He Miaomiao froze on the spot, utterly dumbfounded.
“What is this? SSS-rank talent? Me?”
Even as someone who didn’t play video games, she knew that SSS-rank was definitely top-tier.
Precisely because of this, He Miaomiao had never imagined such a thing could ever be associated with her. If there were any SSS-rank label meant for her, it would only be “SSS-Rank Jinx.”
And yet right now, she—He Miaomiao, who had been plagued by bad luck her entire life and had zero connection to good fortune—had actually pulled an SSS-rank talent!
A trap always follows a big prize. That was the hard-earned lesson from He Miaomiao’s life experience.
In the past, every single time she thought life was giving her a pleasant surprise, it ended up turning into a horrifying shock.
However, a talent already drawn couldn’t be refunded, so He Miaomiao had no choice but to brace herself and accept it.
Regardless, she had to survive, didn’t she?
Standing inside the doorless wooden hut, He Miaomiao looked outside. After making sure there were no living creatures other than herself, she carefully walked over to the spot where she had kicked the rabbit to death.
A chunk of meat was lying there.
As she approached, she didn’t pick it up immediately. Instead, she cast Appraisal on it first.
[Raw Rabbit Meat: Dropped by Lv0 Corrupted Rabbit.]
So that rabbit with the rotting face earlier was called a Corrupted Rabbit.
Once she confirmed the item was harmless, He Miaomiao bent down to retrieve it. Before her hand touched the meat, she remembered the other skill she had just learned and shifted her thought.
“Loot.”
[Raw Rabbit Meat ×1!]
[Raw Rabbit Meat ×1! (Critical Hit)]
The raw rabbit meat in front of her vanished and reappeared on her system panel.
There were 8 slots in total on her panel. Right now, a rabbit meat icon appeared in one of the slots, with the number 2 written in the upper right corner, indicating that she currently possessed 2 portions of raw rabbit meat.
He Miaomiao hadn’t expected her newly acquired SSS-rank talent to be this overpowered, capable of doubling the meat obtained from killing a Corrupted Rabbit. Beside herself with excitement, a sense of crisis simultaneously washed over her—such a good skill surely had a time limit. It might suddenly disappear at any moment, so she had to hurry up and stock up on resources while the skill was still active!
What He Miaomiao wanted to upgrade most right now was her safehouse. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find any way to upgrade it at all, nor did she know what conditions needed to be met. Thus, she shifted her gathering goal to crafting a stone axe and a campfire.
The materials required to craft a stone axe and a campfire were stone, wood, and dry grass.
The safe zone of a Lv0 safehouse was extremely small, restricted strictly to the interior of that tiny house. Stepping outside meant stepping out of safety.
He Miaomiao decided to gather resources nearby, ready to dash back to the safehouse the instant she encountered danger.
Coincidentally, the spot where the Corrupted Rabbit had been contained dry grass; that was the exact stuff it was nibbling on earlier.
He Miaomiao tried using Loot, but it was useless. She had no choice but to squat down and pull it out with her hands.
Dry grass was just withered grass. Anyone who had seen it before knew that it only took a little bit of effort to pluck easily. Yet, He Miaomiao failed on her first attempt and only managed to pull it out of the ground on her second try.
[Dry Grass ×1!]
[Dry Grass ×1! (Critical Hit)]
She moved to the neighboring patch of dry grass to test it again, and it still took two tries.
“A game mechanism?”
Since a living human like her had attributes now, it was only natural for dry grass to have attributes requiring two pulls to harvest.
After pulling up three more stalks in succession, she stopped.
At this point, in her portable 8-slot storage space, she was carrying 2 portions of raw rabbit meat and 10 portions of dry grass.
With so few items, she couldn’t do much of anything, yet He Miaomiao was exhausted.
A normal person wouldn’t be so tired that their limbs felt weak and their head felt dizzy just from pulling a few stalks of grass, but digitized players would.
There were lethal monsters in Despair Valley, and He Miaomiao didn’t dare let herself pass out from exhaustion outside her safehouse, so she had no choice but to stop and rest.
There was no stamina-related metric on her attribute panel, but she could feel her stamina recovering at an agonizingly slow pace.
If she truly had to wait until she regained her strength before resuming work, it would waste too much time. What if her Crit Talent’s trial period ended while she was waiting? Wouldn’t she suffer a massive loss?
Therefore, as soon as she recovered a tiny bit of strength, He Miaomiao immediately scrambled up and returned to the safehouse to lie down.
Just as she had guessed, the panel showed that resting outside while doing nothing recovered 1 HP per minute, whereas resting inside the safehouse recovered 2 HP per minute.
The recovery speed for her stamina was also roughly doubled.
During her rest, He Miaomiao didn’t stay idle either, quickly drafting her upcoming gathering plan.
“If even gathering dry grass is this difficult, getting wood and stone will only take more time. A stone axe requires 15 wood and 10 stone, while a campfire only needs 5 wood and 3 stone. I should build the campfire first.”
Based on the limited gaming experience she had gathered from watching videos, having fire meant she could cook food. Since she had raw rabbit meat in her bag, cooking some food first would give her strength. She could then carry the cooked rabbit meat with her and eat whenever she felt dry-heaving from hunger, eliminating the need to run back to the safehouse every single time and saving precious time.
No sooner said than done.
Feeling that her strength had mostly returned, He Miaomiao didn’t waste a single second and set off immediately, intending to harvest 10 more portions of dry grass.
As luck would have it, the moment she stepped out the door, she spotted a Corrupted Rabbit.
She cast Appraisal.
[Corrupted Rabbit: Lv0]
[HP: 80]
[Attack Power: 18]
[Defense: 0]
[Agility: 2.8]
[Special Skill: Pack Alertness. When 3 or more Corrupted Rabbits appear simultaneously, the attack power of all Corrupted Rabbits increases by 20%.]
He Miaomiao: ???
Where was the justice in this?! As a whole adult human, her HP was only 50 and her attack power was merely 5! And the rabbits even had a pack buff!
Fighting a rabbit was risky. Being rammed once would cost He Miaomiao 18 HP; she only had 50 in total, meaning three hits would end her. On top of that, fighting rabbits consumed stamina.
Therefore, when she realized that if she didn’t actively attack the Corrupted Rabbit, it wouldn’t actively attack her either, He Miaomiao had briefly considered living in peaceful coexistence with it—it could nibble its grass, she could gather hers, and neither would bother the other.
However, He Miaomiao only entertained the thought for a brief second.
Corrupted Rabbits ate dry grass, and she needed to gather dry grass. To make matters worse, the dry grass near the safehouse didn’t look particularly abundant, and paired with her jinxed physique…
He Miaomiao closed her eyes, opened them again, delivered a kick to the rabbit while it was busy eating grass, and bolted.
After another round of 15 continuous attacks and a thrilling tug-of-war where she ducked back into the safehouse 14 consecutive times, the Corrupted Rabbit was finished.
[Raw Rabbit Meat ×1!]
[Raw Rabbit Meat ×1! (Critical Hit)]
[EXP +20!]
[EXP +20! (Critical Hit)]
Player: He Miaomiao (Lv0)
HP: 50/50
Attack Power: 5
Defense: 0
Agility: 5
EXP: 60/100
Skills: Appraisal (Primary), Looting (Primary)
Personal Assets: Lv0 Safehouse (Durability 100, Defense 0, Monster Alert Radius 0m, Storage Box 4 slots, Arable Farmland 0 slots, Defense Structures 0), Rabbit Meat 4 (Slot 1), Dry Grass 10 (Slot 2), Portable Inventory Free Slots: 6
He Miaomiao: !!!
EXP could trigger critical hits too! This was way too strong! Worthy of an SSS talent!
Furthermore—
“It seems killing a rabbit guarantees a 100% drop of 1 raw rabbit meat.”
The guaranteed baseline was something she could obtain every single time.
He Miaomiao utilized a notepad-like feature on the panel to jot down this new piece of information under the entry for Corrupted Rabbits.
Having eliminated the threat within her field of vision, He Miaomiao—now even more aware of how useful her Crit Talent was—took a brief rest and went right back to pulling grass.
Two pulls.
[Dry Grass ×1!]
[Dry Grass ×1! (Critical Hit)]
Four pulls.
[Dry Grass ×2!]
[Dry Grass ×2! (Critical Hit)]
Pushing her stamina close to the limit she had tested earlier, He Miaomiao harvested 10 portions of dry grass with the boost from her critical hits. Just as she was preparing to head back, an unexpected turn of events occurred.
[HP -18!]
[HP -18!]
A Corrupted Rabbit charged over like crazy from the distance. Even though He Miaomiao started running at the very first instant, she was still rammed twice. Her remaining HP plunged to 14 in an instant, and her entire body was engulfed by overwhelming pain.
Due to the sharp drop in HP within a short span of time, He Miaomiao’s arms and legs turned weak, and she stumbled, almost falling over.
Fortunately, because her threat perception had long been trained by countless unlucky incidents throughout her life, she noticed the Corrupted Rabbit the moment it showed its face and reacted immediately. Added to the fact that she hadn’t dared to wander far, she was currently only one step away from the safehouse, managing to scramble back inside before the rabbit’s third attack landed.
Thud.
Relying purely on her willpower to survive, He Miaomiao leaped and dived straight into the room.
Unsurprisingly, she got another mouthful of dust.
“Cough, cough… Cough, cough, cough…”
She took advantage of the momentum to lie flat where she landed, refusing to waste a single drop of stamina while resting to recover, simultaneously checking the logs on her panel.
The first Corrupted Rabbit appeared when she had just opened the door.
The rabbit, which originally wouldn’t actively attack players during the grace period, was struck by the falling door, causing it to launch an attack against her.
The second Corrupted Rabbit appeared when she returned to the safehouse to rest after her first attempt at gathering grass.
At that time, she was testing where the rough threshold of her stamina lay for the first time, having only gathered grass 5 times.
To ensure she wouldn’t be ambushed while gathering grass, she had proactively attacked the rabbit.
The third Corrupted Rabbit appeared just now.
Coincidentally, it was also right after she had pulled grass 5 times.
Oddly enough, this time she hadn’t actively or passively attacked the rabbit, yet the rabbit had charged straight at her and nearly taken her life.
He Miaomiao placed a question mark next to this log entry and wrote down a hypothesis: Pulling grass right in front of a Corrupted Rabbit draws aggro, triggering an active attack.
The underlying logic was probably… stealing food from a rabbit’s mouth?
At the same time, He Miaomiao added a new entry.
Pulling grass 5 times attracts 1 Corrupted Rabbit (To be verified).
“If that’s really the case, haven’t I struck it rich?”
After realizing that EXP could also land critical hits, the way He Miaomiao looked at Corrupted Rabbits was completely different from at first, when she found them eyesores that hindered work and threatened her life. They were clearly God of Wealth figures delivering resources and EXP straight to her door!
She absolutely had to kill as many as possible before her Talent Free Trial expired!
Besides, having realized that rabbits weren’t entirely incapable of proactively attacking players, there was no way He Miaomiao could leave one alone to graze out there.
Once she was well-rested, she began chipping away at the rabbit’s HP 5 points at a time once more. After 15 repetitions, she successfully killed it again.
[Raw Rabbit Meat ×1!]
[Raw Rabbit Meat ×1! (Critical Hit)]
[EXP +20!]
[EXP +20! (Critical Hit)]
[Stone Sickle Blueprint ×1!]
[Stone Sickle Blueprint ×1! (Critical Hit)]
At the same time, the EXP column on her attribute panel began to flash.
[EXP: 100/100 (Upgradeable)]
“I can level up now?”
He Miaomiao was overjoyed.
According to game logic, the higher her level, the stronger her attack power would be, allowing her to slay rabbits faster.
Just as she was about to press the level-up button, she stopped at the very last second.
“Wait, something’s not right.”
Could someone with an innate jinx physique like He Miaomiao really be this lucky?
There had to be a catch!
He Miaomiao carefully dug through her memories regarding games. She recalled that in the gaming videos she had watched, while players getting stronger as they leveled up was true, the monsters they faced after growing stronger would also become more formidable.
“As expected, there’s a catch. I’m not leveling up for now!”
What if a stronger monster rammed and destroyed her safehouse? She didn’t even know if the safehouse could be repaired after collapsing. Even if it could, it would definitely require a lot of materials.
No way, no way. She should stick to her original plan: gather materials, craft a campfire, and roast rabbit meat to restore her stamina first!