Nothing could remain concealed while my Dark Pupils skill was active, so I was able to spot the red dot hiding somewhere inside the dark, wet soil in front of me. I slowly got closer before kicking off the battle with Dragon Slaying Slash!

Bang!

The Dragon Slaying Slash pierced the ground and caused a soft, rubbing noise. Right after that, a venomous stinger burst out of the ground. The way it glowed green in the dark caused shivers in my heart. I didn’t want to know how painful it would be to be stung by this thing...

Ss ss...

The mob’s stinger swam across solid ground like a shark’s dorsal fin on the sea. When it came within 5 yards of me, the entire creature abruptly burst out of the ground. I was surprised by how big it was. It was at least a person tall, and it possessed savage features, multiple limbs and a tail stinger that swayed erratically in midair. It was terrifying!

The Venomous Scorpion’s exact stats appeared to me thanks to Dark Pupils. It was as strong as I expected it to be—

Venomous Scorpion (Fiend)

Level: 245

Attack: 15500~21000

Defense: 18000

HP: 2,200,000

Skills: Venomous Sting, Demonic Armor, Frost Poison Flurry

Introduction: The Venomous Scorpion is a terrifying evil spirit that lives in Iron Skull Wilderness. It possesses incredible offensive potential and a deadly poison that can kill an adult earth dragon with a single drop. For tens of thousands of years, nothing, and no one, had been able to chase away the Venomous Scorpions from their habitat.

……

Holy shit, 21000 Attack? This mob was stronger than many of the bosses I had encountered in the past, and it was a fiend-rank mob—the rank above dread—too. I couldn’t wait to profit from it!

"Come at me, coward!"

I spurred my little dragon forward and hit the Venomous Scorpion with a devastating Thousand Ice Slash + Burning Blade Slash four-hit combo immediately. Although it was a fiend-rank mob with a total of 18k Defense, it still wasn’t good enough to mitigate my attack. Huge damage numbers kept flying above its head—

128883!

86623!

132029!

173982!

……

I had dealt 500k damage in an instant! I could take out this Venomous Scorpion in half an hour at most, not to mention that I was assisted by the Phantom Wolf King too.

"Hiss…"

While the Venomous Scorpion was screeching in pain, icy energy suddenly surrounded its pincers before it struck me twice across my shield. A kind of freezing energy immediately slowed me and dealt a sizable amount of damage.

32187!

29181!

Its Attack was pretty high, and it wasn’t done yet. Before I could react, its stinger stabbed into my shoulder with lightning speed almost as if my Heaven-burning Armor didn’t exist. My HP immediately began dropping at an incredible rate.

Beep!

Combat Log: The Venomous Scorpion used "Venomous Sting", dealing 45282 poison damage. You have been poisoned, and will take 5000 poison damage every second for 10 seconds!

……

I was stunned. This mob is a bit overpowered, isn’t it? In just one combo, it had deleted over 100k HP from me and left me with a status condition that was going to delete another 50k in total! This is crazy!

I kept dishing out basic attacks with the Purple Ying Sword until the 6-second restriction on my skills had passed. I was going to execute Universe Break + Burning Blade Slash combo, but Universe Break triggered the Purple Ying Sword’s septuple damage passive and scored a critical hit, effectively dealing 14 times more damage than normal to the Venomous Scorpion and one-shotting it! As a result, my Burning Blade Slash missed its target completely!

2598848!

+519769!

……

The ridiculous 2.6 million damage hit allowed me to lifesteal a whopping 510k from the now-dead mob. It was so crazy that I felt sorry for complaining about the Venomous Scorpion’s "OP" offensive power. It was nothing compared to what I just did!

Tsk tsk, the Ancient Divine Armament version of my Purple Ying Sword was so much stronger than the original!

"Roar roar roar…"

Green poison sloshed out of the giant hole that Universe Break drilled into the Venomous Scorpion’s body as it collapsed. It dropped two pieces of equipment, one card and one Purple Crystal in total. What a generous mob it was!

I picked up the equipment drops and gave them a look. One of them was Silver-grade, and the other, Dark Steel. Normally, I wouldn’t even bother storing them in my bag, but these particular items had one special quality going for them: they were both Level 200. At the current stage of the game, most players were fighting low-level mobs and finding equally low-level equipment—a large majority of them were Level 180 or below—only. Even those who were at a sufficient level and skill didn’t know where they could grind equipment like this. As a result, there were practically no items at Level 200 or above on the market.

When the number of Level 200 players began to grow by leaps and bounds—it should take half a month or a month at most—I fully expected these items to sell like hot cakes. And why wouldn’t they? Level 200 Silver-grade equipment was as good as Level 150 Immortal-grade equipment. An irrational player who picked their equipment based on item grade instead of cold, hard stats was only going to starve to death eventually.

Next, I checked out the card dropped by the Venomous Scorpion. A big grin immediately crept onto my face when I saw its effects—

Venomous Scorpion Card: Increases Attack by 50%, grants 20% armor penetration, and increases poison resistance by 50%. Grants immunity to Petrification status effect. Level Requirement: 200. Duration: 120 minutes.

……

I used it immediately. I’m going to have to fight a lot more Venomous Scorpion after this, and this card gives me exactly what I need to tank its poison damage effectively!

More red dots appeared as I ventured deeper into the cave. Most of them were buried under the ground or inside the walls. However, the deeper I went into the cave, the more numerous the enemies became. It was why I didn’t dare to fight more than 3 Venomous Scorpions at the same time. Losing levels because I was hasty would invalidate all the time and effort I had put into grinding all that experience in the first place. Yes, the royal road here was definitely luring the Venomous Scorpions over with Dragon Slaying Slash and killing them one by one.

The Venomous Scorpion also yielded an incredible amount of experience, so there was no reason to take a risk at all.

Sometimes, the mobs would drop something that looked like a black crystal. It was the Scorpion Venom, vials of which were the quest item I was tasked to collect. They felt ice cold to touch.

Time passed bit by bit. I fought my way toward the innermost area of the map.

Pop!

A pleasant surprise occurred while I was killing a Venomous Scorpion. It had dropped a shiny, orange ring that looked anything but basic, and it wasn’t. The beautiful thing didn’t look like something a non-boss could drop at all—

Purple Cloud Ring (Immortal-grade, Outstanding★★★★★★)

Strength: +1200

Stamina: +1150

Agility: +1090

Tactics: +75

Passive: Increases user’s Attack and Defense by 35%

Passive: Increases user’s poison resistance by 50%

Outstanding Property: Purple Cloud Strike. When attacking, the user has a chance to poison the target. Potency of the poison scales with user’s Attack.

Level Requirement: 200

Reputation Requirement: 400000

……

This Immortal-grade item was as good as some low-level Cambrian Divine Armaments, and it didn’t even come from a boss or even a miniboss! What is wrong with my karma today??

I hurriedly brought up the database, typed in "Immortal" in the equipment space and "Fiend" in the monster space before checking for the corresponding drop rate. The result was a staggering 0.001%!

In short, a 0.001% drop rate meant that, on average, I would have to kill 100k Venomous Scorpion to get an Immortal-grade item. Not only that, it was one of the rarest equipment drop one could get from a mob, a ring! I should absolutely buy two lotteries today when I logged out of the game. With luck—and I absolutely had that today—I might even win the 50 million jackpot!

I checked out my existing rings to decide which one I should replace. In the end, I decided to remove the Level 120 Spirit-grade Silver Dragon Ring. Although the Silver Dragon Storm was pretty strong, its trigger rate was too low for it to be worth it at this stage of the game. On the other hand, the Apparition Ring would remain a very useful item for a very long time to come. My mind decided, I replaced the Silver Dragon Ring with the Purple Cloud Ring immediately. Tsk tsk, this is awesome!

My stats jumped up visibly, and my max HP now sat at a whopping 430k without any buffs. It should be enough to challenge the final boss of this map. Even if it wasn’t, HP wasn’t the main stat I relied on when challenging a boss anyway. My Purple Ying Sword’s 20% lifesteal was the attribute that would allow me to facetank the boss like a real man...

……

Anyway, after that brief but pleasant interlude, I continued fighting my way toward my destination. The entire journey had lasted almost 5 hours, but I had finally managed to reach the innermost area of the Scorpion King’s Cave. I managed to obtain a lot of equipment, and my experience had skyrocketed by 45%. I was now less than 20% away from hitting Level 207. So far, it looked like Iron Skull Wilderness was good enough to level me up to 210. Also, the player density was scarce enough that I should be able to hog the entire map to myself.

Besides the Immortal-grade Purple Cloud Ring I got entirely out of the blue, I found 3 Heaven-grade and 7 Earth-grade pieces of equipment. They were all Outstanding Level 200 equipment, the first choice of any player at the current stage of the game. Currently, my plan was to give them away to my guild’s core players when I finally returned to my country because they were as good as the reward equipment of the S1 instance, if not better. Moreover, they were actually easier to obtain than the S1 instance equipment. Until now, no one had managed to beat the S1 instance, let alone farm its unique set. It was just that difficult.

It was reported in the forums that Song of Cloud and Water had ordered Song of Ice and Fire, God Bone and Ringwraith to form a party with Stranger of Three Lifetimes and Moon Dew to grind the S1 instance. However, their cooperation still ended in failure. The biggest reason behind their failure was their inability to defeat the bosses. More accurately, neither Song of Ice and Fire nor God Bone were tanky enough to hold the boss long enough for the damage dealers to kill it. As a result, they kept getting wiped.

I glanced at the Purple Ying Sword and the Ancient Divine Dragon and thought that I should give the S1 instance a try after I returned to Sky City. Right now, my Defense was far stronger than Gui Guzi or He Yi’s, not to mention that my weapon had a 20% lifesteal effect. There should be no one whose survivability surpassed mine in the entire world.

So far, my journey in Scorpion King’s Cave was a fruitful and joyous one. It was too bad I couldn’t return to Sky City yet, or I could’ve launched a wave of buying sprees with these items myself. My in-game nationality still hadn’t been restored, and even my Air Force One had closed its doors. I knew because the system notified me about its closing, and it would remain so until I returned to the China server. Truly a shame.

……

Suddenly, a cold wind blew from the front. It was so cold that even the Ancient Divine Dragon shivered a bit. Then, a pair of red eyes appeared from the darkness, and the gigantic Scorpion King charged us while emitting a series of spine-crawling hisses. Heavens, this boss looks incredibly disgusting!