The jagged rocky expanse of the Level 4 zone played host to a brutally one-sided slaughter.
Jack hunkered firm behind a towering slab of weathered gray stone. He drew a slow, steady breath, plucked a rough-hewn wooden arrow from the quiver slung at his hip, and nocked it tight against his bowstring.
Forty meters out, a colossal Ironhide Giant Lizard lay sprawled on the ground, idly resting.
Jack released his fingers. The wooden arrow streaked through the air as a gray blur, crossing the distance in the blink of an eye and burying itself deep in the lizard’s unprotected eye socket.
> -78!
A huge red damage number burst into the air above the creature. The Level 4 monster, famed for its absurdly high physical armor, never even had time to stagger to its feet. Its heavy, scaled body crashed fully to the ground before dissolving into a drift of glowing light particles.
> [Ironhide Giant Lizard (Level 4) slain.]
> [Base experience awarded. Level-difference challenge bonus triggered. Additional experience added.]
> [SSS-rank talent Infinite Plunder activated: Permanently increases Attack Power by 1 point.]
Jack watched the system notifications scroll past with a perfectly impassive expression. He stepped forward and scooped up the handful of copper coins the monster had dropped.
The hunting efficiency in this zone genuinely exceeded his expectations. The system did impose an accuracy penalty for fighting above your level, after all—challenging Level 4 mobs while two levels lower meant Jack’s hit rate had taken a noticeable hit.
He couldn’t have cared less about that minor statistical drop.
The Attack Power on his stat panel had already skyrocketed to borderline incomprehensible levels for this stage of the game. For an ordinary newbie, even kitted out in a full set of top-tier starting gear, scraping together 50+ points of damage per hit was considered the absolute ceiling. Jack was dealing nearly 80 points of physical damage with every single basic bow shot.
That massive overkill damage perfectly offset his accuracy deficit. As long as one arrow landed, any Level 4 mob was guaranteed an instant one-shot. He had a full 40 meters of kiting distance to work with—an enormous safety buffer. Even if the system cruelly flagged his first shot as a miss, he had more than enough time to loose a second before the lizard could close the gap.
In the span of barely half an hour, Jack had already cleared out every Ironhide Giant Lizard across a wide swath of the surrounding terrain.
A warm golden light bloomed upward from beneath his boots, and the level counter in the upper-left corner of his vision flickered.
He’d hit Level 3.
Leveling up granted a baseline boost to all core attributes, and the most immediate tangible change was his health pool. Jack glanced down at his stat panel: his maximum HP had finally shattered the 50-point threshold, settling at 55.
Not far from his current position lay the territory where Level 5 creatures roamed. With his terrifying Attack Power, one-shotting Level 5 mobs would be just as effortless as his current grind. But he had zero intention of crossing that boundary anytime soon.
Level 5 monsters were the apex predators of the entire newbie zone. A single basic attack from one could deal a minimum of 30 to 40 points of physical damage.
Jack’s current health sat at only 55 points. He had no defensive skills whatsoever, and wasn’t wearing a single piece of armor. If he recklessly charged into the Level 5 zone and accidentally pulled aggro on two or more mobs—or if he made one misstep and let a single monster close the distance to land a couple of hits—his health bar would drop to zero in the blink of an eye.
In this world where reality and game data had fully fused, a zeroed health bar came with no do-overs. It meant permanent, real death—a heart that stopped beating forever. Jack would never gamble his life for minor gains. Sticking to the Level 4 zone, triggering his talent steadily and efficiently, was the only smart play.
Jack turned and headed toward another cluster of jagged rock formations, scanning the area for his next target.
He was in the middle of taking down his 30th consecutive Ironhide Giant Lizard when his eyes suddenly narrowed.
At the very bottom of his field of view, a semi-transparent elongated indicator bar had materialized out of nowhere. It was a progress bar, colored a deep, inky crimson, with faint flame effects licking along its edges.
Its current fill level was extremely low—just a tiny sliver of progress. At the far right end, marking its completion point, hovered a blurred icon of a snarling monster skull.
This was a hidden mechanic with zero accompanying system text to explain its function.
Jack furrowed his brow slightly, letting his gaze linger on the burning progress bar for several seconds.
In the theory classes at prep academy, instructors barely ever mentioned these kinds of hidden field elements, because the conditions to trigger them were usually absurdly stringent. But Jack knew for a fact that a progress bar popping up out of nowhere had to be directly tied to his recent actions.
He’d just slaughtered a massive number of Level 4 monsters in an extremely short window of time.
Jack didn’t pause. He nocked another arrow to his shortbow and put it straight through the eye socket of a freshly spawned lizard.
Just as he’d predicted, the second the lizard collapsed into light particles, that flaming crimson progress bar lurched forward by another small chunk, and the glow of its edge flames brightened just a little.
Looks like as long as I keep up a high kill frequency, this bar will keep climbing, Jack reasoned silently. He tightened his grip on his worn wooden bow and picked up his pace as he hunted down the next mob.
The Level 4 zone was massive, and its terrain far more complex than the open grass plains of the lower-level areas.
Roughly a kilometer away from Jack’s position, in a stretch of scrubland dotted with low, thorny bushes, several figures were scattered across different corners, each struggling alone against Ironhide Giant Lizards.
The four of them wore identical miniature guild emblems pinned to their chests—they were a pre-made party who knew each other well. Oddly enough, they weren’t grouped up and fighting together the way a normal team would. Instead, they’d deliberately spread more than 100 meters apart, stubbornly soloing mobs on their own.
“Alright, lads, status update—what’s your progress bar sitting at right now?”
A gruff voice crackled over the party’s private comms channel. It belonged to Mark, the team’s Warrior. He’d just tanked a tail swipe from a giant lizard with his shield, losing a tenth of his health in the process, and was using the brief window while backing off to chug a low-grade health potion.
“Don’t even get me started. I’ve barely pushed mine to 15 percent,” came the Rogue’s complaining voice over the line. “These Level 4 mobs are built like literal tanks. I dump my entire skill rotation into one and it’s still got over half its health left. I have to keep stealthing and landing cheap shots just to slowly whittle them down. It’s so slow I swear the flames on my progress bar are about to fizzle out entirely.”
“Hang in there, nobody quit on me now,” Mark said, his tone dead serious. “We paid a fortune for this intel off the black market, and it’s worth every copper. As soon as we get that drop, we’ll cover all our costs and then some.”
The black market—Prospect City’s most bustling underground trading hub. It was a place where not just gear of dubious origin changed hands, but where highly valuable hidden game intelligence was bought and sold for exorbitant prices.
What Mark and his party had purchased was a secret about a hidden mechanic in the newbie zone.
Concealed within this very Level 4 area was an exceptionally rare special item: an Elite Entry Ticket.
It was a unique spatial consumable. Using the ticket out in the field would prompt the system to open a temporary, single-person portal on the spot. Stepping through would teleport the player into a small, isolated pocket dimension, where they would face a dedicated Level 4 Elite monster.
The Elite inside these independent spaces was one-of-a-kind: no other players could interfere with your fight, and the loot from killing it was absurdly generous. Most crucially, defeating it came with a fixed chance to drop a precious Archer skill book.
Skill books in this world had always been strategic resources monopolized by major guilds and wealthy elites. Even the most basic common skill book could fetch an astronomical price at the public auction house.
And according to the black market intel, the Archer skill book dropped by this specific special Elite carried the system tag Bind on Pickup.
A bound item couldn’t be traded, couldn’t be sold. Whoever picked it up had it bound to their soul permanently. Since it was restricted to the Archer class, if anyone of a different profession got their hands on it, the skill book was nothing more than a useless scrap of paper, doomed to collect dust in their inventory forever.
Precisely because of that, the only people hunting for these entry tickets were Archers desperate to boost their combat power as fast as possible.
“When that ticket finally drops, I’m not selling it for anything,” panted Robin, the party’s dedicated Archer, over the team channel.
He was positioned behind a gnarled tree, peppering a giant lizard with arrow after arrow. His base Attack Power was only in the mid-teens, each shot dealing single-digit damage. It was grueling, miserable work.
“I’m using this thing myself!” Robin’s voice burned with raw fervor. “Next week is the new high-difficulty Novice Dungeon trial. The instructor posted the stats already—the clear rate’s only 30 percent. If I can farm that skill book, my combat power jumps through the roof, and getting that clearance badge is as good as guaranteed.”
“No problem, Robin. Once it drops, it’s yours. You can pay us back with extra gold down the line,” Mark encouraged over the channel. “Everyone pick up the pace! The black market intel was crystal clear—once this red progress bar hits around 20 or 30 percent, the drop rate for the entry ticket spikes hard. The very next kill could be the one that pops it!”
Triggering this hidden red progress bar in your UI required brutally strict conditions.
First, the player’s level absolutely could not exceed Level 5. Otherwise, the system automatically disqualified you from all newbie hidden challenges.
Second, you had to be in a state of absolute solo combat—no buffs from party members, no shared damage assistance of any kind. That was exactly why the four of them had spread more than 100 meters apart.
Last, and most difficult of all: you had to kill Level 4 monsters continuously within a strict time limit. The higher your kill frequency, the shorter the interval between two mob deaths, the brighter the flames on the progress bar burned, and the higher your chance of the entry ticket dropping. If you paused to rest for too long mid-grind, the progress bar would rapidly cool and regress.
For ordinary newbies like Mark and Robin, soloing even a single Level 4 monster was already an enormous struggle. They could only slowly grind them down one by one, relying on chugging health potions and carefully kiting to stay alive. Their current kill frequency could barely keep the progress bar from regressing, inching it forward at a torturously slow crawl.
They had absolutely no idea that on the other side of this very same Level 4 zone, there was a player gripping a beat-up wooden bow who was currently, in a manner that defied all game logic, on an unhinged slaughter spree that was violently rocketing that hidden progress bar’s threshold upward faster than anyone had ever seen.