CHAPTER 813: 813: DIVINE GAME- CARD SWAP 62

After the team match, Rita had drawn out roughly seventy percent of Demon City’s map from the footage shown on the screens.

She’d pinpointed 131 confirmed demon statue locations across 39 different types.

She’d even tried connecting identical statues with lines, but there was no discernible pattern. Statues of the same type were scattered with no obvious commonalities.

Still, one thing stood out—there was one place where not a single demon statue had ever appeared: the Old District.

In the last minute before the solo match began, Rita slipped into a hidden corner just outside the Old District.

Her map for this area wasn’t complete either.

Much like the solo match’s rules, finding demon statues meant getting intel from Demon City’s citizens.

Whether the top hundred-ranked players hadn’t gotten much intel, or the ones who had simply hadn’t made it into the top hundred, she didn’t know.

3... 2... 1...

The "1" shattered into a blade of light, cutting through the crimson barrier, splintering it into a hundred separate screens that drifted down over the Long River.

At the start, all players’ positions were equal, and the screens displayed random scenes.

High above the Long River, on seats formed from Ashenvale’s heavy fog—

Wail asked, "That kid from Moonlight Marsh—the one who won the fun match—what’s she been doing these past few days?"

GodDraw77 replied, "Buying intel in Auberdine, or back in her room working out strategies."

Wail nodded approvingly. "Good. Very good. Solid mindset."

"Isn’t it?" GodDraw77 said. "Kasilanar’s about to see a new dawn."

Berrento, the Puppy Ranch headmaster, finally lost patience. "You two done yet? You think we can’t tell she’s Lightchaser’s apprentice?"

The unicorn at GodDraw77’s side jabbed him in the ribs with its horn. "GodDraw77’s talking. Who asked you to butt in?"

The Golden Hills headmaster, who’d just opened his mouth, quietly shut it again.

...

The instant the match began, Rita activated [Waste Guide].

The world froze. Time belonged to her alone again.

First, she took off her pumpkin hat, scooped out the winter snow inside, and used [Summer Snowman] to craft her miniature snowman.

Once it was done, she tucked it safely into her oversized pocket—her most important safeguard for rewinds—and stepped into the Old District, determined to explore every room she could access.

Even when used with purpose, [Waste Guide]’s time-stop only made the Waste Index climb very slowly, though any action still added a bit of buff.

She’d used this skill so often she knew exactly what idle activities gave her the best crit-rate buffs.

Whenever Lightchaser taught her a skill, Rita would excuse herself for "a quick drink of water" or "a bathroom break," slip away to practice in time-stop, and then return just as it ended—earning astonished praise for her "genius comprehension."

At first it worked. The elf would look surprised, sometimes even pat her head with a "Not bad."

But Lightchaser was too sharp. Eventually she caught on. After teaching any combat technique, she’d say, "You’ve got ten seconds to take a bathroom break. Then I start the test."

Damn it!

Muttering complaints about Lightchaser, Rita flipped open the notebook on the desk.

It showed a strange backpack—square, stuffed with duck eggs, with a cloud-like base and a crank on the side like a capsule toy machine.

The text wasn’t in English or Kasilanar script. She couldn’t read it, but she memorized a few unusual symbols anyway.

One was a petal-shaped cloud at the machine’s bottom right, another was a white bone.

Even in the notebook, these two symbols sometimes swapped places. Weird.

Turning back to the first page, Rita wandered through the house until she found a white bear watching TV in the living room—the owner of this little garden.

It was adorable, more like an all-white panda than a polar bear, with round ears and no dark circles, its black eyes like two beans.

She couldn’t help but chuckle. "Hilarious," she said before moving on.

In time-stop, she always felt like the world was hers, free to express every fleeting thought.

Leaving the bear’s garden, she slipped into the neighboring mini-forest.

Perhaps the Old District had gotten its name because so few lived here.

Ten hours later, she’d scoured the place without finding anything special. Only eight residents lived here.

By architecture and race, she divided the district into the "Zoo" and the "Culture Quarter."

The Zoo’s houses had a natural, primal charm, like Moonlight Marsh’s, which felt oddly comforting. All the residents were animals—

The white bear, a white-gloved hedgehog playing violin, an otter lounging in a pool with snacks, and a pink mini-mantis she’d only spotted by accident while looking up at the flowers.

The Culture Quarter looked... cultured. The buildings were modern in design—also strangely nostalgic for her.

Its residents were clearly the intellectual type:

A robed, white-masked figure reading a thick geography magazine over a massive nautical map covered in symbols she didn’t understand.

A Death Eater with a book. A black-haired woman grinding coffee. A boy in overalls sketching a comic—two bizarre scenes: a rabbit strangled by a human hand, and a coot smacked in the head with a rifle butt. No killers shown. No clue what the message was.

Rita had nearly combed the whole district, but still found nothing special.

These eight residents were also no pushovers—level 100, every stat over ten thousand. And even that might be fake data.

At those numbers, even if they stood still, she’d need a year to kill one.

If this was the kind of "god" the solo match wanted her to kill... she’d have to tell the Bike her "era" had already *whooshed* past.

Of course, it was possible the god was hidden among them, and those terrifying stats were just a disguise.

With fourteen hours of time-stop left, Rita decided to scout elsewhere before making a choice.

On her way out of the Old District, she detoured past the white bear again.

She gave its head a gentle pat and repeated, "Hilarious," before leaving.