Exploiting Me Again? Doing It to Myself? Then It's Fine

That was right. In this respect, administrators were a bit like Pokémon trainers. They could buy training services for players and drill them to death like operatives.

"I saw that before, so if I buy it on my end, they get forcibly trained over there?"

"[One Hour of Skill Training] (With the player's consent, the player can be forcibly placed in a training state to practice a skill they possess for one hour. They cannot do anything else during this period unless the administrator stops the training.)"

"Price: 50 Employee Points."

There were similar services for item training, physical training, even training for other specialties, along with packages of different durations.

Sister Wang confirmed it. "That's right, but there are quite a few restrictions. First, it can't be used after entering a dungeon, unless the dungeon identifies an area as safe. Second, the player has to agree to it. Otherwise, buying it is useless.

Then there are situations like ordinary people being detected nearby, the training potentially affecting others, or consumable materials running out. In those cases, it'll stop.

Still, the service really is effective. This is the kind I recommend you buy. As long as you discuss it with the player, you can arrange it soon enough.

Forced focus is far more efficient than normal people training hard on their own. Players almost instantly enter a flow state, and their proficiency rises before they know it."

Zhang Anzai found this quite surprising, but Sister Wang merely waved a hand.

"That's only because your permissions are low, and you can't afford the advanced services. The more expensive ones don't require training in reality. You can directly customize a dream for the player. Training in the dream doesn't consume materials or physical strength, but proficiency still goes up."

"That powerful?" Lin Zhao seemed tempted. "This would've been great back when I was coding..."

For workers like them, whose jobs were tedious and miserable, this ability was almost too good to be true.

As Zhang Anzai listened, aside from finding it novel, he felt a little miserable. "I know it's useful, so I'm happy about that, but I can already vaguely see what my daily life is going to be like."

That night, after finishing a late-night snack and replenishing his energy, Zhang Anzai decisively turned on his computer and entered the interface for his bound player.

"Ha... it feels a little awful, but I still have to train."

Zhang Anzai freely summoned the True-Form Scissors from the game.

The game did not provide every player with their own system storage space, but at least outside dungeons, they could freely retrieve and store all kinds of items.

The cold iron scissors with special effects felt no different from ordinary scissors in his hand. They did not seem like a mystical item at all.

"The only way to know the exact effect is to try it." Zhang Anzai found the item training service on the bound player interface and decisively spent 50 points to order an hour.

A notification immediately popped up on his phone: "Your bound administrator has purchased a training service for you. Begin?"

After he tapped yes, there were no particularly obvious signs, but Zhang Anzai finally felt something was different.

He tried to put down the True-Form Scissors in his hand, only for his hand to suddenly go limp. He had no strength to let go.

His hand was weak, and the scissors were about to fall, yet his fingers instinctively clenched again, gripping the scissors' handle tightly.

"So that's what forced means. I can only do this, and I have no strength to do anything else." Zhang Anzai took a thick stack of office paper from the drawer.

As a worker, copy paper was practically standard equipment for everyone. As a newcomer, he had been issued some as well, which saved him from having to specifically buy office paper or other paper for practice.

For ordinary paper-cutting and origami, A4 paper was enough.

Compared to that, what had really cost him money was the reference book for learning.

"This sucks, but I can't just cut things blindly and figure it out myself. Forget making anything useful—I probably couldn't even cut a decent window decoration."

Zhang Anzai silently opened the Introduction to Paper Crafting he had bought in advance from the player forum.

It was an extremely basic introductory book with no special effects whatsoever. The guy selling it had bundled it together with a pile of miscellaneous books and sold it as junk.

"Bro, you seriously only want to buy this one book, and you're willing to pay 20 Old Dust for it?"

Zhang Anzai had wanted to say that he did not want to buy it this way, but wasn't that how the guy had priced it? He could hardly add another thirty and buy it by the pound as the seller had intended.

Still, it was not too bad. Once he opened the book, he found that it was genuinely suitable for him: paper folding and paper-cutting for little children learning paper crafting, practically kindergarten-level material.

"It really looks pretty dumb. Feels like something they'd use as arts-and-crafts material in kindergarten."

Though Zhang Anzai mocked it, Chinese culture was vast and profound. Paper-cutting was also a delicate craft, and veteran craftsmen in this trade were truly creating works of art.

For Zhang Anzai to master the entire book, and become proficient enough to use it in a dungeon, would not be easy. Otherwise, why would he buy a training service specifically to push himself?

"Snip, snip..." Whatever else could be said, the True-Form Scissors were genuinely sharp. He still did not know exactly what effects their cuts would produce, but at least the tool itself did not hold him back.

"Uh..." After struggling for a while, Zhang Anzai cut out a very basic little window decoration—a flower shape.

The moment he finished, he blinked and felt as though the paper flower in his hand had suddenly changed.

Perhaps because his cutting had been too rough, the result was truly hard to praise. It looked as though quite a few petals were stretching outward, but on closer inspection, there were still many irregular strips of paper.

"So if it doesn't meet the standard, those parts won't transform at all?" Zhang Anzai roughly guessed the reason.

What he did not notice was that as he pondered, he had already stopped thinking about all sorts of random things and quietly started cutting again.

Time around him suddenly seemed to become a rather vague concept. Zhang Anzai paid it little attention, focusing entirely on the scissors and paper in his hands.

At that moment, he had no spare attention to consider how he had become exactly what he hated most. There was no need for corporate brainwashing or incentives like wages and bonuses.

Zhang Anzai had simply turned around and begun ruthlessly exploiting himself.

"Snip, snip..." Zhang Anzai placed a finished paper cutout on the table. A rabbit that had seemingly appeared from nowhere suddenly began hopping around on the tabletop with one lame leg.

Aside from the leg that had been cut crooked, its size and appearance were nearly lifelike.

"Maybe I'm actually pretty talented?" Zhang Anzai experimentally touched it, only to find that the skill description was absolutely right. His cutout looked fairly similar, so the rabbit really felt like a rabbit—three-dimensional and solid.