Chapter 1 After the Freaks

After the four oddballs from Bingdi left, Feng Bujue resumed browsing the mall. The items in the system store were as he had expected, mainly various clothing and consumables.

Speaking of clothing, it was indeed a good thing. Besides giving players a personalized appearance without taking up an equipment slot, it also came with stat bonuses. However, due to Thriller Paradise's blurred data processing of characters' abilities, in the absence of any numerical basis, the annotations for those attributes were generally "slightly increases total survival value," "increases the accuracy of firearm shooting to a certain extent," "increases the height of jumping by a small amount," and so on.

The types of clothing were mainly divided into tops, bottoms, suits, hats, shoes, and accessories. This game didn't offer skirts, for obvious reasons. However, socks could be found for sale in the accessories category, including stockings. Female players who had a strong desire to show off their legs could buy a pair of shorts or capris to match.

Each piece of clothing on a player could "slightly" improve a certain stat by a bit. Buying a whole set of equipment would naturally make one stronger than having nothing equipped. And to prevent players from having to compromise on appearance when choosing the desired attributes, the bonus attributes of all clothing were set as optional. For example, if a player bought a beret, it would not have any stat bonuses when purchased. But when the item entered the player's inventory, three stat bonuses would be randomly generated, and the player could choose one of them to equip.

Clothing was a non-tradeable item. If a player had to刷 (shua, grind) out a specific attribute, they could only repeatedly purchase the same item. Exchanging with others was not possible. Of course, that situation was rare, because all stat bonuses were basically useful, especially since it was already a three-way choice.

In short, Thriller Paradise was clearly encouraging players to prioritize the appearance they liked most when choosing clothing.

The current random-optional system was specifically designed to serve this purpose. Under this premise, the chances of players wearing the same outfit were not high. Even if they encountered someone with similar tastes, the stat bonuses of their clothing would be different.

Next, let's talk about consumables. The most commonly needed were survival value replenishment potions, stamina value replenishment potions, hemostatic bandages, universal antitoxin serums, and mixtures to remove abnormal states such as electric shock paralysis, burns, diseases, and freezing. There were also various bullets, ropes, arrows, batteries, and explosives.

There were many types of consumables. Replenishment potions included large, medium, and small categories, 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 "Scare Box," so it only sold regular equipment of common level and below (including common level), without special effects. Even if a player had just completed the newbie tutorial, even if they were only level one, had no specializations open except for the general specialization f, it didn't matter. Players in this situation could still find usable equipment in the system store, although it was poor, it was better than nothing…

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

Feng Bujue quickly browsed the contents of the system store, generally skimming over consumables. After all, bullets, blood potions, and the like didn't need to be looked at too closely. He just needed to pay attention to what he might use.

As for clothing, he was considering buying it, but the prices were indeed high. Moreover, the prices of these clothes seemed to be determined by the degree of oddity of the appearance. For example, a "Panda Suit" actually sold for 300,000 game coins. Not to mention that this suit selling for 300,000 coins had the same randomly generated attributes as any suit selling for only 30,000 coins, just consider how inconvenient it would be to move around in this thing. Wouldn't that be tying your own hands? Did Dream Inc. think that dressing like a mascot in the script would help relieve the atmosphere of horror, so these kinds of strange costumes were priced high?

Oh, right, I have to talk about the issue of money. At the start of the public beta, Dream Inc. suddenly announced that this game had no "diamonds." Except for the two types of goods in the Scare Box (special equipment and game coins), which required skill points to purchase, everything else had to be consumed with game coins. And Dream Inc. officially provided RMB and game coin exchange services.

Originally, this was nothing, but Dream Inc. also 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 according to market conditions.

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

The exchange rate update time was every Monday at 8:00 AM, at which time Dream Inc. would give the exchange rate for the week. Suppose one RMB could buy 100 game coins last week, but this week, it might be able to buy 120, or only 85.

From a profit perspective, the game company naturally hoped that the exchange rate would be as high as possible, preferably 100 RMB could only buy 1 game coin, but that was impossible. No one would buy it that way.

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 recovered by the system store, and so on, to regulate the exchange rate for the next week.

Although this constant change in exchange rates might cause offline "currency speculation" phenomenon, but that had nothing to do with Dream Inc. Anyway, the exchange they provided was one-way. The game company only received RMB, selling game coins according to 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 1:10000 and then cash them out at 1:100, that would be your skill.

Later events also proved that currency speculation was difficult to do. Because the exchange rate controlled by the system did not have much fluctuation in a year, and was always in the range of 1:2000 to 1:3000. The weekly update frequency was there. Wealthy players were too lazy to talk to currency speculators, and 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 become lower than the price offered by the currency speculators.

Of course, Feng Bujue, in his current state, even if he wanted to buy game coins with RMB, he was unable to afford it...

What he needed to buy right now all depended on the rewards he earned himself. As a level 13 player, Feng Bujue's assets were not bad. He had as many as 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 worth a few cents to sell for a little game currency. It seemed that he had overlooked it. But thinking deeper, that kind of thing that was readily available in the script, not equipment, probably wasn't worth much. If that kind of stuff could also be sold for several thousand points, then he wouldn't do anything else in the script in the future. He would just become a professional virtual battery thief. He would unload one, put it in his backpack and bring it back, and it might sell for tens of thousands.

"Well... I should go take a look at the auction house first. Clothing is really expensive." Feng Bujue pondered, turning around and heading 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 that were constantly refreshing the auction house items, there was also a dedicated screen for each, displaying the rankings in the game.

The highest point of these four objects were respectively printed with the characters "East, South, West, North," obviously to facilitate players in distinguishing directions in this bowl-shaped space.

Feng Bujue came to the East fan-shaped pillar and looked up. The ranking here was the level ranking. In the top twenty, the names of two people showed the word "anonymous." And the other eighteen players whose names were displayed all had a bracket added to their name by the system, with the name of their guild, or the names of those studios, written in the brackets. It seemed that as soon as the guild system was launched, those studios had all been established.

Feng Bujue did not yet know about the advantages that the guild system could bring and the conditions for its establishment. He decided to return to the login space to learn more. At this time, he just scanned the level list in a hurry, and the nicknames and studio names of those players were already clear in his mind.

Afterwards, Feng Bujue came to the South fan-shaped pillar. The title of the ranking here was "Combat Power Ranking." Surprisingly, of the eighteen IDs with names on the level ranking just now, only five had entered the top twenty of the combat power ranking.