The legendary dragon fang

Given that a certain murderous maniac regularly roamed the wilderness killing people with a bright red name over his head, it was hardly surprising that he had earned so much collective hatred...

As Lan Xi put it, "As long as I'm breathing, I'll keep PKing!" The bastard's name was so red it had practically turned purple and black. Whenever he spotted someone he disliked out in the wilderness, he charged over and beat the hell out of them, regardless of their faction!

Generally speaking, seven or eight people were no match for him. A dozen or so could just about make him take a fight seriously. Even against several dozen, the bastard could escape unscathed... To surround and kill this damned PK maniac, they needed at least a hundred people deployed in layers of encirclement. Only then did they have a chance of exhausting all his skills and mana and finally securing a hard-fought kill.

Ye Fengxing often got splitting headaches from the guy's constant yelling...

"Coordinates XXX. Get your ass over here! More than two hundred people have me surrounded."

"Coordinates XXX. We've put together a wilderness killing squad, and we're having a blast fighting those bastards from War Hero. Want to come lend a hand?"

Ye Fengxing usually deleted messages like these without a second thought. Only when he was in an exceptionally foul mood would he answer Lan Xi's "call to arms" and join him in chopping people up.

Now that Chronicles of the Sky had launched, the guy had followed One Leaf Windwalk's example, selling his Light of Freedom account and throwing himself into the world of Chronicles of the Sky instead. What choice did he have? The game was just that popular. Before its servers even opened, it had already reached 1.5 billion registrations worldwide! As of just moments ago, more than seven hundred million players were online simultaneously!

The game's rise was already inevitable. All the old full-immersion, thought-controlled games would become dust in history, gradually forgotten.

"PK my ass. Focus on leveling!" Ye Fengxing found a moment to reply to Lan Xi. The bastard really never changed. He wasn't even level ten yet, and he was already thinking about PKing. He was completely insane.

"Don't care! PK, PK, PK!" Seeing Ye Fengxing reply only made him more excited.

"Then come on over. If you can find me, I'll fight you."

"Where are you?"

"I don't know either."

"Fuck!"

"I really don't know. This shitty system randomly assigned me the Dragonkin race. I can't even find any mobs here. All I can do is mindlessly mine to level up."

"Son of a... Well, keep digging for now. Something's happening over here. Talk later." A sudden boom came from the other end, sounding suspiciously like a fireball hitting someone.

Ye Fengxing helplessly closed the chat window. When would this guy ever change...?

Mining really did make leveling fast. Ye Fengxing had already reached level seven and dug up countless chunks of ore, large and small, along the way. Unfortunately, his gathering skill was too low, and he simply couldn't dig up anything good. Still, this place called the Dragonrest Wilds had plenty of medicinal herbs. Most were low-grade, but he couldn't turn down free stuff. Waste was a crime, after all...

Item grades in Chronicles of the Sky were much the same as in ordinary online games: gray (junk), white (common), green (fine), blue (exceptional), yellow (rare), purple (epic), orange (legendary), and silver (ancient).

A huge pile of white-grade ore already covered the ground. Ye Fengxing was almost impressed with himself. Sure, his gathering skill was a little low, but surely that didn't mean he couldn't dig up a single green-grade stone in seven or eight straight hours? Just how rotten did his luck have to be to accomplish a "feat" like this?

Like hell I'm giving up...

Someone silently steeled himself and swung his hoe faster and faster. Beneath the moonlit sky, a lone figure worked up a drenching sweat as the pit in the ground grew ever larger...

By dawn, Ye Fengxing had reached level nine, but his experience bar had stopped moving. No matter what ore he dug up, it no longer increased. There was nothing he could do about it. At level nine, he couldn't gain experience unless he dug up green-grade stones.

He remained utterly unmoved and kept digging. The guy was as stubborn as a mule. If the system wanted to pick a fight with him, he would fight it to the bitter end!

Perhaps heaven really had taken pity on Ye Fengxing... A flash of purple appeared, and his pupils instantly contracted as he dug faster. Although the purple glow was very faint, his eyesight was excellent. He pinpointed his "prey" at a glance.

Attributes such as sight, hearing, touch, and mental perception were all hidden attributes. Generally speaking, they were difficult to improve through leveling. Apart from mental perception, which increased with the spirit attribute, the other sensory attributes improved through constitution. The gains were tiny, however. Even a thousand points of constitution wouldn't add much. They depended mostly on what someone was born with.

Although many of Ye Fengxing's base attributes had been slashed, his sensory attributes hadn't been reduced much. Considering his real-world perception... Well, the system had actually gone easy on him.

No! More accurately, the system had shown him considerable favoritism. Base attributes could be improved through all sorts of means, such as equipment, quests, and levels. Sensory abilities, on the other hand, would probably leave plenty of people frustrated and baffled for a very, very long time...

As Ye Fengxing's hands moved faster, the thing underground gradually revealed its true appearance. Fuck! It was huge!

After half an hour of hard work, Ye Fengxing finally dug out the enormous purple-grade object. He gazed at his prize in satisfaction, wondering where it had come from.

Purple-grade items were called epic items. As the name implied, they were things mentioned in epics. Put more simply, they were objects with a story behind them... And the thing before him, which was considerably larger than Ye Fengxing himself, looked very much like the eating equipment of some gigantic reptile...

Could this be the legendary dragon fang?

Ye Fengxing immediately began fantasizing about purple-grade weapons in all sorts of shapes: a dragon fang sword, a dragon fang saber, a dragon fang spear... Sure, this thing was a little oversized and wouldn't be very handy to wield, but weren't there crafting skills for that? Enough said. Once he got out of this godforsaken place, he was going to learn smithing!

"Did you dig this up?" A hoarse voice interrupted Ye Fengxing's fantasies. He could only sigh and obediently reply, "Yes."

Foreman Esk raced over to the enormous dragon fang, stretched out his trembling hands, and gently stroked its surface. Scalding tears even streamed down his face...

"Isn't that a bit much?" Ye Fengxing stuck his hoe into the ground and quietly stood off to the side to watch the performance.

"O ancestor, this unworthy descendant has been blessed with the chance to behold a part of your remains. Truly, this is a blessing earned over three lifetimes. Please permit me to lay your remains in the Dragon Tomb. May you rest forever in peace. Saxi buyamoha..."

Ye Fengxing couldn't understand a word of the profound, obscure Draconic that followed. He could only let the guy chant a string of strange, spell-like syllables with a devout expression. Listening to it made him want to rush over and hack someone up.

Forget it. I might as well allocate my attribute points while he's at it.

In Chronicles of the Sky, player characters had five base attributes: constitution, strength, agility, intelligence, and spirit. Whenever a player gained a level, all five attributes automatically increased by five points. In addition, they received five freely assignable attribute points.

Constitution increased Health Points, defense, and a very small amount of sensory ability.

Strength was indispensable for physical damage classes. It increased a character's physical attack power, abbreviated as AP (Attack Power). The higher the AP, the harder their hits hurt.

Agility was a difficult attribute to weigh up. It increased movement speed, physical attack speed, dodging ability, jumping ability, balance, and other such attributes. Invest too little, and there was no noticeable effect. Invest too much, and attacks stopped hurting. As a result, it frequently proved a real pain in the ass for players.

Intelligence was an attribute caster classes invested in without hesitation. It increased a player's spell power, also called SP (Spell Power), which could be further divided into spell damage and spell healing. Intelligence also provided a certain increase to critical strikes, so many casters liked to pile points into intelligence right from the start.

Spirit improved quite a few secondary attributes, including mana regeneration, casting speed, mental perception, and resistance to negative status effects. Many were hidden attributes, and ordinary players rarely bothered looking into such "irrelevant" things. Mana regeneration and casting speed, however, were essential for caster classes.

This time, Ye Fengxing was playing a mage rather than the warrior he was familiar with. Deciding how to allocate his attribute points really did take some thought.

Intelligence was definitely necessary, but he didn't know a single spell yet, so investing in it would be useless. Besides, the mage Ye Fengxing wanted to play was by no means the kind focused on raw damage output. Sure, one-shotting someone felt great, but what if he ran into an expert? Especially an expert whose equipment matched or even surpassed his own?

A mage who dealt hundreds of thousands of damage with a single spell and simply violated their opponent could only bully weaklings.

After all, full-immersion, thought-controlled games like Chronicles of the Sky gave characters an extremely high degree of freedom. Take Light of Freedom, which Ye Fengxing had played before. His Agile Warrior had invested in both strength and agility, with little constitution or defense, yet he had never met a mage who could blow him away in one hit.

Why was that?

He had once answered that question like this: "When you see a fireball or wind blade flying at you, can't you dodge it? Can't you block it?"

Those words had left countless warriors in tears... Come on, man, reaction speeds like yours were downright freakish! If we stacked agility as high as you did, we wouldn't even be able to control our characters properly!

For example, when a warrior used Charge, its acceleration applied a percentage increase based on the character's own speed. If their base movement speed was too high, then charging over would be... How to put it? Everyone understood driving, right? At sixty kilometers an hour, you could still hum a little tune. At two hundred, would you have any attention left for anything else?

Given the attributes of the character with the ID One Leaf Windwalk, using Charge while Gale Step was active made him faster than an F1 car. Could an ordinary person handle that kind of thrill?

As for "blocking"... Spells fired by caster classes might not quite rival bullets or missiles, but to ordinary eyes they really left little more than a string of afterimages. All you could register was, "Ah! I got hit!" Asking someone to swing their weapon to block one was simply asking too much!

Speed was one thing; accuracy was another. Everyone agreed on how difficult this was, but according to a certain someone, it was just like playing table tennis. Practice made perfect... That was all!

Ye Fengxing's reflexes far surpassed those of ordinary people. Combined with the absurdly high agility of his monstrous character, they let him pull off something as bizarre as "casually blocking spells with a weapon." Only a handful of people in all of Light of Freedom could manage it, and every last one of them was a top-tier expert!