Red Flower City was ruled by Lord Akai Hana. Akai Hana was a noble with the rank of Hakushaku, essentially equivalent to a count; he controlled Red Flower City along with all nearby villages and a few other smaller cities. He was a local big shot, commanding ten thousand soldiers and collecting taxes from the residents. However, he was still under the authority of the Kampaku.

The Kampaku was technically not a king; he was more of a prime minister, but in practice, he held all the power.

The Emperor used to wield considerable power, but that was in the past; nowadays, the Emperor is merely a figurehead, still wealthy and living in luxury but at the mercy of the Kampaku. It could be said that the Kampaku is not the Emperor only because he fears public backlash; after all, the Emperor's position has been inherited for thousands of years, and in the eyes of the people, he is more like a deity.

In the past, the Kampaku had gotten away with secretly killing the previous Emperor, but openly removing the entire royal family and assuming the throne could truly destabilize things.

Despite being the de facto leader of the country, he still doesn't have absolute, total control; local lords like Akai Hana could still rebel.

Currently, however, even if all local lords combined their forces, they couldn't resist the Kampaku, but it's no doubt that spending so much time fighting local rebels would severely weaken him, opening the way for foreign enemies.

The Emperor is only a child anyway; he would sign whatever the Kampaku gives him, so there is no need to remove him and risk chaos.

Local big shots such as Akai Hana usually try to stay on the good side of the Kampaku; that's why when he heard of Jack, he became very worried.

...

"Did you find him?" asked Akai Hana from a few of his captains, who were kneeling on the ground.

"My lord, Jack is a very strong man; we must activate our reserves to catch him," said the captain with a white mustache.

Touching his chin, looking around helplessly, Akai Hana said, "You really want me to activate our reserves for one person? Ahh, do it, just catch him as fast as possible!" he said.

The captain bowed and left.

...

Akai Hana was a noble with thousands of soldiers, but most of them were actually reserves; his active troops numbered only around 2,000.

Keeping 10,000 professional warriors for a city of 400,000 is a bit unaffordable; instead, he only calls them in when there is a problem. The system is quick, and he can gather all his reserves and create an army of 10,000 professional soldiers in less than a week.

Soon, the reserves gathered and started patrolling the city, carefully looking everywhere.

...

"So smelly!" Jack sighed, very dissatisfied; at the moment, he is using a mortal body, which means even a simple bad smell can annoy him.

Looking at the running wastewater, he sighed; a while ago, he entered the city, but soon, for some reason, they started looking for him.

He had no choice but to hide in the sewer pipes. It's quite impressive to build sewer pipes in this environment; it's said that Lord Akai Hana was very germaphobic, so he spent a huge amount of money on creating one.

"I remember that I wrote him as brave, so why does he look like a coward? He is looking for me only because the Kampaku's minion asked him; if he were brave, he would have refused!" Jack sighed.

He wrote this script, but it went much worse than what he wanted. To begin with, he is just one normal person, with the entire country looking to kill him; if it weren’t for his persistence, he would have already been caught.

The problem with the pipes is not just the smell; the gases in here can be very poisonous; there is barely any oxygen here; if it were not for small holes through which fresh air and water could enter, Jack would have died.

Jack could still die here if he is careless; of course, he would only die in this dreamworld; he himself would be completely fine, but that would waste his efforts.

Looking down, it was completely dark, but he could feel cockroaches moving around.

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"It seems I have no choice but to eat cockroaches?" he thought calmly.

He has no problem eating cockroaches.

What foods are good food and what are bad? For mortal humans, it all boils down to their culture. Some cultures allow more dietary diversity, eating a range of animals and even insects, while others only eat certain animals.

Jack, however, doesn't care about these irrational constructs; in his view, three factors are all that matters: its nutrients, its harmfulness, and its price.

If, for example, cockroaches are nutrient-rich, not harmful to the body, and are also cheap, why shouldn’t he eat them? As an immortal, he only cares about rationality, not mortal factors, such as cockroaches looking disgusting.

Still, that was only theoretical; in fact, cockroaches here look very dirty and very harmful; he would surely get horrible parasites if he started eating them.

Still, he has two choices: One is trying to get out of here to find food.

Going out is extremely risky, as even from here, he can hear soldiers walking and looking for him; it would be his death if he is found out.

The second option is to start looking for cockroaches to eat; this has less immediate risk but can cause a lot of diseases in the future.

After rationally calculating, he determined that the chances of managing to find food without being found out outside are slim. At least in the case of cockroaches, he would die later; if he goes out now, he would die now.

One must always try to prolong one's life as much as possible; maybe the cockroaches aren’t as filled with parasites and disease as they look.

Jack didn’t bother checking with his database whether cockroaches are dangerous to use as food. This is kind of a test run for the difficulty of this dreamworld, so it's best not to cheat in it.

After deciding, he started plowing through the dirty mud to look for cockroaches.

...

After looking for two weeks, Akai Hana finally deactivated his reserves. He looked everywhere in the city and determined that Jack must have run away long ago; Kuro also didn’t insist anymore; after all, he was allowed in the city, and clearly saw how they looked for Jack.

After not finding him here despite looking this hard, Kuro couldn’t find any excuses, so he left. After all, Akai Hana outranks Kuro by miles; technically, Kuro is just a commoner; his only power is being an agent of Kampaku.

Akai Hana already gave Kampaku a lot of face by activating his entire reserves and looking through his entire city for Jack, all at his personal expenditure. In addition, he gave permission to Kuro to move freely in his territory and look for Jack himself, so there was really nothing to complain about.

Soon, everything returned to normal.

...

In the middle of the night, in an inconspicuous location, someone covered in sticky black goo climbed out of the soil.

"I hate myself!" Jack thought as he felt his nose was numb from the terrible smell.

He has been eating cockroaches for three weeks, which would have been intolerable to the overwhelming majority of mortals. Jack, though, is an immortal; his mental strength is unimaginable; despite living in total darkness, in horrific smell, and plowing through waste to find cockroaches to eat, his mental state was perfectly stable.

As someone who has lived for over a trillion years, there are few things that could affect him.

Maybe if he were in true life-and-death danger, he would have really been affected, but as this is just a rank 9 dreamworld, his life is completely safe.

Still, most mortals couldn’t do it. Imagine someone creates a game in which one can play. One would feel everything one to one; if you play with a sword, then be careful, because any injury would be as painful as if you were really injured.

True, you know that your real body is safe, but still, you feel the pain. Now, in that virtual reality, they put you in a dark place and say that you must stay there for an unknown period of time and must eat cockroaches. Even if you know it's all fake, most would still break down after a short time.

"I hope I don’t get too sick!" Jack thought. Consuming cockroaches he finds in the mud doesn’t sound healthy; sure, he survived, but he probably has all kinds of parasites in his digestive system.

After sneakily running around, he broke into what looked to be an abandoned house and stayed there until the morning.

Two weeks later, Jack changed his looks so he would not be recognized as easily anymore.

He has stolen good clothes and an identity card; now, he can live here.

"This hell mode script can't be solved easily; I must stay hidden and slowly gain strength!" he felt.

Recently, there have been a few health scares. He had severe stomach pains lately and has found wriggling worms in his poo. Those were very concerning; he has used his stolen money and went to a doctor to get some drugs.

"Cockroaches aren’t safe to consume, I guess; or, at least the ones in the sewers aren’t safe!" he thought.

Lately, he has been eating good food, but even with that, he has been getting thinner.

"Would I die from parasites?" Jack felt it would be funny for a grand rank 13 immortal like himself to die from literal worms.

He wanted to immediately run away from this city; after all, so many people saw his drawing. But with such a severe parasite infection issue, it would be dangerous to run to the forest.

...

After two more weeks, his issue got much more serious; he saw big worms in his poo and even felt them in his throat.

He has gotten much thinner, and no matter what he ate, it was like worms ate everything, leaving nothing for his digestive system to absorb.

From his bed, he didn’t have energy to stand up.

"It turned out, eating cockroaches was not a good idea!" Jack nodded to himself, already planning for his next round.

If it were a fiction, someone may have come to save him, but it was not a fiction; it was a dreamworld. No one came to the abandoned house to save him; after a few days, the worms in his stomach caused internal bleeding, killing him shortly after.

..

"It's too hard," thinking about his last experiment, Jack thought.

In the dreamworld, he cannot use any supernatural power; that’s why it's so hard; otherwise, nobody could have killed him, as his skills strengthen him whenever he is hit.

"Let's give myself a few friends!" he thought and started redesigning the dreamworld. He wouldn’t make it too easy, as that would bring down the Dao collection, but he wouldn’t make one against the world, like previous runs.

"Let's start the next run!" he smiled.