When Charles slipped back into the game, it seemed no one had noticed the little mishap just now. The girls were still laughing as they dodged around him, but their swimming was terrible. Every minute or two, someone would suddenly get caught by Charles and end up fluttering in his arms like a spoiled child. All that body‑to‑body contact left their faces burning red.
Time flew. In the blink of an eye, more than an hour had passed. The blazing noonday sun had already started to slide westward. Exhausted, the group climbed back aboard, chattering and comparing "battle reports"—how many each griffon had caught, how the mother chimeras had managed to block the griffons' rushes.
Once the stats were tallied, the difference was… obvious. Aside from Charles, the other nine girls who'd played griffons had very meager records. Even Hattie and Theresa had only caught six each; Anno and Nymeria had five and four respectively, and the rest had even fewer.
As for Charles, he'd caught forty‑seven—and that wasn't even counting the time he'd accidentally grabbed Nymeria.
Even Charles scratched his head at that result, suddenly feeling a bit guilty. He didn't think his swimming technique was that good—definitely nowhere near Hattie's.
At the very start, after catching the first girl, he'd honestly felt that as long as the nuns were just the slightest bit careful, it would be hard for him to grab many more.
But for some reason, after Nymeria accidentally ended up in his arms that once, the nuns suddenly became ridiculously easy to catch. Thinking back on it, it felt less like he was catching them and more like they were each taking turns kicking those little feet to throw themselves into his chest, one after another.
Before long, he'd cycled through every girl matched up against him. Then, indignant, they lined up again—only to be scooped up by Charles a second time…
He had no idea why that had happened. All he knew was that, when he finally reported his score, everyone was in an uproar, and the nuns on his side of the "field" were red‑faced with shame over how easily they'd been caught.
In the end, after some discussion, they decided it had to be that the mother chimera facing Charles was just too weak—she couldn't shield her cubs, which gave Charles all those openings. So the poor "mom" got stuck with the penalty of cleaning the ship's latrines, and only then did the game officially wrap up.
She didn't look the least bit depressed about it, though. If anything, she looked perfectly content. Thinking back, Charles distinctly remembered her blocking him more than once—and every single time, she'd been the one to rush in and hug him first, then "accidentally" let her hands wander all over…
But in any case, the swimsuit party ended there. That night, honoring her bet, Anno lay on her stomach and let Charles take her from above for one good "last time" before they curled up together and drifted into deep slumber.
The big ship sailed on through the night without stopping. By dawn the next day, when the first ray of sunlight slipped up over the eastern horizon, their destination—Garbage Island—was already looming ahead.
In the middle of Garbage Island rose a little mountain that split the island into two halves. Both halves crawled with roaming undead, but only one side was piled high with trash while remaining relatively "safe"—moving around there wouldn't trigger the slumbering undead below.
The other half had far less garbage, but was riddled with hidden alarm wards the undead had set in life. One careless step could wake something best left sleeping.
As the ship drew near, the familiar reek of rot and refuse rolled over the water. In the summer heat, it was even more nauseating than usual.
Luckily, this trip was different from his last visits, so they didn't anchor on the trash‑choked side. Instead, they chose the other shore, where they could dock and carry out the original plan.
Step one: clear out every undead on this half of the island.
Staring at the skeletons and zombies shambling across this shore, Charles couldn't help thinking back on the old game guides.
In the game, clearing all the undead off this entire island had actually been laughably easy. The dev team hadn't implemented underwater combat at all. Anyone who went into the sea simply died on the spot.
So players had figured out how to abuse that mechanic. They'd tag the undead to draw aggro, then hop onto a small boat and paddle a short way out from shore.
The mindless mobs would just plod along right after them, one by one walking into the surf to drown themselves, while the players' XP bars rocketed upward.
It was, honestly, one of the best grinding spots for low‑level characters in the entire game.
Unfortunately, there was no way he could pull that trick here. In reality, undead didn't die just because they walked along the seafloor. And more importantly, he had to personally touch each undead to earn Purification Points, which completely killed that strategy.
So he had no choice now but to handle things the straightforward way—purifying these undead one by one.
Setting foot on this half of the island to do the job properly, however, was no small task.
According to the game's lore, over the long years, the seals the ancient undead had laid on themselves were starting to fray. Endless confinement had driven them half‑mad, and now they were starving for life to consume.
Basically, any living, non‑undead creature stepping foot onto that half of the island risked disturbing the seals and waking whatever slept below.
Worse, if you happened to step on certain key nodes, you could wake every boss at once. Four massive undead monsters plus an endless tide of undead soldiers… in the game, that pretty much meant a guaranteed wipe.
That was exactly why Charles had never sent Theresa and the others to that side of the island to kite undead for grinding.
But now, the situation was different.
He wasn't just here for them—he had something else going for him.
He could fly.
That changed everything.
On the bow, Charles began chanting a string of intricate, eldritch syllables under his breath. A pair of pale blue wings unfurled from his back. With a single, gentle flap, they whipped up a powerful gust that lifted his body and sent him gliding forward—
He quickly soared to a position above the island. There, he whispered a single word: "Purify."
Milky white light washed over his blade, lighting up everything around him—and immediately rousing every undead on this half of the island.
They raised their weapons and lurched toward him. Charles didn't hesitate. He tucked his wings and dove, streaking right through the ranks of skeletons, his keen blades slicing across their bodies in passing—
Buzz—
Each time he made contact, he struck and was gone in an instant. His blows didn't look especially heavy, but the purifying light rippling along his weapon swept through each skeleton's frame, snuffing out the soul‑fire behind their eye sockets and sending their bones collapsing into scattered heaps, ready to crumble to dust with time.
At the same time, his Purification Points shot upward. Every skeleton was worth anywhere from ten to twenty‑five points, and he was flying fast, while the skeletons themselves were mindlessly converging on him.
Within less than a minute, he'd already reaped nearly a thousand points.
Over the next few minutes, as the skeletons thinned out, his efficiency naturally dropped—but even so, twenty or thirty undead a minute, yielding four or five hundred Purification Points each sixty seconds, wasn't hard to maintain.
Twenty minutes passed quickly. As the duration of Tasha's Otherworldly Guise neared its end, the skeletons on this half of the island had been thinned to a ragged scattering—and Charles had racked up a full ten thousand Purification Points.
It took twenty thousand points to go from level 12 to 13. Right now, he'd already saved up the full amount.
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