Hatred festered in the depths of Ma Xiaoli’s eyes. Right at that moment, the system suddenly popped up to make its presence felt: [Host, the system upgrade has been completed. Shall we begin the electric scooter upgrade right away?]
In fact, when Ma Xiaoli looked at the panel of her errand system on her phone, the electric scooter’s upgrade had already begun.
Ma Xiaoli was so angry she laughed: [So after upgrading, you can just bypass me and make decisions on my behalf?]
System: [This is the newly added upgrade queue function. It will automatically run the upgrade program according to the host’s wishes to save time. What, is the host unsatisfied?]
Ma Xiaoli rolled her eyes and began to carefully inspect what had changed after the system upgrade.
The system, however, was still babbling on: [Just a reminder to the host, after the upgrade, this system has been default-bound to this phone—what I mean is, including the SIM card inside, everything has become a single entity of this errand machine. This means the host cannot casually instruct this system to bind to other devices in the future.]
While speaking, a steamed-bun-like robot with the words “System” floating above its head bounced around on the interface to make its presence felt. With a flick of her index finger, Ma Xiaoli cleanly swiped it away: [Then what if this phone gets stolen?]
The steamed bun robot bounced back, its round eyes turning into inverted triangles: [If this system can mask your Jade Buddha, could it possibly fail to mask this phone?]
In other words, this phone was just like her Jade Buddha—as long as she was unwilling, others wouldn’t be able to see it either!
Ma Xiaoli was secretly delighted inside, though her face maintained a forced, solemn expression.
In this system upgrade, the most direct change was that the orange errand app interface had become much more refined, with an additional small bluish-purple dot in the bottom left corner.
Looking closely, this small dot was actually a chibi version of a zombie head!
Too lazy to bother with such tacky humor, after tapping open the app’s functional interface, the first thing that met her eyes was a prompt box filled with text across the entire screen. Ma Xiaoli read it patiently—it was all unfamiliar code, but she had to scroll all the way to the very bottom of the prompt box to exit this prompt interface.
Ma Xiaoli kept scrolling up with her finger, and finally reached the bottom!
Unexpectedly, she saw a few lines of Chinese text at the very bottom—
[After this upgrade, the system has enabled an autonomous evolution program, which will autonomously evolve based on collected host behavior patterns and develop exclusive functions adapted to the host’s growth.
*The final right of interpretation for this upgrade belongs to the System Primary God Program.]
Here it came—this forced user-data collection mode designed to screw over existing users!
Ma Xiaoli searched around—heh, when phones and software collected user data, one could still choose to decline, but the system didn’t even have a decline feature!
Exiting the prompt box, she finally saw the main landing screen of the errand app—it was no longer a simple task bar, but had added a system operation interface, which looked quite similar to a phone’s settings interface. The first thing that caught her eye was her 8-bit pixel avatar. Tapping into it—
Ma Xiaoli: Adult Human Female
Character Level: Level 2
Abilities: Plant Type, Absolute Favorite (Ineffective on Humans)
Stamina: 6/10
Strength: 6/10
Charm: 2/100
Luck: 2/100
System: [An average human male’s stamina and strength are both between 3-5. Looking purely at these two stats, the host is still very impressive. However, as a side note, when Luo Xiaoxiao first bound to the system, her charm was 70/100 and her luck was 67/100.]
Ma Xiaoli silently exited her data interface. The next interface was “System Functions.” Tapping into it, she selected the “Mask System” function without a second word.
The third item was the original “Task Function.” Tapping into it revealed two categories: “In Progress” and “Task History.” Since no new tasks had refreshed currently, “In Progress” had no content, while “Task History” displayed the two errand tasks she had completed, as well as the task completion time and task reward items.
Returning to the functional interface, the fourth item was “Mine.”
Tapping into it, the page listed out various EXP requirements needed for upgrades, divided into four sections: Personal Upgrade, Ability Upgrade, System Upgrade, and Electric Scooter Upgrade—
Ma Xiaoli immediately felt as though she had found a treasure, holding her phone tightly.
Personal Level was currently 0/2, though she temporarily didn’t know what the two numbers represented respectively.
The Ability section mainly referred to the EXP needed to upgrade an ability from Level 1 to Level 2. Currently, Plant Type ability displayed as 1/20, and Absolute Favorite (Ineffective on Humans) displayed as 0/20.
Since Ma Xiaoli still hadn’t figured out how to use “Absolute Favorite” or whom to use it on, displaying “0” was very easy to understand, but why was Plant Type ability at “1”?
She quickly recalled how she had overdrawn her ability this afternoon to restore the plants in the whole yard to their original state—did upgrading an ability refer to the number of times an ability was used, or… the number of times she overdrew her ability?
At this thought, she hurriedly walked downstairs quietly.
It was already 8 o’clock in the evening. Ye Huiling had returned to the master bedroom to binge-watch dramas, while Ma Xiaoli’s father was buried in the study, ruthlessly driving off-work employees to work overtime. Ma Xiaoli slipped out into the yard just in time to conduct her experiment.
Even though it was nighttime, she was still acting like a thief after all, so Ma Xiaoli didn’t enlarge the plants in the yard all at once. Instead, she squatted in a corner, causing trouble with fingernail-tall weeds.
She first used a bit of ability to boost the weeds up to the height of an index finger all at once, then hurriedly checked the Personal Upgrade interface.
The Plant Type ability data hadn’t moved in the slightest.
Gritting her teeth, she exerted power over a patch of fingernail-tall weeds in front of her, making these weeds instantly shoot up tall, then absorbing back the ability on them to return them to their original state. After repeating this about five times, she finally overdrew all her ability—
Clutching her throbbing temples, she opened the interface to look: sure enough, the Plant Type ability data had turned into 2/20!
Ma Xiaoli was wildly overjoyed.
With this digitized display, as long as she worked hard and diligently used her ability, she might even be able to level up her ability ahead of time before the zombies appeared!
For a hardcore grind-heavy player, as long as grinding could make one stronger, this was simply the best possible news!
With a conclusion reached regarding the ability upgrade, Ma Xiaoli continued to look at the other two upgrade options.
The system was currently Level 1, and upgrading to Level 2 required an obscenely outrageous amount of EXP, which could be ignored for now.
On the other hand, the electric scooter…
The electric scooter was currently upgrading to Level 1, with a progress bar of 2%. Upgrading to Level 2 would require 2000 EXP.
In other words, she only needed to farm Errands Task 2 one more time, and the upgrade would be a sure thing!
Backing out to the previous interface again.
Ma Xiaoli’s eyes turned toward the bottom—the last item currently visible. The remaining content was all garbled code, which she estimated would only be unlocked after the system upgraded to Level 2.
“Discover”—this was somewhat similar to WeChat’s Moments. Could it be that hosts bound to the system could even post on Moments and like each other’s posts?
Feeling awkwardly amused by her own wild imagination, Ma Xiaoli tapped into it. The “Discover” interface was actually a digital map!