WTYTIAAN Chapter 14

Chapter 14

It was easier said than done, but the three of them eventually found an empty church and climbed through a broken window into the storage room behind it.

Yan Yunqing choked a few times from the dusty windowsill.

The environment wasn’t great, but they didn’t have a choice.

The commotion outside lasted for a long time, and it wasn’t until dawn that it completely subsided.

Yan Yunqing was afraid that someone would come to the church when it got light, so he woke up his two companions in the hazy morning. “We should leave. Someone could come here at any time.”

Conilia woke up the moment Yan Yunqing spoke. Although she looked sleepy, she didn’t hesitate. After getting up, she patted her cheeks to make herself more awake.

Lillian, on the other hand, was willing to open her eyes only after being called several times. She put her hand in front of her mouth, yawned loudly, rubbed her eyes, and slowly landed on Yan Yunqing’s head. “You have so much energy. Aren’t you sleepy at all?”

As she spoke, she wanted to reach out and grab Yan Yunqing’s ears, but her hand grabbed empty air.

Lillian was stunned. She looked at her hand, then at the top of Yan Yunqing’s head. After a moment of daze, she exclaimed in shock, “Oh my god, Little Cat, your ears are gone!”

Conilia heard Lillian’s exclamation and looked towards Yan Yunqing, a hint of surprise in her eyes. “Really?”

Yan Yunqing was puzzled. “Huh?”

He reached out and touched the top of his head, and sure enough, he found nothing. He turned his head to look behind him, and the tail that had been so noticeable since he woke up in the warehouse was gone.

It was really gone?

Yan Yunqing opened his character panel and found that the Beastman race in his profile had disappeared, leaving only the Demon King.

Yan Yunqing: ???

What’s going on? Can a species be changed a second time?

Could he have secretly evolved?

Lillian flew around Yan Yunqing, circling up and down. “Completely gone! Logically speaking, the secondary characteristics of beastmen can’t disappear. This is a genetic throwback. Could it be that…”

“Could it be that?” Yan Yunqing waited for Lillian’s answer.

Lillian clapped her hand in realization. “You’re not Little Cat. Little Cat has been replaced by a bad guy!”

“Quick, tell me who you are! What’s your purpose in replacing Little Cat!”

Conilia was startled and looked at Yan Yunqing with immediate vigilance, becoming fully alert. At this moment, she looked more like a cat with bared claws than Yan Yunqing did.

She was just short of extending her claws and scratching Yan Yunqing.

Yan Yunqing was speechless at Lillian’s shocking words.

“Come on, in just a few hours, who could have replaced me?”

Lillian shook her head with an unfathomable expression. “That’s not certain. Magic is a very profound subject, and there are magical camouflage spells in this world. Maybe someone could replace you silently?”

Yan Yunqing: …

Yan Yunqing bent his fingers again and flicked Lillian away.

“Be serious!”

Lillian covered her head and rolled a few times in the air. “Ouch, you bad cat!”

Yan Yunqing studied the panel for a while and felt that he might not have been a beastman from the start. The beastman race on his personal panel had a question mark behind it!

Perhaps he had temporarily turned into a beastman through some means? Once the time was up, all his beastman characteristics disappeared.

This explanation was the most reasonable, but Yan Yunqing didn’t plan to say it.

Although the race column on the game panel said Demon King, his appearance now was completely human, and Lillian hated humans so much.

Yan Yunqing didn’t want to scare away his newly formed team, at least not yet. Lillian, as a temporary ‘magic tutor,’ was still very useful.

He had skipped the class change quest and directly used magic, and he might even be able to get a few more skills from Lillian.

Anyway, his race was indeed Demon King, not human, so it wasn’t exactly lying to the elf, right?

Conilia understood from Yan Yunqing and Lillian’s interactions that they were joking again. While relieved, she was also a little curious as to why Yan Yunqing’s ears and tail had disappeared.

However, Yan Yunqing didn’t seem to want to explain, so she tactfully didn’t ask.

Erasing all traces of their overnight stay in the church, the three of them left as quietly as they had come.

When they were resting yesterday, Yan Yunqing had already re-examined his game panel. His main quest, [Escape the Auction House], had been completed, and two new quests had appeared.

[Safe Place]

Description: You have successfully escaped the fate of being arbitrarily selected on the trading table, but merely leaving the auction house does not mean you are safe. The person you met on the escape route warned you that it would be best to leave here before those noble lords reacted. You must leave this bustling capital as soon as possible and find a truly safe haven.

[Investigate ‘Crimson Mist’]

Description: You met a strange person on the escape route. Not only did he not harbor any ill intentions towards you, he even let you and your companions go. From his words, you deduced that he belonged to the organization that caused the chaos tonight. Perhaps they are the ‘mice’ that those ‘kitties’ are trying to find? You are curious about this. Find an opportunity to investigate ‘Crimson Mist’!

One was a stage mission of the main quest, and the other was a side quest for exploration.

Yan Yunqing felt that the descriptions of these two quests were not quite like the previous Escape the Auction House quest. The previous quest description seemed to be filled with malice, calling him Little Cat, while the current quest descriptions had become very ordinary game text.

It was as if the two were not written by the same planning team.

Was it just his imagination?

He decided to ignore it for now. He opened the skill panel and spent five skill points to light up the skill he had been considering all night.

[Disguise (Cannot be upgraded)]

You can disguise yourself as any ‘character’ you have seen whose level is lower than yours. During the disguise, you will completely conform to all the characteristics of the disguised object. The consumption of magic power varies depending on the difficulty of the disguised object.

After his character level reached level 1, because he skipped the class change quest, his skill panel was directly unlocked, but it was still gray, and skill points were needed to light up these skills.

According to the setting in “Demon King,” the initial skill bar only had the most basic skills. All new skills needed to be learned through skill books, and learning skill books required skill points.

There were few ways to obtain skill points. Every level up would give five skill points, and certain hidden quests would have skill point rewards. There was a certain probability of getting skill point rewards from weekly dungeons.

There were many ways to obtain skill books. They could be bought with real money in the store, skill books could be found in the game’s library with a certain probability, and you could even learn from NPCs in the game… and so on.

Yan Yunqing’s skill panel had a pile of random skills, all inherited from the Demon King’s panel, but they were all grayed out and needed to be re-learned with skill points.

However, this greatly benefited Yan Yunqing. At least he didn’t need to search the world for skill books to learn, he only needed to grind levels to light up advanced skills.

The Demon King’s skill panel was very gorgeous.

For example, this [Disguise (Cannot be upgraded)] didn’t belong to any branch of mage or swordsman. It was just a special encounter skill given for completing a hidden quest.

It just happened to meet Yan Yunqing’s current needs. He needed to leave the capital safely, and powerful disguise skills were essential.

He put all five free attribute points gained from leveling up into Constitution, making sure he wouldn’t accidentally kill himself during the escape. Yan Yunqing asked Lillian and Conilia to wait in the corner first.

“What are you going to do?”

Yan Yunqing used [Disguise (Cannot be upgraded)] in front of them.

Yan Yunqing, who originally had black hair and black eyes, gradually shrank, slowly turning into a real cat. His long, curly white fur and blue-green eyes were like sparkling jewels. His limbs were slightly short, the fur on his belly touched the ground, and he even wore a pink bow tie around his neck.

This was the cat that Yan Yunqing had seen in the auction house banquet hall. At that time, a well-dressed noblewoman was holding this cute cat and chatting with people.

Lillian: ?!

Lillian exclaimed in surprise, “Eh?! You actually… Ah, I understand! So, your ears and tail disappeared because you completely reverted to your ancestry! Eh… Wait, can beastman cubs completely revert to their ancestry? Or did you just come of age today?”

Affected by the disguised character, Yan Yunqing subconsciously shook his fur and rolled his eyes at Lillian. “This is just my ability.”

Everyone had innate skills, so it was normal for him to have a disguise talent, right?

The main thing was that skills like ‘Demon King’s Arrival’ were completely useless!

Resisting the urge to lick his fur, Yan Yunqing flicked his tail. The benefit of this skill was evident. Being a cat for the first time, he learned to walk on all fours without a teacher.

“I’m going out to observe the situation. You guys wait for me here,” Yan Yunqing told his two companions, and jumped away.

Lillian complained, “And you won’t let me call you Little Cat. Aren’t you completely a cat now?”

*

The sky was not completely bright yet, and many civilians were already up and working, seemingly unaffected by the accident last night.

Yan Yunqing traveled through the street corner alleys, making it difficult to attract anyone’s attention. The cat he was disguised as was very petite, the type that could be held in a noblewoman’s palm, probably specially selected for breeding to be petite.

He looked left and right, jumped onto a window sill of a house, and jumped several times onto the roof.

Standing on the roof and looking down, Yan Yunqing couldn’t help but take a step back and took a deep breath to restrain his legs from almost starting to tremble.

Whoa, so high!

By raising his gaze and not looking down, Yan Yunqing felt much better. Running and jumping along the roof, Yan Yunqing found a place where people gathered and lay down to listen to the people below chatting.

There were no nutritious topics, either discussing which store sold the cheapest wheat flour, or talking about whose son and which girl were getting along.

The porters discussed going to the tavern together for a drink in the evening, and the women washing clothes discussed going to buy new patterned fabric together in the morning, so they could get a discount by buying enough.

Yan Yunqing lay down and listened for a while, yawned, and regretted it a bit.

He should have brought Lillian along. That guy was chatty, and it wouldn’t have been boring to squat here with her and eavesdrop.

After squatting for a while, Yan Yunqing stood up and was about to leave when he heard the two women washing clothes finish talking about the family’s daughters. One of them quietly looked around, and then leaned in next to the other like a thief.

“Did you hear about what happened last night?”

Yan Yunqing perked up, shook his fur, pretended to be nonchalant and approached, jumping a few steps and sitting behind a bamboo basket behind them.

“You mean last night’s?” The woman who was listening to gossip also looked around, learning from the other, and said in a low voice, “Not just heard. You know my house is very close to there. It was very lively over there last night, fighting and killing. It seems like several noble lords died!”

“Really?”

“Of course. I was scared to death at home last night. Warren didn’t sleep all night, guarding the door with a knife.”

She looked around and said in an even lower voice, “I heard it was a group of mercenaries who came to the door. The auction house tricked and sold the family members of their members as slaves, so the mercenaries came to take revenge.”

“You know all this?”

“I didn’t sleep all night, listening to what those people outside were saying.”

“Ah, did anything happen to anyone in your family?”

“No, it seems there was also a drunkard who came home late and ran into those masked guys head-on, but he was let go.”

“That mercenary group is quite reasonable.”

“…”

Yan Yunqing flicked his tail, thoughtful.