[“What kind of playstyle is this from Qi Ling Village?”]

[Holy crap, am I seeing this right? A 12-minute record!?]

[That’s two minutes faster! What’s going on?]

[Did Griffin come up with a new strategy again?!]

Xiaoyao Xian didn’t rush to check the other speedrun leaderboards. Instead, he carefully examined the record, clicked on the ID of this new record holder, and discovered that it didn’t come from Server 214, where Griffin’s smurf group operated, but from the fringe Server 3145. This was a new record set by a wild talent. “Not one of Griffin’s people. Clearing Qingshan Academy in 12 minutes—this guy’s got some skills.”  

[12 minutes is insane. Can that annoying Qingshan Academy dungeon even be improved further?]

[Low-level dungeons can just be steamrolled with stats, right?]

[Solo dungeons have stat scaling, though. If it were just about overpowering with numbers, the speedrun leaderboard would’ve been a mess ages ago.]

Qingshan Academy, a low-level solo dungeon, wouldn’t have gotten much attention from players if it weren’t for Griffin’s antics sparking some buzz in the gaming community. After the company behind Griffin started using smurfs to dominate the leaderboard, Qingshan Academy caught the eye of countless players. The top-tier leaderboard pros didn’t bother with such a minor speedrun list, but behind the scenes, some players who couldn’t stand Griffin had been itching to challenge its records.  

The problem was, it wasn’t easy. Qingshan Academy’s resentful scholars introduced too many variables—randomly spawning courtyard layouts, different numbers of scholar mobs in each courtyard. A player could only run the dungeon twice a day, yet the database for the Divine Tree dungeon could generate hundreds or thousands of possible variations. To maintain a consistent performance, a speedrunner would need exceptional adaptability.  

Griffin’s dominance wasn’t without reason—they exploited Tian He Mountain’s summoner playstyle, using multi-stage pathfinding and summoned creatures to pull mobs.  

As a beastmaster himself, streamer Xiaoyao Xian could roughly guess a thing or two once he knew the record-breaking player’s class. This wild talent had likely mastered a speedrun strategy using Tian He Mountain’s beastmaster mechanics.  

[The new record’s from a Tian He Mountain player too?]  

[No…]  

A small wave of discussion erupted on the server-wide world chat. Breaking a record and hitting rank one wasn’t surprising—what was shocking was that it was a newbie, and they were using the Qi Ling Village class!  

The new record wasn’t from Tian He Mountain, so it wasn’t the beastmaster summoner strategy.  

The speedrun leaderboard provided clear, straightforward info:  

Top Rank: Cycle of Eternity | Clear Time: 12:22:11 | Server: 3145 | Class: Qi Ling Village.

“This record was set by a healer class? And it shaved off two minutes?” Xiaoyao Xian sat up straight, his irritation instantly replaced by excitement. “No way. Griffin’s crew got their record smashed by a healer, and it’s two minutes faster??”  

[I heard that several small chat groups in the Griffin newbie area are going crazy.]

[They were so sure of locking down the weekly leaderboard, and now someone snatched first place. Their pile of accounts in the top ten are just there as decoration now—haha, I’m dying.]  

Seeing this record, Xiaoyao Xian wasted no time sharing Qingshan Academy’s new record in the private chat of the Hidden Immortal squad, instantly sparking a flurry of reactions. Hidden Immortal used to hold third place on the leaderboard, but after Griffin muscled in, they knocked both the Wonder Zoo team and Hidden Immortal off the ranks. Since Hidden Immortal didn’t get along with Griffin anyway, plenty of players in the group were more than happy to revel in the drama.

“Two minutes? Griffin’s hired hands are seriously slacking this week.”  

“Impressive! Two minutes faster—probably not a pure healer, maybe an attack-oriented combat medic?”  

“A combat medic outrunning a beastmaster with their natural pathfinding advantage in Qingshan Academy? What kind of strategy is that?”  

The captain of the Hidden Immortal squad immediately reached out to Xiaoyao Xian, asking, “You know this guy?”  

Xiaoyao Xian didn’t know them—he’d just stumbled across the drama while spectating. “No clue. The speedrun leaderboard doesn’t give detailed stats, or I could’ve figured out how they cleared it.”  

“Boss, wasn’t the historical best time for Qingshan Academy just over 12 minutes too?”  

It’s not that Qingshan Academy’s historical record was unbreakable. Over a month ago, during the early stages of the game, someone had set the all-time best record for the dungeon—within 12 minutes, about 30 seconds faster than this new one.  

That record still stood because it was achieved under extremely tight conditions. The record-breaker had gotten lucky, encountering a courtyard with hardly any mobs, saving a ton of time. Later, other skilled players tested it out and found that without that kind of luck, even the best beastmaster summoner strategy would take at least 10 minutes to deal with the mobs across seven shifting courtyards. Even if you could down the boss, the headmaster, in 3 minutes, the best time would still hover around 13 minutes.  

Not a beastmaster.  

So how did this person do it?  

Xiaoyao Xian racked his brain but came up empty. He tossed a screenshot into another group chat:  

“What kind of playstyle is this from Qi Ling Village?”  

—-

The moment Zhou Sui stepped out of the dungeon, a message from his buddy Slack Bro popped up like clockwork.  

Breaking a record triggered a server announcement, and Slack Bro didn’t even bother checking the wild map boss drops before spamming Zhou Sui with messages.  

“Holy crap! Insane! I saw your announcement!”  

Zhou Sui ignored the flood of messages. His rewards had already landed in his inventory when he finished the run. He’d known he’d beaten the record, though it took a bit longer than he’d hoped—probably because he bumped into a couple extra mobs in the last courtyard. Luck was never really on his side. Zhou Sui stretched a little, rolling his wrist as the weapons in his gadget box shifted with the motion.  

From needle to scythe, then quickly to pestle—his skill swaps were getting smoother. He twirled the weapon casually, reminded of how much he used to enjoy gadgets.  

Zhou Sui had always been good at gadget-based combat. Back in the training camp, while others collected all sorts of props, he focused on gathering gadgets. Short weapons, long weapons—he had them all. Long weapons had bigger swing ranges, but the wide movements often made his actions feel clunky if he over-rotated. So he’d always preferred short weapons. As long as his reflexes were quick enough, a short weapon could hit exactly where he wanted.  

In the game, the weapon-switching speed was even faster than in the camp. The needle spun nimbly between his fingers before snapping back into the box with a *whoosh*.  

Zhou Sui cleaned up his inventory.  

The first clear had dropped basic rewards—brush, ink, paper, and inkstone. The second clear doubled that haul: brush, ink, paper, and inkstone x3, plus an extra material reward, [Agarwood Ink].  

Feeding this reward to his Serpent Venom Water skill gave a hefty chunk of experience—the skill’s progress bar shot up visibly.  

Right after he fed the new materials, a *ding* sounded in his ear.  

[Congratulations to player Cycle of Eternity for topping the Qingshan Academy weekly speedrun leaderboard! Rewards have been sent to your inventory—please check them!]  

Has the leaderboard been finalized? 

The rewards were generous. Some were gear materials Zhou Sui couldn’t use yet, but the skill materials included a gold-tier rare drop. He fed all the usable skill materials into Serpent Venom Water, combining them with his earlier rewards, and finally pushed the skill to its second-level upgrade.  

[Healing · Serpent Venom Water (Rare) (Level 2/3)]  

[Upgrade Effect [Poison Strike]: Consecutive Serpent Venom attacks can stack a poison damage debuff, up to 3 stacks. Each stack adds an extra 1% poison damage effect.]  

Zhou Sui didn’t focus on the base attack stats. His eyes landed on the extra poison damage stacking—1% per stack, 3% at three stacks.  

This meant Serpent Venom Water’s original max damage over 3 seconds with successful combos was 6% HP. With Poison Strike stacked via combos, the max crit damage after 3 seconds could hit 6% + 3%.  

The skill upgrade gave Zhou Sui a clear insight: Serpent Venom Water, as a basic attack skill, wasn’t built for high burst damage. Each hit was modest, but with successful combos, the damage could stack steadily over time.  

The prerequisite is stacking combos—without combos, the damage is just the bare minimum.  

It looks like a skill with decent HP-draining potential, but in practice, it demands a lot from the environment.  

“Combos, huh…” Zhou Sui mused thoughtfully. He’d noticed it during his first Qingshan Academy run—lingering too long, getting interrupted by mob skills, or other environmental factors could all break what seemed like an easy combo chain.  

Holographic game skills weren’t as straightforward as he’d thought. The skill designs let players gain an edge right from the start, but the real explosive potential hidden behind every impressive skill relied heavily on the player’s own movement and finesse.  

Slack Bro couldn’t wait any longer and sent a party invite. As soon as he joined, his voice rang out before Zhou Sui even saw him: “Haha, guess I can say I’m acquainted with the top-ranked player now! You snagged the rewards right before the leaderboard locked today—how come you didn’t reply to my messages?”  

Zhou Sui: “Too many messages.”  

And there really were a lot. Tons of stranger DMs, plus a flood of friend requests.  

Slack Bro: “You broke a record—of course people are gonna hit you up. Some might even wanna ‘cpdd’ you.”  

Zhou Sui, puzzled: “Cpdd?”  

Slack Bro snickered: “Means they wanna make you their boyfriend.”  

Zhou: “…”  

Zhou Sui didn’t even glance at them—just hit reject on everything. He also turned off the game’s stranger messages and friend system with one click, finally earning some peace and quiet for his ears.  

“Hey, don’t do that, bro! Cpdd’s not a bad deal. Who doesn’t love a strong player in a game?” Slack Bro was used to Zhou Sui’s quiet nature by now. After chatting on and off for a few days, he’d gotten comfortable and loosened up, though Zhou Sui still barely responded. “Hold hands in-game, and you won’t have to worry about finding online love. Like in my last game—tons of people met up IRL ^[1] In real life—”  

He’d barely caught up when he saw Zhou Sui heading out. “Hey? Where you going?”  

Zhou Sui: “Leveling.”  

And leveling meant leveling. Zhou Sui left the Qingshan Academy area and headed straight to a nearby wild mob zone. He’d already claimed the speedrun rewards, and with no new attempts available yet, there was no point sticking around.

—-

But as Zhou Sui left, his new Qingshan Academy record sparked a small buzz in the StarNet livestream rooms. Meanwhile, the top ten players on the weekly speedrun leaderboard—those with a stake in the outcome—weren’t looking too happy. Mysterious Frog was a pro player, or in other words, someone who made a living off gaming. Everyone in the studio worked for pay, grinding leaderboards and handing over tradeable materials to the boss for inspection.  

They’d already cashed out their Qingshan Academy gig with the boss, but no one expected someone to swoop in and break their record right before the leaderboard locked.  

Their faces darkened. Qingshan Academy was a newbie-zone leaderboard they could dominate, but now the top spot was gone, and with it, the guaranteed tradeable material drop for first place slipped through their fingers.  

Without a lock on the top spot, future clients would surely lowball their rates for leaderboard grinding and material farming.  

“Griffin’s company is asking what’s going on,” one of the studio lackeys piped up.  

Mysterious Frog’s face darkened as he stared at the new record. Their usual clear time hovered around 14 minutes—largely because they had mastered timing tricks to maximize record refreshes and boost tradable material drop rates. “Then we’ll beat his record. Getting 12 minutes has to involve some luck.”  

The lackey asked, “Can we beat it?”  

Mysterious Frog glanced at the friend request that couldn’t be sent in-game and Cycle of Eternity’s grayed-out ID. Gritting his teeth, he said, “…We have to. Even if it’s impossible.”  

—-

When Zhou Sui logged off, the room was quiet. His mechanical cat was asleep in its little nest.  

He stood up and immediately felt his stomach growl. Turning to rummage through the storage box, he opened it to a clatter of empty nutrient liquid bottles—ones he’d drunk and tossed in without throwing away.  

He’d been spending too much time in the game lately. Seeing the storage box left Zhou Sui a bit dazed. His peripheral vision caught his hand resting on the cabinet edge, and he realized he’d developed a real interest in the game. As the mechanical cat’s comment about “gaming addiction” resurfaced in his mind, Zhou Sui stepped into the bathroom. He took a quick shower and grabbed some random clothes from the wardrobe to throw on.  

The nutrient liquid the mechanical cat had ordered online was still in transit. To avoid starving, he needed to head out.  

Night had fallen. An autumn breeze carried a crisp chill as Zhou Sui walked to the nearest convenience store, guided by memory. The automated robot was still at the counter. He bought enough nutrient liquid for the next few days, doubling the amount after gauging his recent appetite. On his way out, he spotted a discounted mechanical toy at the door and picked up a pet teaser wand for the mechanical cat.  

The last one had met its end under his careless foot, earning him days of feline grumbling.   

On the way home, as he passed a certain shop, someone stopped him.  

“Man, it’s been half a month since I last saw you, little bro!”  

The gym owner poked his head out, worried Zhou Sui might leave, and eagerly invited him inside. After Zhou Sui entered, the owner enthusiastically handed him a hot drink. “Nobody’s beaten the record you set last time you were here. Over the past half month, a bunch of people came in—some even said my records were fake, refusing to believe it. Look over there—that group’s still busting their butts trying to top your score.”  

The gym was buzzing with customers. Many machines displayed historical records, and the highest scores on the most-used ones belonged to Zhou Sui.  

When Zhou Sui first moved here, the training gear for his home gym hadn’t arrived yet, so he’d come here for a while. His doctor only allowed short bursts of activity—too much exertion made him drowsy—so he’d leave right after a satisfying session.  

He hadn’t spent much time training here. The only thing that stuck with him was how the owner was always so warm, often “casually” lingering near whatever machine Zhou Sui was using.  

It was clumsy, but Zhou Sui never called it out.  

Because the coffee and pastries here were damn good.  

“Oh, they won’t break it anytime soon,” Zhou Sui said matter-of-factly. His body wasn’t what it used to be after years of inactivity, but that record he’d set? Without systematic training, most people wouldn’t come close.  

“That definitely can’t be broken. With your physical condition, we won’t find anyone like you within a hundred miles. Back then, I thought you, little brother, were at a professional level—haha, my judgment was spot on.” The owner was a bit overly enthusiastic. Not only did he serve Zhou Sui a drink, but he also brought out some snacks. “Why haven’t you come by recently?”

Zhou Sui: “Been playing games at home.”

The owner perked up with interest: “Professionally?”

Zhou Sui: “Amateur. I guess you could say I’ve retired.”

The owner: “?”

‘Retired at your age?!’

At this moment, Zhou Sui recalled the game he’d played earlier today—Qingshan Academy. He still remembered a few flawed details from it. He wasn’t someone with many hobbies, and he could only respond casually to the owner’s enthusiasm. Suddenly, he noticed the equipment inside. “Is your holographic simulator free right now?”

The owner paused: “It’s free. It’s in the room at the very back.”

“Then I’ll use it.” Zhou Sui didn’t have a holographic simulator installed at home, so he could only try it out here. When he entered the simulator, he found the environment settings were pretty bare. Relying on his memory, he recreated a few of the challenging points from Qingshan Academy using the simulator, setting up a rough approximation of the environment before diving in to test it.

However, the simulator couldn’t replicate his weapon—it could only be set to a single generic tool—and it couldn’t fully recreate Qingshan Academy either. 

He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but after getting used to the settings in Divine Tree, the data from other holographic simulators didn’t feel as realistic to him.

After tweaking the flawed details he’d noticed earlier, Zhou Sui exited the simulator. The owner tried to keep him around to chat, but seeing that Zhou Sui was set on leaving, he stuffed a business card into his hand, saying to keep in touch whether there was something up or not. The card had the owner’s private contact number on it.

By the time Zhou Sui got home, it was already a bit late. When he opened the door, the mechanical cat didn’t stir—it was fast asleep.

Feeling a little tired, Zhou Sui sat on the sofa in a daze. After a while, he opened his optical computer to search for Qingshan Academy. There were no more chances to replay it in-game, so he could only look online for information related to Qingshan Academy to fill in the gaps he hadn’t noticed. However, the strategies circulating on the StarNet varied wildly—they were all the latest guides he’d already seen, with the fastest professional strategy credited to a beastmaster from Tian He Shan.

He had to switch search terms, changing from “strategy” to “Qingshan Academy map analysis.”

With the new keywords, even fewer results came up… and the ones that did were mostly discussions about how many courtyard variations Qingshan Academy had, trying to figure out the probability calculations of the Divine Tree mainframe. In other words, they were gambling on luck to find tricks.

It seems there is nothing useful…

Zhou Sui was about to give up.

Then, buried beneath countless strategy videos, he spotted one with a moderate amount of views—  

[Terrain Changes and Field-of-View Analysis (Qingshan Academy)]

[I get the logic, but it’s really sleep-inducing…]  

[This is about map mechanics, right? The uploader’s a tech pro!]

Zhou Sui’s spirits lifted instantly. Amid the flood of clickbait strategy titles on the StarNet, there was actually something this straightforward and proper.

When he clicked into the video, Zhou Sui didn’t see a person. Instead, it showed a simulated map of Qingshan Academy built using a holographic simulator, along with an analysis of each small monster’s visible range. Simply put, this wasn’t a dungeon walkthrough video—it was a breakdown of the dungeon’s terrain and the monsters’ attack orientations.

It was indeed straightforward, with no leading commentary, just a flat, direct style of narration.

The video didn’t cover how to clear the dungeon. Instead, it focused on the driest data analysis. Compared to other popular strategy videos, its view count was pitifully low, and even the comments were mostly clustered at the beginning. The upload date was a month ago—right around the time Divine Tree had just launched—indicating this was recorded during the initial exploration phase of Qingshan Academy.

“Currently, the academy’s courtyards have 108 possible layout variations, but the core spawning patterns can be condensed into 27 basic types, distinguishable by the distribution of scholars in the first courtyard… “

The uploader’s voice sounded like a synthetic one, and the narration was exceptionally methodical. It started with a few sentences summarizing the patterns, then dove straight into explaining the terrain rules and the distribution patterns of the 27 monster refresh models, paired with visuals from the simulator. For anyone who’d paid attention to the courtyard layouts, it was easy to follow along.

In a holographic game, the bosses and small monsters in-game had a certain degree of intelligence.

It was as if they’d been given a dimension of thought, so these small monsters weren’t rigid—their eyes moved, and their visible range was incredibly wide. In other words, the scholar mobs were highly agile; with a turn of their eyes, they could see a much broader area and easily lock onto players.

The in-game map changed, but the mechanics were fixed.

The flaw Zhou Sui had encountered today was underestimating the gap in the small monsters’ ability to lock onto his field of view, which had delayed him by about ten seconds before entering the boss courtyard. This video, however, pinpointed the exact calculation rules for the monsters’ vision—crystal clear and packed with raw, calculated insights that saved him the time of exploring the map rules himself.

The video was only 10 minutes long, and Zhou Sui slowed it down to watch.

It wasn’t until the end that he saw the credits for the model and data provider—  

Yin-Yang Harmony.