Chapter 18: Have I Been Recognized?

When the new and old players swarmed into the game, Sykes stood quite naturally among the colorful group of newborn fish.

‘Very good, very perfect. Although a merman couldn’t possibly crawl on the ground like a new player and lose face, he could pretend to be an old player and swim reasonably.’

Sykes flicked his tail, about to go to the bottom of the quest board to wait for a rabbit¹, looking for teammates for an exploration team to act with.

‘?’

He flicked his tail again.
Something wasn’t right.

He flicked it again.

This feeling seemed familiar.

Sykes turned his head in confusion, only to find his tail being held in the palm of a certain crawling lizard.

The merman: “…?”

The female player looked a bit disheveled from crawling quickly, but it couldn’t hide the ecstatic expression on her face—

“You must be a special NPC!”

Sykes’s pupils quaked, and even the tip of his tail stiffened.
“I’m a player, look at my ID.”

Ge Feifei, the girl who had grabbed the merman’s tail, didn’t believe Sykes’s explanation at all.
She still looked up with an expectant face and said, “Don’t pretend! Based on my years of experience reading game novels, there must be a high-level NPC mixed in with the players’ team. As long as I find him, I can get a god-level quest!”

Sykes: “Huh?”

Ge Feifei: “That’s right, you probably don’t know where you slipped up yet! Even those old players can’t swim as naturally as you, just like a real fish!”

She miraculously maintained her prostrate posture, one hand holding the merman’s tail without letting go, while the other could be placed on her hip, striking the pose of a great detective who had seen through the truth.

“There is only one truth! You are the NPC!”

Sykes fell silent.
His eyes swept over a certain old player nearby with a stiff swimming posture.
His fishtail was as straight as a stick, like a salted fish that had been air-dried for three hundred and sixty-five days.

‘A miscalculation,’ he thought.
He had been observing the first-clear team all along and hadn’t noticed that the other players’ swimming postures were quite different.

“I’m just better at swimming,” Sykes tried to pull his tail out, but the other person held on even tighter.

“No, don’t you try to deny it!”

“I’m not…”

“You are!”

The merman really couldn’t understand why he had been recognized so quickly.
This situation made him a little at a loss—what was going on now?

[On the otherworldly network, this situation is generally called “dropping one’s horse²,” ] Ella explained thoughtfully.

‘Shut up, Ella.’
The merman forcibly muted his butler in his mind.

Then Sykes sighed and looked at Ge Feifei.
“Alright, I am. What do you want from me?”

But the subsequent development was a bit unexpected for the fish.

The girl who had just been full of expectation now had a strange expression on her face.
She looked the merman up and down again and let go of his hand.

“Oh, you’re not,” she crawled away, uninterested.

Leaving only Sykes standing there, stunned for a long time.
“…”

A small, turquoise fish, full and content, swam past him leisurely and blew a bubble at him.

‘Players… are truly a existence that a fish cannot understand.’

“Where did you just run off to?”
Ge Jiao had looked around the spawn point but couldn’t find her sister who had entered the game with her.
Just as she was about to log off and ask her, she found that the other had already crawled in front of her.

“I just ran into a guy pretending to be an NPC. People are so bored these days. A high-level player coming to the newbie area to pretend to be a special NPC,” Ge Feifei complained to her sister.

“A special NPC?”

“Yes, the kind of intelligent character often seen in novels, who mixes into the players’ team. That guy must have also read that book, My Days of XXX in a Game!”

Ge Feifei was first indignant, then she showed off with a smug face, “I was really fooled by him at first, but he slipped up himself.”

Ge Jiao had learned to dive in her spare time.
After adapting a bit to the hardcore swimming method in Sea Realm, she actually learned it quite well.
While pulling her sister up from the ground and forcing her to learn to swim properly, she asked perfunctorily, “What slip-up?”

Ge Feifei flicked her tail a few times following her sister’s force.
“A real NPC would never admit their identity—how could an intelligence set by the system violate the rules? He shouldn’t think I’m a fool!”

Ge Jiao let go, and her foolish sister fell to the ground with a splat.
The tail-flicking she had just learned was now completely forgotten.

She sighed.
“Aren’t you?”

The moment Hua Yibing, Old Li, and Yan Shuangwen came online, they gathered in Old Li’s personal hut.

To be fair, this “artistic” mural created by Huahua, and that glowing green roof, after looking at them for a long time, they seemed… quite pleasing to the eye?

Regarding this, Old Li resolutely refused to admit that his aesthetic had been assimilated by Hua Yibing.

“Ahem.” He cleared his throat.

Opposite him, Yan Shuangwen stood with his arms crossed, leaning against the wall, looking quite at ease.
As for Huahua, he had found a stool from somewhere, sat on it with his hands supporting him in front, his body leaning forward, waiting乖巧ly for his speech with a pair of puppy-dog eyes.

“Have you all seen the new panel?”

“I’ve seen it, but I can’t click on it. The system says I have to clear away the confusion first before I can enter the palace of knowledge. What does such a literary phrase even mean?” Huahua raised his hand to answer first.

Yan Shuangwen sneered, “Hmph, it means an idiot can’t understand it.”

“? What do you mean by that meaning?” Hua Yibing turned his head and glared at his roommate.

Yan Shuangwen curled his lip.
“My meaning, of course, has no special meaning.”

Crackle, crackle, sparks seemed to fly between the two roommates’ gazes.

“Stop, stop, stop practicing tongue twisters there,” Old Li helplessly stood between them.
“Number Two, have you discovered anything?”

“Although I don’t know what the settings are for other online games, didn’t the notebook before mention magic categories?”
Yan Shuangwen subconsciously pushed up his glasses, only then remembering he was in a game and didn’t have such things as glasses.

“I guess the system’s ‘clearing away the confusion’ means finding out which type of magic one is suited for?”

“I know the answer to this one! Testing spiritual roots!!” Huahua jumped up from his stool with a ‘thud’.

“No, no, it’s testing elemental affinity!”
He realized this was a magical world and quickly corrected himself.

Old Li was lost in thought.
“I seem to have read a few similar novels before. So should we set out now to find if there’s a place that can detect elements?”

“Let’s go!”
Hua Yibing stood at the door with a ‘swoosh’, ready for action, as happy as a primary school student wearing a red scarf on a spring outing.

Footnotes:

1. 守株待兔 (shǒu zhū dài tù) is an idiom that means “to wait for a rabbit by a tree stump.” It refers to waiting for a chance windfall or relying on luck instead of working for it. Here, it means he was going to wait for a team to come to him.

2. 掉马 (diàomǎ), literally “dropping one’s horse,” is internet slang for having one’s real identity or a secret identity exposed. It’s often used in contexts of online anonymity or when a character is trying to hide who they are.