Thankfully, Tacha Macha was able to speed through the forest without meeting a single radish.

  With the village in sight and the depths of the Nightgleam forest way behind her, the granny could finally take a breather.

  Glancing back, she thought it strange. The Spirited Radishes are a very common mob in the forests near the village. To not see even one of them… did she kill too many of them, affecting their population?

  Heh, surerly not. Right…?

  But thinking about it, the developers could have implemented something like it. A decrease in population aftee excessive hunting is very realistic!

  However at the same time, wouldn’t this anger the players? Levelling up by hunting mobs is an instinct for all of them, afterall.

  Now that Tacha was out of the radish danger, she had enough time to check on her status and notifications.

  It was obvious since she had not died yet from the Voidblight that the status was gone; however she just wanted to make sure.

  Seeing that she had only 3 Hp left, her heart almost jumped to her throat. She almost died! Her quests, she had almost lost them all!

  She took a couple of minutes to calm down. Then, her eyes landing upon the temporary effects, she frowned. If she remembered well the Corruption status appeared in the fight against the slime Layla. However, at the time it had been difficult to read due to the unrecognizable letters.

  Was it because of a system error? Did they give the game a patch fix while she was away?

  She couldn’t tell if it was good or bad. But an increase in affinity is usually a good thing in games. With that in mind she didn’t worry about it too much. Since it was a temporary effect, it was bound to go away sooner or later.

  Next, she checked her quests. Before logging out she remebered being some quests updated, but since she was in a hurry at the time she didn’t even look at them.

  At the top of them all she could a greyed out quest, a notification appearing right after.

  She failed it!? But didn’t she get out of that place alive together with the other kid?

  When she saw that the main quest items would be destroyed she panicked and checked her inventory. She took a sigh of relief when she saw that she still had everything with her.

  But then a question naturally came to mind. How come it mentioned quest items being destroyed? Was this common to all of the Urgent quests, or was it specific to this one?

  And if so, does it mean that she intruded upon the questline? If there was a chain quest leading to that weird world, then it would make sense for there to be some quest items.

  Tacha looked at the greyed out rewards. Maybe it’s related to the Abyssal Fragment. She made a mental note of it. Someone was bound to know more about it. It wasn’t a bad idea to know more about this ‘red world’.

  She had a vague recollection of said mark. Going through her status menu she found it among her passive skill section.

  She still couldn’t believe that a skill so full of debuffs could exist. What was worse was that she had to stay at 20% Hp. With that she was basically a sunfish.

  Tacha couldn’t help but cuss out the devs. Whoever created this skill is a devil, a devil I say!

  So the reason she failed the quest was because she received the mark? Wasn’t that still back in that weird place? Why didn’t the quest fail as soon as she got it?

  Tacha Macha had no answer for such questions. And by just looking at the rewards, she could tell that it was a difficult quest. The boss she killed didn’t even give half of that exp!

  She wondered wether it was difficult because it was dangerous or because the clues to the curse were too difficult to find.

  Still, living with such a passive was simply terrible. No matter what it would take, she was going to find a cure.

  There was no new notification, and in her quest list only two older quests were left. The first one was the chain quest that lead her to fight the corrupted Layla, meanwhile the other one naturally popped up while she was scavenging a rather well dressed skeleton in the ruins.

  While she had a few leads for Kirio’s quest, she had no idea what to do about the last one.

  Tacha started pondering. The skeleton was found in the boss room, the same boss room that would give you the Voidbight status and the same room that has a big ass gate that leads to the Red World that gave me the mark. Moreover, the skeleton was wearing a necklance that has the passive to prevent Blight statuses.

  To say that it was all a coincidence it was very unlikely!

  “Mmm…” Everything felt like some sort of ceremony. Something related to the Blight and the Red World.

  She then remembered that there were a lot of paintings in the ruins, and one of them was ruined by anything but accidentally. Who else would be bothered to ruin an old mural but one of the villagers that fear those ruins oh so much?

  Tacha felt as she was on the verge of discovering the answer. With sparkling eyes, she headed towards the village.