"Leader, leader, did you play in the closed beta?"
"Yeah." The speaker was Dou Ni Wan, as shown by the flashing name in the prompt box.
"Great! Can we snatch the Pig King today?"
"Pretty much, as long as you follow orders!"
"Hundreds of people! How are we supposed to snatch it? We can just tag along." This was Piao Lai Piao Qu speaking; by the sound of his voice, he had to be at least seventy years old.
Dou Ni Wan was in high spirits. "Then leader, hurry up and give us your orders. We'll listen to you!"
Xiao Yu: "When I yell 'retreat' in a bit, everyone run off the screen."
Dou Ni Wan: "Got it."
After a moment, there was complete silence in the voice chat.
Dou Ni Wan: "Leader!"
"Hm?"
"Give the orders! What's next?"
"That's it..."
The voice chat went dead silent instantly.
Two seconds later.
Piao Lai Piao Qu: "Haha..."
She Shoot You: "Classic..."
Taiyi Zhenren: "Cough, cough... I'm choking to death..."
Dou Ni Wan: "Our leader is truly a divine being!"
In the team chat channel.
Xiao Yueya: "..."
Ceng Jing Shu Guang: "What are those six dots supposed to mean?"
...
Dou Ni Wan: "Big brother leader, you call that giving orders?"
"What else would you call it?"
Dou Ni Wan: "..."
Just a few seconds later, a long string of text appeared in the team chat box.
Ceng Jing Shu Guang: "The Pig King is a low-level boss at level 10. Its primary attacks are close-range single-target physical attacks, meaning external offense. When the boss reaches low health, it will unleash a major skill called [Stomp], which covers a ground radius of thirty meters. When it is on the verge of death, it will unleash a second major skill called [Double Stomp], covering a ground radius of fifty meters. When it dies and collapses, it will trigger a [Crush] effect."
Seeing Ceng Jing Shu Guang type this out, the others fell silent.
Every boss in *God Tribulation* had an introduction on the official website, but they were extremely vague. They only stated that bosses would use skills when their health ran low, leaving out any details about what those skills were or how much damage they dealt. This sketchy introduction style was Tenglong's operational strategy, designed to build a sense of mystery around the game—and humans were naturally drawn to things that seemed mysterious.
If Ceng Jing Shu Guang could rattle off all this and analyze the Pig King so thoroughly, then there was a good chance his claim of having participated in the closed beta was true.
By now, even more people had gathered around the Pig King. Ceng Jing Shu Guang mingled in the crowd, his longsword repeatedly stabbing into the Pig King's abdomen.
"3!"
"3!"
"5!"
"Critical hit 9!"
...
Level suppression, combined with the Pig King's already naturally high defense and thick hide, meant that even critical hits from the sword dealt only single-digit damage. With hundreds or thousands of people swarming it together, the decrease in the Pig King's health bar was barely noticeable to the naked eye.
Fortunately, there were numbers on their side. If it were just ten or eight people, even if the Pig King stood there doing nothing and let you hack away at it, it wouldn't die in half a day.
Twenty minutes later, the Pig King's health was finally approaching the red zone.
Low health meant the monster's HP had dropped to 10%, the threshold where certain monsters would unleash their unique skills.
"Run!"
The voice chat, dormant for so long, finally carried Ceng Jing Shu Guang's voice.
Hearing that single word, the few members of the team bolted into the distance as if chased by dogs...
At the same time, the Pig King finally flew into a rage!
Accompanied by a low roar that sounded half-bear, half-tiger, the Pig King jerked its head up, kicked off the ground with its hind legs, and stood completely erect on its hind legs!
"Holy shit! This pig is a male! I just saw its dick..."
"Must be a female, look at all those nipples! A row of a hundred and twenty, two rows of two hundred and ten..."
"Did your math teacher happen to be an English teacher? That's obviously three hundred and twenty-one..."
"What a huge pig kidney! Slice it up for drinking wine!"
"Damn it, my head almost got sucked into the pig's ass..."
...
"The Pig King is about to use its ultimate skill! Everyone scatter!" someone suddenly yelled.
It was already too late!
The Pig King's upright posture lasted only a brief moment before a cracking, popping sound rippled outward along with its descending body...
"Boom!"
The entire earth began to shake, and a massive shockwave instantly radiated outward. Wherever the shockwave passed, the ground cracked entirely, and the lush green grass beneath the players' feet instantly turned to powder. The patch of green earth within dozens of meters around the Pig King's feet turned to bare yellow dirt in an instant.
At the same time, two golden characters flashed above the Pig King's head: [Stomp]!
The Pig King's skill [Stomp]: A ground attack that deals massive damage to all targets within a thirty-meter radius, with a 50% chance to inflict the [Daze] status on targets for 3 to 5 seconds!
The players who had been crowding around the Pig King counting nipples and measuring dicks felt their eardrums ring and the earth shake, and then their entire screens turned gray-white...
Dead?!
When the Pig King raged, casualties were countless!
With just a single [Stomp], seven or eight out of ten players clustered around the Pig King were wiped out!
Those who miraculously survived mostly found themselves afflicted with the daze status, standing frozen in place without moving a muscle.
Corpses piled high upon one another across the ground, and the public chat channel was flooded with curses.
Scattered across the ground were novice swords and novice equipment—all dropped after those unlucky kids died.
Ceng Jing Shu Guang hadn't run. The exact microsecond the Pig King's front hooves touched the ground, Xiao Yu pressed the A, S, and D keys simultaneously with three fingers of his left hand, gave his right-hand mouse a gentle flick, and clicked the left mouse button. Ceng Jing Shu Guang on the screen squatted down slightly and executed an upward slash with his longsword into thin air, his whole body actually leaping into the air!
This jump was executed purely through manual manipulation of techniques. The jump height was barely a couple of centimeters off the ground, almost imperceptible unless looked at closely. Ordinarily, such a jump was a completely useless operation, but today, it worked!
It was precisely that gap of a few centimeters—Ceng Jing Shu Guang was already airborne, and by the time he landed back on the ground, he had narrowly dodged the shockwave generated by the [Stomp]!
[Stomp] could only deal damage to ground targets; it had no effect on anything in the air, not even by a millimeter!
"Come back and attack!" Xiao Yu shouted.
Dou Ni Wan was the first to run back from off-screen. Looking at the Pig King, only a few dozen people were left standing around it, and the majority of those dozen were frozen in place, struck by the daze status, while others were kneeling on the ground, looking severely injured. Only one guy was standing right by the pig's ass, holding a longsword and thrusting it relentlessly at the pig's rear end. Looking at his ID: Ceng Jing Shu Guang!
"Holy shit, leader, how did you run back so fast?" Dou Ni Wan cried out in astonishment.
"I didn't run."
"Why the hell not?"
"Don't like running."
"...Don't like running?"
Dou Ni Wan almost choked to death on his own breath. Why was this guy so obnoxious when he spoke? What does "don't like running" mean? That's a boss! If you don't run, you die!
In the team chat, Xiao Yueya also sent a message: "In this day and age, the ones who should die don't die, and the ones who shouldn't die are all dead..."
"Who is Xiao Yueya cursing? Is she talking about us?" Piao Lai Piao Qu asked.
"Don't guess, she's cursing me," Ceng Jing Shu Guang said indifferently. "Pick up the DPS, grab aggro first!"
"Got it!"
Seeing that the densely packed players had been thinned out into a sparse few by the Pig King's single stomp, while their own team of six remained completely unscathed—all thanks to this Ceng Jing Shu Guang—the six of them dropped the small talk and simply obeyed orders, pouring out all their damage.
Not even twenty seconds later, Ceng Jing Shu Guang spoke again: "Aggro has been seized; it's on me now."
"What? So fast? Awesome!" Dou Ni Wan was overjoyed.
What the hell kind of snatching aggro was this? It was clearly picking up free aggro. Everyone else had kicked the bucket, so of course the aggro fell onto Ceng Jing Shu Guang's team!
The dead-silent voice channel instantly livened up. The group chattered back and forth like frogs leaping in a muddy pond, croaking away. Aside from Xiao Yueya the girl, who remained silent and only typed four characters in the team chat—'Small men exalted in success'—the other newly acquainted teammates suddenly seemed like long-lost friends.
"I'll pull the monster and run, you guys pause attacks! Keep up!"
"Why run? Can't we fight here?"
"We can, but I'm afraid of it getting snatched. The six of us can't out-damage those big guilds."
As they spoke, Ceng Jing Shu Guang had already started running!
The Pig King trailed closely right behind Ceng Jing Shu Guang, its nose—nearly half a meter long—thrusting directly at his backside.
"Leader be careful, the Pig King wants to pop your cherry!" Dou Ni Wan yelled.
The attack of a level 10 Pig King was absolute doom for level 4 or 5 players. Over the past twenty-some minutes, no fewer than several hundred players had been gored to death by its snout. It was just that the attack frequency wasn't high, and since it was a single-target attack with so many players around, dying at a rate of ten or twenty per minute wasn't obvious.
There were simply too many players in the small fishing village. The moment the Pig King was kited a few hundred meters away, hundreds of people tailed right behind it. Brandishing their swords and blades, shouting at the top of their lungs, they piled onto the Pig King regardless of the consequences.
Suddenly, Ceng Jing Shu Guang, running in the lead, came to a halt. Waving his right hand, he delivered a sword strike straight to the Pig King's snout.
"Leader has a death wish! Watch out for getting one-shotted!" Dou Ni Wan was startled. Wasn't this asking for death?
He had seen with his own eyes many players above level 5 getting sent straight back to the safe zone by a single hit from the Pig King. Judging from the weapon in Ceng Jing Shu Guang's hands, this guy hadn't even learned any skills and was at most level 4. Now that he had the aggro, if he got gored by that pig, could he possibly survive?
***
The sudden appearance of the Pig King startled Xiao Yueya out of her wits, the plump, round firmness of her chest nearly popping right out of her clothes.
"The Pig King is here!"
"Come quick!"
"Kill it!"
...
Before Xiao Yueya could recover from her shock, dozens of nearby players had already charged forward. Aside from the majority who rushed up brandishing longswords to hack away, a few pioneering players who had already reached level 5 proudly flaunted their newly learned skills under the envious gazes of the crowd.
Though most skills only produced a tiny flash of light, having light was better-looking than having none—much like how things with fur were more alluring than things without. The collision-free avatar system of the novice village allowed players to overlap while killing monsters; a single coordinate could hold dozens of players. Even though the Pig King had high defense and thick HP, it couldn't withstand the sheer volume of players, and its long health bar began to tick away thread by thread.
"Form up parties!"
"No team, invite me!"
"Level 4 Venom Master seeking party!"
"Level 3 Lance Cavalry seeking party!"
"Bunch of idiots, reporting your classes without even learning skills! Level 5 Monk looking to be carried!"
"Level 4 Immortal Zither seeking a team, whoever parties with me, I'll marry!"
"I'll party with you! Wife, what do you do for a living?"
"Hostess at a high-end club..."
"..."
...
More and more players gathered around; all passersby swarmed over. At this moment, Xiao Yueya noticed that her own party had somehow filled up with members, though they were uniformly level 4 players without a single level 5 among them.
In the team chat.
Ceng Jing Shu Guang: "Have any of you played *God Tribulation* before?"
Xiao Yueya: "..."
Dou Ni Wan: "Didn't it just launch in open beta today?"
She Shoot You: "Never played!"
Piao Lai Piao Qu: "Nope."
Taiyi Zhenren: "Does the leader mean the closed beta? Missed out on that..."
*God Tribulation* had previously held a limited closed beta, during which only a few thousand game cards were distributed.
Ceng Jing Shu Guang: "Then listen to my orders in a bit and hide external players first!"
To make things convenient for players, *God Tribulation* featured dozens of auxiliary functions. Hiding external players made it so that only members of one's own team were displayed on the screen.
Piao Lai Piao Qu: "Leader, let's open voice chat. Isn't typing exhausting?"
"Alright."
*God Tribulation* was a semi-virtual game with a built-in voice chat function, which was disabled by default when logging in. Dialogue with NPCs in the game could be conducted via brainwave communication, but player-to-player conversation required turning on the voice chat function externally.
However, Xiao Yu didn't like voice chat; he was used to typing, and his typing speed was far faster than speaking.
Still, for the sake of snatching the boss, turning on voice chat was more convenient. So Xiao Yu enabled the voice system while adjusting the voice realism setting to fifty percent.
Adjusting voice realism was a feature of *God Tribulation*; players could freely adjust their voice in the game, altering pitch and thickness, and even allowing men to speak in women's voices.
Even so, most people still preferred using their original voices because the official website was running an event with very generous rewards that required real-person scanned voice pronunciation to participate. As for the hidden purpose behind this event, only the Tenglong Company knew.
The moment he opened the team voice chat, Xiao Yu heard someone calling out to him.
"Leader, leader, did you play in the closed beta?"
"Yeah." The speaker was Dou Ni Wan, as shown by the flashing name in the prompt box.
"Great! Can we snatch the [Pig King] today?"
"Pretty much, as long as you follow orders!"
"Hundreds of people! How are we supposed to snatch it? We can just tag along." This was Piao Lai Piao Qu speaking; by the sound of his voice, he had to be at least seventy years old.
Dou Ni Wan was in high spirits. "Then leader, hurry up and give us your orders. We'll listen to you!"
Xiao Yu: "When I yell 'retreat' in a bit, everyone run off the screen."
Dou Ni Wan: "Got it."
After a moment, there was complete silence in the voice chat.
Dou Ni Wan: "Leader!"
"Hm?"
"Give the orders! What's next?"
"That's it..."
The voice chat went dead silent instantly.
Two seconds later.
Piao Lai Piao Qu: "Haha..."
She Shoot You: "Classic..."
Taiyi Zhenren: "Cough, cough... I'm choking to death..."
Dou Ni Wan: "Our leader is truly a divine being!"
In the team chat channel.
Xiao Yueya: "..."
Ceng Jing Shu Guang: "What are those six dots supposed to mean?"
...
Dou Ni Wan: "Big brother leader, you call that giving orders?"
"What else would you call it?"
Dou Ni Wan: "..."
Just a few seconds later, a long string of text appeared in the team chat box.
Ceng Jing Shu Guang: "The [Pig King] is a low-level boss at level 10. Its primary attacks are close-range single-target physical attacks, meaning external offense. When the boss reaches low health, it will unleash a major skill, which covers a ground radius of thirty meters. When it is on the verge of death, it will unleash a second major skill, covering a ground radius of fifty meters. When it dies and collapses, it will trigger an effect."
Seeing Ceng Jing Shu Guang type this out, the others fell silent.
Every boss in *God Tribulation* had an introduction on the official website, but they were extremely vague. They only stated that bosses would use skills when their health ran low, leaving out any details about what those skills were or how much damage they dealt. This sketchy introduction style was Tenglong's operational strategy, designed to build a sense of mystery around the game—and humans were naturally drawn to things that seemed mysterious.
If Ceng Jing Shu Guang could rattle off all this and analyze the [Pig King] so thoroughly, then there was a good chance his claim of having participated in the closed beta was true.
By now, even more people had gathered around the [Pig King]. Ceng Jing Shu Guang mingled in the crowd, his longsword repeatedly stabbing into the [Pig King]'s abdomen.
"3!"
"3!"
"5!"
"Critical hit 9!"
...
Level suppression, combined with the [Pig King]'s already naturally high defense and thick hide, meant that even critical hits from the sword dealt only single-digit damage. With hundreds or thousands of people swarming it together, the decrease in the [Pig King]'s health bar was barely noticeable to the naked eye.
Fortunately, there were numbers on their side. If it were just ten or eight people, even if the [Pig King] stood there doing nothing and let you hack away at it, it wouldn't die in half a day.
Twenty minutes later, the [Pig King] was finally approaching the red zone.
Low health meant the monster's HP had dropped to 10%, the threshold where certain monsters would unleash their unique skills.
"Run!"
The voice chat, dormant for so long, finally carried Ceng Jing Shu Guang's voice.
Hearing that single word, the few members of the team bolted into the distance as if chased by dogs...
At the same time, the [Pig King] finally flew into a rage!
Accompanied by a low roar that sounded half-bear, half-tiger, the [Pig King] jerked its head up, kicked off the ground with its hind legs, and stood completely erect on its hind legs!
"Holy shit! This pig is a male! I just saw its **..."
"Must be a female, look at all those **! A row of a hundred and twenty, two rows of two hundred and ten..."
"Did your math teacher happen to be an English teacher? That's obviously three hundred and twenty-one..."
"What a huge pig kidney! Slice it up for drinking wine!"
"Damn it, my head almost got sucked into the pig's **..."
...
"The Pig King is about to use its ultimate skill! Everyone scatter!" someone suddenly yelled.
It was already too late!
The erect posture lasted only a brief moment before a cracking, popping sound rippled outward along with the descending body...
"Boom!"
The entire earth began to shake, and a massive shockwave instantly radiated outward. Wherever the shockwave passed, the ground cracked entirely, and the lush green grass beneath the players' feet instantly turned to powder. The patch of green earth within dozens of meters around the feet turned to bare yellow dirt in an instant.
At the same time, two golden characters flashed above the head: [Stomp]!
The skill [Stomp]: A ground attack that deals massive damage to all targets within a thirty-meter radius, with a 50% chance to inflict the status on targets for 3 to 5 seconds!
The players who had been crowding around counting **, measuring ** felt their eardrums ring and the earth shake, and then their entire screens turned gray-white...
Dead?!
When the [Pig King] raged, casualties were countless!
With just a single [Stomp], seven or eight out of ten players clustered around were wiped out!
Those who miraculously survived mostly found themselves afflicted with the daze status, standing frozen in place without moving a muscle.