What was so laughable about Jun Moxiao's skill choices?
First, the low-level stage passes quickly anyway. Carefully planning skills at this stage was completely unnecessary—many people simply left them blank and just let someone power-level them to level 20 to change classes;
Second, although below level 20 players got to experience all the classes, from the moment they entered the game, most players would already have a general idea in mind—mage class, swordsman class, or gunslinger class? That much of a direction they had. But what about Ye Xiu's skill combination? It actually spanned every class. Sure, learning skills below level 20 had no restrictions, but using them did—because of weapons.
Take the Gunslinger's Rising Shot. If you were holding a swordsman-class blade, there was no way to use it at all. So with a skill build like Jun Moxiao's, one would have to carry weapons of every class in their bag, swapping back and forth constantly. Why go to all that trouble during the fledgling sub-level-20 stage if not to torture yourself? Unless you were playing the once-popular Unspecialized.
What was Unspecialized? Having no class meant being Unspecialized. But that was a thing from the era when the level cap was 50. After the level cap was raised and class awakening quests appeared, the Unspecialized playstyle had disappeared. Seeing Jun Moxiao's skill setup, players today wouldn't think of Unspecialized at all—they'd only want to laugh.
Yet Ye Xiu didn't seem to have considered this. Right now, Jun Moxiao carried only a plain bronze sword, and when passing the grocery store after learning his skills, Ye Xiu even had him sell off this one and only weapon.
He then walked straight to the warehouse's storage box and opened it—and inside lay a piece of equipment.
An account that was transferred between servers was supposed to be an empty account. Empty meant that experience, money, inventory, storage box, even the mailbox, all had to be empty.
Yet Jun Moxiao, an account that had just transferred to Server 10, had a piece of equipment smuggled inside its storage box.
No one knew how this was possible, but all of it seemed to have been within Ye Xiu's expectations. He knew he would find this equipment here. Yet at the moment he found it, there wasn't the slightest trace of joy on Ye Xiu's face—only sorrow. His right hand, the one on the mouse, once again showed that rare trembling. The last time was when he lost One Autumn Leaf; this time, it was when he was about to retrieve this piece of equipment.
The mouse moved over.
Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella, Level 5.
Weight 2.3 kg, attack speed 5.
Physical attack 180; magic attack 180.
That was all. So simple it didn't even have附加 attributes—it might as well have been a plain white weapon.
But the color of the words "Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella" was anything but white. It was silver.
In Glory, an item's tier could be told by the color of its name: orange, purple, blue, green, white. White items had no附加 attributes. Green items were mostly transitional quest rewards. Blue items always dropped from dungeon bosses and occasionally came from quests—they made up the bulk of mainstream equipment. Purple and orange items were high-end goods; whether through luck or money, you needed something special going for you to obtain them.
The silver color of Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella's name belonged to none of these five. If Chen Guo were awake at this moment and saw it, she would surely be astonished. Silver was the exclusive name color of self-made equipment. Self-made equipment was one of Glory's signature features—not items crafted through the game's life skills, but equipment created with the game's equipment editor, and it belonged to high-end content.
There was a widely circulated saying in Glory: self-made equipment isn't necessarily the strongest, but the strongest equipment is always self-made.
Self-made equipment was the only thing that could surpass epic-tier orange-name equipment. In the professional league, every club had a dedicated team researching self-made equipment, pouring funds into it. Battle God One Autumn Leaf wielded a self-made silver weapon—the war spear Evil Annihilation! It was a famous weapon in Glory, one of a kind, with no equal.
The nature of self-made equipment made it nearly impossible to replicate—every piece was one of a kind.
But it could just as easily be a one-of-a-kind masterpiece surpassing epics, or a one-of-a-kind piece of trash.
And what about the Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella? Trash or treasure?
If Chen Guo were awake, and if she understood weapon attributes, she would be able to judge immediately.
Treasure. The Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella was a true treasure, a treasure surpassing same-level orange weapons, just like Evil Annihilation. 180 physical and magic attack—that was equivalent to a level 10 orange weapon, and roughly one of the highest-attack orange weapons of any class. But weapons with the highest attacks usually had heavy weight and low attack speed. The Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella's weight was not high, and it had an ordinary attack speed of 5. On that point alone, it would utterly crush a level 10 orange weapon.
Its flaws, however, were also obvious: the Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella had only basic stats, no附加 attributes whatsoever. Moreover, it was level 5—a fleeting level, one that would be left behind in the blink of an eye.
But Ye Xiu paid no mind to any of this, because he knew this Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella was truly a work of genius. After countless experiments and failures, producing this level 5 Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella was already a tremendous success. The beauty of self-made weapons lay in the fact that once you grasped the concepts and blueprints, you could keep improving them. So there was no such thing as a self-made weapon becoming outdated—with the equipment editor, it could be continuously upgraded.
Ye Xiu gently took out the Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella and placed it in Jun Moxiao's hand. "Let's begin," he said in a low voice, then controlled Jun Moxiao to walk toward the starter village dungeon, Greenglade Forest—as if Jun Moxiao had actually heard his words.
Greenglade Forest was a 5-man dungeon, entry at level 5, with results invalid above level 10—meaning you couldn't compete for any of the leaderboards. Since new players were distributed randomly, even though many had come with friends to clear the dungeon together, they hadn't managed to regroup yet. Outside the dungeon, pickup parties predominated. The moment Ye Xiu brought Jun Moxiao over, he received quite a few invitations. He didn't bother to pick carefully and just joined a party that was missing exactly one person.
"Full, full, we're full!" The moment he joined, Ye Xiu saw the party leader, whose name was Yuezhong Mian, shouting in the party chat.
"How do we split drops if a hidden boss spawns?" Ye Xiu asked.
"Hoh, someone's ambitious!" Yuezhong Mian's offhand remark showed this person wasn't truly a newbie—at the very least, he hadn't asked what a hidden boss was.
Hidden bosses could only be encountered when entering a dungeon in a party, and the system would alert players at the moment of entry. A hidden boss's strength was generally even more fearsome than the dungeon's final boss, and it would drop equipment or items that normal bosses could never produce.
With top-tier professional skill like Ye Xiu's, he was fully capable of soloing this small dungeon. He joined a party purely for the hidden boss that only spawned in party mode. He needed the materials the hidden boss dropped—materials that would definitely be needed to continue upgrading the Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella. Ye Xiu knew perfectly well that compared to leveling Jun Moxiao, upgrading the Thousand Mechanisms Umbrella was the far harder task, and he had decided to start now, working on both fronts.
For a low-end dungeon like Greenglade Forest, no matter how good the equipment was, it would quickly be phased out, so it held little value. Aside from experience, the most tempting thing here was the materials dropped by the hidden boss—materials that never became obsolete. Even in the older servers, high-level characters would bring newbies to Greenglade Forest to hunt for the hidden boss just for these materials.
Yuezhong Mian clearly knew this too, so he quickly announced the split for the hidden boss: "That stuff's pure money. When it drops, everyone rolls dice!"
"Fine." There was nothing else to be done. Good drops going to yourself? This was just a pickup party—there was no justification for that.
"Alright, if everyone's ready, let's go in." Yuezhong Mian typed, and after receiving everyone's confirmation, entered the dungeon.
Ye Xiu had been talking to Chen Guo, who sat beside him, so he hadn't used his headset until now. He picked it up and put it on, and the moment they entered the dungeon, a voice roared through it: "Damn, what kind of luck is that? We just mentioned hidden bosses and one shows up?!"
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To all readers confused by the opening, don't panic just yet. You should know that Butterfly Blue's books never have plot holes—only pits. If you've found a "plot hole," you've actually fallen into a pit. Whatever you do, don't fall asleep in the pit, or you'll be buried alive when the pit gets filled one day. So be sure to vote on time every day—this is the one and only way to stay awake.