Ye Jinran suspected that when Bai Yanzhou had opened the instance Riding the Wind back then, it wasn’t just to screw Amanda over. It was also to lure him out, otherwise, why would he have deliberately chosen an instance whose spatial passage just happened to be damaged?
And before departure, such a huge commotion had even broken out in Ye Jinran’s shop. If that wasn’t intentional, he absolutely refused to believe it.
【Bai Yanzhou: Care to take on a bit of a challenge?】
【A Salted Fish Without Dreams: Thanks for the invite but my job is stable, my life is fulfilling and I have no intention of seeking thrills. Games are just for casual entertainment, getting addicted is strictly forbidden.】
Ye Jinran practically wanted to copy paste the health advisory that pops up every time you launch a mobile game and slap it straight into the chat window, right onto Bai Yanzhou’s face, so he’d read it properly.
Moderate gaming benefits the brain.
Excessive gaming harms the body.
Arrange your time reasonably and enjoy a healthy life.
【Bai Yanzhou: I generally don’t run overly simple instances. Besides, your level and mine aren’t on the same scale as ordinary players. It’s hard to match suitable teammates in normal instances. Since we’re here to have fun, how can it not be a little more exciting?】
【A Salted Fish Without Dreams: I object. Right now, it’s only you who’s looking for fun. I agreed to your conditions solely to ensure smoother work in the future.】
【Bai Yanzhou: Since you’re playing a game for once, don’t you want it to be more interesting?】
【A Salted Fish Without Dreams: Then what do you recommend?】
As if he had been waiting for that sentence for a long time, Bai Yanzhou immediately sent over a pile of instance detail page links. The screen filled with shared messages, so dazzling it made one’s eyes hurt.
Ye Jinran didn’t even need to click them. Just from the names alone, he could roughly recall their content. All of them were high difficulty instances, with Lost Rates above 70%.
The so called Lost Rate was the key metric used to evaluate instance difficulty. It represented the probability that a player would become lost inside an instance and be unable to return to reality, including but not limited to character death, failure to clear the instance within the time limit and other such situations.
Mist of Nanjin Village was an instance with a Lost Rate of only 40%. After players mastered its clearance techniques and shared them widely and as a large number of successful escape records appeared, that value was once revised down to an even lower level. Even so, it still carried a certain degree of exploratory difficulty, so its final rating remained at Medium.
Below Medium were two more difficulty tiers: Entry and Normal. Entry instances were essentially newbie instances. Players would only encounter them the very first time they entered an instance after being selected as game participants. Their Lost Rate was under 10%. Some were single player, some multiplayer and each person had only one such opportunity in their lifetime. After that, the lowest difficulty they could participate in would be Normal.
As for Riding the Wind, which Bai Yanzhou had just experienced, it was a genuine high difficulty instance, with a Lost Rate as high as 80%. A Lost Rate above 70% was one of the shared defining characteristics of high difficulty instances.
Ye Jinran had absolutely no desire to gamble on the probability of whether he could survive but surviving in an infinite game ultimately depended on nothing more than luck and strength, both were indispensable. He had the system shop backing him up, so he wasn’t lacking in strength. As for luck… the fact that he had been singled out from players all over the world to become a shop owner probably meant it wasn’t that bad.
If obtaining this position could be considered a form of good fortune.
Another new message popped up in the chat window.
【Bai Yanzhou: That said, I won’t choose any of these.】
Ye Jinran: ?
Are you messing with me?
【A Salted Fish Without Dreams: What do you mean?】
【Bai Yanzhou: Isn’t it obvious? You’re thoroughly familiar with the content of these instances, aren’t you? If you already know the plot and the answers in advance, the game loses its meaning. I want to choose an instance you don’t understand, one that’s sufficiently difficult.】
【A Salted Fish Without Dreams: That’s hard to say… For work reasons, I familiarize myself with all instances that have gone online, especially high difficulty ones. Players’ demand for items is much greater there.】
【Bai Yanzhou: Then what about those that haven’t gone online yet?】
【Bai Yanzhou: This game doesn’t have a test server, does it?】
Ye Jinran fell silent. As far as he knew, it really didn’t. After all, the infinite game was a creation of the Main God, there was simply no such thing as bugs.
The last time Zhao Qian and the others had ended up stuck outside the instance map was an extremely low probability accident. It was also the first time Ye Jinran had ever encountered something like that.
【A Salted Fish Without Dreams: So what if it doesn’t?】
【Bai Yanzhou: Then you should only learn about instances after they go online. If this is something you do voluntarily, I suggest you restrain yourself a little.】
【Bai Yanzhou: Let’s play the newest Desperate Instance together. No matter which one the next update releases, I’ll choose it and you won’t look up its content in advance either. How about that?】
Well played. He really knew how to crank up the pressure. Ye Jinran’s mouth twitched.
Above high difficulty, there was still another difficulty tier: Desperation, literally a situation of utter despair. Its Lost Rate was 100%, recognized by the Main God and the system as having no possibility other than a Bad End. No one would choose this type of instance, except for extreme lunatics or people seeking death.
In probability theory, absolute zero does not exist. Desperation merely meant that even the gods themselves could not conceive of how humans might solve it.
So for players, it was undoubtedly a dead end but perhaps one day, some astonishing genius would emerge from nowhere and find a second ending within a Desperate Instance.
Ye Jinran knew that Bai Yanzhou alone had three records of clearing Desperate Instances with a True Ending. That was the most brilliant page in his entire battle record.
Only someone like him could consciously choose to enter a Desperate Instance while still maintaining his sanity, he possessed both sufficient strength and absolute confidence.
That said, Ye Jinran truly found it difficult to judge whether Bai Yanzhou still possessed anything resembling rationality. In the eyes of others, his behavior was unquestionably insane. Even observing him from a god’s eye perspective, it was hard to comprehend.
【A Salted Fish Without Dreams: I’ll try not to look…】
When you’re about to face a critical exam that could cost you your life and the answers to the test paper are placed right in front of you, available for you to check at will, can you really resist the temptation to look?
When Ye Jinran was still in school, there was a period when online classes were all the rage. Even exams were conducted as written tests at home, monitored by three cameras.
Back then, many classmates tried every possible way to sneak glances at textbooks and reference materials from blind spots in the surveillance. Even Ye Jinran had almost failed to resist the temptation.
In the end, when the results came out, his ranking plummeted straight to the bottom. Everyone else had soared upward by relying on cheating.
Ye Jinran still remembered how, during the class meeting that followed, the homeroom teacher brought up the incident to criticize him for not studying seriously during the period of online classes, completely ignoring the possibility that people had cheated during the exams.
Although Ye Jinran had never been the kind of straight A student who buried himself in books, being publicly scolded like that still wounded his teenage pride. From that moment on, he secretly resolved that if there was a shortcut available, he would no longer make things difficult for himself.
So now, should he go look at the answers in advance?
The game’s instance pool updated weekly. Ye Jinran would always be the first to know which new instances were going online and he would receive the relevant materials provided by the system. Bai Yanzhou couldn’t truly control his actions anyway, so what if he secretly looked at the puzzle solutions?
Ye Jinran stared at the chat history on his phone screen, hesitated briefly, then typed out a message.
【A Salted Fish Without Dreams: Whatever the next newly released Desperate Instance is, we’ll play that one. I promise I won’t look in advance.】
In business, sincerity and integrity were essential. Right now, he represented the system shop and he couldn’t afford to damage its credibility.
This was an equal exchange. Bai Yanzhou would support the system shop’s updates and iterations in his own way. If Ye Jinran failed to wholeheartedly meet his demands, Bai Yanzhou would very likely respond by perfunctorily fulfilling the cooperative content he had previously agreed to.
Ye Jinran felt that his self control was still barely sufficient, that it hadn’t eroded too much with the passage of time. Back then, he had been able to completely ignore the textbooks right beside him; now, he should also be able to overlook the materials provided by the system.
【Bai Yanzhou: By the way, when is that super value bundle of yours going live? Put it on the shelves first or at least post a preview. I can help promote it on the forum.】
You still remember that, huh. Ye Jinran was genuinely touched on the spot.
【A Salted Fish Without Dreams: Give me a moment, there are still some details to polish. I’ve got something to take care of first, so I’ll be off.】
Ye Jinran’s takeout had arrived. The doorbell rang incessantly.
He tossed his phone onto the sofa and rushed over to open the door. When the delivery guy in a yellow uniform saw him, he greeted him with a smile and handed over the food. “Hey, you switched to a new flavor today. Enjoy your meal.”
This delivery guy often delivered food in the area. After taking Ye Jinran’s orders several days in a row, they had become familiar with each other. Ye Jinran took the heavy package and nodded. “Trying meat once in a while. Why do you look so bad? Is it raining outside?”
The delivery guy looked utterly dejected. Even when he forced a smile, it couldn’t hide the exhaustion between his brows and eyes. “Yeah… I’ve been way too anxious lately and haven’t slept well. I don’t know why I’m so unlucky, I got selected into that damn infinite game too. Sigh. Making a living is already exhausting enough and now I have to risk my life in instances. Sometimes I really just want to slam my head into a wall and be done with it.”
Seeming to realize that venting negative emotions in front of a customer wasn’t very appropriate, he rubbed the tip of his nose awkwardly. “Sorry about that. Don’t mind me. I’ll be fine after I get some rest.”
After hesitating for a moment, Ye Jinran replied, “It’s fine, don’t force yourself. Actually, just relying on Normal difficulty instances is enough to earn what you need for the remaining time.”
In this world, there were far more ordinary people like the delivery guy who had been innocently dragged into the game. They didn’t have the wealth to hire top tier players to escort them safely through instances. At the same time, they were crushed by the pressures of real life, leaving them without sufficient energy or mental sharpness to cope with all kinds of dangers.
Life was already bitter enough. Being unlucky enough to get dragged into the game only made it worse, forcing them to live on thin ice.
Ye Jinran couldn’t save everyone and he knew that continuing to dwell on it was meaningless. He offered a few words of comfort, closed the door and returned to his room to enjoy his dinner.
As he slurped his noodles, Ye Jinran thought about the shop’s upcoming plans for new products.
When designing bundle packs, he should give players some real benefits. Usually, game shops would have at least a few genuinely worthwhile, inexpensive bundles, not every pack would be stuffed full of junk.
As for which ones were traps and which were truly good deals, that could be left to the players themselves to judge. Some people really enjoyed making spreadsheets to calculate cost performance ratios for in game purchases.
After finishing his meal, Ye Jinran opened the backend interface of the system shop and entered his first brilliant idea of the night.
【New Player Beginner Practical Item Bundle】
【Bundle Contents: Points ×600, High Lumen Flashlight ×1, Large Capacity Insulated Water Bottle ×1, Compass ×1, Crowbar ×1】
【Price: ¥6】
【This bundle is permanently limited to one purchase per account. Final interpretation rights belong to the system shop.】
Ye Jinran clicked upload. Before long, the system popped up a feedback interface.
【Product approved and now available】
✦ ✧ ✦
Nycreth
[Translator]
☕ A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR THE TRANSLATOR
(╯°□°）╯︵ ☕ — deploy caffeine!
☕ BUY THEM A COFFEE →
✧ (づ｡•ㅅ•｡)づ ☕ ✧
✦ thank you for reading ✦
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ChaptersChapter 1 · Blood Moon Town: ShhhChapter 2 · The Mist of Nanjin Village (1)Chapter 3 · The Mist of Nanjin Village (2)Chapter 4 · The Mist of Nanjin Village (3)Chapter 5 · The Mist of Nanjin Village (4)Chapter 6 · The Mist of Nanjin Village (7)Chapter 7 · The Mist of Nanjin Village (6)Chapter 8 · The mist over Nanjin Village (7)Chapter 9 · The Mystery of Nanjin Village (The End)Chapter 10 · Real WorldChapter 11 · Riding The Wind (1)Chapter 12 · Riding The Wind (2)Chapter 13 · Riding The Wind (3)Chapter 14 · Riding The Wind (4)Chapter 15 · Riding The Wind (5)Chapter 16 · Riding The Wind (6)Chapter 17 · Riding The Wind (7)Chapter 18 · Riding The Wind (8)Chapter 19 · Riding The Wind (9)Chapter 20 · Riding The Wind (10)Chapter 21 Part 1 · Riding The Wind (11)Chapter 21 Part 2 · Riding The Wind (11)Chapter 22 · Real World (1)Chapter 23 · Real World (2)Chapter 24 · Golden Sands Fade Away (1)Chapter 25 · Golden Sands Fade Away (2)Chapter 26 · Golden Sands Fade Away (3)Chapter 27 · Golden Sands Fade Away (4)Chapter 28 · Golden Sands Fade Away (5)Chapter 29 · Golden Sands Fade Away (6)Chapter 30 · Golden Sands Fade Away (7)Chapter 31 · Golden Sands Fade Away (8)Chapter 32 · Golden Sands Fade Away (9)Chapter 33 · Golden Sands Fade Away (10)Chapter 34 · Golden Sands Fade Away (11)Chapter 35 · Golden Sands Fade Away (12)Chapter 36 · Golden Sands Fade Away (13)Chapter 37 · Golden Sands Fade Away (14)Chapter 38 · Golden Sands Fade Away (15)Chapter 39 · Golden Sands Fade Away (16)Chapter 40 · Golden Sands Fade Away (17)Chapter 41 · Golden Sands Fade Away (18)Chapter 42 · Golden Sands Fade Away (19)Chapter 43 · Golden Sands Fade Away (20)Chapter 44 · Golden Sands Fade Away (21)Chapter 45 · Golden Sands Fade Away (22)Chapter 46 · Golden Sands Fade Away (23)Chapter 47 · Golden Sands Fade Away (24)Chapter 48 · Golden Sands Fade Away (25) The EndChapter 49 · Main God’s DomainChapter 50 · Anomaly Investigation Bureau (1)Chapter 51 · Anomaly Investigation Bureau (2)Chapter 52 · Item FactoryChapter 53 · Defrosted Friendship (1)Chapter 54 · Defrosted Friendship (2)Chapter 55 · Defrosted Friendship (3)Chapter 56 · Defrosted Friendship (4)Chapter 57 · Defrosted Friendship (5)Chapter 58 · Defrosted Friendship (6)Chapter 59 · Defrosted Friendship (7)Chapter 60 · Defrosted Friendship (8)Chapter 61 · Defrosted Friendship (9)Chapter 62 · Defrosted Friendship (10)Chapter 63 · Defrosted Friendship (11)Chapter 64 · Defrosted Friendship (12)Chapter 65 · Defrosted Friendship (13)Chapter 66 · Defrosted Friendship (14)Chapter 67 · Defrosted Friendship (15)Chapter 68 · Defrosted Friendship (16)Chapter 69 · Defrosted Friendship (End)Chapter 70 · The Real WorldChapter 71 · Matching TimeChapter 72 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (1)Chapter 73 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (2)Chapter 74 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (3)Chapter 75 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (4)Chapter 76 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (5)Chapter 77 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (6)Chapter 78 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (7)Chapter 79 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (8)Chapter 80 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (9)Chapter 81 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (10)Chapter 82 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (11)Chapter 83 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (12)Chapter 84 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (13)Chapter 85 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (14)Chapter 86 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (15)Chapter 87 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (16)Chapter 88 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (17)Chapter 89 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (18)Chapter 90 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (19)Chapter 91 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (20)Chapter 92 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (21)Chapter 93 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (22)Chapter 94 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (23)Chapter 95 · The Meaning of Endless Abundance (Complete)Chapter 96 · The Main God Invites You for TeaChapter 97 · The Player ForumChapter 98 · Training GroundChapter 99 · Eternal Night – The Stone-Striker (1)Chapter 100 · Eternal Night – The Stone-Striker (2)Chapter 101 · Eternal Night – The Stone-Striker (3)Chapter 102 · Eternal Night · The One Who Strikes the Stone (Finale)