The Goddess’s Urgent Mission 

Ard could tell that the Boss man was much more amicable toward him now. Although much of it was still a false front, it was enough to show that his words now carried some weight. He was confident the chieftain wouldn’t act rashly again. While Ard wanted to stir up conflict between the two sides, he didn’t want them to go to war just yet. Regardless of the outcome, such a battle would inevitably bring suffering to the innocent residents of the region. What Ard wanted to do now was to minimize the pain of this conflict as much as possible.

Ard spent another day at the Sunstone stronghold, enjoying the Boss man’s warm hospitality. The next day, with four days left until the plan was to be set in motion, he began his journey back to the lord’s city. These past few days, he had been in a different place with a different allegiance each day, and it was making his head spin. No wonder Yexi disliked solving problems this way. Although the long-term consequences were smaller, the process itself was incredibly troublesome.

Full of vigor, Ard set out early in the morning. He planned to go straight to the lord’s city to meet with Roco and figure out what he was thinking. His sleep last night had been decent. After his recent string of reckless actions, he didn’t want to push Yexi’s patience to its limit and end up a eunuch. So, last night, he had obediently slept in a separate room from her. Without any distracting thoughts, he had quickly fallen into a deep sleep.

But in his rare, high-quality slumber, he was met with an unexpected visitor.

The familiar, pure white space. But this time, it was not the goddess wearing Yexi’s face. The one who appeared before him was a blonde beauty, and she was glaring at him with undisguised hostility.

Ard sighed. “So you’ve finally shown your true face. I was wondering why you were always sneaking around, wearing someone else’s face. You’re quite beautiful, you know. I thought maybe you were…”

“Shut up, you trash!” the blonde goddess gritted out. With a flick of her wrist, she had Ard hanging upside down.

From her reaction, Ard knew this was definitely not the same person as before. “Um, who might you be?”

“I am the administrator of this world, Lifa.”

“The one I…” Ard quickly caught himself. “The beautiful Goddess Lifa. It is the fortune of three lifetimes to meet you.”

“Shut up!” Although her senpai’s counsel had dissuaded her from actively trying to kill Ard, that didn’t mean she was going to be nice to him.

“Alright, I’ll shut up.” Ard obediently fell silent. In front of a goddess with whom he had a grudge, who was moody and overwhelmingly powerful, he wisely chose to be meek. This was not like teasing Yexi. He had some understanding of Yexi’s personality, and they didn’t have a feud between them.

Lifa said directly, “I have a mission for you.”

“I’ve been a bit busy lately…”

“As the world administrator, I can’t directly kill you. But I can lower your luck to rock bottom. You’ll step in dog poop every time you leave the house, choke on your food, choke on water, get insulted every time you talk to someone, lose every bet you make, and the item you want to buy will always be sold out the moment you get to the front of the line… (and so on for ten thousand words).”

Ard sucked in a cold breath. What a vicious woman. He immediately changed his tune. “I was wrong. I will follow all of your instructions, my lady.”

“Hmph!” Lifa pouted. “There is a dangerous item in your vicinity. I need you to find it for me.”

“What dangerous item?”

“The Desire Gene Amplifier,” Lifa said with a frown. “It’s an item that can modify a creature’s genes based on its greed. The modified being will be completely consumed by its desires and turn into a monster that only follows its base instincts. And their strength will be greatly enhanced.”

“That thing is so dangerous? And you need me to retrieve it?”

Lifa frowned. “The danger level of the item itself is manageable. The main problem is that it’s not something that should have appeared on this world’s developmental timeline. It seems someone, perhaps a transmigrator like you, brought it from another world. In any case, you need to bring it back to me, quickly!”

Ard looked at her strangely. “It’s not from this world? You seem a bit nervous. It’s just an item from another world, isn’t it?”

“Is your pig brain only capable of thinking about eating and drinking?” Lifa said with disdain. “What I’m concerned about is the potential harm of that item. Different worlds, due to their different environments, historical backgrounds, and opportunities, often develop different civilizations. Although the ultimate goal of all civilizations is to analyze the source of all things, the paths to get there are vastly different. If a civilization is invaded by another before it has developed to the point where it can accommodate it, the consequences can be severe.”

Ard, being a man of his world, tried to understand her words with his own common sense. “You’re talking about something like an invasive species, right? A creature that shouldn’t exist in a certain region suddenly appears in its ecosystem, disrupting the original food chain. Without natural predators to keep it in check, the ecosystem collapses, and the entire region’s native species are driven to extinction.”

“Very clever. The principle is similar,” Lifa said. “The structure and forging method of that item cannot be analyzed with this world’s current level of knowledge. Naturally, there is no way to counter it, only to destroy it with brute force. But to use your previous example, that’s like using a highly toxic pesticide to eradicate an invasive species. Such measures will cause great damage to the original ecosystem. I certainly don’t want my world to suffer such damage for the sake of one small item.”

Ard felt a sense of responsibility. He never thought he’d have a chance to save the world. “Alright, I’ll do it. Just tell me the location.”

“I don’t know. I just have a vague feeling that it’s in the region where you are.”

“…” Ard asked in disbelief, “You don’t know where it is in your own domain?”

Lifa said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “That’s right. If I knew where it was, I would have retrieved it myself. What would I need you for? So you have to find it!”

Ard said helplessly, “Alright, then at least give me a clue.”

“Didn’t I just give you a clue? It’s in the region of that Baron Quentin.”

Ard didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “How am I supposed to complete this mission? You don’t know the specific location and even gave me such a large area to search. How the hell am I supposed to find it?!”

“Here, take this.” Lifa produced a detection device. “It will alert you when you are within a hundred meters of an otherworldly item. The closer you get, the stronger the reaction will be.”

“A hundred meters is still a pretty big area! Give me some more clues, oh omnipotent goddess. Surely a small thing like this is not beyond your power. How did you find out about this thing in the first place?”

Lifa said, annoyed, “No more clues! Find it yourself! If you don’t, I’ll smite you with a divine curse of bad luck!” With that, she threw Ard out of the dream space.

After he was gone, Lifa grumbled to herself, “Clues, my foot. I don’t even know how that thing got there.”

According to the previous timeline, Lifa should have been concentrating on training Isaac. But this time, because of Ard’s interference, she had also been paying some attention to him, cursing him a few times when she was in a bad mood. It was because of this that she had noticed the fluctuation of an otherworldly item in Baron Quentin’s region. But when she tried to track it further, she had lost the signal. Helpless, Lifa had figured out what the item was based on the fluctuation and had then grabbed Ard to be her free labor.

Lifa frowned. She had no idea how that thing had come to this world. She should have been alerted to any item or being that broke through the world barrier. But the Desire Gene Amplifier had appeared out of thin air, as if it had always belonged to this world. If she hadn’t been lucky enough to notice something was wrong while she was venting her anger on Ard, she would probably still be in the dark.

The thought made her panic. Before time was reversed, she hadn’t paid much attention to the Hanlock Kingdom. Although some major events had occurred, from her god’s-eye view, they were just ordinary calamities. At that time, she had been obsessed with training Isaac to break her zero-performance record. It seemed she had overlooked many problems. The events in the Hanlock Kingdom back then were probably not so simple.

It wasn’t that Lifa hadn’t tried to investigate. The moment she realized something was wrong, she had immediately gone to check the historical information stored in the management room, to see if she could find out what had happened in the Hanlock Kingdom before time was reversed. But a single look had made her face turn even uglier. The historical information for the five years before time was reversed was completely corrupted and unreadable.

This time, Lifa was truly panicked. Something like this should have been impossible. This historical information was stored in the world’s information bank; it was a part of the world itself. There was no such thing as natural corruption. That meant it had to be man-made interference. But the only one who should have been able to access the world’s information bank was her, the administrator!

Lifa was dumbfounded. She wasn’t a fool. She knew she had been set up.

“Which turtle bastard set me up?!” she cursed.

Helpless, Lifa had no choice but to use Ard as a free laborer for now. She really couldn’t spare the attention. Her top priority was to patch the vulnerabilities in the world management system. She absolutely could not let something like this, bypassing the administrator to change the world’s information, happen again. She had even put Isaac’s training on hold.

“Right, I need to discuss this with my senpai. This is definitely a violation of the rules. I wonder how they’ll deal with it.”

Lifa began to add firewalls to her management system while contacting the senpai she trusted.

“I hope that despicable person didn’t change too much. But no matter what, I have to find them. Forget it, I can’t train Isaac so slowly anymore. He has to make a move.”