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Translated by: Craxuan
Edited by: darklord5555
Chapter 16: Run Skill Level Up!
The status window of the Zhao Soldier’s body was still visible, and every stats and skills could be seen clearly.
Yue Qiang did not close the Zhao Soldier’s stats window and read the system message first. When he finally turned around to take another glance at the body, he was surprised to discover that all of the Zhao Soldier’s skills had dropped down to LVL 1. All four skills Vertical Strike, Wide Sweep, Well Trained and Fighting Spirit had all become level one.
Did that mean that when he died all his skills would be locked at level one, and all the experience required to level them up would be transferred to the player character?
In other words, combat experience was actually used to level up skills!
This was a real bargain alright.
From the battle just now, Yue Qiang had experienced deeply the power of combat skills. A single ‘Vertical Strike’ skill could actually deal four times Strength attack damage, and even after deducting defense it was still able to take a quarter of his health in an instant.
As for his somewhat joke-like ‘Run’ skill, it had saved his life many times during many dangerous moments and was an extremely useful life saving skill.
This ‘combat experience’ was just way more useful than the character leveling experience from other games.
Impatiently, he clicked his own character status screen and as expected, saw an option to enter experience at the bottom of ‘Run’ LVL 1. It didn’t take him too long to choose enter.
It was definitely the right choice to level up a lifesaving skill like this.
Following Yue Qiang’s mouse movements, the Run skill’s progress bar slowly filled up until finally, after expending 300 combat experience points, the Run skill was successfully upgraded to level 2.
340 combat experience seemed like a lot, but as it turned out, he had finished almost all of it leveling up Run alone. After making a rough estimation, he came to the conclusion that the amount of experience required to raise the Zhao soldier’s skill was 100 points, and the numbers of those skills were all pretty good.
To think that his Run skill would take 300 combat experience points to upgrade a single level! In that case, how good would its benefits turn out to be then?
System Message: Your ‘Run’ Skill has been upgraded to LVL 2. Stamina usage has decreased, and movement speed has increased.
Although it appeared to be a most simplistic explanation, Yue Qiang understood that his life saving ability had been increased by leaps and bounds. The reason for that was the game’s combat system settings.
For an in-game enemy – take this Zhao soldier as example – his stats were only slightly higher than Yue Qiang’s, whereas his skill bonuses was at a completely different level. If this was a different game, the enemy should’ve been able to wreck him in seconds through sheer stats difference.
But this game used a more realistic combat system and disallowed skills from locking down targets. This meant that there was a certain probability to evade attacks, and his Run skill, in a way, had increased his evasion probability. To level up this skill was to increase his power by a huge and absolute margin. Especially for a micro player like Yue Qiang, if he had infinite stamina and was faced again with a level of attack just like that Zhao Soldier’s, he would be able to achieve a near perfect battle.
And this was probably the biggest difference between a computer-controlled NPC and a player-controlled character.
This meant that the combat system itself was designed to be advantageous for the player. As long as the enemy did not have a similar type of skill or lacking in agility, Yue Qiang would be able to slowly grind down the enemy to death through stamina alone.
That was assuming that he had infinite stamina of course.
But even so, the intrinsic value of this Run Skill was impossibly huge. Now that he thinks of it, he had practically jogged out this life saving skill through three days of eating, sleeping, and non-stop running. Yue Qiang thought that it was pretty ironic.
Imagine if he did not have this life saving skill. There was only so much damage he could do relying on his Strength stat alone and an attack-less weapon. If he didn’t had a solid foundation in gaming controls, plus that soldier happened to be injured in the first place and thus allowing him to score hits that ignored defense, he would still have lost at the end of the fight.
Yue Qiang did not want to think about this problem any longer, and he switched his attention to the newly acquired letter. Normally, such items would trigger a quest.
As he expected, the moment he moved the mouse on top of the item, a message popped up:
System Message: A quest will definitely be triggered if you open this letter. Will you open it?
Without a doubt, the word ‘definitely’ was a warning as to the difficulty of this quest. Yue Qiang was very confident with his Run LVL 2 skill right now, so after a little bit of hesitation he chose yes.
It was a letter demanding their surrender. The contents were pretty simple though,
“We have gave many warnings to the Yue Family. This is our last. You are compelled to surrender the Ring of Earth in three months’ time, or we will slaughter the entire village!”
The signed name was ‘Zhao Yan’.
System Message: You have accepted the quest ‘Send the Letter’.
The quest’s font was yellow in color, so it should be pretty easy. The quest description was also very simple; he was to deliver the letter to the village chief’s hands and it would be done.
This was fine too. Although the system had stated that the quest ‘Assist in the Defense of Yue Village’ was complete, but he still hadn’t reported to the blacksmith Tan Xiong after all. A person should not do things by halves. Although he had withdrawn the quest reward ‘A Blackish Iron Rod’ (T/N: It was only ‘An Iron Rod’ when the item was first introduced, so just suppose that the author has made a minor mistake. I may fix it later on for consistency.) Beforehand, it wouldn’t waste too much energy to go back and converse a little.
Returning along the same route he used to walk over, he arrived in front of the smithy’s entrance. The moment the blacksmith Tan Xiong saw him, he proactively triggered a conversation.
“Done with the quest already, kid?”
“Yes sir. I took out an Injured Zhao Soldier, and I also found a letter to be passed to the village chief.” Yue Qiang said.
“I didn’t expect someone your level to be able to kill an enemy.”
Naturally this was the time to flatter the NPC, and so Yue Qiang said, “All are responsible for the killing of our country’s enemies.” He paid special attention to call the Yue Village a ‘country’ every time he talked to the blacksmith Tan Xiong.
An ‘Mm’ of approval popped up above the blacksmith’s head, and he said, “The village chief is just at the house over there. Go.” That was all he said after that, and there were no messages about additional quest rewards either.
Yue Qiang was not surprised however. He had experienced how stingy this NPC was long ago, so he didn’t hold any hope in the first place. Before he left, he offhandedly clicked at the blacksmith’s avatar and checked his stats. A row of skill labeled with ‘?’ earlier had been unlocked.
‘Heart of Mohist LVL 1’
There was neither a description nor usage about the skill. What a strange skill.
He did not give it too much thought and ran straight towards the village chief’s house. Along the way he passed by Gongshu Shaoyang’s giant crossbow log house and very naturally greeted her. The young girl had always expressed to others warmheartedly, so even though she was just an NPC Yue Qiang got used to the habit of chatting up to her a little. Before he left, he again clicked her avatar offhandedly to check her status. Besides her Strength and Vitality she also had a very high ‘Dexterity’ value; reaching at 31 points. Other than a row of question marks inside her skill window, there was also a strange skill with no description whatsoever.
‘Heart of Artisan LVL 1’
Yue Qiang paid some attention to this ‘Heart of XX’ skill. He was able to see this particular skill on both Gongshu Shaoyang and the blacksmith Tan Xiong only after he had completed and returned from his quest. Moreover, they were both lacking any sort of description whatsoever.
Was there a connection between the two?
Thanks for doing this chapter! 😇