Leaving Guoguo’s Cottage, he passed quietly through the City of Stars, past one leveling party after another, until he arrived at a stretch of grassland he knew reasonably well — the territory of the Little Raccoons, where he’d been grinding not long ago. These passive little monsters showed no sign of recognizing the villain who had butchered untold numbers of their kin, drifting about at their leisure as though he weren’t there at all. Before today, in order to level faster, he’d been forced to hold himself below 20% HP — a lethally dangerous state — to keep Frenzied Battle Intent active and squeeze out maximum efficiency. But now…
He summoned the Hour of Fate, charged into the thickest cluster of Little Raccoons, and swung once, casually.
-669, -1352, -1355…
A Little Raccoon had 680 HP, and Ye Tianxie’s base attack had now reached a staggering 679. A plain, unremarkable normal attack triggered two consecutive crits, killing two raccoons outright — and the only one that survived was left with a pitiful 11 HP.
And those two yellow numbers were both above a thousand.
A level 15 player, dealing four-digit damage. Without seeing it themselves, how many players would believe it?
The raccoon that had narrowly escaped now had the misfortune of becoming the test subject for his new techniques.
“Dragon Rend Strike!“
The Hour of Fate came slashing down — used with a slashing weapon, Dragon Rend Strike automatically became Dragon Rend Slash — and smashed into the raccoon, the point of impact erupting with a dull, bursting crack.
-1344!
The raccoon’s remaining 11 HP was erased by a blow that could have killed it a thousand times over, and the 30% knockback triggered as well; it staggered backward and toppled, dropping two coppers and a red potion.
“Ding… Your pet ‘Mystic Spirit Snow Fox’ has risen to level 1. HP +20, MP +80, physical attack +4, magic attack +8, accuracy +1, evasion +1.”
Under normal circumstances, if a pet wasn’t deployed, the master gained it no experience from kills. But Yaoyao was evidently an exception. She hadn’t been released from the pet space at all, and yet she’d gained experience anyway — and on three Little Raccoons, she’d made the jump from level 0 to level 1. Curiously, her gains on leveling weren’t high; apart from MP, everything was pitifully small. But then, for Yaoyao, MP was the critical stat, since each of her increasingly extraordinary skills demanded a great deal of it.
When a pet was deployed, the master’s experience was reduced to share out. The rule ran roughly thus: if a monster gave 100 experience, then with one pet deployed the player received only 95 while the pet received the full 100. With two, the player got 90 and both pets got 100 each. And though deploying a pet cost 5% of the experience gained, a pet’s assistance in combat naturally added more than 5% to the kill rate. Unfortunately, barring some heaven-defying item or special condition, no player except a Summoner could deploy more than one pet at a time. Being able to bring a second would raise one’s combat power enormously. Then again, given how pets were acquired in the World of Fate and how rare they were, having even one was already a treasure — and how many people could ever obtain two?
It was precisely because of this experience split that pets always leveled slightly faster than their masters. But one thoroughly maddening rule of the World of Fate was that a pet’s or mount’s level could never exceed its master’s. If the master was level 20 and the pet reached 99.99% of level 20, it simply would not advance until the master hit 21. And if the master dropped from 20 to 19 or lower for any reason, the pet would drop with him.
Player levels averaged around 13 now, and well over half the experts on the rankings had reached 14, with players gradually beginning to move into Little Raccoon territory. Ye Tianxie killed a few more raccoons offhandedly and set off south. On his trip to Guping Town he’d gotten a rough map of the monster distribution across the southern reaches of the Windfall Plains, and where he was going now was the territory of the level 20 Plains Grey Wolves. With his current strength, he was more than capable of fighting level 20 monsters.
Plains Grey Wolf: Level 20. HP 1,150. The gentlest of all wolf species. Loves green grass and unspoiled nature. Will not initiate attacks on other living creatures. Those wolf eyes, so often gazing into the distance, always carry a faint sorrow.
Innate — Pack: Never acts alone. When one is attacked, nearby grey wolves will swarm the attacker together.
Skills: None.
Weakness: Fears fire-type attacks. On being struck by a fire-attribute attack, 5% chance to enter a “Terror” state.
In truth, with Ye Tianxie’s astonishing talent stats and his current attributes, he could have gone to the edge of the Windfall Plains and killed level 30 Flame Foxes without much strain. But too great a level gap imposed a significant penalty on accuracy, so for pure leveling efficiency, the level 20 Plains Grey Wolves were his best choice. At a five-level gap the accuracy penalty was negligible — and with his current attack, Dragon Rend Slash could one-shot these wolves outright.
Back when he had no class at all, with overall stats below an ordinary player of his level, he had still managed to grind Little Raccoons three levels above him at a jaw-dropping rate by riding Frenzied Battle Intent. Now, able to one-shot level 20 wolves, his efficiency was higher by an unmeasurable margin. He would earn several times what others earned, in half the time.
With the Eye of the Evil Dragon, a single glance laid bare each wolf’s attributes, innate traits, and skills — and even the weaknesses ordinary players could almost never detect — with a clear health bar appearing above each one’s head. Ye Tianxie strolled up to a wolf gazing sorrowfully into the distance, looked at it for half a second, and drove a Dragon Rend Strike into its skull.
-1300!
The wolf’s full health bar emptied in an instant, and it collapsed with a mournful howl. And that attack had, unquestionably, kicked a hornet’s nest. Seven wolves within a dozen meters turned their heads as one, a savage crimson gathering in those sorrowful eyes, and came howling at him from every direction.
How does one achieve higher efficiency in the same span of time, killing more targets? Greater attack power? Attack power resolves targets faster. Greater defense? Strong defense eliminates hesitation, and so invisibly increases your number of attacks. The optimal method of attack? A superior approach kills faster under identical conditions.
And if you combined all three…
Ye Tianxie’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t charge any single wolf. Instead he swept the field, locked onto the gap between two of them, shifted sideways abruptly, and with one bound slipped precisely out of the closing ring of seven — then spun, the Hour of Fate already leveled in front of him.
“Dragon Shadow Slash!!“
It was his first time using it. The instant it fired, savage power gathered into his hands of its own accord, wind screaming past his ears, and his body shot forward like a bolt of lightning, trailing an afterimage almost too faint to see.
A dash lasting 0.2 to 0.5 seconds — and the duration depended on the one who cast it. With Focus several times that of an ordinary person, Ye Tianxie’s dash came out at maximum speed and minimum duration: 0.2 seconds.
Like a vertical bolt of lightning tearing through, his body crossed five meters as though teleporting — and of the seven wolves, whose positions he’d calculated precisely, five were run straight through along the perfect line he’d chosen.
-772, -779, -760, -768, -1542!
Four of the five struck lost most of their health; the last was not only blasted away but killed outright by a critical. From launch to landing upright again, the whole thing took 0.2 seconds, and the wolves that had lost their target had no time to react at all… But in that same instant, Ye Tianxie — with his terrifying Reaction — spun the moment he stopped, took a small step forward, and swept the Hour of Fate through the wolves that the Dragon Shadow Slash had bunched together.
One of the terrifying properties of Ye Tianxie’s normal attack was that it hit everything in range, giving it an advantage over Dragon Rend Slash when striking multiple monsters at once. That small step forward placed all four of the near-dead wolves inside his arc, and one swing killed all four together.
“Ding… Your pet ‘Mystic Spirit Snow Fox’ has risen to level 2. HP +20, MP +80, physical attack +4, magic attack +8, accuracy +1, evasion +1.”
As the four wolves fell, the chime of Yaoyao’s second level-up sounded in his ear, and Ye Tianxie felt a distinct pang of envious resentment… She didn’t have to lift a paw and she was rocketing up levels. Whereas back in the novice village, he… Comparing a man to a fox really was enough to make a man furious.
He spent the entire afternoon rampaging back and forth across grey wolf territory, howls rising everywhere he went. Without Frenzied Battle Intent, he had no need to hold his mind at a constant knife-edge of tension, and though he was now facing monsters far stronger than Little Raccoons, it was vastly easier. The experience he gained and the pace of his leveling were, likewise, beyond comparison with before. Through all of it he barely touched a health potion — rarely so much as brushed by a wolf’s claw all afternoon, the Ring of Life’s 5 HP per second was entirely sufficient to keep him at full — though the stockpile of mana potions he’d accumulated took a considerable beating.
And Yaoyao, over the course of that one afternoon, under her master’s focused and brutally efficient grinding, went from level 2 to 3… to 4… to 5… to 6…
(End of Chapter 139)