Chapter 1 After the Departure

After the four oddballs from Bing Di left, Feng Bujue continued browsing the mall. The items in the system store were as he expected, mainly various outfits and consumables.

Speaking of outfits, they were indeed good items. Besides giving players a personalized appearance without taking up equipment slots, they also came with attribute bonuses. However, due to Thriller Paradise's blurred data processing of character abilities, the annotations for those attributes generally read things like "Slightly increases total survival value," "Increases firearm accuracy to a certain extent," "Increases jump height slightly," and so on, with no numerical basis.

The types of outfits were mainly divided into tops, bottoms, sets, hats, shoes, and accessories. The game didn't offer skirts, for obvious reasons. However, socks were available in the accessories category, including stockings. Female players who strongly desired to show off their legs could buy shorts or mid-length pants to pair with them.

Each piece of clothing a player wore could "slightly" improve an attribute. Equipping a whole set naturally made one much stronger than wearing nothing at all. And to avoid players having to compromise on appearance when choosing desired attributes, the bonus attributes of all outfits were set as optional. For example, if a player bought a beret, it wouldn't have any attribute bonuses when purchased. But once the item entered the player's inventory, three attribute bonuses would be randomly generated, and the player could choose one to equip.

Outfits couldn't be traded. If a player absolutely had to get a specific attribute, they could only repeatedly buy the same item; exchanging with others was impossible. Of course, that situation was rare, because almost all attribute bonuses were useful, especially since it was already a three-way choice.

In short, Thriller Paradise was clearly encouraging players to prioritize their preferred appearance when choosing outfits.

The current random selection system was specifically designed to serve this purpose. Under this premise, the chances of players wearing the same outfit were low. Even if they encountered someone with similar taste, the attribute bonuses of their outfits would be different.

As for consumables, the most commonly needed were survival value supplements, stamina value supplements, hemostatic bandages, universal detoxifying serum, and potions to remove abnormal statuses such as electric shock paralysis, burns, diseases, and frostbite. There were also various bullets, ropes, arrows, batteries, and explosives.

There were many types of consumables. Supplements came in large, medium, and small sizes, restoring different percentages, and were priced differently. Other items, depending on the model and quantity, had very precise prices, down to every inch of bandage and every bullet.

Finally, the system store also sold equipment, but this wasn't a "Thriller Box," so it only sold regular equipment of common grade or below (including common grade) without special effects. Even players who had just completed the tutorial, even if they were only level one, even if they hadn't unlocked any specializations except Universal F, could find usable equipment in the system store, although it was bad, it was better than nothing…

Therefore, players who couldn't get equipment in the scripts could just pile up money. No matter your level or specialization status, you could always find a set of usable common equipment in the system store.

Feng Bujue quickly browsed the system store's contents. He mostly skimmed over the consumables, since bullets, health potions, and the like didn't need to be looked at too closely; he only needed to pay attention to what he might use.

As for outfits, he considered buying them, but the prices were indeed high. And the prices of these outfits seemed to be determined by how bizarre they looked. For example, a "Panda Suit" actually sold for 300,000 game coins. Leaving aside the fact that this 300,000-coin suit and any random 30,000-coin suit generated attributes randomly, just consider how inconvenient it would be to move around in this thing. Wouldn't it be tying your own hands? Did Dream Company think that dressing like a mascot in a script would help ease the atmosphere of horror, so they priced these bizarre outfits high?

Right, I also have to talk about the issue of money. When the open beta started, Dream Company suddenly announced that this game had no "Dian," and except for the two types of items in the Thriller Box (special equipment and game coins) that required Skill Points to purchase, everything else had to be purchased with game coins. And Dream Company officially provided an exchange service between RMB and game coins.

This wasn't a big deal in itself, but Dream Company had a very sharp policy – the exchange rate between Thriller Paradise's game coins and real-world currency was not fixed. The game's currency exchange rate would fluctuate based on market conditions.

Thus, the in-game currency market, which should have been determined by "gold farming" companies, was now directly controlled by the official company.

The exchange rate was updated every Monday at 8:00 AM. At that time, Dream Company would give the exchange rate for the week. Assuming that one RMB could buy 100 game coins last week, this week it might be possible to buy 120, or only 85.

From a profit perspective, game companies naturally wanted the exchange rate to be as high as possible, preferably 100 RMB could only buy 1 game coin, but that was impossible, because no one would buy it.

Therefore, this change was entirely determined by the system. The system would calculate based on the number of players, the amount of currency rewards given, the total amount of currency recycled by the system store, and so on, as a basis for adjusting the exchange rate for the next week.

Although this practice of constantly changing the exchange rate might cause "currency speculation" offline, that was irrelevant to Dream Company. Anyway, the exchange they provided was one-way. The game company only accepted RMB and sold game coins at the current exchange rate. As for what players did with the game coins they bought, whatever… If you had the ability to buy game coins at a price of 1:10,000 and cash them out at 1:100, that would be impressive.

Later facts also proved that the currency speculation business was very difficult to do. Because the exchange rate controlled by the system didn't fluctuate much in a year, always staying within the range of 1:2000 to 1:3000. With a weekly update frequency, wealthy players were too lazy to talk to speculators, while meticulous players would consider… whether to buy these game coins that were slightly cheaper than the official price, or wait a few more days to see if the exchange rate next week would be lower than the speculator's price.

Of course, regarding the matter of buying game coins with RMB, the current Feng Bujue, even if he wanted to, couldn't afford it…

Right now, everything he wanted to buy had to rely on the rewards he earned himself. As a level thirteen player, Feng Bujue's wealth was not small, with 164,300 game coins and 843 Skill Points.

At this moment, he suddenly remembered that the bag of garlic he had destroyed earlier might be able to sell for a few coins to exchange for some game coins. It seemed he had overlooked that. But thinking further, those things that were readily available in the script were not equipment, so they probably weren't worth much. If those kinds of things could sell for thousands of points, then in the future he wouldn't do anything in the script and just steal batteries for a living in the virtual world. Take one down, put it in his knapsack, and bring it back, maybe it could sell for tens of thousands.

"Well… I'd better go take a look at the auction house first; outfits are really expensive." Feng Bujue pondered, turning around and walking towards the information tower in the middle of the mall.

As he approached, he noticed that on the four fan-shaped structures around the information tower, in addition to the screens constantly refreshing auction house items, there was also a dedicated screen displaying the game's leaderboards.

The highest points of these four objects were marked with the characters "East, South, West, North," obviously to make it easier for players to distinguish directions in this bowl-shaped space.

Feng Bujue came to the East fan column and looked up. The leaderboard here was a ranking of levels. In the top twenty, two names showed "Anonymous." And the other eighteen players whose names were displayed all had a bracket added by the system after their names, with their guild written inside the bracket, which were the names of those studios. It seemed that as soon as the guild system was launched in the open beta, those studios had all been established.

Feng Bujue didn't yet know about the advantages and conditions for establishing a guild, and he decided to return to the login space to learn more. At this time, he only scanned the level leaderboard quickly, and the nicknames of those players and the names of the studios were already clear in his mind.

Afterward, Feng Bujue came to the South fan column. The title of the leaderboard here was "Combat Power Ranking." Surprisingly, of the eighteen named IDs on the level leaderboard, only five had made it into the top twenty of the combat power ranking.