Chapter 3: The Three Brothers' Planes

He tossed the head of the disbelieving man onto the nearby street lamp. Liu Zhi waited for a long time before finally walking away slowly.

As for whether the other party had truly died, Liu Zhi did not care in the slightest. He could kill the opponent once, and he could kill him a second time. Since the two had already offended each other, there was no need to fear anything.

Instead, Liu Zhi’s thoughts were now focused entirely on the badge in his hand. It seemed like a communicator, as if players from inside and outside the game could communicate through this device.

Liu Zhi injected a trace of spiritual energy into it, and his brain nearly exploded from the flood of various information.

“Congratulations on village network connection!”
“Welcome to join the cross-plane game!”
“Little brother, is it on?”
“New undead mage, I have a large number of corpses here—do you have any interest?”
“Little brother, don’t mind the corpses. I have interesting souls here…”
“Old iron, fixed group not, miss a milk!”
“Don’t join any organization casually. Wait for me. I’m the closest—I’ll arrive within a month…”
“5000 to send 1000. Come and get V12. First money, reputation merchant. Miss it and wait till next year…”
“xlss, 4=1”
“......”

Listening to these chaotic, jumbled messages, Liu Zhi could only rub his brow. He then withdrew his spiritual energy from the badge.

It was not the time to deal with these matters. He still needed to understand what a corpse collector, a soul reaper, and a blood reaper actually were. If he failed to grasp this point, he might not even know how he had died.

Fortunately, Liu Zhi was currently at the Bone Wind Academy. While other things in the academy might be absent, the library that recorded knowledge would definitely be present.

After carefully recalling Sandro’s memories, he followed them to the library he usually frequented.

Along the way, no one was surprised by Vidnina trailing behind him. Instead, some students who had not yet been employed greeted him curiously.

“Isn’t that Sandro? You’ve succeeded in your apprenticeship?”
“The undead behind you looks impressive. Is it an upper-level one?”
“Does it have its own intelligence?”

Liu Zhi could only answer each question in turn. Only after a great deal of effort did he finally reach the library.

As soon as he stepped inside, Liu Zhi immediately found a spot and dragged over a pile of books that might contain the information he desired.

Watching Liu Zhi frantically moving the books, the mummy guarding the library spoke up. “Young brother, stop moving them. If you take these out, I’ll have to put them back one by one. It’s useless for you to force yourself to read here—it won’t increase your passive skill experience either.”

“I’m not doing it to gain experience. I just want to look up knowledge related to history.”

The mummy glanced at him. “You’re looking for plane knowledge, aren’t you? No need to stare at me like that. Every apprentice is overwhelmed by various occupational details after success, and you’re not the only one. The one with the bone cover—you’ve seen it, right? Just read that book and you’ll be good.”

Liu Zhi gave a soft “oh,” then followed the mummy’s gesture to locate the book with its bone cover.

A skull grinned fiercely on the cover. When opened, the skull would still appear to shout, making it somewhat difficult to endure.

Still, the content recorded inside was remarkably detailed.

Liu Zhi immediately became absorbed in it.

It turned out the book did far more than introduce the roles of corpse collectors and soul reapers. It fundamentally explained the entire world of this plane from beginning to end.

The world Sandro had originally inhabited was called the Southern Swamp Plane. Its overall size was roughly seven times that of Earth. More than eighty percent of the plane’s area was swamp. The reason it was named the Southern Swamp Plane rather than simply the Swamp Plane was that two brother planes of almost equal size also existed within it.

As for the situation of those brother planes, Liu Zhi had never heard of them before. The term “brother planes” did not refer to the other two having been born from the same source.

Instead, because those two planes, just like the Southern Swamp Plane, were all being eroded by a certain plane known as the Ghost Light Hades Plane.

This Ghost Light Hades was a kind of eroding plane. From its birth until now, it had collectively swallowed fifteen planes of the same size as the Southern Swamp Plane, giving it a total area twenty-seven times larger than the Southern Swamp Plane.

At present, the Ghost Light Hades was simultaneously eroding the Southern Swamp Plane, the Eastern Desert Plane, and the Arctic Ice Plane.

It was precisely because of this reason that these three planes had formed brother planes, jointly resisting the invasion of the Ghost Light Hades.

Their method of resisting the Ghost Light Hades was also very simple: suppress the main entrance of the invasion with the strongest beings of the plane, while ordinary players cleared the fragmented aura left by the Ghost Light Hades within their own planes.

According to the book, in order to suppress the main entrance of the Ghost Light Hades invasion, the three planes had poured their most powerful forces into the effort—half-gods above level fifteen.

It was said that the Arctic Ice Plane was guarded there by a sixteen-level ice death knight. He had sealed his throne inside an ice mountain and sat upon it himself, leading his undead troops to stand eternal guard over the entrance to the Ghost Light Hades.

The strongest being in the Eastern Desert Plane was an undead mage of unknown level. He had constructed six true and seven false ancient tombs within the Eastern Desert Plane to lay down a great array that suppressed the invasion of the Ghost Light Hades.

As for the strongest in the Southern Swamp Plane, it was a man draped in white baboon skin. He possessed a giant city carried upon the back of a colossal mastiff corpse. At this moment, he was inside that giant city, standing guard over the passage leading to the Ghost Light Hades.

Those high-level battles were far beyond the reach of level-one players. They could not hope to engage in such combat; instead, some minor matters were the focus of ordinary players’ efforts.

In this book, it was explained that regardless of a player’s occupational faction, players within these three planes would be divided solely into three categories of death knights and three categories of necromancers. The titles of corpse collector, soul reaper, and blood reaper were classifications specifically for the necromancers.

This classification was determined by the players’ own choices.

Within the three planes, people died every day, and the erosion method of the Ghost Light Hades was also quite straightforward. Whenever someone died, the plane would borrow a trace of Hades aura through the dead soul and send it across. Once the plane was completely invaded by Hades aura, the entire plane would merge into the Ghost Light Hades and become part of the Hades itself.

The corpse collector was one type of classification targeting this kind of erosion. They possessed their own Hades city, which they usually stationed at the gathering points across the plane. Whenever someone died or there was any aura erosion, they would appear at the first moment, guide the departed soul into their city, and then transport it along the correct path to the underworld.

Because they always arrived at the first instant after death and directly carried away the body, people had taken to calling them corpse collectors.