Blood Hand… a hidden class!!
This “King” had come charging out of nowhere like a dark horse, without a sound. The class name Blood Hand carried not only the shock a hidden class always brings, but a smell of blood along with it.
A man who can get himself a hidden class… is anything but ordinary. Ye Tianxie thought it privately, and fixed that extremely memorable name in his mind.
But what Ye Tianxie did not know, and no other player knew either, was that this “King” had not entered the World of Fate until the fifteenth day after it opened. Back then, Ye Tianxie had taken nine days to go from level 0 to level 10… and this man had taken three.
Granted, it should be added that Ye Tianxie was only online seven or eight hours a day back then.
A full fifteen days behind everyone else… which meant he had used less than half the playing time of most players to fight his way into the top ten of the Level Ranking for all Huaxia.
If Ye Tianxie had known that frankly terrifying fact, his verdict would have gone a good deal further than anything but ordinary.
He closed the Level Ranking, narrowed his eyes at the road ahead, and the cold smile at the corner of his mouth came and went. “Wings That Shroud the Sky… to dare use the name Xian’er gave me. What size of nerve does that take!!”
In his whole life Ye Tianxie had never been provoked like this… and had rarely been this angry. Wings That Shroud the Sky were strong, but that did not mean for a moment that he would hold back. Least of all when someone had touched what he held sacred. Once he came to hate a man, or a group of them, he could go mad enough to do things not even he could predict.
He took out the map and turned his eyes to its southern half. The distance left to him now was small; the City of Heaven’s Sun was less than half a day away. That he could be this close in so short a time was owed to two things. One was the Return Scroll from Guping Town. The other… was that Ye Tianxie had run the whole way with Frenzied Battle Intent active. Without it, reaching the City of Heaven’s Sun inside ten days would have been flatly impossible.
“La la… la la… la… la… la…”
Guoguo lay on the Blood-Sweating Steed’s head with her chin propped in both hands and her two little white legs kicked up behind her, humming away in that small childish voice of hers — and spread out in front of her was a picture book.
The book was only a little smaller than she was, so every time she turned a page it cost her a considerable effort. And the book, needless to say, was another thing Guoguo had brought over from the real world to pass the time. As for where she had got hold of it… for that you could only ask Su Feifei.
And the miracle of it was that over these last few days Guoguo had already been through that picture book a good dozen times and more, back to front and front to back, and was still reading it with the same absorbed delight every single time, eyes never leaving the page. Ye Tianxie had run out of things to say about it.
“Master, shall Guoguo tell you the story of Grey Goat and Happy Wolf?” (Grey Goat and Happy Wolf — a send-up of a hugely popular Huaxia cartoon, with the wolf and the goat swapped round.) Guoguo lifted her head and looked at him, eyes shining.
Ye Tianxie: “…Guoguo, you have told me that eight hundred times.”
“Eh? Then — Guoguo tells it really nicely, doesn’t she?” Guoguo put both hands in front of her chest, pushed her lips out flat, and looked up at him with pleading eyes.
“Mm. Very nicely.” Ye Tianxie answered through gritted teeth. If he dared answer otherwise, he would get Guoguo’s eyes-and-tears offensive, one hundred percent guaranteed.
Guoguo’s eyes turned brighter still. “Then Master must still want to hear it very much, mustn’t he? Guoguo likes Master so much, so Master must like hearing Guoguo’s stories too, mustn’t he? Mustn’t he?”
“…He must.”
“So shall Guoguo tell Master the story of Grey Goat and Happy Wolf?”
“Yes…” Ye Tianxie had no words left in him.
“Yee-yaa! Master is the best-behaved of all! Now listen to Guoguo’s story properly.” Guoguo’s starry eyes blinked and blinked, and her small body rolled over and sat up. She settled her two slender little legs in front of her, pressed her small snow-soft hands down on her skirt, and began the story she had already told upward of eight hundred times… And at the exact moment she began it, Yaoyao — curled up in front of Ye Tianxie fast asleep — turned into white light with a whoosh and attached itself to him. Ye Tianxie had absolutely not recalled it.
“Once upon a time there was a fierce goat, and its name was Grey Goat, and its body was all grey, and its eyes were all grey, oh la la la… just exactly like that goat over there…”
“……”
“……”
Ye Tianxie had braced himself to sit through the tale of Grey Goat’s mighty war with Happy Wolf, only to find that Guoguo had barely got the story started before it stopped dead. After a pause came an outrageously loud shriek. “Eee-eee-eee-eee-eee-eee!! Master, look, look over there… Yee-yaa!! There really is a Grey Goat!!”
Ye Tianxie glanced idly along the line of Guoguo’s small pointing finger… and very nearly fell off the horse.
Apart from one reasonably even little track, everything around them was empty, barren hill country, with no monsters and very little plant life either. And there, where Guoguo was pointing, one grey living creature stood out sharply. It was a goat. Apart from having rather short hair, its shape was no different from an ordinary goat’s, but its body was less than half the size of a grown one, so that it looked more like a young grey kid. And its name…
Grey Goat: Level 15 Lord-tier BOSS. HP 12,000. A peculiar goat whose reason for living is catching wolves. Origins unknown; possibly an unidentified creature from some other world. Possesses an incomparably powerful ability to run away. At present it appears to be searching for the mate it lost many years ago, so it wanders everywhere and has no fixed home. It never stays in one place for more than 30 seconds. Defeat it, and you may perhaps come by some peculiar things from another world.
Talent: none.
Skill — Take to Its Heels: The moment a human, or any creature that looks threatening, comes within twenty meters of it, it will run away at once. While running, its movement speed rises fifteenfold! It has never once been caught.
Weakness: none.
Ye Tianxie: ⊙﹏⊙b……
Seen from a distance, this grey oddity of a goat was pulling up grass out of boredom, and its two small goat’s eyes gave off a light of pure cunning. Whatever else might be said about it, this strange monster was plainly one of those special unique creatures of which the whole game holds exactly one, and which turns up at random on different maps…
Its attributes were no threat whatsoever to Ye Tianxie, but its uniqueness made it fiendishly hard to beat… With a fifteenfold flight speed, unless you had some trap to pin it down, a hundred men could meet it a hundred times and never dream of catching it.
And the rarer and harder to kill a monster like this was, the more likely it was to be hiding something special. Since he had run into it by chance, how was Ye Tianxie going to let it go?
“Yee-yaa! Master, Grey Goat is the big bad who likes catching the kind, lovely Happy Wolf. We have to finish it! Finish it! Master, let’s go!!”
Guoguo let out a battle cry and shot off with a whoosh.
Ye Tianxie did not move… did not dare move, because by this odd monster’s own description, anyone coming within twenty meters would send it running… Damn it all, unless you could kill it outright from beyond twenty meters, talking about catching it was talking in your sleep.
Oh — wait… the moment a human, or any creature that looks threatening, comes within twenty meters… any creature that looks threatening…
Ye Tianxie’s gaze snapped around onto Xiaobei, and he pointed. “Xiaobei… go!”
Xiaobei obeyed, hopped down off the horse, and went bouncing off toward the Grey Goat… exactly like a little rabbit.
Forty meters… thirty meters… twenty meters…
The Grey Goat spotted Xiaobei at once and its eyes went wary in a flash. It was on the point of taking to its heels — and then it saw what Xiaobei looked like, and the impulse to flee stopped dead. Instead it waited there, swaggering… Because with a shape as small and sweet as Xiaobei’s, the sort you want to snatch up and squeeze, there was no way on earth to attach the word threatening.
But as Confucius so wisely said: never judge a cat by its cover.
The instant Xiaobei came near, it pounced with a meow, spun its body in midair, and swung one snow-furred cat’s foot — wildly out of proportion to the rest of it — through a splendid arc, driving it down with enormous force onto the head of the entirely unprepared Grey Goat…
Whoosh…
Xiaobei’s body was small, but its Meow-Meow Kick had once punted the leader of the Big-Beak Birds — a creature a good deal bigger than Ye Tianxie — through the air like a football, so booting one small Grey Goat was no harder than flicking a marble. There came a rush of hard wind, and the Grey Goat’s body flew off like a cannonball… then hit a tall rock a few meters behind it with a crack and slid limply down it. Xiaobei’s kick had been angled exactly right: the Grey Goat was not only knocked flat and unable to rise, there were little stars circling above its head as well… plainly it had been knocked senseless.
Xiaobei pounced at speed, and the Meow-Meow Fist came down on it like a driving storm. Ye Tianxie strolled up after it.
−741, −738, −1460, −733, −747, −728, −744, −739…
When Xiaobei attacked, the damage figures over a target’s head always came in like a rolling tide, far too fast for anyone to read them properly… four strikes to a use, three uses in two seconds, which came to six strikes a second. Xiaobei at level 16 now had an attack power of 780, and before its third Meow-Meow Fist was even finished, the Grey Goat, unlucky enough to have met Xiaobei, had had its life emptied out and become a dead goat.
Xiaobei patted its paws together, sprang back and up onto the horse, and rubbed itself against Ye Tianxie’s chest like a creature asking for a reward… Level 16, and wiping out a Lord BOSS of nearly its own level had taken the blink of an eye. The speed of it made Ye Tianxie sweat a little. Much as he did not want to admit it, he had to: Xiaobei’s single-target attack power ran far past his own. At present, at least.
Unexpectedly, the dead Grey Goat dropped nothing at all — not so much as a single coin. Ye Tianxie thought about it, jumped down off the horse, stood beside the Grey Goat’s corpse, and used Gathering on it over and over…
“Ding… You have successfully gathered the special item ‘Grey Goat’s Toolbox.'”
Grey Goat’s Toolbox: Packed full of the many tools Grey Goat uses to catch wolves. What exactly is inside is unknown, and the box appears to need some special method to open.
Ye Tianxie: “……”
“Ding… You have successfully gathered the special item ‘Red Goat’s Frying Pan.'”
Red Goat’s Frying Pan: It is said that Grey Goat and Red Goat were a devoted pair, and were separated afterward for reasons unknown. This frying pan appears able to give information about Red Goat, though where it is remains unknown. It is said that Red Goat may know how the Toolbox should be opened.
Ye Tianxie: “……”
“Ding… You have successfully gathered the special item ‘Grey Goat’s Goatskin.'”
Grey Goat’s Goatskin: Grey Goat put its genius for invention to work and used special magical materials to give its own hide a strange magic. Any living creature at all, so long as it holds this hide and silently says “I am a goat,” will at once take on the appearance of Grey Goat, for up to 3 minutes a day. Once transformed, it need only silently say “I am not a goat” to return to its original shape.
Ye Tianxie: “！@#￥%……”
(End of Chapter 234)