Though he had already issued his declaration of vengeance in rather dashing fashion, John did not immediately storm their doorstep. After all, Theodore was most likely still receiving treatment in a Trauma Team ward, and as long as the people of the Skeleton Iron Society were not idiots, they should have scattered like birds and beasts by now. Add to that the bounties in the hands of the fixers, and making a move at this point would be unlikely to yield much in the way of results.
At this very moment, he was bringing the spoils of this battle back to the cyberware clinic, waiting to use them to craft new miracles.
Aside from fodder, there were three sets of valuable items from this battle.
First were four combinations of Sandevistan and Kerenzikov. However, he needed to use two of the Sandevistans to craft Fanyin Paizi—the time-stop hand—so he sold off two Kerenzikovs. Of the two remaining sets, one would go to a new character, while the other would be reserved for his main body.
That said, no matter how one put it, this thing was known as a cyberpsychosis manufacturing machine. Even with the protection of the [Human] affix, Feng Xue could not possibly install it directly. Instead, he planned to first craft a new character as a test subject.
The second set was a complete set of standard Trauma Team equipment. In truth, he had killed several Trauma Team members this time, but each set had its own defects. After picking and choosing, he had only managed to assemble this one complete set. The remaining damaged pieces were all bundled up and sold to Sal.
Unfortunately, all of Trauma Team’s cyberware came from Blacksteel International and had no usable affixes. Still, they were all four-star configurations, able to hold one trait and two skills. No matter how one looked at it, they were better than the three-star parts Feng Xue had been using as stopgaps. Not to mention, there were quite a few components such as frontal cortex implants, neural interfaces, and reinforced internal organs—parts he normally would not install when creating a character.
As for the third set, it consisted of usable affixes. There were not many, only three: [Adrenaline] from Trauma Team, [Shield with One’s Body] from the bodyguard, and [Second Chance] from some unknown small fry.
Affix: Adrenaline
Type: Skill
Quality: Blue, Fine
Effect: Grants the item the skill of the same name. Designate one skill as the target and refresh its cooldown. Cooldown: 12 hours. Skills of the same name share a cooldown.
Remark: Follow the will of heaven with dopamine; defy fate with endorphins; seek life amid death with adrenaline.
……
Affix: Shield with One’s Body
Type: Skill
Quality: White, Common
Effect: Grants the item the skill of the same name. Designate one target within 20 meters of yourself. When that target is attacked, move yourself in front of the target and transfer the attack to yourself. This attack is guaranteed to hit. Skills of the same name can only be used once per day.
Remark: I am the man who turns the impossible into the possible!
……
Affix: Second Chance
Type: Trait
Quality: Blue, Fine
Effect: Grants the item the Second Chance trait. When a probability-based ability fails to trigger, the check may be performed again. This effect can only trigger once for the same check.
Remark: All my people~ All my people~ Know everything about you~~
……
Although these three skills could not be called powerful without any blind spots, they were all the sort that could deliver brilliant results as long as the right situation was found.
Adrenaline could be paired with skills like Mirage, Spinosaurus Form, and Nigerundayo. It could attack when advancing and defend when retreating. If it could even refresh limited-use skills like Golden Cicada Shedding Its Shell, then that would be an absolute finisher.
Shield with One’s Body looked like it could only be used for self-preservation by a lone wolf like Feng Xue. Because of its remark, he could not even give it to Lika. But thinking about it from another angle, if he designated an enemy as the target and fired a low-power attack at them, could it not be used as an instant gap-closing movement skill?
As for Second Chance, this thing was even more of a gambler’s favorite. At present, the only probability-based ability he had was [Multiple Attack], so it was not worth a trait slot. But if he obtained more probability-based skills in the future, this thing could absolutely become the core configuration of a gambler character.
Two of them were already very useful, and the other had promising prospects. Feng Xue suddenly felt the urge to take a gamble. At the same time, he also suddenly thought of a question—
Could this Second Chance affect the probability of successfully upgrading an affix?
At present, the white fodder in his affix library had already piled up like a mountain, while he had only ten pieces of usable fodder. After a brief moment of thought, he decided to gamble!
[Upgrade failed!]
[Upgrade failed!]
[Upgrade failed!]
[Upgrade failed!]
[Upgrade failed!]
[Upgrade successful!]
[Upgrade failed!]
[Upgrade failed!]
……
“All right, looks like it doesn’t work.”
Refusing to believe in evil, Feng Xue threw all of his white affixes into the upgrade area, except for the three affixes that could not be produced repeatedly—[Battle Continuation], [Charged Strike], and [Rapid Fire] (Note ①). But in the end, the only one that successfully upgraded was actually [Silk Spinning].
And when he opened the description with hope in his heart, he discovered that this upgrade had merely increased its daily output from 100 meters to 500 meters.
“From the looks of it, the return isn’t very high!”
Looking at the new Silk Spinning skill, Feng Xue could not help shaking his head and gave up on the idea of continuing to upgrade blue affixes. At the same time, this upgrade also made him realize that the previous affix mutations and cyberware mutations were probably not a matter of probability. In fact, it would not be difficult to verify this idea—
“Wouldn’t it be enough to collect some affixes with obviously compatible attributes and upgrade them?”
Thinking of how [Benevolent Chest], [Talented Shoulders], and [Virtuous Back] had previously mutated into [Human], Feng Xue’s gaze could not help but focus on the three purple affixes that clearly came from the same source—
[Plague], [Abomination], [Envy].
“But just these three alone aren’t safe enough. It would be best to get one more that has some connection to them.”
Feng Xue’s gaze focused on [Flesh Maitreya]. If one insisted on forcing an interpretation, this thing could barely be considered lust, right?
However, when he thought about how he had already failed seven out of eight times today, or possibly fifteen out of sixteen, he decisively gave up on the idea of continuing to upgrade. While having Kong Wu send over the materials to be used on his main body, he also had his stand upgrade John’s drones. Previously, the configurations he had given them were all uniformly [Great Strength] + [Pojun]. But in this actual battle, he discovered that the algorithm Old Jiang had left behind was sufficient for the drones to handle more tactical instructions. Thus, he split up the drone configurations and created various combinations such as [Hidden-Breaking Strike] + [Charged Strike], [Multiple Attack] + [Energy Release], [Protect the Master] + [Shield with One’s Body], and so on, intending to test the effects of various combinations in actual combat.
……
“Phew… finally done!” After multitasking for an entire day, Feng Xue’s main body saw that all his clones had returned to the proper track and finally relaxed. He reached out to pull Lika into his arms, planning to do something to relax both body and mind.
But at that moment, Suxin’s voice suddenly came from the study, as if she had deliberately raised her volume—
“It! Is! Finally! Finished!”
“What’s finished?” Faced with this voice that only he could hear, Feng Xue sighed helplessly, fastened the button he had just undone, got up, and went to the study. The moment he entered, a chip was already tossed in front of him—
“Here. The algorithm version of the Sword of Hell.”
“This big?” Feng Xue scanned it with a card reader and looked at the 200 GB of text data. For a moment, he was a little dazed—
“No, how did you turn less than 1 MB of text into 200 GB of data?”
“What else did you expect? You think a machine can understand what a sword heart is, or what a human heart is? Natural language has to be converted into computer algorithms before an AI can truly comprehend it.”
Seeing Suxin’s expression of “this is perfectly normal,” Feng Xue lowered his head to glance at the chip and suddenly asked:
“Then have you practiced it?”
“What kind of joke is that? How could I possibly practice with a freshly made test version like this? The reason I called you is so you can make a sword identical to my main sword, then load this algorithm into Moye’s swordsmanship AI to collect data. Only then can I fine-tune the data based on the feedback, and only after most of the bugs have been eliminated will I load it into myself…”
Suxin said this as if it were only natural. Hearing it, Feng Xue could only sigh emotionally:
“With the way you talk, I’m already having a hard time telling whether it was the sword spirit that swallowed the AI, or the AI that swallowed the sword spirit!”
“Of course it was the sword spirit that swallowed the AI! I only talk like this because the only information I’ve come into contact with is AI and your brain-drive database. I also think talking like this is more efficient. If you want me to be more human, then communicate with me more, instead of going off to hug that lump of iron whenever you have nothing to do!”
Note ①: The reason he chose those that can be regenerated here is not because he is afraid of failure, but because he is afraid of mutation. After mutation, the skill will change, and the protagonist is worried that mutation might make the original combination impossible to achieve. By contrast, upgrade failure merely means it cannot be used as fodder and cannot be upgraded again. Now that he is not lacking in fodder, that is not really an issue.
But I originally thought Breath of the Bird had a chance to mutate. I didn’t expect it to not even succeed. Looks like this protagonist has no fate with the Ripple Breathing Method.
PS1: This chapter has a few affix descriptions, but they only add up to about three hundred characters. According to the theory of extra updates, this chapter’s word count is a bit higher.
PS2: It is normal for upgraded affix values to be low, because this mechanism was originally meant for the protagonist to use in the early stages, so the values would naturally be conservative. Otherwise, when everyone is still using three-star cyberware early on, if you upgrade Great Strength by five times, ten times, or twenty times, how would the story continue?
The problem is that the protagonist either fails or mutates directly, and even unlocked the Second Male Lead Arm and Tomboy, which directly caused him to skip from only being able to cobble together bargain-bin cyberware into the era of special cyberware research and development. It is like Diablo: in the early stage, a mage should be switching between different skills and blue gear with affixes, surviving by drinking potions or even whacking monsters with a staff, but then the Countess directly drops the runes for “Leaf.” Now not only blue gear, even low-level rare and unique equipment is no longer impressive. He directly enters the era of fireballs going boom boom boom. What mana bar? Go talk to my Warmth and mana-on-kill!