Chapter 72: A Bountiful Harvest |
The moment Jiang Chen approached, he saw two items.
The first thing that entered his sight was a gray bead. Wisps of gray aura flowed continuously across its surface.
“What the heck is this?”
Picking up the bead, Jiang Chen carefully examined it.
【Item: ???】
【Description: A bead emitting abyssal aura. It may have unexpected uses.】
Seeing this, Jiang Chen roughly understood what it was.
“If my guess is correct, this should be a special item.”
Naturally, Jiang Chen was familiar with this type of special item. It could possibly be an item required for a special quest.
In short, depending on the game, the functions of these special items could differ drastically.
However, one thing was undeniable—once one discovered the dungeon or quest related to this item, the rewards generally would not be small.
“This should’ve been dropped by that tentacle monster just now.”
As he spoke, Jiang Chen stored away the bead and shifted his gaze toward the other item on the ground.
It was a pair of white lace short gloves. The length perfectly covered the wrists, and wave-like patterns were embroidered onto them.
“Pretty nice-looking.”
As he spoke, Jiang Chen looked toward the attribute panel that popped up.
【Deep Sea Gloves (Rare) (Deep Sea Set 1/3)】
【Intelligence +63】
“Holy shit!” Jiang Chen was stunned the moment he saw the stats.
“63 points in a single Intelligence attribute!”
This truly shocked Jiang Chen.
Under normal circumstances, equipment dropped from game bosses usually had rather mediocre stats.
Truly top-tier equipment was mostly obtained later through equipment forging.
The situation in this game was basically the same.
Based on Jiang Chen’s conclusions so far, the current equipment acquisition paths in this game were roughly:
BOSS drops, shop purchases, equipment appraisal, and finally equipment forging.
The last category of equipment forging also had another name—crafted equipment.
Naturally, Jiang Chen had never placed any hopes on premium crafted equipment during the early game phase.
And appraised equipment was similarly difficult to obtain.
Thus, Jiang Chen’s main focus had always been on shop purchases and BOSS drops.
Actually, compared to BOSS drops, Jiang Chen paid even more attention to shop equipment.
Of course, the shop equipment Jiang Chen referred to was not the trash sold in the Silvermoon City marketplace stores.
What Jiang Chen wanted were the high-quality goods sold by roaming mysterious merchants in the game.
Unfortunately, he had yet to encounter one.
For this type of open-world MMO, mysterious merchants were definitely a built-in feature. There was no need to deliberately search for them—one might encounter them purely through luck someday.
As for BOSS equipment, especially this type obtained through summoning-ticket mechanics, Jiang Chen actually had not held much hope.
After all, how good could guaranteed equipment really be?
Yet who would’ve thought he would suddenly obtain a top-tier item today.
The drop rate for this kind of premium equipment was extremely low.
Jiang Chen originally thought another long-entry, inflated-stat garbage item would drop.
Who could have expected such a pleasant surprise to arrive so suddenly?
“Based on the information I’ve gathered over these past two days—”
“Equipment of different qualities in this game all have a total attribute range.”
This was a common mechanic used in most games. Even among purple equipment, some were god-tier while others were trash, and the distinction came from the total attribute values.
According to Jiang Chen’s deductions—
“The total attributes of purple Rare equipment should range between 40 and 80.”
“These gloves have a total attribute value of 63. Purely in terms of total stats, they’re still somewhat below the upper limit of 80, but they’re already considered a minor premium item.”
“But if we’re talking about stat distribution, no question—this is absolutely a top-tier premium item.”
After storing the gloves away, Jiang Chen did not immediately equip them.
Previously, in order to hide his combat power while fighting the BOSS, he had already equipped all the gear used for concealment.
Taking them off now was meaningless. Other players had definitely already noticed the changes on the Leaderboard.
So Jiang Chen could only piece together another combat-power-hiding equipment setup.
Of course, Jiang Chen was still extremely satisfied with the harvest this time.
While thinking, Jiang Chen began searching around again.
Not long afterward...
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Jiang Chen frowned tightly.
He wandered around for quite a while longer but still discovered nothing.
“No... I clearly remember using two summoning tickets. Logically, two pieces of equipment should’ve dropped.”
After searching another round and still finding nothing, Jiang Chen became puzzled.
Carefully recalling the previous events—
It seemed that only one BOSS summoned by the summoning tickets had appeared.
At first, Jiang Chen had been rather confused. Originally, he thought two bosses had spawned simultaneously and their names had overlapped visually.
But now it seemed he had only summoned a single BOSS.
“I should’ve realized earlier.”
“This is probably a system bug.”
“Usually during beta testing for new games, all kinds of bugs show up.”
“Especially when summoning multiple special bosses at once, situations like this can happen—using multiple summoning tickets but ultimately only summoning one BOSS.”
“I absolutely need to submit a bug report for this later.”
Although that was what he thought, Jiang Chen still felt miserable inside.
“The Deep Sea Set is only missing one piece, and then the game pulls this crap on me.”
Letting out a sigh, Jiang Chen felt speechless.
Still unwilling to give up, Jiang Chen searched the area once again.
At present, the basement had already been completely ruined.
The explosion site had become an enormous Deep Pit.
After searching through the Deep Pit, Jiang Chen even went outside and wandered around for another round.
In the end, Jiang Chen completely gave up hope.
Letting out another helpless sigh, just as Jiang Chen prepared to leave, something appearing on a nearby wall suddenly caught his attention.
Walking over and taking a closer look, he saw exposed silver-white metal.
This area had originally been where the bookshelves stood. Judging from the metal’s position, it should have been hidden behind the bookshelves before.
“What’s this now?”
Filled with curiosity, Jiang Chen dug the object out.
It was a metal box roughly one meter long, half a meter wide, and half a meter tall.
“This thing really looks like a safe.”
“But it was hidden pretty deeply.”
“If I hadn’t blown this place apart and caused most of the basement to collapse, I really wouldn’t have found it.”
As he spoke, Jiang Chen stored the object away as well.
To be safe, Jiang Chen circled around the surrounding walls several more times.
Only after confirming nothing had been missed did Jiang Chen finally leave the area.
Actually, Jiang Chen still wanted to search a few more rounds.
However, considering the game’s circumstances, such a massive commotion would definitely attract people to investigate.
If he got caught by then, there would be plenty of troublesome aftermath to deal with.
So Jiang Chen left in advance.
After leaving, Jiang Chen immediately rushed toward the marketplace.
The goblin was still waiting there with his group of underlings for Jiang Chen to collect the goods. Naturally, Jiang Chen intended to dispose of all this stolen loot.
As he walked, Jiang Chen opened his backpack and began reviewing this round’s harvest.
Aside from the premium Deep Sea Set equipment piece, the most valuable items this time were probably the three boxes and the safe discovered in the secret chamber.
First were the three boxes found near the altar inside the secret chamber.
“Let me see what’s inside these things.”
He took out one of the boxes and opened it.
【Demonic Dragon Eye (Quality: ???)】
【Description: Special material used for equipment forging】
Jiang Chen’s eyes instantly lit up upon seeing the prompt.
“Damn, equipment forging material—and high-quality too.”
Naturally, Jiang Chen was extremely satisfied with this item.
Immediately afterward, Jiang Chen opened the remaining two boxes.
Just as he expected, they were also equipment forging materials:
【Demonic Dragon Fang】【Demonic Dragon Scale】
Their quality ratings were all displayed as question marks.
Having played games for so long, Jiang Chen naturally knew that items with descriptions like this could never be low-tier.
“Based on my years of experience, these are at least Legendary-grade materials, maybe even Divine Artifact-grade.”
Without question, Jiang Chen was extremely satisfied with the contents of these boxes.
Of course, aside from that, there were also the skill books.
A total of fifteen books.
Among them were eight First Ring Magic books, five Two-Ring Magic books, and two Three-Ring Magic books.
The vast majority of these magic books were not very useful.
Although Jiang Chen currently had plenty of magic slots available, he would not learn skills recklessly.
Before this game released a respec item, once learned, skills could not be undone.
Jiang Chen would never stupidly learn garbage magic at random just to occupy his skill slots.
Opening the character panel—
Jiang Chen began pondering.
“I currently have three First Ring Magic slots.”
As he spoke, his gaze landed on the eight First Ring Magic books.
Most of them were attack-type magic.
Honestly speaking, Jiang Chen did not care at all about attack-related magic.
The base damage of First Ring offensive magic was simply too low.
Even relatively powerful First Ring Magic only dealt around five hundred damage, and it was not even true damage.
As for Two-Ring Magic, stronger spells only barely exceeded one thousand damage.
Learning these spells would not help him much.
After all, his current skills casually dealt tens of thousands of damage. He truly looked down on this tiny amount of damage.
After excluding all the offensive magic, Jiang Chen only took interest in one support magic spell.
【Jump LV1, MP Cost 10】
This skill increased the user’s jumping ability by five times for one minute.
It was a fairly decent buff-type skill.
Immediately afterward, Jiang Chen shifted his gaze toward the Two-Ring skills.
Among the five Two-Ring skills, only one caught his attention.
【Resistance Enhancement LV1, MP Cost 15】
This skill increased all attribute resistances by 1% for five minutes.
“Barely usable.”
“Once the skill level increases in the future, it should still become somewhat useful.”
Among all these skills, the one Jiang Chen was most satisfied with was the Three-Ring skill book.
【Ancient Memory LV1】
Increases Intelligence by 10 points for 60 seconds.
This was obviously a buff skill used for burst damage phases. Jiang Chen was very familiar with this type of skill.
Back when recording videos to instantly kill bosses, before entering BOSS rooms, Jiang Chen would stack all kinds of similar buff skills onto himself.
“Sigh, it’s just a shame my current strength hasn’t reached Three-Ring yet.”
“Otherwise I could learn it right now.”
While pondering all this, Jiang Chen unknowingly arrived at the meeting location agreed upon with the goblins.
Not far away, Gree and his other goblin companions had already been waiting there for quite some time.