[Serpent Venom Water]

The commotion not far away still hadn’t died down. The two leaderboard players who triggered the quest had long since left, but more and more players were flocking to Tong Shi Town!  

“You think I was just watching the crowd for fun?” Slack Bro turned his head toward the growing throng in the distance. “Skill mutation—that’s what every Divine Tree player is scrambling for! In the whole game, the rarest and most sought-after drops are skill materials.”  

Divine Tree’s original tagline was that every gifted one was unique.  

Unlike other games, Divine Tree was famous for its skill freedom, shedding many of the rigid frameworks other games imposed and leaving more room for players to experiment.  

Everyone got a fixed number of skill points, so the powerful skills everyone picked had a high overlap rate.  

But once you applied materials to a skill, the skills on the Divine Tree skill tree could evolve or mutate!  

And the materials that triggered these skill tree mutations came from all sorts of unexplored drops scattered across the Divine Tree world!  

Slack Bro opened his skill tree, and Zhou Sui immediately noticed something unusual about his build. The lit-up nodes on his skill tree glowed, but one of them shimmered with flowing light, as if adorned with something special. “This is from a rare event I ran into a while back—a crit stone drop. It boosted this skill’s crit rate. If I want to enhance it further, I’ll need to feed it more materials of the same type.”  

The radiant glow swirling through his skill tree set Slack Bro’s apart from the norm. By comparison, Zhou Sui’s skill tree—pure points with no materials applied—looked like a blank slate, as ordinary as it got.  

“Those two rare materials you sold were the same kind?” Zhou Sui thought back to the source of his sudden windfall.  

Slack Bro shook his head. “Nah, those weren’t. This game has crafting materials for refining gear too. Mine were equipment materials. Skill material drop rates are insanely low. Otherwise, why do you think leaderboard big shots jump at the slightest hint of a rumor? Rare skill materials are few and far between!”  

No big shot was bored enough to hang out in newbie servers—they were rolling alts to hunt materials, planning to transfer them out of the newbie zone to their mains later.  

Newbie servers were overcrowded because tons of guild-like player groups were hoarding materials!  

Now Zhou Sui finally understood why leaderboard players were so obsessed with progression. Materials could enhance skills—a detail that didn’t quite match some of the guides he’d skimmed online.  

As he mulled this over, Zhou Sui’s peripheral vision landed on Slack Bro’s skill tree again. Besides that standout crit boost from the rare material, there were faint traces of glow on some other skills—much dimmer, likely from common materials.  

Not only that, but not all of Slack Bro’s skills had enhancement traces.  

Zhou Sui considered and concluded that materials had varying qualities, with rare being the best, and skill selection was also important.

Slack Bro was still explaining skill enhancement materials to Zhou Sui when a voice suddenly piped up beside them—  

“So how do you get skill materials?”  

Slack Bro jerked his chin toward the bustling material shop next to the weapon store. “Basic skill materials can be bought from NPCs, mid-tier ones circulate among players, and the rare ones? Those are what the big shots chase after.”  

He added, “When players get skill materials, you have to judge them. They glow when they’re near the skill tree.”  

“They glow?”  

Zhou Sui suddenly glanced at his inventory. He pulled something out, and the next moment, a prompt popped up in front of him—  

[Please select the skill you wish to refine.]  

Zhou Sui looked at a specific skill and asked, “So you take the material out and pick a skill, right?”  

“Yeah, if it glows, it means you can apply it—” Slack Bro was about to demonstrate when he turned and caught sight of what Zhou Sui was holding. A dark glow flared up!  

Slack Bro: “What the—?!”  

A burst of flowing light flashed between them, shimmering with an eerie brilliance before settling onto Zhou Sui’s skill tree. It crystallized on one of the first three nodes—[Healing]—causing the skill to glow with an odd light. Unlike Slack Bro’s vibrant, radiant node, Zhou Sui’s gave off a strange, dark sheen.  

Slack Bro’s eyes widened. After choking back another “What the—,” he stammered, “You!?”  

“You’ve got a rare material?!”  

That kind of glow only came from rare skill materials!  

“Holy crap, I’ve never seen a color like this before.” Slack Bro hurriedly dragged Zhou Sui into a nearby alley. “You’ve got something this good and didn’t say anything? You can’t just slap it on randomly—you could ruin a skill!”  

Zhou Sui: “Didn’t you know?”  

Slack Bro, bewildered: “Huh?”  

Zhou Sui: “Fang.”  

What? Fang??  

In a daze, Slack Bro suddenly pieced it together. It was that Golden Serpent King’s venom fang—the trash material every player had scoffed at, cursed with a debuff that could poison its holder to death at any moment! That useless junk isn’t an equipment material?? Every Golden Serpent King fang in the past had been for gear!  

Wait, hold on—that debuff?!  

It got applied! Where did the skill land?!  

Zhou Sui: “The effect’s pretty decent.”  

Pretty decent???  

Slack Bro had a bad feeling. When he followed Zhou Sui’s gesture, the grin on his face froze. The dark glow had settled on [Healing], one of Qi Ling Village’s three starting medical skills—a bread-and-butter attack-heal skill every healer in Qi Ling carried.  

[Heal · Serpent Venom Water (Rare) (Upgradable)]

The Golden Serpent King’s treasured venom fang has corroded and mutated the skill [Healing] into a venomous effect, stripping away all healing/support functions. It can no longer provide healing or buffs to allies. Post-mutation, it gains a persistent serpent venom erosion effect, scaling damage with the player’s maximum spell attack power. It delivers a sustained 3-second venomous assault on a single target with consecutive hits, adding the negative effect [Poison Damage], which inflicts an additional 1~2% of poison-based damage to the hostile target.  

[Upgrade Effects ****, Unlocked]

Slack Bro turned to stone on the spot. Zhou Sui, meanwhile, studied the skill details on his own. After a while, he glanced at the unusually silent chatterbox. “What’s up?”  

“You’re asking me what’s wrong? Dude, do you even know what skill you just used?! Even though the base healing of a normal attack heal becomes really low as character HP increases, it’s still a basic attack, for crying out loud!”  

Slack Bro jabbed a finger at the “loses all healing effects” tag, practically wailing. “You ruined a healing skill!!! And you ruined a no-cooldown basic attack healing skill!! In all of Qi Ling Village, this is the only medical skill that isn’t affected by the global cooldown, a basic attack skill!”  

No-cooldown skills are widely known as combo transitions. They allow for move chaining when necessary and can even be used to adjust the global cooldown for maximized DPS or healing.

Physicians and Apothecaries in Qi Ling Village all picked this skill—it was an essential part of their healing toolkit. With it trashed, Zhou Sui’s ability to heal and withstand pressure would be a step below everyone else’s from now on.  

The more he looked, the more Slack Bro felt his blood pressure spiking. “Rarity 65?! Holy crap, that death-dealing venom fang actually has a rarity of 65?! Where are you gonna find materials to replace it later?”  

Skill materials were scarce, and once applied, they couldn’t be removed unless replaced with something of higher rarity. Common skill materials were fine to slap on casually since they could be swapped out easily, but rare ones demanded caution—once you used them, replacing them meant hunting down an even rarer material!  

How could this guy just throw a rare material on without a second thought??  

“What’s wrong with it?”  

Zhou Sui had already read through the skill effects. “I got an extra no-cooldown attack skill out of it.”  

“What do you need an attack skill for? Even if you’re going for an attack Apothecary, you’d still need—” Slack Bro stopped mid-sentence, finally noticing the extreme skew in Zhou Sui’s skill tree. Aside from a few scattered points in medical and potion skills, everything else was dumped into the weapon branch at the bottom—a whole chain of points at that. “Holy crap, you specced into weapon skills?!”  

The weapon branch—the most utterly ordinary of Qi Ling Village’s three major professions!  

Unlike the straightforward healing of the medical branch or the support-focused potion branch, it was a physical attack specialization relying on gear, a niche within the mainstream that few players picked.  

After all, for higher physical damage, you had Sui Xing City with its talent bonuses. For faster attack speed, Yin Yue Alliance churned out assassins galore. Why would players wanting to play a physical class specifically come from Qi Ling Village when choosing Sui Xing City or Yin Yue Alliance wasn’t better?!  

So, among Qi Ling’s three branches—and even across Divine Tree’s current class system—the weapon specialist was widely regarded as the weakest.  

In a split second, Slack Bro’s mind felt like it’d been tossed into an old-school washing machine and spun a hundred times. Then he remembered how this guy had solo-kited mobs up a mountain with just a scythe. So what if this guy goes with a “plain old” weapon build? Hard to wrap his head around, but he could only respect it.  

“Next time, toss some points into the medical branch. Pick up one or two healing skills—good for emergencies, at least you can recover some health.”  

Zhou Sui didn’t know what Slack Bro was thinking, but he didn’t feel like the skill was wasted.  

The skill had a continuous attack effect, with detailed descriptions of its attack power in the skill details. Zhou Sui had only given it a quick glance, focusing more on the part that described the combo’s additional poison-type damage. This was what differentiated it from his usual slashing skills, as it provided an extra damage-over-time effect.  

Initially, the healing skill could indeed restore 40% of his health in one go. However, after he changed his equipment, the healing effect dropped to 10%, turning it into an emergency skill with a negligible impact.    

This bonus damage, though? A closer look at the description showed it was independent of the skill’s base damage.  

A skill’s power scaled with the player’s stat panel—higher attack meant higher skill damage. Serpent Venom Water’s primary hit tied into his stats, but the combo follow-up damage was percentage-based, calculated off the enemy’s health.  

Maxed at 2%?  

What about the upgraded effect, then?  

Upgrading Serpent Venom Water required materials. This time, Zhou Sui hovered over the skill, spotting an [Upgrade] button next to the glowing node on his skill tree.  

He tapped it, and a list of feedable materials popped up.  

Slack Bro, calming his dramatic nerves, figured the swamped weapon shop was a lost cause. “Forget this—didn’t you need a weapon? I’ll take you to another shop… What are you doing?”  

Zhou Sui: “Feeding the skill.”  

Feeding? Feeding the skill?!  

With what materials?!  

Slack Bro glanced at Zhou Sui’s inventory, now half-empty, and racked his brain—what had been in there before?  

“Stuff I picked up grinding the Serpent Cave. A lot had poison effects, so I checked—they were feedable, and I dumped them all in,” Zhou Sui said. He’d figured since the Golden Serpent King and the cave’s Serpent King were a couple, items from the same lineage should work. So he fed it snake skin, snake gall, even a hatching snake egg. “Shame the cave’s a one-time run.”  

Now he got why players chased materials so hard—his full inventory barely pushed the upgrade bar to 20%.  

Slack Bro: “…”

‘You wiped out the snake family, and now you’ve fed the whole family to your skill???’

‘And the kicker—those things actually worked!’  

With a nervous heart, Slack Bro trailed Zhou Sui to another weapon shop in town. Even after Zhou Sui bought a transitional weapon, Slack Bro was still a bit dazed.

Zhou Sui bought his weapon quickly this time, not lingering too long in the shop. As he stepped out, he started heading back toward the forest. Slack Bro reached out to stop him. “Where you off to?”  

“Leveling,” Zhou Sui said, opening his quest panel. It was packed with a bunch of unfinished tasks. “Thanks for the weapon help. Anything else?”  

“Let’s level together!” Slack Bro offered enthusiastically. “We can hit the wilds and grind mobs—I know the spots.”  

Zhou Sui: “You’re Level 31.”  

Slack Bro froze mid-sentence. Right—he’d hit 31 thanks to the Golden Serpent King. Regular forest mobs wouldn’t give him decent experience anymore, and the quests were outdated for him too. With their level gap, teaming up to grind wasn’t practical, and piggybacking off Zhou Sui wouldn’t work either. “25’s kinda awkward, yeah. Even the lowest-level dungeons don’t unlock till 28… Oh, right—make sure to stash valuable cash and items in the warehouse. If you die in the wild, stuff drops. Be careful.”

At that, Slack Bro casually pulled a pile of items from his inventory and dropped them. “Take these for now.”  

The stuff hit the ground—some familiar to Zhou Sui, like honey fruit, and others weird props with various effects: red potions for health regen, talismans for defense boosts… Each one had a crafter’s name attached, and the bold ID read: Slack Bro.  

Zhou Sui suddenly recalled that during his self-introduction, this guy had called himself a life skills player. “You made these?”  

“Gotta survive in the wilds—self-sufficiency’s the name of the game. I told you I’m a life skills player ^[1] refers to someone who plays games focusing on life skills or non-combat aspects,” Slack Bro said. “That crew probably won’t come after you, but better safe than sorry.”  

Zhou Sui thanked him, and Slack Bro, eager to check out more commotion, took off quickly.  

Before leaving, he told Zhou Sui to hit him up if he had any questions.  

Leveling up was a real challenge for Zhou Sui. After parting ways with Slack Bro, he headed back to the forest to tackle quests. Even after finishing a few big ones, he still hadn’t hit 26. The experience bar hadn’t felt this long before, but post-25, each level was a slog. Questing wasn’t as comfy as mob grinding for him, so he followed a newbie guide to the forest’s 25-27 mob zone.  

The area was crawling with mobs perfect for Zhou Sui, but there wasn’t a single open spot to grind.  

Teams of players had claimed every spawn point—mobs got yanked the second they refreshed. Zhou Sui skimmed the nearby channel’s chatter and realized that since spawn points were fixed, mob zones were dominated by pre-formed squads. With so many players around, you even had to queue for a slot.

Unfortunately, the mob zone was packed right now—most players on Server 3145 were stuck in this level range.  

Joining a team and waiting for a spot would mean at least a half-hour delay.  

Zhou Sui opted to turn back, sticking to quests to get more familiar with the game’s mechanics.  

Over the next few days, he didn’t rush to level up. Instead, he cleared out several key quests highlighted in the guides.  

Questing was relatively straightforward. In his downtime, he imported and skimmed through all sorts of current Divine Tree guides. What Slack Bro said was easy to grasp, but the StarNet descriptions were more in-depth. With a clear direction, he picked up the game’s ins and outs much faster.  

While questing, he kept testing Serpent Venom Water.  

This skill, being a basic attack with no cooldown, was used very frequently. Zhou Sui had allocated many of his initial stat points to sustain and speed, which resulted in his attack stat being relatively low.  

Back when he fought the Golden Serpent King, the fear trait had boosted his damage, making it an easy kill. Without that bonus now, facing regular mobs four or five levels above him felt sluggish.  

But that was just the first hit. When Zhou Sui experimented with combos, he found that once he chained over 10 hits, Serpent Venom Water’s poison damage became significant. The higher the combo count and the faster his attack speed, the more reliably the poison ticked for 2%—pretty much the skill’s current max damage cap.  

He mixed in other skills for combos, and as long as the gap between hits didn’t exceed 4 seconds, maintaining Serpent Venom Water’s chain delivered solid damage.  

The more he used it, the more it felt like second nature.  

“Pretty handy.”  

In-game skills only needed to be learned—no years of grinding to master them. Compared to reality, it was way too convenient. For Zhou Sui, this was part of the appeal. No one would turn down learning more tricks and skills, but just picking them up wasn’t worth bragging about. The real key was blending them seamlessly into your toolkit.  

The only downside? Serpent Venom Water’s upgrade materials were rare as hell. Days of questing, and he hadn’t found a single thing to feed it.  

Just then, a golden announcement flashed across the top of Zhou Sui’s screen.

[Announcement] Player Mage Alt 123 has successfully cleared the [Liuli Palace] dungeon with a completion time of 23:02:33, claiming the top spot on the [Liuli Palace] daily and weekly leaderboards!  

[World] Greasy Noodles: Holy crap, the leaderboard got refreshed! Are the Wonder Zoo big shots done with their mains and now smashing it on alts?!  

[World] Skateboarder: The weekly list closes in 4 hours, so the pros are all grinding ranks now.  

[World] Puzzle Fiend: Even the newbie zone is this competitive? I thought only the high-level areas were this intense.  

[World] Meow Meow is Miao Miao:*l The rewards are too good to pass up, right? The big shots are all chasing those juicy prizes.  

The speedrun leaderboard—one of the comprehensive ranking types in Divine Tree’s dungeon gameplay.  

Each dungeon had its top performers listed based on various clear conditions—first kills, fastest completion times, and so on—split into categories like First Kill Leaderboard, Record Leaderboard, and more. The Speedrun Leaderboard was the most frequently updated of them all.  

It was further divided into daily, weekly, and monthly rankings, judged solely by completion time. The shorter the time, the higher the rank. Those who made it to the top could snag rewards tied to each ranking period.  

Zhou Sui remembered this Mage Alt 123. A few days back in Tong Shi Town, this guy had triggered a special quest.  

Slack Bro had said he was a leaderboard high-roller—one of the game’s elite players.  

Zhou Sui wasn’t too hung up on the guy hitting the announcements again, but when he clicked into the Speedrun Leaderboard, he noticed the reward drops listed there. They were exactly the kind of materials he’d been grinding mobs and quests for days without finding.  

Zhou Sui muttered, “Speedrun Leaderboard rewards, huh?”  

Liuli Palace was a Level 35 dungeon—way out of his reach. But as he scrolled down, he spotted a solo dungeon: [Qingshan Academy].  

[Qingshan Academy]—a Level 28 solo dungeon, difficulty ★★★.  

Level 28. A dungeon tier he could finally tackle.