Chapter 56 – Leveling Isn’t Easy
When Ye Xiu passed by the reception desk, he saw Chen Guo sitting there with the mini Whack-a-Mole in her hands. She had a bitter look on her, so he didn’t say hello to her and ran to the smoking area to find a computer.
Nowaday, Ye Xiu’s Lord Grim wasn’t well-known only in the game. Ye Xiu himself was well-known in the Internet Cafe. Almost all the Glory players there knew that Lord Grim was this Internet Cafe’s network manager. He also had a self-made Silver weapon. Nearly all of the players in the smoking area knew Lord Grim. Many of them came in the afternoon after work and played until now without leaving. Seeing Ye Xiu come, they all called out to say hello to him.
Ye Xiu also casually waved at the people who greeted him. After putting the cigarette in his mouth and lighting it, he entered the game. He immediately suffered from a bombardment of messages. After going online for five seconds, the message prompt kept on flashing, flashing, flashing.
After looking at them, he saw that they were all the usual greetings. Seven Fields and the others said “Brother expert, you’re here.” Immersed Jade “I pay respects to God”. Blue Brook Guild’s representative Blue River invited him to level with them. Tyrannical Ambition’s representative Endless Night reserved him for some midnight dungeon runs…….
Ye Xiu replied to each of them. Seven Fields, Immersed Jade, and the others each replied with a smiley face. Blue River’s leveling invitation and Endless Night’s dungeon reservation were both tactfully refused.
Each of these players worded their messages to Ye Xiu very carefully. After Ye Xiu replied to all of them, they temporarily went quiet. But more messages quickly popped up. Piles upon piles of friend requests filled the screen.
I’m that famous already? Ye Xiu scratched his head. He had only helped set a new clear record and nothing more. The big guilds might have recognized that he was an expert, but they shouldn’t have went so far as to kneel down and worship him, right?
Ye Xiu ignored all of these notifications. In the end, someone to the side bumped into him: “Brother, why don’t we be friends?”
“Huh?” Ye Xiu turned his head. He discovered that quite a few Internet Cafe guests had walked towards him and waved their hands to greet him: “Brother, let’s be friends!”
These friend requests should all be from this Internet Cafe! Ye Xiu started sweating. Due to the opening of the new server, the amount of tenth server players in the Internet Cafe was relatively large. Most of them were just playing for fun and didn’t take the game too seriously. But some of them liked to make friends with experts. If they could become friends now, then their relationship would be more solid. As a result, there were quite a few people who wanted to add Ye Xiu as their friend.
“Oh? What are your names?” In front of them, he felt too embarrassed to directly turn down everyone. Ye Xiu asked everyone their game IDs and added each and every one of them as friends. After a short while, Lord Grim’s friends list had already reached 37 people. In addition, none of them were offline. Besides the players he had met in the past two days like Seven Fields, the rest were all Happy Internet Cafe guests. Although most of them were from the smoking area, there were also a few people who ran over especially to make friends with him.
With such a long list, Ye Xiu couldn’t match the real person and their ingame character. Riding on wave of momentum, one player joked: “We’re all from the same Internet Cafe. We should all form a guild together.”
This call didn’t receive many responses. So far, Glory only had ten servers in total. Adding in the communal Heavenly Domain, it wasn’t rare to meet with someone from the same server. Besides Ye Xiu’s expert status as a dungeon record holder, everyone lined up to make friends with him because they all knew something Blue Rivers and the others didn’t: Lord Grim had a Silver weapon.
This thing was more eye-catching than a dungeon record. If Blue River and the others knew that Lord Grim was hiding this, they would have tried to rope him in even more crazily.
The proposal to establish a guild only received a few cold, hollow laughs. The brother that suggested it felt extremely embarrassed, so he shut his mouth, playing on his own. Everyone wore headphones and once again immersed themselves into the game world. On the other hand, Ye Xiu actively sent a friend request to someone else.
Soft Mist.
This was Tang Rou’s in-game name. Ye Xiu didn’t know what it was supposed to mean. He reckoned that she took the “Mist” from “Chasing Haze”, took Soft from her name Tang Rou and just randomly put them together. (TLNote: Haze is made up of two words in Chinese. Mist is one of those words. Rou from Tang Rou means soft)
After sending the request, he didn’t see a response. Ye Xiu supposed it was because this little sister was too unfamiliar with the game and couldn’t even notice this type of system message. Sending more wouldn’t work. Sending one would flash in the same way that sending eight would. As a result, he just left it for now. After organizing the items in his inventory. Ye Xiu prepared to kill monsters and level.
The biggest problem with the beginner village was that there were too many people. But after leaving the beginner village, in the Level 20 stage, the biggest problem at the moment was still too many people.
There were multiple beginner villages to share the server traffic, but after the beginner village, everyone came together onto a single piece of land. Although this land was larger than the beginner village by several times, every Level 20 flocked here after leaving the beginner village. In the end, the situation was basically the same as beginner village. The area surrounding Bulls also had vast crowds of people.
Last night, Ye Xiu took advantage of the very early hours in the morning, when there were less people online, to grab and complete a few quests. But now was just at the peak of Internet activity, so doing quests would only make leveling slower. Receiving quests and completing quests both required lining up. Killing monsters had to be scrambled over. Just thinking of all this made him shiver in terror. Rather than quests, it’d be better to look for a firm location to clear monsters and level.
At this stage, what leveling area had fewer people? Of course it was the higher leveled areas. Players would lose experience when they died in Glory, so most players wouldn’t rashly take risks. They preferred to line up for quests, line up for monsters, and level up steadily. If they weren’t experts, they wouldn’t even think of going to high leveled areas to level.
In Glory, dungeons were the fastest way to level. The next fastest was completing quest lines. And the slowest was clearing monsters. But in the current circumstances, he no longer had any dungeon entries left and he’d have to wait in line to do quests, so clearing monsters were the most optimal choice.
Difficulties and so on, those weren’t in Ye Xiu’s considerations. With his peak level of skill, as long as the NPC’s level wasn’t too high above his, then there wouldn’t be any problem.
The experience gained by killing monsters depended on the level difference. This difference still used five as a standard. If the monsters were five levels above or below the player’s level, then the player would only receive minimal experience. Within that range, the higher the level, the greater the experience. As a result, monsters that were five levels higher than the player gave the most experience.
Five levels didn’t sound like a lot, but in Glory, each level higher had the problem of Level Suppression.
In Glory, levels weren’t only used to define players. Physical attack, magic attack, Bleed, Stun, Root, and other status effects had levels too.
When the system didn’t display the difference in levels, then these levels would all be the same as the player’s level.
In other words, the current Lord Grim’s level was 21. If he used Double Stab to cause a hidden BOSS to Bleed, then the Bleed’s level would be 21.
Level 21 damage or a Level 21 Bleed would have a reduced effect on Level 22 and up monsters. The higher the level gap, the more obvious the reduction. This type of situation was called Level Suppression.
The difference between being high-leveled and low-leveled wasn’t just the difference in attributes and equipment. The concealed calculations of Level Suppression added to the difficulties of challenging those at a higher level.