Chapter 531: You Came Just In Time
After the Sporeggar Mill Nightmare was resolved, the players’ mission to build the teleportation waypoint would no longer be hindered.
Originally, purifying the nightmare three times was a relatively easy condition.
The players would prioritize purifying the nightmares with the lowest difficulty since they could choose.
Anyway, they were the novices at Bronze Rank.
They could receive the rewards of normal difficulty nightmares wholly. When advanced to the Silver Rank, they could only level up by clearing nightmares with difficulty above hard. It would not be so easy to get experience points.
After Bernardino was killed, the players left the initial “beginner stage”.
Their footsteps advanced from the Freezing Water Port to the capital. In this process, Annan provided the “dungeon instance” used for their level-ups and the foes they could kill for free. Not only were their daily necessities met with the nightmare key provided, but no one supervised them.
When the players left the capital and traveled independently, they gradually realized it was not easy to find high-quality nightmares.
Generally speaking, players would die a couple of times before clearing the dungeon, even in a fresh normal difficulty nightmare, unless it was a high-IQ player who was particularly familiar with this process.
At the same time, nightmares like these gave stingy rewards.
For example, restricted increment on the level of the swordsman profession or the dungeon could only increase the levels of the lurker profession. Otherwise, the nightmare would only give out skills that were not needed, or multiple curses would restrict the players for no reason.
There were few nightmares with puzzle-solving content, and the durability was usually depleted before the puzzle was solved. Also, there could be people defeating the nightmare already. Then, they left directly because of being unsatisfied with the reward. As a result, it left a mess for the people approaching later.
The problem was that players could not see how much of the nightmare durability was left.
Only priests specializing in nightmares could use rituals to identify how many entries were left.
In the end, the entry count would be depleted when the players only cleared the nightmare two to three times where the decryption progress had reached more than 60%, sometimes even 90%.
That annoyed the players terribly.
Those queued in front, you should finish what you have started!
Why would you want to show the leftovers!?
Still, the players had to purify the nightmares.
The reason was also simple.
Murder was against the law.
After reaching Bronze Rank, ordinary people no longer gave experience. However, it was tough to defeat a transcender, and it easily became troublesome if they were to commit murder.
In fact, some players were being hunted down by the veteran Silver Rank’s hunters. There had been two deaths so far. The experience deducted from death was ten times more than the experience gained from killing someone.
Until now, his “Diary of Being Hunted” was still serialized in blood and tears on the forum. It became the second most popular post daily. His experience amused the players, who were more cautious and did not like to cause trouble. The spectators did not need to sabotage themselves and experience dying richly.
Also, Delicious Wind Goose contributed to the daily most-read post. These posts recorded many practical and simple rituals.
Delicious Wind Goose had not gone far on the path of ritualist, and the knowledge he carried was not heavy enough. At the same time, he could not impart the knowledge to others. If he told others about this knowledge, he would lose knowledge of the same weight.
But he found a trick.
He recorded the more uncomplicated ritual knowledge to the real world with a drawing program and ill.u.s.trated them with stick figure patterns.
He did not use pen and paper to write it out in detail because that would trigger the forgetting mechanism, which he learned after trying it once. The forgetting mechanism would activate even if he wrote down ritual knowledge on earth. He was so frightened that he looked back at this knowledge directly and then burned the paper.
Delicious Wind Goose was in high spirits, thinking he would become a ritualist on earth. But as expected, these rituals were useless on earth.
Luckily, when Delicious Wind Goose used the abstract narrative method of “soul painter-level stickman stick figures combined with numbers” to record the ritual, it did not trigger the forgetting mechanism.
This seemed to be treated as creating a “false tome”.
Afterward, Delicious Wind Goose printed and took screenshots of this knowledge and pa.s.sed them to the Freezing Water Port forum. The players watched those stickmen to “enlighten themselves”.
The result was that this post had been read hundreds of thousands of times. People were earnestly figuring it out, but some treated it as nonsense or a joke. Everyone was “expressing their own opinions”.
Then, Delicious Wind Goose would pin the post that successfully “figuring out the Charades” at the top of the post. So the players could comprehend it intuitively.
It turned out that rituals worked in this manner—like the “key” to false tome.
Although the players still did not have this occult knowledge, they could hold the ritual if they followed suit. Of course, this was limited to rituals that “did not consume occult knowledge”.
In this way, Delicious Wind Goose roughly understood why false tome came about.
It was simply because creating a false tome did not consume knowledge!
As long as the knowledge was not output in total accuracy, it would not be judged as “pa.s.sing the knowledge”.
However, Delicious Wind Goose felt something was wrong with this strange setting. This was unlike a natural rule, but more like a manmade constraint.
After all, he had never heard that the earth’s white collars could abuse bugs.
By the way, among Delicious Wind Goose’s posts, the ritual with the highest commendation was the ritual for “preservation”.
Compared with those bizarre nightmares, nightmares obtained from the influence could only be challenged once.
But at least the rewards were generous.
Since the dungeon was a.s.signed, the rewards given would be practical.
Of course, the difficulty was not necessarily the case.
After experiencing all kinds of nightmares, players regarded nightmares as dungeon instances with limited time, limited entries, and rich returns.
Holding the idea of ”take the free meal first before eating your food”, Lin Yiyi and the others kept the “Novice Influence: Leviathan’s Air” when they pa.s.sed through the seafloor tunnel.
From this influence, a random nightmare of hard difficulty would be presented.
It was the most profitable to wait until they advanced to Silver Rank before challenging it.
They were still three Bronze Ranks back then, and it was a waste to challenge the nightmare of the hard difficulty level.
The reason “back then” was noteworthy was because Lin Yiyi had successfully advanced. The silver jewelry that Nefertari sent was at the right time.
It was [Azure Blue Saint Guard].
After getting used to the new curse and profession skills, Lin Yiyi was ready to challenge Hard nightmares and continue to level up.
“Are you going away for a while?” Nieusel was a little surprised.
But he quickly smiled and said, “It’s fine. The Sporeggar Mill Nightmare has been purified. We already owe you a big favor.
“If you want to leave, it’s better to wait a couple more days because we’re still preparing the gifts.”
“We won’t be leaving so soon. We have to purify some nightmares before we leave. Someone will come here later to take over our jobs.” Jiu Er explained.
Then, Nieusel was in deep thought.
“Are you occupied with something else?” He asked with concern, “Can I help?”
“Probably,” Annan replied with a smile.
He glanced at Jiu Er and Suankou and guessed what they were thinking.
After Jiu Er and Suuankou finish the teleportation waypoint mission here and get the mission reward, they would be approaching the “qualifying rounds”.
In other words, it was time for them to prepare for the advancement nightmare of attaining the Silver Rank.
At the same time, the two of them had yet to figure out their advanced options.
Lin Yiyi had predesignated advancement stages, so she did not need to be concerned.
Delicious Wind Goose was satisfied with [Sword Saint] that befitted him.
However, neither Suuankou nor Jiu Er wanted to casually advance to a standard route.
Also, Jiu Er could not travel by herself.
She was too small, and she looked like a little girl.
If she were to travel alone, she might get into trouble. No, she would definitely get into trouble!
Then, she had to bring Suuankou along.
However, since she brought Brother Koutsu with her, she would have to take Sister Hyphen along. Otherwise, if Sister Hyphen stayed here alone, she would be lonely.
The group had said they would stay to purify nightmares, and they were a little embarra.s.sed to leave too soon.
However, the group still had to bring up this matter.
At most, they would come back after advancement.
Where else could there have more dungeon instances besides the underground world?
Hearing Annan’s response, Nieusel took another look at the silver jewelry on Lin Yiyi’s chest.
He asked probingly, “If you are troubled by the professions’ advancement, how about I consult Nefertari?
“She is the actual Wise. She has read a lot and is knowledgeable. I think she should be able to help you a little bit.” The golden retriever did not have any psychological burden, so he sold out his childhood sweetheart.
The players glanced at each other, then at Annan.
Annan’s expression was also a little weird.
What? Do you have a lot of information about professions’ advancement?
It just so happens that I’m here, and it’s time for the third batch of players to come. At that time, more than 200 people will come in one shot. I have yet to figure out the advancement for them too.
You came just in time!
——Whatever! Show me your goods!