Players, Please Board the Train

The train heading to other wormhole points was quite different from previous trains.

First, the contents of the train carriages had increased. For example, before there were only passenger carriages and a dining car, but now besides those two, there was also a separate lounge where players could spend money to pass the time, and the dining car had changed from one to three.

Second were the carriages themselves. Previously they were mostly twenty-four seats, but now one carriage became twelve small rooms, arranged along the four corners, with a public living room in the middle containing tables and chairs and such, more than enough for twelve people to amuse themselves.

The front and rear door opening and closing methods were still the same as before. The front carriage could directly open the rear carriage’s door, but if the rear carriage wanted to enter the front carriage, they needed to press the doorbell.

Finally was the train’s exterior appearance. Previous trains used transparent materials on the left, right, and top, though the partitions of the front and rear carriage doors used opaque materials. You could only see the connecting carriage in the middle and the front and rear carriage doors through the windows in between. Now, aside from some daily necessities and decorations inside the train, all the carriage walls, including the walls of rooms and restrooms, had been changed to transparent materials. However, the restrooms and rooms could be switched to frosted mode, and the front and rear doors had also been changed to automatic doors that retracted to both sides.

Overall, the entire train felt more high-tech. Ordering food used projection screens, serving food used automatic hovering robots, and passengers could choose to dine in the carriage or in the dining car. The dining car no longer had a threshold.

Train attendants generally stayed in the lounge. If you had special requests you could call for them, but whether they would actually do anything was another matter. They had no separate passageways, coming and going through the carriages, though a new chef performance segment had been added.

Naturally, the entire train had become wider and longer. Xu Huo looked at the floating sign on the carriage wall. He was currently in Carriage Sixteen of Train C171.

Only one player had boarded at the same station as him. After getting on, he had only seen three players in the same carriage, and one who stayed in his room the whole time.

The player who had boarded with Xu Huo was probably also a new upgrade. After getting on, he first walked around observing the carriage’s layout. Xu Huo made no effort to hide that he was a newcomer and had grasped the train’s changes in the shortest time possible.

Both being newcomers, the two nodded at each other in greeting without exchanging names.

Of the two men and one woman resting outside, the short-haired female player had only sized them up briefly at first before focusing on browsing the dining car’s menu. The meals the train could provide numbered in the hundreds.

Of the two male players, one sat facing the window, seemingly admiring the scenery outside, with a mechanical dog crouching at his feet.

The other was one-eyed, with a ring pattern branded over his blind left eye. He paid the two newcomers no mind, his eye drifting toward the short-haired female player from time to time.

C-level players generally had an evolution rate that could reach 50%, and their senses were sharper. The female player had noticed the one-eyed man’s gaze from the start but had held back. When she raised her head after finishing her order through the terminal, a giant sword as wide as a person flew toward the one-eyed man. She leaped after it, and when the one-eyed man blocked the sword with a defensive item, she grabbed the hilt, swinging the sword out horizontally with her arm!

The one-eyed player was not as easy to deal with as imagined. He patted his clothes, and six palm-sized hexagonal metal pieces automatically connected into a larger shield, blocking the sword strike without a scratch.

The short-haired female player used the momentum to leap up, launching a flurry of kicks from the air toward the one-eyed man’s other side. Her shoes were probably an item, as a small-range shockwave burst from the tips when she kicked!

The one-eyed man immediately raised his right arm to block. His forearm was wrapped with a defensive item, but direct contact did not completely dissipate the female player’s force. Even from far away, you could see the muscles on his arm vibrating. Then the one-eyed man retreated several steps to create distance, saying without changing expression: ”I just looked at you twice. No need to kill someone over that, right?”

The female player did not entangle herself in debating whether there should be a necessary causal relationship between ”looking twice” and ”killing someone.” Instead she said simply and brutally: ”Killing needs a reason? I just don’t like the look of you.”

The one-eyed man narrowed his remaining eye. ”I let you off with one hand because you’re a woman. Don’t be ungrateful.”

The female player sneered, pulled out a spinning top, and threw it to the ground. ”Single-person passage!”

Xu Huo stepped aside and looked down to see a semi-transparent walkway appear on the floor, only one meter wide, running directly toward the front and rear carriage doors. The female player and the one-eyed man happened to be within this ”single-person passage,” their left and right spaces sealed off. The female player raised the oversized long sword and chopped down at the one-eyed man’s head. After he defended once again, she used an item from a distance to kick him out of the carriage.

The carriage doors were fully automatic, sensing someone approaching in advance and letting the one-eyed man fly out unimpeded, while simultaneously triggering Carriage Seventeen. As the doors on both sides opened and closed, two players from Carriage Seventeen stepped to the doorway, while the short-haired female player ahead had already left Carriage Sixteen and entered the connecting carriage.

The two really had started fighting.

Normally on the train, players would avoid fighting in front of everyone. First, it easily exposed one’s trump cards. Second, win or lose, one could get injured and become prey for other players. But C-level players clearly had no such concerns.

It looked like there would be no result anytime soon. Xu Huo bought a room at the front door, and that was right. The individual rooms in the carriage cost money, five thousand White Bills per night.

The room had only a bed and a desk. It was not spacious, but enough for someone to sleep comfortably. When the frosted function was not activated, people could see each other from inside and outside.

Xu Huo activated the frosted function to cut off outside views, though he could still hear sounds from outside.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he opened his personal panel, preparing to upgrade items.

This dungeon clear gave him two item merge and upgrade opportunities, plus one he originally had this month, for a total of three merge and upgrade chances. He planned to use them all.

There were quite a few items that could be upgraded. Xu Huo leaned toward the two aspects of ranged attacks and tracking.

He currently had two ranged attack items of considerable use. One was the ”Crimson Sword,” the other was ”V. Fanxiao’s Tool of Crime.” The ”Crimson Sword” was a special item, and special items generally could not be merged and upgraded, but the item upgrade permission unlocked by C-level players allowed paying extra to swap for something better. ”V. Fanxiao’s Tool of Crime” could be merged and upgraded with the D-grade item ”Explosive Aesthetics” into a C-grade item.

The Lighter could cover a wide range, but the things it could burn were limited, especially now that players all used high-tech protective suits or item protective suits. ”Explosive Aesthetics” could perform targeted explosions, but the places where it was actually used were not many, and it was hard to reliably target it onto players.

After players’ levels increased, both of these items were more suited to daily life scenarios, burning things or causing explosions. But that did not mean they were useless. In places beyond human power, these were instead two quite good items.