High Experience Bonus

After reading the announcement, Liu Xuan turned his attention to the chest that stood half as tall as a person.

He excitedly walked over, rubbed his hands together, and opened it. Inside, he found ten gleaming gold coins.

With that, his total number of gold coins was now close to 193.

Then there were two pieces of equipment:

【Fish-Head Hat】

Quality: Fine

Required Level: 10

Health: +50

Armor: +20

Strength: +3

Intelligence: +3

Effect: After taking physical or magical damage, the next instance of damage of the same type is reduced by 10%. This effect can only have one stack. Taking damage of the other type immediately changes the effect.

Damn! What a rip-off!

It had the exact same effect when it was on the boss, so how come it was so much weaker after it ended up in his hands?

The damage reduction had gone straight from 50% to 10%!

Fortunately, the stats were still quite impressive.

The appearance, however, was hard to describe. It really was just a giant fish head. You put your head into the fish’s mouth, and that counted as wearing it.

The second piece of equipment was a pair of shoes:

【Waterlogged Boots】

Quality: Fine

Required Level: 10

Health: +30

Armor: +12

Agility: +5

Effect: Maintains normal movement speed in muddy areas.

Both pieces of equipment required Level 10. Liu Xuan was still one level short, so he could only put them away for now.

Beneath the equipment were four pieces of transparent leather. Liu Xuan guessed that they might be rare materials like the ones he had found before.

When he picked them up and took a look, delight appeared on his face.

【Giant Salamander Leather (Rare Material): Give a certain amount of this material to a leatherworker to craft equipment or backpacks.】

It could be used to make equipment or backpacks. However, unless the equipment turned out to be particularly good, Liu Xuan planned to have it made into a backpack.

He was still using a small backpack made from the hide of a 【Killer Snake】. It only had five slots.

The giant salamander was so much higher-leveled than the killer snake. Surely a backpack made from its hide would have at least ten or twenty slots, right?

After putting away the leather, Liu Xuan suddenly noticed that there was something else at the bottom of the chest: a sheet of golden paper.

At first, he thought it was a skill book, but after picking it up, he found that it was something else.

【Proof of the Giant Salamander Slayer: Offer this to an altar somewhere to prove your battle achievements. You may receive an unusual reward.】

An altar? He had no idea where one was.

He would ask an NPC when the time came.

Speaking of NPCs, Liu Xuan slapped his forehead as he suddenly remembered something. He quickly turned around to look for Bell.

He found that Captain Finch had already dragged Bell to the rear.

Liu Xuan hurried over and asked, “Is he all right?”

“He’s only seriously injured and unconscious. He’ll need to recuperate for a while.”

As long as he wasn’t dead, that was fine.

Liu Xuan took out several bottles of healing potion and handed them to Captain Finch. “Give these to him. By the way, the battle at this outpost should count as complete, right? What do we do next?”

With the outpost’s greatest threat eliminated, Captain Finch looked quite pleased as well. He pointed toward a wooden bulletin board not far away.

“We need to wait for the bridge across the river to be built. But you warriors don’t need to worry about that—we’ll take care of it. In the meantime, you can complete the tasks posted there.

“You can accept the same tasks over in the village. They’re mainly meant to stabilize our rear so that the coming expedition won’t have any worries behind it. Once all the tasks above have been completed, we’ll be able to cross the river.”

Liu Xuan walked over to the bulletin board and took a look. At the very top was a progress bar displaying 0/10000.

Below it were all kinds of missions, including killing various monsters—the same ones Liu Xuan had fought before.

There were also missions to complete a dungeon once, donate supplies once, or donate money once.

All the missions could be completed repeatedly, rewarding experience and money. Once the entire battlefield had collectively completed 10,000 missions from the board, they would be able to cross the river and begin the expedition.

No wonder Captain Finch had said they were meant to stabilize the rear.

Looking at the 10,000 missions, Liu Xuan increasingly felt that this battlefield couldn’t be treated as nothing more than a game.

In other virtual games, players were often competitors even when they cooperated.

Competing for monsters and resources, killing one another for loot—such things happened all the time.

But on this battlefield, everyone was a soldier taking part in the expedition.

When fighting a war, they had to work together.

If Liu Xuan hadn’t been so powerful, most of the battles so far would have required the entire battlefield to join in.

They had only been crushed by Liu Xuan’s overwhelming strength.

But when they encountered something that didn’t test individual strength, such as these 10,000 missions, there was no way he could handle it alone.

“The strength of our battlefield is far beyond that of the others, and we currently have an extremely high experience bonus as well. I imagine we should be able to complete these 10,000 missions fairly quickly. I’ll discuss it with Zhang Meng later.”

As Liu Xuan pondered this, the people outside the battlefield had already gone numb while staring at the announcement on the light screen.

In reality, when the progress of the Chinese light screen had begun jumping from 25% to 50%, many countries had already started wailing.

The first and second stages were completely different. During the first stage, everyone’s progress had risen gradually, with some moving faster and others more slowly.

But the second stage only had three thresholds: 25%, 50%, and 100%.

As a result, many countries that couldn’t conquer the lumber camp remained stuck at 0%, without moving at all.

Meanwhile, China’s progress was leaping forward at an astonishing speed. It had only been an hour since they reached 50%, yet the progress had already jumped to 100%.

The announcement also stated that China’s battlefield had received a seventeenfold experience bonus before Level 10, and an experience bonus of more than twenty times before Level 3!

The other Chinese battlefields had received half as much.

In other words, if a newcomer joined a Chinese battlefield now, they could level up after killing just two or three monsters.

How were they supposed to play like this?

Had anyone ever seen a game that dared to give its players such a ridiculously high experience bonus?

The nations of the world wailed in protest, all claiming that it was unfair.

But the light screen simply ignored them.

The battlefield’s difficulty was right there for all to see. According to the calculations, you pathetic Earthlings needed five or six days to take down an outpost. The Chinese battlefield had done it in only six hours. That was because they were strong, and according to the rules, they deserved a twentyfold bonus.

What, were they unhappy about it?

At that moment, the light screen began displaying the second-stage results.

Everyone around the world, whether inside or outside the battlefield, stared intently at the screen. No one even dared to blink. They all wanted to know how China had managed to accomplish this.

As before, a gray overhead map appeared, marking out the basic locations and monster distributions.

It showed that almost all the green dots representing the players in Battlefield 2468 were concentrated around the beginner village, with quite a few more near the farm and fields.

In other words, most players had only reached Levels 1 to 3 at this point, no different from the other battlefields.

There was only one green dot that had ventured alone deep into the shrubland to the west. It wandered around there for a long time before suddenly accelerating for some unknown reason.

It headed straight for the lumber camp without stopping along the way. Almost the instant it arrived, the lumber camp changed on the map from a monster-occupied area into a friendly region.

After that, the green dot swiftly returned to the Newbie Village, then immediately headed for the quarry. In no time at all, the quarry had also been converted into a friendly area.

Next, he went north to the banks of the Orchid River. After lingering there for a moment, a simple fortress icon appeared by the river.

The outpost was captured in an instant as well.

As everyone watched the results screen beneath the glowing display, they all involuntarily cried out:

“Huh???”

They genuinely couldn’t make sense of it. Where did he go, and how did he get there so fast?

“Is it just me, or did he spend less time fighting monsters than he did traveling?”

“I’m getting dizzy. Why does this battlefield look so easy?”

“Then why don’t you go in and try it yourself?”

“No way! Do you think I’m stupid? Look how many people died.”

“So you do realize that a lot of people died.”

“Damn it, this battlefield couldn’t have been made by the Chinese, could it? Why is it favoring them so much? One person can clear it solo.”