Chapter 249: Unnamed

Guild registration can be carried out anywhere the World Tree’s roots pass through.

After finishing their meal, Qi Si led Lin Chen away from the main trunk of the World Tree.

They passed through clusters of buildings erected by human players on the ruins, bypassed temporary camps where people gathered, and walked for another half hour until they stopped when they couldn’t see another soul on the desolate land.

The terrain of the Ruins of the Sunset was difficult to traverse, with rugged, cracked ground crisscrossed by towering bricks and stones, comparable to an off-road hiking trail.

Lin Chen followed Brother Qi, trudging through the difficult terrain, getting covered in dust and dirt, and several times nearly stumbling into Qi Si’s back.

Now, he stood still on a patch of ground that was barely flat, panting as he asked, “Brother Qi, why are we hiding from people? I heard that once the guild is registered, it will be announced on a stone tablet, and everyone will know about it then.”

“But they won’t know how our guild was established, how many members we have, or who they are.” Qi Si crouched in front of a half-person-wide ditch and reached in to retrieve the golden root lying within.

He condensed a phantom image of the 【Crimson High Priest】 card on his fingertip, placed it over the root, and silently chanted the words “Register Guild.”

This was the simplest default procedure on the Forum: first, attract the attention of the World Tree using special items closely linked to the Eerie Game—such as items and Identity Cards—then state your request to trigger the automated response preset by the game mechanism.

【Registration of a Guild requires the payment of 10,000 points】

Silver-white text refreshed, and a point payment progress bar appeared on the system interface.

—It is not uncommon for founders to share the cost and co-establish a guild, so the Eerie Game humanely designed a Fundraising Mechanism. Players within a five-meter radius can see the fundraising progress bar and contribute points to it.

It is said that in the early days, there were several instances where founders of other guilds threw their points in the wrong place, and Pranksters wandered around randomly contributing points. Fortunately, the guild member list is still based on the Contract, so no major chaos ensued.

Of course, it’s best to establish a guild in a secluded place like Qi Si is doing, which directly avoids all potential trouble.

Qi Si threw five thousand points into the fundraising bar, and a golden beam of light flowed brightly, filling half of the long groove.

Lin Chen snapped back to reality and also started contributing points, filling the remaining half of the groove.

【Point payment complete. Entering registration process】

The golden fluid in the groove dispersed into specks of light, weaving into the shape of a Covenant Document before their eyes, with hot-stamped golden text floating on the translucent sheet.

A Feather Pen floated and darted beside the Covenant Document, looking quite lively.

Qi Si turned his head to look at the dumbfounded Lin Chen: “You are the Guild Master, you fill it out.”

“…Huh? Me, the Guild Master?”

When Qi Si previously said, “You be the Guild Master, I’ll be the Vice Guild Master,” Lin Chen thought he had misheard.

It wasn’t until Qi Si repeated it now that he realized it wasn’t an auditory hallucination.

The rules of the Eerie Game simply and crudely designate the guild as the property of the Guild Master. Although the Vice Guild Master is also a mechanism-recognized position, they usually only hold advisory and managerial rights.

Although rights and responsibilities are equal—the Forum has the saying, “Members fly bravely, the Guild Master takes the fall”—once a guild develops steadily, the Guild Master will be the direct beneficiary.

On the one hand, Lin Chen didn’t think that given Qi Si’s character, he would create a huge mess for him to clean up; on the other hand, he didn’t intend to forget his principles for profit and act recklessly based on the Guild Master’s authority.

But what virtue or ability did he possess to exclusively enjoy the greatest benefits in a guild they co-funded and registered?

Qi Si said calmly, “According to that so-called Covenant, all guilds have the obligation to send people to participate in Joint Operations. As a newly established guild, we are being watched by countless eyes, and we inevitably cannot escape this.

“If my prediction is correct, established guilds will soon contact us, demanding that we send people to fulfill our responsibilities. The first mission will likely not be easy, partly as a warning to us, and partly to test our capabilities.”

“For thirty-six years, it has not been customary for a Guild Master to personally handle tasks. If we set that precedent, it will make us look easily manipulated and inferior, and it will also reveal a lack of confidence in our strength.”

“In other words, if I were the Guild Master, and other guilds challenged our guild, you would have to face them alone.”

Qi Si lowered his eyes and sighed, “Lin Chen, do you think you currently have enough strength to deal with the endless variables and crises?”

These words were blunt and were the harshest Qi Si had spoken since they met in the Rose Manor.

Lin Chen knew this was not an exaggeration.

After the Frog Hospital instance, his ranking on the rookie rank only climbed thirty-seven places, reaching 【48】, and that was after binding the 【Plague Doctor】 Identity Card.

His aptitude in all aspects was average, his knowledge needed expanding, his intelligence and combat strength were only at the level of an ordinary person, and his abilities leaned towards support… Such a person was undoubtedly unremarkable in the Eerie Game, which constantly produced geniuses.

Without Qi Si, he wouldn’t have even survived the first instance in the Novice Pool.

Although he was inwardly unwilling to believe in the zero-sum, dog-eat-dog nature of the game world, what he had seen and heard over the past month meant he would no longer foolishly regard those respectable established guilds as benevolent entities.

Therefore, he fully understood Qi Si’s cold, serious attitude.

Deciding to establish a guild, getting involved in a competition that others had been cultivating for decades, and attempting to disrupt an already solidified interest system meant inevitably facing pressure from all sides.

Every decision from now on had to be made with extreme caution, as one wrong move could lead to total ruin.

Lin Chen mumbled softly, “Brother Qi, you’ve always been the one helping me. I don’t understand many things. What if I mess up?”

“If you mess up…” Qi Si squinted and smiled, “Then the Guild Master and Vice Guild Master will just die together.”

“Uh… huh?”

“So you cannot mess up.” Qi Si retracted his smile, his gaze deep as a pool of water. “Not only that, you must strive with all your might to do your best.

“The Puppeteer should have told you about the ‘Gate,’ the ‘Tower,’ and the ‘Card.’ Now that both the ‘Gate’ and the ‘Tower’ have been opened, chaos is imminent, and order is precarious. Driven by despair and fear, many people are willing to take risks and violate established rules.

“If you hold an Identity Card without your own faction for protection, it’s like a child carrying gold through the marketplace. You will either be forced by circumstances to join an existing guild and become a skeleton used to fill death quotas, or you’ll be targeted by opportunists and subjected to endless hostility and attacks.”

“You’ve been through so many instances now; you should have some understanding of the Gambler’s Fallacy Principle and the exclusiveness of human groups. Even though those who didn’t get an Identity Card know they can’t steal one from another player, they are certainly happy to kill someone like you, who is suspected of having a higher chance of survival.”

“In the Eerie Game, if you don’t become sin itself, you will be consumed by the sins of others… Time is running out for you.”

Lin Chen nodded dumbly.

If previously he had followed Qi Si to register the guild simply because the moment felt right and he agreed haphazardly, now he clearly understood the necessity and urgency of registering his own guild, leaving him no path for retreat.

Although what would happen next was still unknown, although the Ruins of the Sunset still wore a veil of peace and tranquility, and although there were still many doubts about the function of the Identity Card… the principle remained the same.

When rookie players join an established guild, if they lack special skills, they will inevitably receive less attention than veterans and can easily become disposable pawns in the larger scheme.

Creating a new guild was imperative. At the very least, they wouldn’t be oppressed internally, and externally they could bluff, preventing others from gauging their true strength and daring to manipulate them.

Lin Chen stopped stalling, reached out to take the Covenant Document and the Feather Pen floating in the void, and looked at the first line.

“Guild Name?”

Qi Si said, “You decide.”

He had actually considered naming the guild something like “Crimson,” which would point to his divine name, but firstly, it was too blunt and sounded immediately related to a certain Identity Card; secondly… it was too Chuunibyou.

Qi Si, being terrible at naming things, decided to dump this unimportant topic onto the designated helper.

“I decide?” Lin Chen pondered deeply. “‘Hell Frontline’? ‘Inverted Cross’? ‘Zhongzhou Team’?”

Qi Si added, “Don’t make it too weird.”

In the end, after rejecting a pile of strange names like “Heaven and Earth Great Love Alliance,” “Sitting-Forgetfulness Dao,” and “Tarot Club,” the two people who were terrible at naming things settled on “Unnamed” for the guild name.

Well, that was even weirder.

“Next is… Guild Master Name.”

“Don’t write your real name,” Qi Si suggested. “Write an Alias associated with you.”

Lin Chen, who had already written the character “Lin,” glanced at the 【Plague Doctor】 card in the upper right corner of his vision, and wrote the two characters “Crow” after “Lin.”

The mask the Plague Doctor held looked quite like a Crow, so he decided to treat it as a Crow Mask.

The Vice Guild Master column was naturally filled with the name “Si Qi.”

Since quite a bit of information had already been exposed because of Chang Xu’s livestream, they might as well roll with it and interact with other forces using the identity of “Si Qi.”

Although the Eerie Investigation Bureau and the closely associated Jiuzhou Guild certainly knew that “Si Qi” was “Qi Si,” they didn’t know the relationship between “Qi Wen,” “Zhou Ke,” “Cheng An,” and “Si Qi,” nor did they know that “Qi Si” had a side job besides being a Specimen Maker.

So, the problem wasn’t big.

“Brother Qi, it says here that we can designate a piece of land in the Eerie Game as the Guild Base, and we need to pay a Rental Fee of 1,000 points weekly,” Lin Chen said, pointing to a line of small text on the Covenant Document.

Qi Si leaned closer and asked the Eerie Game, “Must a registered guild have a base?”

Eerie Game: 【Yes, the base serves as a place for guild members to meet and communicate, and undertakes important functions such as collective decision-making and recruiting new members. It is indispensable】

Qi Si took out the 【Directors Special Pass】 and the 【Sea-God Scepter】 from his inventory, and asked again, “Any territory within the Eerie Game will do, right?”

【…Yes.】

“Frog Hospital is an Eerie Game instance, and it is essentially under my control. Can it be used as a Guild Base?”

【…It can.】

“Hmm, let’s use Frog Hospital then. Since I’m using my own land, I shouldn’t need to pay rent, right?”

【Y…es.】

Lin Chen watched Qi Si’s sequence of actions dumbfounded, even detecting a hint of grinding teeth in the cold System Voice.

The crumpled pass disappeared into specks of light in Qi Si’s hand. A string of incomprehensible Coordinates appeared after the 【Guild Location】 column, with the four characters 【Frog Hospital】 noted next to it.

Lin Chen stammered, “Br-Brother Qi, when did you gain control of the Frog Hospital?”

“It was a pleasant surprise from the last instance.” Qi Si stroked his chin and said without changing expression, “The Dean took my Sea-God Scepter item for a while. During that time, likely to establish an anchor point and stabilize his own existence, he transferred control of the Frog Hospital into the Scepter.

“Later, he shot himself in the foot and died during the Ritual to draw in Evil Spirits. His previous actions naturally ended up benefiting someone else… Well, I was lucky and picked up the slack in the end.”

Lin Chen blinked and asked, “Does the Frog Hospital still count as a game instance now?”

“I guess so.” Qi Si looked up at the sky. “Didn’t the Eerie Game just default that the Frog Hospital belongs to the instance category?”

Lin Chen’s eyes lit up: “If that’s true, our guild has hit the jackpot!

“Brother Qi, you might not know this, but many players wait for the seven-day Countdown to end and spend 5,000 points to enter a specified easy instance. Guild members, however, don’t have to pay to enter the Guild Base.

“This means that if our guild members don’t want to be matched with unfamiliar instances in the future, they can go to the Frog Hospital once every seven days, and it counts as having completed a instance run.

“Currently, only a few established guilds like Jiuzhou and Tingfeng have Guild Bases that are instances, and those are only used as Training Grounds, strictly off-limits to ordinary members.

“As long as other players know that our guild has the Frog Hospital instance as its base, we’ll never have trouble recruiting new members!”

Qi Si listened quietly until Lin Chen finished, then tilted his head and looked at him: “Why do we need to recruit new members?”

Lin Chen was stunned: “Huh? We’re not recruiting?”

“How can you ensure that someone is loyal rather than an opportunistic schemer? How do you judge whether they have ulterior motives for joining our guild? And how do you guarantee they aren’t Spies sent by other guilds, or won’t accidentally reveal our guild’s secrets?”

Qi Si posed three consecutive rhetorical questions and sighed faintly, “I don’t plan to force every player who joins the guild to sign a Soul Contract, but I also can’t trust the guild’s future to strangers whose backgrounds are unknown.

“Possessing Treasure Makes One Guilty. As you said, only a few guilds have instances as Guild Bases. If other established guilds knew that a new guild like ours controls the Frog Hospital territory, could they possibly view it normally without coveting it greedily?

“At that point, they could claim that we colluded with the Eerie Game and betrayed human interests to obtain the instance as a base; or they could simply say we met with misfortune in the instance and have become eerie entities ourselves, then stand on the moral high ground to annex our guild.

“After all, we are still too weak. The right to judge right and wrong has always belonged to the strong, hasn’t it?”

Lin Chen was subjected to a barrage of Machiavellian Theory. He clenched and unclenched his palms, which gradually became covered in a thin layer of sweat.

During the Rose Manor, Qi Si had also said things to him that went against Public Morality and Order, but they were ultimately too deep for a shallow acquaintance.

Now, suddenly laying out every piece of Dirty Secrets for him was likely because he had taken the position of Guild Master and needed to grow up quickly so he wouldn’t show weakness in the turbulent struggle for profit.

Lin Chen knew he could no longer naively retreat into an Ivory Tower as he had before.

People always have to grow up, either by leaving school for society and losing their illusions of purity and romance, or by recognizing the truth of the world and embracing fear and the unknown.

He had to shoulder responsibility, learn to Form Alliances and Counter Plots, and guard against open and hidden attacks. What he invested next was not just his own fate, but also Qi Si’s… Qi Si looked into Lin Chen’s eyes and smiled, “Guild Master Lin, draw the Guild Emblem.”

The last column of the Covenant Document was printed with the outline of an Emblem, leaving ample blank space.

Lin Chen pondered for a long time, holding the Feather Pen, and drew a slanted crucifix on it, which at first glance looked like a distorted fork.

The Covenant Document dissolved into the void and vanished.

Two blood-red Metal Emblems fell into the hands of the guild’s only two members, the black Crosses on their surfaces solemn and ominous.

At the same time, all players located in the Ruins of the Sunset heard a System Broadcast.

【Congratulations to player “Lin Crow” for successfully registering the “Unnamed” Guild】

Under the World Tree, the three characters 【Unnamed】 were prominently listed on the last line of the Guild Power Ranking.

【2397, Unnamed, Guild Master: Lin Crow, Vice Guild Master: Si Qi】