Woodland Mouse

Before setting off for the logging camp, Liu Xuan decided to buy some healing potions and clear out his inventory while he was at it.

Since he wanted to farm attributes now, he couldn't just kite monsters around like before—after all, he had to take hits to inflict the Poisoned status.

Naturally, he would be losing health much more frequently. Fortunately, with his Potion Addict passive, carrying extra potions wouldn't be a waste.

The potion merchant sold three types of healing potions.

Minor Healing Potion, Minor Recovery Potion, and Minor Regeneration Potion.

They all cost 10 copper coins a bottle. The Minor Healing Potion instantly restored 50 health points. The Minor Recovery Potion restored 60 health points over 30 seconds, and the Minor Regeneration Potion restored 80 health points over 15 seconds, but it couldn't be used in combat.

Liu Xuan directly bought 10 Minor Healing Potions, 10 Minor Recovery Potions, and 50 Minor Regeneration Potions.

He wasn't short on money right now anyway!

Moreover, thanks to Potion Addict, a single Minor Healing Potion could restore 300 health points for him, making it an incredible bargain.

Come to think of it, how long would it take for those monsters to deal 300 damage to him?

The Recovery Potions would serve as a supplementary measure.

The Regeneration Potions could restore a whopping 480 health points. Drinking these after a battle would greatly improve his monster-farming efficiency.

Next was the pile of random dog teeth, snake skins, and rabbit fur in his inventory; that had to be dealt with too.

Liu Xuan first spent some money at the leatherworker to craft four snakeskin bags out of his snake skins, each adding 5 slots of inventory space.

Then, he crafted all the equipment he could. Although they were all Common quality white-tier gear that only added armor, wearing a few pieces still boosted his armor up to a solid 14 points.

At this stage, monsters only dealt physical damage, so the returns from armor were quite good.

One or two points might not be obvious, but stacking over a dozen points provided substantial damage reduction.

Against these low-level monsters, it was nearly a fifty percent damage reduction.

The Bouncing Rabbits only had 20 attack points, after all.

Finally, he listed all his remaining materials on the auction house.

Liu Xuan studied the auction system a bit. When listing items, one could display their name, their title, or both.

He was already a famous professional gamer and never felt there was anything to hide.

Besides, this battlefield currently only allowed entry and no exit, so he didn't have to worry about people knocking on his door in the real world. Thus, he chose to display both.

Wealth and honor without returning home is like walking in the dark in fine clothes, as the saying goes.

As soon as the items were listed, Liu Xuan saw the seller column read: Blue Star's First Warrior Liu Xuan.

The title in front even had a glittering gold border.

Liu Xuan could only admit that the battlefield's designer really knew what they were doing.

Since he was currently the only one using the auction house, it was hard to judge exactly how much the materials would sell for.

Liu Xuan basically listed them all at relatively cheap prices.

This was mainly because he considered the nature of this battlefield; from what he could see, it felt more like a strategy simulation game.

The competitive relationship between people on the same battlefield wasn't very obvious. Instead, they needed to cooperate to achieve their expedition goals.

According to the battlefield rules announced at the very beginning—"The national faction with the most outstanding performance will lead the entire Blue Star, becoming its representative to participate in subsequent conquests."

In other words, the other countries now, and other planets or races in the future, were the real opponents.

They would clash sooner or later.

No matter how strong he was alone, he couldn't guarantee winning a "war" by himself.

In war, the more people, the better.

Therefore, without affecting his own growth, slightly boosting the overall strength of this battlefield seemed highly necessary.

After listing his items in the auction house, Liu Xuan left the village from the west and headed toward the logging camp.

Just outside the village was a grassland. This was the home of the Bouncing Rabbits, and the ground was dotted with rabbit holes.

A perfectly good patch of grass had been dug full of craters.

Liu Xuan went up and tested it, discovering that merely standing by the hole wouldn't draw the monsters out; he had to stomp a few times on the outside.

One hole contained about 5 to 12 Bouncing Rabbits. Logically speaking, this mechanic felt a bit too much like a lottery.

For an ordinary party, fighting 5 versus fighting 12 was on a completely different level of difficulty.

As soon as Liu Xuan saw the monsters, his old habit kicked in, and he couldn't help but think about how to fight them optimally.

In his eyes, the best way to deal with these Bouncing Rabbits was to form a full-ranged party with high agility—Priests could also add points to agility in the early game to increase their casting speed—and then have everyone spread out. One person would go up to lure the rabbits out of the hole.

Then, everyone else would focus their fire on the closest pursuing rabbit. Since it only had 100 health points, one round of focused fire would basically finish it off.

After killing them one by one like this, they would move to a new hole and have the second person go up to lure the monsters.

And so on, taking turns pulling aggro.

The efficiency should be pretty good.

You might ask, if this strategy could only be used by Archers and Priests, what about the Soldiers?

Soldiers... Soldiers could just group up into a melee cleave team.

If they put all their points into strength, their damage should be even higher than the ranged team.

However, after fighting a wave like that, they would all have to stop and recover their health, so the efficiency would definitely be a bit lower.

Liu Xuan had a feeling that since these rabbits were so easy to kill, they would definitely become popular farming targets later. In the short term, the level of the Soldiers would probably struggle to catch up with the other two classes.

...

This grassland was vast. It took Liu Xuan half an hour to cross the Bouncing Rabbit zone, leading to a large expanse of low shrubs.

The moment he stepped into the bushes, he was immediately bitten on the foot.

Looking down, he saw a large brown-furred rat.

At first glance, it was the size of a small dog, even bigger than the rabbits from before.

Woodland Rat

Level: 4

Attack: 42

Health: 350

Compared to the Bouncing Rabbit, the attack and health of this Woodland Rat were significantly higher. But the Bouncing Rabbit was an exception; they spawned in large numbers per nest and had skills.

Because of that bite just now, the large rat in front of him already had the Poisoned status hanging over its head.

Currently, Liu Xuan's health was as high as 3400 points, and Poisoned ticked for 170 damage. Two ticks would just about kill the 350-health Woodland Rat.

Of course, Liu Xuan wouldn't just stand there waiting for the monster to die; he would get bitten several more times if he did.

"Let's farm some attributes first."

It was best if he could kill a monster in two ticks, saving a lot of time.

Liu Xuan simply broke into a sprint through the bushes. One Woodland Rat after another was startled by his footsteps, crawling out of the undergrowth, squeaking angrily at him, and chasing wildly behind him.

Some bushes even hid more than two.

As a result, it wasn't long before Liu Xuan had over thirty rats trailing behind him.

Anyone afraid of rats would probably faint at the sight of this.

Seeing that he had pulled almost all the monsters in this area, he simply stopped, letting the rats swarm up and bite him. Only after all of them were inflicted with poison did he run away again, waiting for the rats to be poisoned to death.

"Killed Woodland Rat, gained 2.2 experience points."

"Killed a Poisoned monster, Base Health +1."

"Killed Woodland Rat, gained 2.2 experience points."

"Killed [Poisoned] monster, Base HP +1."

"..."

A massive wall of notifications popped up. This single wave of monsters had provided him with a solid 36 points of base health.

Liu Xuan checked his health bar. Just now, in order to ensure every single rat was afflicted with poison, he had stood his ground and let them swarm him. Some of the rats had even managed to bite him two or three times, causing his health to drop by over a thousand points.

His maximum health was 3760, and his out-of-combat regeneration restored 1% every 5 seconds, which came out to 37.4 points per tick.

If he relied solely on natural regeneration to heal back to full, it would take him around two or three minutes. That was simply too much of a waste of time.

Without dawdling, Liu Xuan pulled out a Minor Healing Potion, popped the cap, and downed it. The very next second, his health began to rapidly shoot back up.

The good news was that after clearing this wave and increasing his maximum health, his [Poison] effect now only needed two ticks of damage to kill a [Woodland Rat].

This meant he would take far fewer bites and wouldn't need to spend as much time recovering, which indirectly boosted his leveling efficiency.

While waiting for his health to top off, Liu Xuan bent down to loot the Woodland Rats.

Each rat dropped roughly 1 to 3 copper coins, and occasionally they would drop crafting materials like rat pelts or rat whiskers. Aside from that, there was absolutely nothing else.

Liu Xuan couldn't help but grumble, "The monsters in this battlefield are seriously stingy."

He could accept the lack of equipment drops, since he could just craft gear using materials anyway, but the abysmal coin drop rate was a real pain.

After all, back in the beginner village, absolutely everything cost copper coins.