Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Ning Shuo finished sending his message and turned to see someone standing a short distance away, looking at him hesitantly.

Seeing that Ning Shuo had noticed her, the person pursed her lips and simply stepped forward. “Hello, do you need a Guide?”

The girl looked thin and frail, her clothes showing visible signs of mending. Ning Shuo noticed her swallow hard as she glanced toward the dining area.

Ning Shuo smiled. “I wonder how much the guide fee is?”

The girl had clearly rehearsed her pitch many times; she spoke rapidly. “Only forty! I can explain the System to you, and I know ‘Overworked and Overrun’ very well. I can take you anywhere you want to go!”

Forty-just enough for two steamed buns.

Ning Shuo nodded and asked as they walked, “How did you know I was a newcomer? Did you see my stream?”

The girl, who introduced herself as Li Ziqian, replied, “No. The Hot Bunks just went up for grabs, and I saw you didn’t go for one, so I figured you might not know about them. Plus, you looked visibly stunned when you paid for your meal, so you probably don’t know the System’s cost of living either.”

“Hot Bunks?”

“Yes,” Li Ziqian said. “Every Rest Area has a batch of cheap housing that everyone calls Hot Bunks. It only costs ten Heat a day to stay there. You have to pay for your own water and electricity, but most people who stay in the Hot Bunks are short on cash and look for work outside anyway, so they don’t end up using much.”

Ning Shuo wasn’t usually a man of many words, but fortunately, Li Ziqian didn’t find his silence awkward. She took it upon herself to introduce him to Overworked and Overrun.

Overworked and Overrun lived up to its name; it was crawling with corporate drones.

Compared to other Rest Areas like ‘Glitz and Glamour’ or ‘All In,’ Overworked and Overrun was considered a good place to find work.

“Like being a Guide?” Ning Shuo asked.

Li Ziqian gave an embarrassed smile. “Yes. It’s probably because this Rest Area is the closest to the modern world. To soothe the nerves of newcomers, many of their logout points are set in Overworked and Overrun.”

After finishing her introduction of the area, Li Ziqian moved on to explaining the System.

As mentioned before, the System was divided into Scripts and Rest Areas. Scripts came in two modes: PvE and PvP. The type Ning Shuo had just played, where players competed against each other, was the PvP format.

“Scripts can be really dangerous sometimes,” Li Ziqian said. “And there’s no telling how many Scripts there are in the System. I finally worked up the courage to tackle my first Script of the month, but the System pulled me out halfway through, saying it needed to update some kind of Patch.”

Li Ziqian sighed. “You’re really lucky. You arrived just in time for a System update reward. This kind of update compensation is usually quite generous.”

From the look of it, she took Ning Shuo for a newcomer who had been interrupted by the update in the middle of his tutorial mission.

Ning Shuo asked, “Is that so? How much is the compensation usually?”

Li Ziqian replied, “Usually around a thousand or so, but it’s even better this time-they gave out two thousand directly! It looks like this Patch was a difficult one to implement.”

She looked at Ning Shuo, hesitating as if she wanted to say something. She seemed to be thinking: *You only have two thousand in total, yet you spent five hundred just to eat a bowl of noodles with meat.*

Ning Shuo had some guesses about what the Patch was.

When he had the NPC perform the Accusation, no notification about discovering a Hidden Rule had popped up at the time, which meant it wasn’t a Hidden Rule.

To impose an action restriction like “cannot accuse the murderer” on NPCs-who possessed some, albeit limited, intelligence-likely required quite a bit of effort.

Thinking of Hidden Rules, Ning Shuo asked, “Do you know any Hidden Rules?”

“I only know one,” Li Ziqian said, “but it’ll cost you Heat to trade for it.”

“Anything related to a Hidden Rule must be part of a formal transaction. Otherwise, you’ll be punished by the System.”

Ning Shuo asked, “What kind of punishment?”

Li Ziqian shook her head. “I don’t know, but I heard that a long time ago, a certain Big Shot forcibly revealed Hidden Rules to many people. A lot of people died, and that Big Shot vanished without a trace.”
Ning Shuo asked, “So, do you know how many Hidden Rules there are? You don’t have to tell me what they are, so that should be fine, right?”

“Of course,” Li Ziqian replied. “But even I don’t know the exact number. Looking at the Forum, the person who has discovered the most Hidden Rules is probably the one at the top of the Ranking List. Someone did the math, and it seems he’s found four, even though his Live Stream Room is occasionally turned off.”

In other words, there were at least four Hidden Rules.

Regarding the Ranking List, Ning Shuo had briefly browsed it while eating and had some impression of the top player. “Rao Lin?”

“Yes, he was among the very first batch to enter the System.”

After chatting a bit more about the System, Li Ziqian led Ning Shuo to an inn. “At this hour, there aren’t any Hot Bunks left, but the prices at this place are relatively cheap.”

Li Ziqian had intended to provide full service by helping Ning Shuo haggle with the owner, but Ning Shuo pointed to a man waiting for him at the inn’s entrance. “The person I’m waiting for has arrived. Thank you for your help, miss.”

Li Ziqian nodded blankly. It was only after she had received her Heat that she realized Ning Shuo must have known someone here already.

Perhaps they had met in the Newbie Script.

This meant he could have avoided spending that bit of money on a Guide in the first place.

For some reason, Li Ziqian felt a warmth in her chest. She called out, “Thank you!”

Ning Wang had changed his clothes; he now wore a clean, sharp-looking windbreaker. He had cut his hair short, styling his bangs into a neat side part.

Seeing Ning Shuo, a teasing smile played on his lips. “After all these years, has my temperament improved? To think you’re actually giving away money.”

Ning Shuo smiled. “That girl is clever. The first thing she did after finishing a Script was find a way to earn money. She’s smart and hardworking; who knows, she might be useful in the future.”

“No matter how smart she is, could she be smarter than me?”

“I’ll take that as you praising me.”

Ning Wang held his sword in his arms. “Let’s go. We need to talk. I’ve already booked a room for you.”

Ning Shuo remarked, “You just came out of there yourself, yet you don’t seem to be short on money?”

Ning Wang didn’t answer. As soon as they entered the room and closed the door, a sword came flying toward Ning Shuo’s face.

Ning Shuo’s hands weren’t idle either. While chatting with Li Ziqian on the way, he had already exchanged some playing cards from the System Shop.

One by one, the cards grazed Ning Wang’s body and embedded themselves into the wall behind him. Ning Shuo fought with effortless ease. “How did you realize I wanted to make a move?”

One was not allowed to violate the rule against Harming Others in the Rest Area, but there was a standard for what constituted “harming.” Simply rendering someone unable to move was still permitted.

Seeing as Ning Shuo was still a sickly person, Ning Wang didn’t even draw his blade, fighting him with the scabbard still on. “Aside from Master, if I’m standing behind someone, nine times out of ten, I’m about to make a move on them.”

“How did you know I would do the same? Who’s to say that after all these years, I haven’t changed some of those habits?”

Ning Wang watched as a card zipped past, slicing off a strand of his hair. “The future me is still me. I know better than anyone whether certain habits can be changed.”

Ning Wang didn’t seem anxious. “You’re about to run out of cards, aren’t you? Your internal energy is barely a tenth of what it used to be. You can’t beat me.”

Ning Shuo remained leisurely. “It’s fine. I only need my mouth.”

To Ning Wang, the calm voice of his future self sounded like an alarm bell signaling imminent disaster. “We’ve been fighting for so long. Why don’t you do me a favor and take a fall?”

A martial artist’s stance was naturally stable. Ning Wang was just about to think that those words were absolute nonsense when his foot tripped over something unknown, and he fell flat on his face.

Ning Wang: “…”

The moment he hit the floor, it felt just like that night in the Script when they were cleaning up bloodstains. The floorboards before Ning Wang’s eyes miraculously overlapped with the floor tiles of the Palace Hall from that time.