“Ding… Blacksmith old Wang asks you to help him comfort his wife. Quest type: Hidden. Time limit: None. Quest reward: blacksmith old Wang’s gratitude. Accept?”
When the quest prompt sounded and those two words — “Hidden” — reached his ears, Ye Tianxie’s heart gave two violent thumps. This was actually a hidden quest!
Ye Tianxie accepted without a shred of hesitation. Hidden quests had an extremely low chance of triggering, and most possessed uniqueness, but their rewards were absolutely far richer than those of ordinary quests. And in the novice stage, the odds of triggering a hidden quest were more minuscule still — yet he had triggered one this easily.
The reason, once again, was that Charm now grown to 20 points. This hidden quest’s original trigger conditions were a Charm of 10 or above, plus a favorability of 30 or above from blacksmith old Wang. Conditions like that were anything but ordinarily strict — for one thing, merely finding someone like Ye Tianxie who’d dumped every last fixed attribute point into Charm was hard enough on its own. The difficulty of triggering a hidden quest is plain to see from this alone.
Ye Tianxie’s dumping of all his fixed attributes into Charm at the outset had been neither a spur-of-the-moment whim nor a brain short-circuit. In both the earlier Skyholder and Slaying Gods, whenever the fixed attributes were freely choosable, he’d set Charm to the maximum. Luck’s most crucial influence was on drop rate, and a higher drop rate meant more wealth and a greater chance of obtaining top-grade equipment. But Ye Tianxie had no need of drop rate at all — because he could simply… kill for loot! Once he set his sights on someone’s equipment, there was basically no chance of escape. At the same time, the equipment rewarded by hidden quests triggered through very high Charm was often stronger than what monsters dropped. And Comprehension… the experience bonus Comprehension brought was an enormous draw for nearly every player, because in the game world, level was the foremost measure of a player’s strength, and the rapid growth and mastery of skills mattered just as much. But to Ye Tianxie, Comprehension was likewise dispensable — in the World of Fate, even maxing it out came to a mere 3% experience bonus, whereas he… so long as he was willing, he was confident that even at the same level and gear as an ordinary player, his leveling speed would be at least 30% higher. That 3% held not the slightest appeal for him.
But he was probably the only one who dared be so reckless with fixed-attribute allocation. If an ordinary player carried 0 Luck and had no talent for killing and looting, then his inevitable fate was to drink the northwest wind all day and live off others’ charity…
The little room in the blacksmith shop, never once set foot in by any other player, was opened. By the dim light, he saw a gaunt figure with disheveled hair sitting in a battered old chair. Blacksmith old Wang glanced at her, shook his head, sighed, and said, “I’m counting on you, young man.”
With that, he closed the door from the outside. The moment Ye Tianxie stepped back out through it would mark the quest’s conclusion — success, failure, or abandonment.
The woman sitting in the chair had a vacant, glassy stare and took no notice at all of Ye Tianxie’s entrance, no different in her manner from a mentally unhinged person in the real world. Ye Tianxie swept his gaze quickly over the room, thought in silence for a moment, then walked up before the vacant-eyed woman. Persuasion-type quests weren’t something Ye Tianxie had never encountered across his past virtual gaming career, and such quests were often even harder than slaying a great BOSS — and basically offered no second chance, because once the first persuasion failed, facing the same person a second time, they’d reject you on instinct.
Ye Tianxie was just about to speak when a big apple core dropped down out of midair. Guoguo patted her little belly, her face full of satisfaction. “Oh la la, I’m so full — that thing called an Apple really is delicious. Huh? What is this place?”
Ye Tianxie looked speechlessly at the apple core on the ground, which had scarcely a shred of flesh left clinging to it. He was certain there couldn’t possibly be a single person in the world who could eat an apple this clean without damaging the core. And besides… for an ordinary person to eat one apple was nothing, but at Guoguo’s body size… Ye Tianxie lifted his eyes to look, and sure enough found the belly under Guoguo’s dress had visibly puffed out just a touch. Full and content, Guoguo sat astride his shoulder, her upper body reclining lazily against his neck — the very picture of comfort and ease.
“To thank master for giving me such a delicious thing to eat, the cutest, best-behaved little loli Guoguo can tell master a little secret.” Guoguo stretched, her two eyes already closed, looking drowsy and half-asleep from her full belly. Her words made Ye Tianxie glance over at once. “What secret?”
“Oh la! It’s about this weird auntie! If you want to persuade her, it’s actually really simple. You just have to make her believe her little kid isn’t dead yet, and that’ll do it… mm! I feel a teeny bit sleepy — Guoguo’s going to sleep now, bye-bye master.”
Having dropped these few vague words, and giving Ye Tianxie no time at all to ask more, Guoguo suddenly turned into a ball of white light, settled over the Hour of Eternal Fate at his chest, and vanished.
Guoguo’s vague hint, and her flight so plainly afraid of his questioning, added yet another layer of mystery to her in Ye Tianxie’s mind. He turned her hint over in his heart several times, then arranged his words, and at last opened his mouth…
There was only this one blacksmith shop in the whole novice village. In this World of Fate with its infuriatingly low drop rate, the vast majority of players could only come hurrying to the blacksmith with hard-scraped-together money to buy some plain-stat gear, or to turn in and take on quests. Blacksmith old Wang, dealing with the many players right now, was visibly distracted, his gaze drifting again and again toward that tightly shut door.
A full hour had already passed.
At last, with a creak, the door that had been closed for an hour opened, and Ye Tianxie walked out with a calm expression, letting out a long breath. Seeing this, blacksmith old Wang hurried over. “Young man, did you—”
He’d gotten only halfway through when his gaze suddenly turned fervent — for he had actually seen his wife, who hadn’t walked out of that room in a full month, following out behind Ye Tianxie, her once murky, scattered gaze restored to its old clarity and spirit. In a clear voice, the woman said to him, “I’m all right now…”
Blacksmith old Wang’s gratitude was beyond words; he could only say, in the most heartfelt of voices, “Thank you, young man. I won’t forget your kindness.”
“Ding… You have completed the quest to persuade blacksmith old Wang’s wife. You have gained 20 favorability with blacksmith old Wang.”
Walking out of the blacksmith shop, Ye Tianxie didn’t linger and headed straight for the Fierce Wolf Valley in the north of the novice village. A hidden quest truly wasn’t so easily completed. When his nearly hour-long persuasion had finally gotten the woman to respond, only then did he learn that the persuasion was merely the beginning of this hidden quest. In the end, that woman lifted her disheveled head, her eyes fixed intently on him: “Young man, so long as you can bring back my son Xiaoming — even just his corpse — I’ll tell you an… earth-shattering secret!”
Her expression, her voice, her gaze in that moment all left Ye Tianxie inexplicably horror-struck, as if gusts of cold wind were darting through every part of his body. On instinct, he sensed that this woman seemed far from as simple as she appeared on the surface.
An earth-shattering secret… just what kind of secret could qualify as earth-shattering?
(End of Chapter 15)