Chen Guo didn't actually have a habit of staying up all night. It was just that the new server area had opened today, so she was following along to watch the excitement. After watching for a while, she quickly got drowsy, leaned back in her chair, and drifted off without meaning to.
The quality of sleep like this was naturally not great; Chen Guo just didn't want to struggle to get up. In her half-asleep, half-awake state, her ears couldn't help but pick up the sounds of keyboard clacking mixed with mouse clicks coming from beside her. This kind of sound was very familiar to an internet cafe owner, but what Chen Guo was hearing now seemed somehow different. The sound was sometimes rapid, sometimes slow, now light, now heavy, with an almost musical rhythm to it. Chen Guo had never heard anyone play a keyboard and mouse like a percussion instrument. Was she dreaming?
Chen Guo jolted awake, collected herself, and listened carefully again—it really didn't seem like a dream. The sound was coming from right beside her, from the hands of Ye Xiu, the new network manager she had just hired today.
Chen Guo sat up to look, and the coat draped over her slid down. She hurriedly caught it and recognized it as Ye Xiu's coat. She hadn't expected this guy to be so thoughtful, Chen Guo thought to herself. Except—how long had it been since this coat was last washed? It smelled a bit sour.
Chen Guo picked up the coat and sat up, just about to say something to Ye Xiu, when she suddenly froze.
A pair of hands—hands enough to move anyone to tears—were right there before her eyes: Ye Xiu's hands.
They looked rather thin, with slender fingers. The knuckles weren't coarse and hard like most men's, but they were clearly defined. The fingertips were fine, and the nails were trimmed clean and neat, which clashed severely with this guy's somewhat scruffy appearance.
Chen Guo hadn't originally been the type to pay much attention to hands, but later, when a girl with very pretty hands started coming to the internet cafe, under her influence Chen Guo gradually began to notice. Now, however, she was thoroughly stunned by Ye Xiu's hands.
The hands were perfect, and the sounds they produced were like music. But the operations... just looking at Ye Xiu's left hand dancing across the keyboard, Chen Guo had only one thought: his hand speed was so slow.
Hand speed, meaning the number of operations per unit of time, is generally measured in actions per minute, abbreviated as APM. Glory was not a strategy game where players merely controlled a single unit, but the skill usage was complex and the precision of action controls was very high, so there was still a great demand for hand speed.
A player with high hand speed could execute attacks faster, and with refined operations, the force and timing of every keystroke directly affected the range of the character's movements in the game. This could make a character more versatile in combat. Of course, this versatility could be good or bad—some people just spam operations endlessly to make their APM look impressive. Those who could truly make every operation purposeful while maintaining high APM were, without exception, top-tier professional players.
An APM of 200 was currently regarded as a commonly accepted dividing line in the Glory community. For ordinary players, an APM spiking above 200 basically meant they were flailing about. Even professional masters sometimes needed special combat conditions to achieve a hand speed above 200—at the very least, their opponents couldn't be too weak, requiring them to bring out that level of speed in response.
For ordinary players, seventy percent had a hand speed in the 80 to 120 range, 25% were the clumsy types who couldn't even reach 80, and the remaining 5% were those who exceeded 120 and kept pushing toward 200—the experts among ordinary players. It was said that among them, some could even reach 200, the professional standard.
Chen Guo's hand speed hovered around 120 on average, but since she could usually hit 120 and then some, Chen Guo firmly believed she belonged to that 5%—an expert among players.
But Ye Xiu, in Chen Guo's eyes, left no room for doubt: he was absolutely one of those clumsy types who couldn't even reach 80. The moment she noticed this, Chen Guo suddenly found that the beautifully rhythmic operational sounds she had heard earlier were gone; what she heard now was just the slow, therefore clear, operations of a clumsy player.
"Was I half-asleep just now..." Chen Guo shook her head, trying to recapture that feeling from her drowsy dream, but no matter what, she couldn't get it back. All she could focus on now was this clumsy-level operation, and a pair of hands so good-looking they were enviable.
Chen Guo was so absorbed in looking at these hands that she forgot to look at the screen. Before long, though, Ye Xiu's hands had stopped, and only then did Chen Guo come back to her senses. She looked at the screen and immediately widened her eyes: "Dark Night Cat Demon?!"
By the time she said this, the Dark Night Cat Demon had already flown down from high in the air and crashed to the ground, scattering loot everywhere.
At the same time, Chen Guo saw a row of eye-catching system announcements flash across the message area of the screen: Area 10, Dark Night Cat Demon first kill: Lord Grim.
"Damn!!" Chen Guo slapped Ye Xiu on the shoulder. "Not bad at all!" Never mind whether he was clumsy or not—he'd actually managed to snag a first kill. That was a feat Chen Guo had never achieved in all her time playing.
Ye Xiu was concentrating on checking what loot had dropped, and this slap caught him completely off guard—he nearly swallowed the cigarette dangling from his mouth. A string of silvery-white ash gracefully fell onto the keyboard. Chen Guo, who had been leaning over behind Ye Xiu peeking at his operations, leaned in even further, and upon seeing this scene, forgot all about the hidden boss first kill. She yanked off Ye Xiu's headphones and roared in his ear: "Who said you could smoke in here?"
"Huh?" Ye Xiu still had the cigarette clamped between his teeth, not yet extinguished, and he didn't quite understand what Chen Guo meant.
"Can't you see the no-smoking sign?" Chen Guo pointed at the wall.
Ye Xiu turned his head and examined the sign on the wall carefully. "You're joking, right? No smoking in an internet cafe?"
"This is the smoke-free section. If you want to smoke, go to the other area." Chen Guo pointed toward another corner of the cafe.
"Then let's go over there," Ye Xiu said.
"No way. Cigarette smoke gives me a headache," Chen Guo said.
"Then what should I do?" Ye Xiu looked as troubled as if he'd encountered a calamity.
"Can't you survive smoking one less cigarette?" Chen Guo snapped.
"I can, but I'll get a headache," Ye Xiu said.
"You, you, you..." Chen Guo realized she was beginning to get to know this Ye Xiu. He could so casually accept living conditions like that storage room, but that absolutely did not mean he was an easy-going person.
"I'll go to the smoking area myself, boss. You go get some rest," Ye Xiu said just then.
"Hold on. You haven't explained how you got that first kill!" Chen Guo said.
"It was nothing. The whole team was wiped out, the boss's HP was low, so I picked up the slack," Ye Xiu said quite casually.
"Must be nice," Chen Guo said, her tone still tinged with envy. She didn't much care for the first kill rewards of a low-level hidden boss—just some extra experience and money, no top-tier equipment drops—but the record would stay on the rankings forever, becoming a legendary presence in this server area, and that feeling was something many players loved. For most ordinary players, making it onto such a leaderboard was only possible during the newbie period. In the mid-to-late game, as dungeon difficulty increased, both dungeon first kills and hidden boss first kills required a stable, well-coordinated, high-level team. And once you reached the Domain of the Gods, even such high-level teams had no chance—the records there were all held by professional teams from the pro circuit.
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This is the first update of the day; the next one will be around five o'clock~
The recommendation votes have been amazing—we've made it to the front page. Thank you, everyone! Keep up the great work and help me climb even higher!