“…” Ye Tianxie slung it back over his shoulder, hesitated for a moment, then scooped up the corpse of the little Six-Winged Purple-Scaled Sky-Treading Lion — already picked clean of anything more to Gather — and tucked it into his inventory as well. Starting from Immortal Spirit tier, beasts that rare and that powerful didn’t have their corpses despawn after death. At the same time, beasts of that caliber were almost always singular — if one was killed, a second wouldn’t appear again. Not anytime soon, at least.
“Quest complete. Let’s head back.” Ye Tianxie pulled out a Town Portal Scroll. Thinking back on it now, he suddenly realized the City of Stars’ lord was kind of a total sweetheart. The first quest he’d handed out had ended up netting Ye Tianxie the Blood Feather, Yaoyao, two pieces of powerful gear, and an absurdly powerful class, all in the course of completing it. And now, in the course of completing his second quest, one accident after another had piled up into a haul that dwarfed the actual reward.
Did the City of Stars’ lord have some kind of immortal’s luck radiating off him or something?
“Second Brother,” Zuo Pojun finally couldn’t hold back the question burning in him any longer. “Can you tell us why your attacks suddenly got so terrifying back there? Never mind the last one — even your ordinary skills were hitting for over eight thousand. Was it because of that red light?”
Murong Qiushui perked up too, settling into a posture of genuine, attentive listening. He very much wanted to say that if he didn’t figure out the source of that terrifying attack power, he wasn’t going to sleep a wink tonight.
Ye Tianxie didn’t bother hiding it. He summoned the Hour of Eternal Fate and shared the Blood Sacrifice of Fate’s skill information with the two of them.
Blood Sacrifice of Fate: Uses one’s own remaining blood as a sacrifice, igniting a frenzy of raw power. Below 10% HP, Attack Power +100%. Below 5% HP, Attack Power +200%. Below 3% HP, Attack Power +300%. Below 1% HP, Attack Power +400%. Force-triggered. Cannot be canceled.
A skill that could only be called terrifying — and not just for the monstrous attack bonuses it carried, either, but for how nearly cruel its trigger conditions were. Even the lowest tier of that trigger required dropping your own HP below 10%, and against an ordinary monster of the same level, doing that was basically indistinguishable from suicide. And against a weak monster, there’d be no reason to boost your attack this way in the first place.
They understood in an instant, then, exactly why Ye Tianxie’s attacks had suddenly turned so horrifying — it was the 400% attack bonus triggered by dropping his HP to 1%, pushing his attack power to five times what it should have been!
“Second Brother, when you had Fourth Brother attack you earlier, that was to…”
“Yeah,” Ye Tianxie nodded slightly. “I’ve got a skill that puts me in a state of total defense, but it costs 10% of my HP every second. If my HP is sitting between 90% and 91% when that defense wears off, my HP ends up under 1%. My HP right now is 2,620 — 1% of that is 26. So I needed Qiushui to knock off somewhere between 9% and 10% of my HP first.”
Zuo Pojun turned Ye Tianxie’s words over for a moment, then suddenly asked, “But Second Brother, how could you be sure Fourth Brother would hit exactly that range? A little too much or a little too little and the whole thing falls apart — and the margin of error there is what, 26 points of damage at most? That’s—”
Ye Tianxie raised an eyebrow and answered evenly, “Before we got here, Qiushui landed a hit on a Demon-Touched Battle Tiger. From the damage I dealt to that same tiger, I could work out roughly how much defense it had. From the damage Qiushui dealt to it, I could work out roughly how much attack power he had — which meant I could work out roughly how much damage he’d deal to me. Archers run high Agility, and their damage output is the most stable of any class — barely any variance at all. Two Double Shots. That landed it right in the pocket.”
Zuo Pojun and Murong Qiushui were both completely speechless, staring at Ye Tianxie like they were looking at some kind of alien.
What in the hell kind of terrifying calculation and judgment ability did it take to work out something that precise, in the middle of a situation that dangerous?
And before all that, Ye Tianxie had been sitting at 5 HP, wiping out well over a hundred thousand HP off a little Immortal Beast in the span of eight seconds. Say it out loud and nobody would believe you.
“Let’s go. Back to the City of Stars.” Ye Tianxie pulled out a Town Portal Scroll and crushed it, returning to the City of Stars first. Su Feifei hurried after him. Zuo Pojun and Murong Qiushui exchanged a look. Murong Qiushui rubbed the bridge of his elegant nose and sighed helplessly. “Don’t look at me. Feelings are a luxury I can’t afford — I don’t know the first thing about them.”
“Looks to me like Second Brother’s got a little something going for Su Feifei — he just might not know it himself yet.” Zuo Pojun shrugged, then let out a soft sigh. “If Su Feifei really could pull Second Brother out of the shadow he’s been living under, that’d be about the best thing that could happen to him. But Big Sister… sigh, with how much charm Big Sister has, even those two guys from the Dugu family and the Yun family have gone at each other’s throats fighting over her. She crooks one finger and there isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t throw himself at her feet. But she just… hah, forget it. Let’s just let things run their course. Big Sister… she’ll find her happiness.”
Just then, a piercing system chime rang out overhead, and it set off a disturbance the likes of which the World of Fate had never seen before.
“Ding… System Announcement! By popular demand from the player base, currency exchange between in-game gold and real-world currency has now officially opened, at an exchange rate of 1 gold = 1 Huaxia yuan. Players who wish to participate should visit an exchange point in any major city to claim a free funds card, free of charge. The funds card will link directly to the player’s real-world financial account, allowing free and independent exchange or trade of currency.”
The announcement repeated five times in a row, and it sent the entire World of Fate into an uproar. Countless players raced back to the City of Stars in record time, and the more ambitious among them broke into excited grins…
…
…
At the same time, in a luxury villa somewhere in Jinghua City.
“…Boss, this is probably the last time I’ll get to call you that. She’s transferred all of her shares to the Yun family… all of them… and she didn’t take a single yuan for it…”
The phone slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor. He sank down to sit on the ground, hollowed out, his face and his eyes gone a lifeless, despairing shade of grey.
“Ding…” The phone rang again. He answered it like a machine.
“Heh. I regret to inform you that Tianhua Group has officially severed all ties with you…”
Beep, beep, beep, beep…
That was all the man had to say. The line went dead — the other party couldn’t be bothered wasting another word on him.
His hand fell limp at his side. He sat slumped against the wall in the corner of the room, no tears, no visible pain — just a heart slowly cooling to ash.
The world felt like it had simply collapsed in on itself in that one moment. He was only thirty-three years old today, and he suddenly felt as though he’d aged a full decade.
Why… why would she do this to me.
They’d been together seven years, inseparable, two halves of a whole for so long neither of them could remember being anything else, and they’d already been planning to marry by the end of the year. He’d loved her so completely, so devotedly, that he would have given up everything for her — and to prove it, to show her he’d throw caution to the wind for her sake, he’d signed over 59% of his company’s shares into her name.
And then she’d handed that 59% straight over to the Yun family, and vanished from Huaxia without a trace.
He was a genius. Everyone said so. He’d started with barely five hundred thousand yuan in capital, and in ten short years, in the most brutal competition imaginable, he’d built Tianhua Group into a name that echoed across all of Huaxia. Only he knew how much that had cost him.
And in a single night, all of it was gone. All of it turned to nothing.
He could live with becoming a pauper. He could live with losing everything he owned. What he couldn’t survive was her betrayal.
Every memory he had of her had gone colorless all at once, the whole world bleeding into grey, and with his heart already turned to ash, the thought of death crept into his mind… He rose unsteadily from the corner where he’d slumped against the wall, and reached toward the table — where a sharp fruit knife lay waiting.
But the first thing his hand found wasn’t cold at all.
It was a pendant — his Fate game device. He’d always been too buried in work to ever spare the time to enjoy anything, and he’d never once carved out a single precious hour to experience this era-defining virtual game.
The virtual game world… another world…
Another world…
He hung the device around his neck and, moving on pure mechanical instinct, pressed a finger to its center… and the world in front of his eyes spun and dissolved into nothing.
“Ding… Welcome to the World of Fate. In the World of Fate, you will have a new life, a new beginning, a new fate… This is your first time logging in. Please choose a nickname to accompany you for the rest of your life…”
“Starting Over.” He stared blankly at the dazzling, endless color spreading out in front of him, and murmured the name aloud.
“Ding… The name ‘Starting Over’ has been registered successfully…”
(End of Chapter 156)