The Eye of Insight

Before the countdown ended, Liu Xuan walked straight over to the row of cave entrances.

Today, he was going to stand alone against an army of monsters!

“...5, 4, 3, 2, 1!”

The one-minute countdown quickly reached zero. A blue screen of light appeared over the quarry, displaying only one number for now: 0.

Just then, a series of muffled “uh, uh” cries came from one of the cave entrances. A moment later, five humanoid monsters charged out.

They were ugly and covered in gray dust.

They stood about 1.4 meters tall, with stocky builds and hunched backs. Their entire bodies were covered in gray fur, making them look like wild men.

Each one carried a large club made of stone and charged forward with bared teeth.

[Stone Swallower]

Level: 8

Attack: 60

HP: 1,000

Magic Resistance: 20

Skill: [Petrified Body] Gains 20 armor and 20 magic resistance for 30 seconds.

Their damage was not particularly high. Overall, they were even weaker than the various level-seven monsters he had encountered earlier.

However, they had extremely high HP, and they were the first low-level monsters Liu Xuan had seen with magic resistance. The only other creature with magic resistance had been the Porcupine Chief, and it had only possessed 10 points.

The fact that so many armor-based monsters had been designed earlier made it obvious that the Priest—the only class capable of dealing magic damage—would be especially valuable.

Many teams would definitely make their Priest the core of the party, investing more resources in them so they could learn more skills and equip better gear.

However, by the time those teams reached this point, they would probably struggle for quite a while.

Liu Xuan could already see that although the Stone Swallowers did not deal much damage, they were incredibly tough.

And the quarry battle was a test of how quickly one could kill monsters. That made them especially troublesome.

As soon as the Stone Swallowers charged out of the cave, they spotted Liu Xuan blocking the entrance. Without a word, they rushed him and began swinging their clubs at him.

But after only a few blows, they died one after another under the combined attacks of [Nightmare Avatar] and [Plague Source].

The number on the screen of light above the quarry changed to 5.

Immediately afterward, even more chaotic cries came from inside the cave.

Before long, ten Stone Swallowers crawled out and continued charging fearlessly toward Liu Xuan.

They did not give him even a moment to catch his breath. The faster he killed them, the faster new monsters spawned.

Clearly, this battle had originally been designed as a large-scale event for the entire battlefield.

Under normal circumstances, several thousand players across the battlefield would probably have to participate.

Five, ten, twenty, forty... three hundred and twenty.

Wave after wave of monsters poured out of the caves, while the number displayed on the screen changed from 5 to 15, 35, 75...

However, because the statistics counted only the number of monsters killed within one minute, by the time the fifth wave had been eliminated, more than a minute had already passed since the first wave began.

As a result, the original five monsters from the first wave were no longer included in the count.

Even so, Liu Xuan’s killing speed was terrifying.

The seventh wave consisted of 320 monsters, but in the face of [Corpse Explosion], numbers were completely meaningless.

More than three hundred monsters were almost instantly blown to pieces.

The number on the screen of light jumped straight to 600!

He had exceeded the requirement by a huge margin!

Liu Xuan roughly estimated that this battle was far more difficult than the lumberyard challenge.

Because he killed so quickly, he was able to finish several waves within a single minute and soon reached the requirement of 500 kills per minute.

But if other players were slower—for example, if they killed 160 monsters but failed to finish the newly spawned 320 within one minute—then all their previous kills would be discarded.

Their score would consist only of however many monsters from that wave they had managed to kill, fewer than 320.

Then, by the time they finally finished killing those 320 monsters, the next wave would spawn 640 at once, making it even harder to keep up.

At that point, the challenge would have to be abandoned and restarted.

The optimal strategy should be to quickly kill the waves of 80 and 160 within one minute, then kill 260 of the 320 monsters in the next wave.

That would keep the pressure to a minimum, but it demanded an extremely high level of strength.

...

As level-eight monsters, the Stone Swallowers gave Liu Xuan a large amount of experience now that he had also reached level eight—eight points per monster.

After clearing these waves, Liu Xuan had killed more than 600 monsters, pushing him directly to level nine.

With the boss still yet to appear, Liu Xuan quickly drew a new skill.

[Eye of Insight: You can view all of a target unit’s attributes, including its skills and equipment.]

Oh? It was a utility-based passive skill.

When he had fought the Porcupine Chief earlier, the two of them had been the same level, so Liu Xuan had been able to see most of its data, but not its skills.

If a monster’s level was higher than his own, he probably would not even be able to see its basic attributes.

This new skill was quite practical.

As for the five attribute points he had gained from leveling up, Liu Xuan continued to invest them in Agility.

There were no mounts or teleportation arrays in this battlefield so far. He had to rely on his own two legs to travel, so having a little more Agility was still very useful.

After allocating the points, he glanced at his attributes.

Strength: 52

Agility: 44

Intelligence: 24

After the battle just now, his HP had landed at exactly 50,000.

His poison damage dealt 2,500 per tick, for a total of 10,000 damage!

Liu Xuan felt like shouting, “Who else wants some?”

He had just finished checking his attributes when an enraged roar suddenly came from the cave.

A massive Stone Swallower emerged.

Its appearance was not much different from that of an ordinary Stone Swallower, except that it was much taller. Instead of a stone club, it carried a roughly carved stone staff.

[Stone Swallower Sage (Boss)]

Level: 9

Attack: 10

HP: 5,000

Armor: 30

Magic Resistance: 30

??: ???

The row of question marks had only just appeared when it immediately changed into accurate numbers.

The [Eye of Insight] had taken effect.

Tenacity: 25%

Skills: [Stone Spike] Fires a magical stone spike at a target, dealing 200 magic damage.

[Rolling Stone] Creates a rolling boulder in the target’s direction, dealing 150 magic damage to all enemies along its path.

[Swallow Stone] When its HP falls below 30%, the boss swallows a piece of stone from the battlefield, gaining 30 armor and 30 magic resistance for one minute.

Five thousand HP, combined with high physical and magical defenses, would make it an exceptionally tough opponent for everyone else.

The final stage was especially troublesome. With a full minute of 60 additional defenses, some players with low damage output might not even be able to break through its defenses.

Moreover, they had just finished dealing with a huge wave of monsters. Their condition might be poor, and their skills might still be on cooldown. Fighting this boss under those circumstances would be extremely difficult.

But to Liu Xuan, compared with the ordinary monsters, the difference was simply whether [Poison] killed it in three seconds or six.

The Tenacity attribute was something he was seeing for the first time. It probably referred to a target’s ability to resist crowd control.

It was very likely that all bosses possessed it. Otherwise, if bosses were vulnerable to every form of crowd control, the difficulty would be much lower.

He hadn’t seen this on the Porcupine Chief before. Perhaps it was a hidden attribute—he hadn’t been able to see it back then because he didn’t have the Eye of Insight.

At that moment, the Stone Swallower Sage seemed extremely displeased that Liu Xuan had slaughtered so many of its kind. The instant it appeared, it began shouting angrily at him.

Liu Xuan couldn’t understand it either.

“What are you babbling about?” Liu Xuan beckoned it over with a finger. “Hurry up. I’m in a rush!”

Seeing this seemingly weak human acting so arrogantly, the Stone Swallower Sage furiously brandished its stone staff and began chanting. A sharp stone spike gathered at the tip of the staff before shooting toward Liu Xuan.

Liu Xuan didn’t dodge. He simply took the attack head-on.

“-200!”

The damage appeared above him, but his health bar barely moved.

The Stone Swallower Sage, on the other hand, took 42 points of magic damage from Nightmare Incarnation.

The moment the effect activated, Liu Xuan silently began estimating how long it would last.

Sure enough, the Stone Swallower Sage soon broke free of Fear. The duration was slightly less than two seconds.

“So resilience really does reduce the duration of control effects.”

That was certainly a useful attribute. He wondered whether he would be able to obtain it someday.

When Liu Xuan examined the boss’s status panel again, he discovered that its resilience had already risen to 50%, with a one-minute countdown displayed beside it.

In other words, the boss had diminishing control resistance.

Using control skills on a boss repeatedly within a short period would make those effects increasingly weaker.

Without this attribute, bosses would be far too easy to fight. A large enough group could simply chain-control one to death.

After breaking free of the control effect, the Stone Swallower Sage used Stone Spike again. However, after taking two ticks of Poison damage, it didn’t even get the chance to use Rolling Stone or Consume Stone before letting out a cry and collapsing to the ground.

It dropped one gold coin, a stone staff, a necklace, a stone, and a skill scroll.