I'm not clean anymore...

The good news was that the traps hadn't reset!

The bad news was that his little Nepenthes bros were giving less experience!

After level four, the experience from Nepenthes had been slashed from a little over a hundred straight down to 45, which slowed Wang Shui's progress toward his next skill slot considerably.

Fortunately, combat in SAO wasn't as boring as in other RPGs.

Although he was still grinding a single kind of monster, and the monsters' appearances didn't change, every battle in this highly realistic virtual world was completely different.

Every step you took, every swing of your sword, even a slight change in terrain-any change in conditions could lead to something unknown happening in the battle ahead.

Of course, for Wang Shui, the main difference was that his little Nepenthes bros fell into the traps in slightly different poses each time.

Every Nepenthes that fell into a trap was like money falling into Wang Shui's pocket, so even after grinding for over a day, he wasn't bored in the slightest.

It was already noon on the fifth day in-game. More players from the second and third waves were appearing nearby, and almost all the later arrivals were in parties.

That wasn't too many people for this grinding spot, but once someone spotted Wang Shui's traps and started copying them, he knew he couldn't stay here anymore.

The monsters' respawn rate would soon fall behind the players' kill rate.

Wang Shui didn't mind people copying him. He even taught other players the trap specifications and how to carbonize the wooden spikes.

Anyone who could make it here today would be a high-end player in the future. Helping each other out and building some goodwill was fine.

Wang Shui wasn't shy like Lord Kirito. Of course, he wasn't socially anxious either. He was a social colonizer.

They were only Nepenthes, after all. Wang Shui already had nearly a thousand bottles of [Nepenthes Honey] stored in the town warehouse, with over two hundred more on him. Even if he hadn't ground them until he was sick of them, it was time to switch to another monster population for materials.

His only regret was that this game wouldn't drop a [Nepenthes Banner] to commemorate his grinding journey.

It had barely reached noon when gaps began appearing in the Nepenthes respawns. Wang Shui didn't want to wait, so he promptly sorted his inventory and set off.

It was still early, so there was no need to return to the village. Wang Shui planned to explore ahead, venturing deeper into the forest to find the red-spotted beetles' spawn points. Some people returning from up ahead said there seemed to be a buildup of monsters in the beetle area. Solo players lacked both the damage and speed to force their way through.

As a result, more people in the village had started farming [Anneal Blades] and looking for parties.

Wang Shui only intended to scout things out. With plenty of supplies and a spare [Anneal Blade] in his bag, skirting the edge of the so-called "beetle area" should be fine.

Yes, that was right. Yesterday morning, he had farmed another little sister with a flower on her head and thorns, and she had contributed a spare sword.

Exploring deeper went more smoothly than Wang Shui had imagined.

In particular, there were more and more leveling parties along the way. They didn't just clear Nepenthes; they also spared none of the less frequently spawning monsters, such as boars, wolves, and deer.

But the moment he entered the outskirts of the so-called beetle area, the number of nearby players dropped straight to zero. The trees grew denser too. There should still have been sunlight at noon, but now everything was shaded.

Wang Shui carefully made his way through the pathless undergrowth, advancing slowly for about half an hour before finally discovering the so-called "beetle area."

The region where Nepenthes spawned wasn't called the "Nepenthes area." This place was called an area because of the sea of red, yellow, blue, and green before Wang Shui-a sea of bugs.

Across a small gap, the enormous broadleaf trees gave way to somewhat shorter fruit trees, though most were still three or four stories tall.

All over these fruit trees, which bore fruit indiscriminately regardless of season, crawled enormous bugs around a meter long, both beetles and worms,

in all sorts of shapes and colors. The sight of over a hundred enormous, multicolored bugs still gave Wang Shui quite a shock. A player with a fear of bugs would probably drop dead on the spot after one look.

Goosebumps rose uncontrollably. Wang Shui endured his discomfort and examined them, soon discovering that the densely packed swarms weren't actually that numerous. He worked his way along the edge of the "beetle area," bypassing the region with large numbers of fruit trees. Sure enough, the density of bugs dropped considerably, though woodland with a giant bug every few steps was still enough to kill a bug-phobic player several times over.

The posts Wang Shui had read on the strategy forums said very little about beetles, and the descriptions were simple. The guides only said that beetles had high defense and weren't very aggressive, while worms moved slowly but offered poor experience and drops.

Now it seemed very likely that there hadn't been so many bugs gathered here during the beta. Otherwise, players wouldn't have ignored such a hellish sight.

Rather than marveling or feeling afraid, Wang Shui had something else in mind. He took out a reagent bottle he had seen enough of over the past few days to make him sick:

[Nepenthes Honey]

[Item type: Material, consumable]

[Quantity: 500 ml × 223]

[Description: The predatory digestive fluid of ferocious Nepenthes. Somewhat toxic and corrosive, it has a sweet, delicate fragrance and is extremely attractive to nectar-loving creatures (insects, birds, rodents, etc.). Nepenthes use the honey they synthesize to attract, paralyze, kill, and digest prey, and also spit honey to attack.]

Clearly, the honey would help with tackling these beetles. The order in which the monsters were distributed could also explain this coincidence.

So had nobody discovered such an obvious strategy detail during the beta?

Perhaps nobody had trained the [Gathering] skill back then. Perhaps those who discovered it hadn't thought much of it. After all, the beetles might not have been so rampant then.

Thinking more and asking more questions was one of Wang Shui's few strengths, though it had also led to his habit of overthinking things.

Now an opportunity to develop a bug-farming strategy lay before him. Faced with this vast supply of monsters nobody wanted, he set his hesitation aside for the moment.

The first thing to do was confirm the honey's effects and find a way to use this item to farm monsters, but the phrase "extremely attractive" in its description kept Wang Shui from opening it outright.

Instead, he gently tossed the glass reagent bottle onto a thick patch of grass, then backed away while keeping the bottle in sight, retreating more than ten meters.

Then he took a pebble from the leather pouch at his waist. Only slightly larger than a coin, it was smooth and solid, comfortable in his hand and very suitable for throwing.

Wang Shui planned to shatter the reagent bottle with the pebble and observe the results.

Hitting something the size of a fist with a stone from over twenty meters away wasn't easy. Two days ago, Wang Shui really couldn't have done it. His frantic stone-throwing to pull monsters over the past few days had greatly improved his throwing ability, though only with pebbles.

Power rose from the ground. Wang Shui engaged the muscles throughout his body, pivoting his foot, twisting his leg, and turning his waist. His right arm lashed like a whip, and when it reached the point that felt right, the thumb, index finger, and middle finger of his loosely gripping right hand released.

The movement was swift and fluid. The pebble shot from Wang Shui's hand like a line, striking the glass reagent bottle in an almost straight trajectory.

Wang Shui had long since grown used to his current strength bonus. His in-game character now had what an ordinary person in reality would consider a superhuman physique.

The reagent bottle shattered with a muffled crack. The sound didn't attract the bugs a few meters away, but just three or four seconds later, Wang Shui suddenly felt his back prickle-the swarm was moving.

The sight of giant bugs moving like an army on the march was overwhelming.

Meter-long beetles and worms of every color surged toward Wang Shui's vicinity in a seemingly endless tide. Wang Shui, who had built up a little courage from his recent grinding, immediately retreated on shaky legs.

Only after fleeing a hundred meters and finding that the bugs hadn't followed did Wang Shui carefully edge back.

The whole process had actually taken only about a minute. When Wang Shui returned, he discovered that the bugs hadn't charged at him. They had simply stopped at the bottle's location.

The swarm had already settled down and was crawling back to its original positions, while seven or eight beetles remained near the shattered glass bottle.

These beetles had paralysis and poison icons over their heads and were twitching around the glass bottle.

The paralysis soon wore off. The beetles turned and returned to the swarm as though nothing had happened, while Wang Shui kept staring at the "-15," "-15" rising above their heads...

Poison damage. Poison damage that didn't make the beetles hostile! How much damage in total?!

Watching until the last damage number disappeared, Wang Shui discovered that the injured beetles had only about a third of their health remaining!

Somewhere between six hundred and eight hundred-a figure surfaced in his mind.

The guides recorded beetle health as ranging from around 1,000 to 1,500, with particular emphasis on their considerable defense. Worms and flying insects had lower health and defense, but received compensation in attack power or methods of attack.

Making a rough calculation from the health range, Wang Shui estimated that if the honey's poison damage was a fixed value, it was 750. In other words, about 15 damage per second for 50 seconds?

Hiss-AoE poison damage, early-game grinding? C-could this be... "Choking Gas Potions"?!

Was this still a world of Sword Skills? Akihiko Kayaba had actually designed this kind of farming method? Could it be a little cheese item prepared for players afraid of bugs?

There was no point considering that now. In Wang Shui's eyes, these terrifying monsters had already turned into experience, Cor, and materials. He began moving along the perimeter of the beetle area, placing glass bottles of honey as he went. By the time he had made a semicircle, he had set out over sixty bottles.

Items deliberately placed on display like this wouldn't be classified as lost or discarded for a long time. Wang Shui had already tested that with the wooden spikes in his traps.

Once the bottles were in place, Wang Shui began running back along the same route, taking out pebbles as he ran and smashing the nearest bottles along the way.

This time, Wang Shui was very close to the bottles and didn't need much force, so he didn't even have to stop.

By the time he finished the three-minute run back to where he had placed the first bottle, he had already reached level five.

The first batch of bugs had long since died, followed by an even denser, unbroken stream of kill notifications! The kill pop-ups didn't stop for fifty seconds. Wang Shui had set them to close automatically, but they still formed a continuous mass.

Golden light rose again, and Wang Shui reached level six. By the time the experience bar gradually slowed to a stop, he wasn't far from level seven.

Wang Shui didn't know how many bugs he had killed... Actually, he could find out, because their corpses hadn't despawned due to the [Gathering] skill's influence. A "mountain of bug corpses" now stretched along the edge of the orchard.

The sight wasn't much better than when they had been alive, but this wasn't the limit yet!

What followed might scare an ordinary person to death, so there would be no detailed description. Instead, here was a little story.

Once upon a time, a miser obtained a batch of gold. He loved that gold so much and liked the feeling of being surrounded by it.

So he melted the gold into tiny grains, stroking them every day and savoring the feeling of them surrounding his palms.

One day, over a hundred chickens accidentally ate the grains of gold. Furious, the miser covered his mouth and nose with an old linen garment, picked up a [Bronze Sword], and began hacking the hundred-plus chickens apart one by one. When the Bronze Sword ran out of durability, he switched to an [Anneal Blade]. Green chicken blood soaked the linen garment, and every breath was thick with a bloody stench, but the miser continued dismembering the chickens with a solemn expression.

After cursing nine generations of the taste-design engineer's family, the miser finally retrieved all his property. Then he collapsed headfirst onto a clean patch of grass, shedding tears while displaying a greedy smile.

All right, that was the story.

When Wang Shui climbed off the grass, the entire woodland had returned to peace and cleanliness. A scattering of bugs had already respawned, but now the sight of bugs made him a little nauseous.

He had thrown the old linen garment far away. Only the stains on it couldn't reset; it needed washing to remove the [Dirty] status. But Wang Shui never wanted to touch it again.

Doing his best to erase the images from his mind, Wang Shui stared blankly at the fruit-tree-filled woodland, gathering his wits through the numbness.

While he had been... practicing [Gathering], he had originally wanted to look for the reason the "chickens" here had proliferated as well. But midway through-uh, perhaps around a third of the way through-his consciousness had entered self-protection mode.

Now the woodland was much cleaner, and the air was fresh again. Wang Shui began wandering as though out for a stroll. Then, unsurprisingly, he spotted a treasure chest in a small clearing overgrown with shrubs.

The enormous golden chest actually gave off a soft green glow. By then, Wang Shui no longer had the brainpower to analyze why a chest would appear outside the labyrinth area, nor did he spare much thought for whether it might be a mimic before opening it.

Inside the enormous golden chest, over a meter tall, was a display stand decorated with red brocade. In the very center sat an enormous green jewel, five centimeters across.

The jewel's left side bore an S-shaped vine in relief, while the right had only slender tendrils. The upturned leaves at the top were lifelike, and beneath the intertwining vines was a curved jade surface glowing blue-green. The whole piece was exquisitely crafted.

Wang Shui reached out and picked up the jewel, and the brocade stand disappeared along with the chest.

[Special equipment · Supernatural Instinct]

[Equipment type: Charm/jewel/pendant]

[Level requirement: None]

[Special effect 1: All attribute bonuses from equipment items are nullified.]

[Special effect 2: All self-training effects are doubled.]

[Special effect 3: Naturally regenerates 5% of maximum health per second. All beneficial effects are increased by 100%.]

[Description: "I don't know how I know, but I just know."]

Ah... what?

It was actually charm-type equipment. Hardly anyone discussed these on the strategy forums, simply because they were too rare. Only a single-digit number had been publicly documented during the beta. Charm-type equipment generally had health and attribute modifiers, while particularly good ones also came with special effects.

Of the ten equipment slots on a player's character model, the necklace, two rings, and charm were the hardest to fill.

Necklaces and rings could be bought in town shops with relatively poor effects. During the beta, high-quality accessories had only dropped from bosses, while charms were even rarer.

This jewel was also an effect-based item that added no attributes, but its power... Wang Shui was puzzled.

The first special effect was purely negative, outright disabling all equipment attribute bonuses.

Sword Art Online, SAO, was a heavily gear-driven game. During the beta, everyone had discovered the huge gaps between equipment attributes. The influence of numerical values on this game was direct and obvious. Based on the first effect alone, Wang Shui dared assert that this damn jewel definitely wasn't late-game equipment.

For the second effect, "doubled" was fairly straightforward. What was suspicious was that the description below clearly used "increased by 100%," so why use such a vague verbal concept as "doubled" here? Shouldn't it all be written in numbers for ease of calculation?

Besides, "training effects" wasn't a keyword. There was no modifier called training effects at all.

Did this training refer to training attributes or training skill proficiency?

But attributes and skills both had caps. Even doubled training effects would only mean reaching the cap sooner. The skills he mainly used would definitely reach their caps anyway.

The second effect could probably save a great deal of time. Overall, it was reasonably useful.

In Wang Shui's view, the most underwhelming one was the third.

Regenerating only 5% of maximum health was far too poor in the early game. Even with a thousand health, that was only 50 per second, not much better than potions.

Especially for Wang Shui, if he wasn't fatally wounded, he could slowly drink health potions. If he took massive damage in succession, was he really going to gamble on a monster just barely failing to one-shot him?

The third special effect clearly grew stronger with more health, but according to the first effect, without equipment bonuses to [Vitality (VIT)], how much health would he have?

Wang Shui's verdict was a self-contradictory, underwhelming toy.

Only in the early game, in an ordinary forest on the first floor, would special equipment like this appear. Its health regeneration was probably meant to save players some potions early on.

Wang Shui opened the map and shrank the panel as far as it would go, examining the cleared map fog. Sure enough, his current location was right in the center of Aincrad's first floor. This jewel was probably a reward for clearing over half the map outside the labyrinth.

Its design was quite exquisite, and having it in the inventory was very soothing for a collector. What Wang Shui hadn't expected was that not a single word of his analysis of this thing was right.

In Wang Shui's view, the special equipment was only a bonus. The beetle swarm that seemed to have been guarding the chest was the greatest gain-the financial gain during the early game.

In less than an hour, Wang Shui had acquired materials far beyond his weight limit. He had no choice but to sort out some cheap, heavy materials, bundle them up, and hide them to collect when he passed through later.

Now Wang Shui was right on the threshold where his load would affect his movement. Even one more pebble would put him overweight. Logically, he ought to return to the village to unload first, but his current location and the time put him in an awkward position.

It was just past noon. If he went back, he wouldn't have time to return here today. He could only compete with a crowd for monsters near the village, or simply rest for half a day.

After brief consideration, Wang Shui decided to continue exploring ahead, keep moving forward as much as possible, and avoid wasting time dealing with monsters.

His aim was to uncover the map. Ideally, he would find a supply point such as a village ahead. If he couldn't, he would head back before four in the afternoon.

If all he was doing was advancing, Wang Shui could move quite quickly.

He moved swiftly between the trees and was very practiced at finding animal trails and judging where he could place his feet. Apart from gathering herbs, which were very light, Wang Shui barely stopped at all. But whenever he encountered monsters, he always took out a booklet and glanced through it.

This booklet was the early release of "Argo's Floor Strategy Guide: First Floor (Paid Edition)."

It recorded information on almost all ordinary monsters on the first floor in considerable detail, including attributes, distribution, attack methods, drops, and so on.

It also contained verified high-value quests, the attribute-training information Wang Shui had supplied, and much more.

Argo, who had originally intended to help novice players for free, had ultimately been unable to bear the costs. She had put both paid and free editions on sale at the item shop. The free edition had less content but was very concise, enough for novices to quickly grasp the game and develop a good habit of systematically improving their combat power.

The paid edition also provided large amounts of unconfirmed information, along with leads on some newly discovered rare items. At 200 Cor, it was good value for money.

Both editions had a red flyleaf marked [Important Notes], listing many crucial points players needed to watch for: the attribute training and saving of attribute points Wang Shui had supplied, certain especially dangerous areas, recommendations to form parties with multiple players, [Switch] techniques, and more.

When resting, Wang Shui also often took out the guide to check the strategy information in his memory and look for discrepancies.

But now, his last-minute reading wasn't to look up monster information. It was because he wanted to acquire the [Hide] skill as soon as possible.

The guide contained information on various skills and Sword Skills. Beyond the attributes of the skills themselves and Sword Skill extensions, it also offered advice on coordination between party members, individual skill combinations, and how to use Sword Skills correctly and efficiently.

Wang Shui was reading the tips and techniques for [Hide], then using the dense forest's complex environment to practice [Hide] as he traveled.

Level five had only added one new skill slot. If he didn't want to ruin his build, he had to fill it with the most useful skill right away.