the new system. It's started capturing people who have just died and putting them into the game. Where will these dead ghosts stay after they finish the game? There are no guides yet, and the number of people monitoring the black mist is far from enough. You need to find more people. Every day that drags on will be a day of trouble."

Shi Jinzhe felt a headache coming on as soon as he heard this. He painfully issued instructions to the system to find all these people first and notify him when they were all gathered.

The dungeons are unlocked tier by tier, with some dungeons used for assessments interspersed among them, and the game officially resumes operation.

Shi Jinzhe chose a world without human inhabitants as a transit point among many worlds, and used his skills to build a city, where new players have already moved in.

These players, who are pulled into the game by the system at the moment of their death, will live here unless they are in a dungeon, until they accumulate one million points.

Meanwhile, the survival game's app icon changed in the dead of night, unnoticed by anyone, from a simple pyramid to a snake-shaped symbol with two intertwined S's, still in gold and purple.

The first people to discover it were completely bewildered, but others were not. Anyone who had dealt with Sheikh recognized that the icon was exactly the same as her earring.

To their surprise, they also received an invitation.

Two days later.

Jiang emerged from a dark passageway, where an ornately carved golden door appeared before her. The invitation in her hand floated into the crack of the door, and then the golden door opened.

Inside the black, enclosed space was a long walnut table with dozens of chairs on either side, and rows of white ceiling lights illuminating the entire space.

There were already people inside. Upon seeing Jiang Jin, one of them raised his hand and greeted him with a "Yo~".

"What are you doing here?" Fu Guan asked, noticing her straightening up. "Just you?"

Fu Guan said, "The others haven't arrived yet, let's wait."

Jiang pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him. "It's so unreal. When I saw that invitation and the icon, I thought I had been to jail. How come the world outside has changed so much when I came out?"

Fu Guanzai: "Is it really that exaggerated?"

Jiang Zi: "You haven't entered the dungeon these past two days?"

He shook his head. "No."

"You'll understand when you enter the dungeon. Jiang Yinxue told me that several of my teammates are dead." Jiang clicked his tongue and corrected himself. "You can't really call them dead. They were briefly resurrected and are no different from being alive. If they hadn't died too early and revealed a little bit of death aura, it would have been hard to notice anything amiss."

Fu Guanzai: "Have they changed the way they bring people into the game?"

Jiang Jin: "Right? I don't know how you did it, but looking at it this way, your scepter that ran away with Shi Jin can be considered to be living a good life now. You don't need to worry anymore."

"Ha, even the scepter I ran off with is living a good life, why aren't you and Jiang Yinxue doing the same?"

"Maybe he won't run off with someone else."

"Excuse me…"

Jiang Ling and Jiang Yinxue turned their heads together and saw an unfamiliar face, an older woman.

"Did you all come with invitations?"

"Yes." Not half a minute after Fu Guan finished replying to her, two more unfamiliar young faces came in.

He and Jiang stopped chatting. More people came in later. He greeted those he knew briefly, and kept silent if he didn't.

At the table, acquaintances discussed the changes in the game, while a few others whispered about the icons, discussing Shekh or Shijinzhe.

Jiang Yi listened and thought to himself that there wasn't enough time, and they had run out of time to find someone to help them, so this was probably a fish that slipped through the net and couldn't speak.

She exchanged a glance with Fu Guan, and saw him nod, confirming that he thought so too.

Because someone who can gradually upgrade their cards to become a high-level player is unlikely to have low emotional intelligence or IQ, and wouldn't do something that would be a disgrace, like discussing the host's private affairs on someone else's turf.

Ten minutes later, Gao Fei, who was the second to last to arrive, looked left and right for an empty seat.

There were only two empty seats left at the long table, and Fu Guan's seat was empty on both sides, so she had no choice but to randomly pick one to sit down, sighing as she did so.

“If you really don’t want to sit next to me, you can sit anywhere else.” Fu Guan gestured for Gao Fei to look at the head seat at the far end, “That’s spacious.”

"No need, I can tell who's the king and queen. If I sit next to you, at most I won't get a card. If I sit over there, I might lose both my card and my person."

Jiang Ziya, sitting across from him, gossiped, "You two know each other?"

Fu Guanzai: "I don't know her, but her dislike for me was quite obvious, so I couldn't help but offer my opinion."

“I’m sitting here because everyone at the table has a problem with you,” Gao Fei couldn’t help but say.

"Young people always have such energy when they speak."

A refined-looking man walked in through the door, a gentle smile on his face, and walked steadily toward this place, taking a seat on the other side of Fu Guan.

Fu Guan glanced at his shadow as if it were unintentional, then looked at the shadows of the others, and calmly looked away.

The golden gate closed, and footsteps echoed from the deep darkness.

Jiang couldn't help but complain, thinking that these two were acting all mysterious and quite convincingly.

She propped herself up on her elbows, her face resting on her hands, and when she saw Shekh without the ribbon, she blinked and stared blankly for a long time.

She was like a mysterious muse in a millennium magazine, inspiring people with her splendor and extravagance. But as beautiful as she was, she immediately gave people a sense of separation from the people at the table, as if they were from different eras. Upon closer inspection, Shi Jinzhe also had that feeling.

"Everyone."

Time was running out, and his knuckles clattered on the table.

Jiang Yi snapped out of his daze and heard him say, "The invitation letter has already stated the purpose of inviting you here: to monitor anomalies in this world, especially those related to the black mist. If you are willing, you will be given special items that allow you to monitor anomalies. The reward is an additional skill slot and three dungeon exemptions. It's not a difficult thing. Is there anyone who is not willing?"

When the time is right, get straight to the point and don't waste a single word.

Someone raised their hand: "Monitoring anomalies is fine, the problem is how to deal with them after they are discovered. I've seen black fog before, it disappears in a flash. If it's discovered in multiple locations at the same time, one person per world isn't enough."

Shi Jin turned back to him: "There won't be many black mists in your world, and there won't be any in anyone here."

The black mist has invaded many parts of the world, making it difficult for all living things to survive. He and Shekh will personally deal with it. The people who came today will not encounter this kind of tricky situation. The purpose of having them monitor is to facilitate the analysis of the source.

"And what about you?" The other person first looked at Shekh, then at Shi Jinzhe. "What's going on with the game now? Why are you the one informing us to do these things?"

"Because I've taken care of the system." Shekh let out his tail, making no attempt to conceal his inhuman identity.

Her tone was devoid of any emotion, sounding even colder than the old system's mechanical voice.

"So you do whatever he tells you to do."

The man avoided her gaze, turned his head to look elsewhere, and said cryptically, "You're really lucky."

"What makes you envious of my good fortune?" Shi Jinzhe asked knowingly, and then kindly offered an answer as if answering a multiple-choice question: "Being able to curry favor with powerful figures? Getting married? Living off a woman?"

"Aren't they all the same thing?"

The man turned back, a hint of disdain in his eyes, "Anyway, it's all just relying on women to bully others."

"So what?" Shi Jinzhe's expression remained unchanged, his tone indifferent. "So what if I'm just a kept man?"