Chapter 2 The Scene Inside

The scene in the second room was even stranger than the first. All four walls, the floor, and the ceiling were covered with drawn faces. The room was empty, but the walls were densely packed with faces. And in the very center of this empty room, a safe stood all alone on the floor.

"The setup of this riddle is a bit too obvious," Feng Bujue went straight to the safe, squatted down, and carefully examined it. "Well... it's a training mode after all, and they probably took into account that players can't think calmly when they're terrified." His words seemed to imply that he thought the difficulty was too low…

Wang Tanzhi also came in. At that moment, he felt that the faces drawn on the walls were lifelike. He couldn't even find two that were the same. It was as if hundreds of eyes were staring at him in this room, making his hair stand on end.

"Jue-ge, how about we move the safe out and then study it?" Wang Tanzhi said.

"Three minutes at most." Feng Bujue quickly stood up again, took out the six facial sketches, held them up close, and began to look at the faces on the walls. "If you get close to the safe, you'll get a system prompt asking you to enter a six-digit password to open it." His gaze soon stopped. "Hmm... there." He walked to a wall and tilted his head to the left. "This room is filled with a large number of faces, just to distract the player." He pointed to the wall. "Look, six faces in a row, arranged diagonally in a line, and they are exactly the six drawn in the sketches, with the same appearance." He compared the terrifying faces one by one, from left to right, from top to bottom, according to the order of the six faces on the wall, and matched them with the numbers in the corners of the sketches, muttering, "Four, one, six, three, five, two."

As Feng Bujue spoke, he returned to the safe and began to enter the password. "If you only opened the door and roughly observed the first room, without carefully searching, you wouldn't find the clues in the sketches. Then when you open the second room, you won't be able to figure out the safe's password." He glanced back at the six faces. "In fact, the answer is in the area where the light is brightest when the door is opened, but without the hints in the sketches, even if you know that the six-digit password has to be found in this room, you won't get those numbers."

At that moment, the safe actually opened, and inside were two items: a key and a card.

"Miscalculated," Feng Bujue said immediately after reading the properties of the two items.

"What's wrong?" Wang Tanzhi seemed to have been infected by his composure. He had calmed down a lot, and his Terror Points had returned to around 3%.

"The key should be used soon, but this..." Feng Bujue handed the card to Wang Tanzhi.

[Name: Explosion God Fist]

[Skill Card Attribute: Active Skill, disappears after two uses]

[Skill Category: Combat]

[Effect: Creates an explosion upon hitting the target, dealing fire damage]

[Consumption: Stamina 50]

[Learning Condition: Combat Specialization f]

[Remarks: Boom!]

"I thought the reward would be equipment, but it's a skill," Feng Bujue said.

"Uh... putting aside the question of equipment or skills, how did you know there would be a reward, Jue-ge?" Wang Tanzhi asked.

"Isn't it obvious? Although this mode doesn't give any extra rewards other than experience, to ensure game-playability, the script still provides players with two ways to clear it," Feng Bujue explained. "We're taking the puzzle-solving route, not the violent rushing route." He held the key in his hand and walked out of the second room with Wang Tanzhi.

"Players who take the non-puzzle-solving route can gain specialization level increases by overcoming their fear, calmly facing the enemy, and fighting efficiently. As their character level increases, and as their combat skills and methods increase, they can also gain Technique Values in combat.

"Our way of playing is more focused on improving overall game efficiency, rather than simply improving combat efficiency. Solving puzzles can reduce the difficulty of clearing the game, reduce the proportion of combat, and allow us to grasp the script situation better. But people who play this way will fall behind in specialization levels, so the system will naturally have other compensations, which should generally be more Technique Values."

Wang Tanzhi understood when he heard this, and continued, "But the training mode doesn't have Technique Values... so if players choose to solve puzzles, they'll directly obtain items in the script as compensation."

"Correct." Feng Bujue tried the door to the third room. As he expected, the door was locked. He immediately used the key in his hand to open it. As expected, it matched, and the key disappeared after the door was opened.

The third room was very clean. Next to the wall was a desk, and on the desk was a notebook.

"By the way, how many of your specialization levels are unlocked?" Feng Bujue asked as he picked up the notebook.

"My Combat and General are both f. What about you, Jue-ge?"

"I've only unlocked General." Feng Bujue had already opened the notebook and was looking at it. "Under what circumstances did you unlock your Combat Specialization?"

"I was attacked by some monkey-like things in the tutorial. After killing them, the system prompted me that I had f-level Combat Specialization," Wang Tanzhi recalled. "But the 'General' specialization level only appeared after the tutorial ended."

"I see. It seems I have to find a chance to unlock all six specializations first," Feng Bujue pondered.

He immediately turned back to Wang Tanzhi and said, "When you got the skill, the skill slot in your menu also appeared, right? Since you meet the conditions, quickly equip that skill card you just got. It might be useful later."

Feng Bujue himself had picked up a skill card for the first time, and when he looked at its properties, the system prompted him that the skill slot had been unlocked.

In Thriller Paradise, a character's skill slots have a total of twelve slots. Skills can only be adjusted before the script starts, meaning that no matter how many skills a character has in the future, they can only equip up to twelve when entering a script. Furthermore, skill cards that have already been equipped, whether they have been used or not, will be bound to the character and can no longer be traded. So if a player obtains a skill card and wants to sell it, they have to put it in their bag, and must not equip it in the skill slot. Once equipped, the card's entity will disappear, and the skill will be converted into a set of data in the player's menu.

There is another setting: skill cards can only be taken out of a script as items, but cannot be brought in. This is to prevent people from equipping twelve skills and then carrying a bunch of spare cards in their bags.

However, there are some exceptions. For example, if a player picks up a new skill card in a script, and also meets the learning conditions, but their skill slots are full. At this time, they can use the newly picked up card to replace an equipped skill, but the replaced skill needs to be re-equipped in the Landing Space. There are also some special skill cards, which exist in the form of items, such as stone tablets, boxes, etc. These can also be brought in and out of scripts.

"It appeared, but why does this skill say it disappears after being used twice?" Wang Tanzhi asked, puzzled.

Asking this kind of question was obviously a sign of not reading the game instructions.

Feng Bujue flipped through the notebook in his hand with great interest, and replied, "The key is in the skill card's attributes... skills are divided into active and passive. Active skills have three types of cards: 'permanently mastered', 'limited-time possession', and 'consumed by use'. Passive skills only have 'permanently mastered' and 'limited-time possession'." He thought for a few seconds. "Yours belongs to the 'consumed by use' type. After being used twice, the skill will be gone."

"That feels pretty坑爹 (kengdie - pit-fathering/lame)," Wang Tanzhi said, but he still equipped the skill according to Feng Bujue's instructions.

"No, it's very reasonable," Feng Bujue said. "With your current Stamina, you can only throw two punches at full strength. If you only use it when there's a chance and the conditions are right, you definitely won't need to throw a third punch in this script, and you might not even need to throw one." He paused. "Besides, if it was a permanent or limited-time version, the learning conditions and usage cost probably wouldn't be so low. It would probably require a higher Combat Specialization level and more Stamina consumption. Otherwise, 'skills' would be too cheap. For example, if a level 50 Shooting Specialization player randomly equipped a permanent boxing skill, and if that skill could be used with Combat f and only cost 50 Stamina, then they could use Hundred Rapid Fists whenever they wanted. That wouldn't work."

Wang Tanzhi felt that it made sense when he heard it. "Yeah... that's true. If they gave me a skill that Combat Specialization f could learn, but the Stamina consumption was 101, then that would mean there was a problem with the game's design."

"Oh, I have to remind you, Specialization level f means that the success rate of using active skills in that system is only 20%. So... whether a low-level character can activate a skill depends on luck," Feng Bujue said.

"Isn't that still 坑爹 (kengdie - pit-fathering/lame)!"

"That's why I was so eagerly hoping to find equipment. I went to the official website and saw that the closed beta started this morning, and the guides came out this afternoon. There are a few guys in the forum who are already above level ten and say that equipment is what most greatly improves a character at low levels, but low-level equipment of 'Fine' or higher quality is extremely rare." Feng Bujue was multitasking, chatting as he was about to finish reading the notebook. "It's probably because this game can quickly transition to above level ten, and if players have very good equipment to support them at low levels, they can violently clear the game more efficiently without solving puzzles, so the game almost doesn't provide that kind of powerful low-level equipment." He closed the notebook. "Also, after level ten, low-level Fine equipment becomes something tasteless to eat but a pity to throw away. Now that the exchange hasn't opened yet, keeping it will only take up space in your bag."

As Feng Bujue spoke, he suddenly said, "Ah, miscalculated..."

"What's wrong?" Wang Tanzhi tensed up, picked up his fruit knife, and looked back at the hallway outside the door, but apart from the bloody handprints on the wall across the hallway, he didn't see anything new or unusual.

"Speaking of which... from now on, you should be the one to open boxes or things like that. I just need to tell you the password or method," Feng Bujue said.

"Tch~ I thought you were going to say something." Wang Tanzhi said, "Character Points are just clouds, just a probability. Do you definitely only get garbage?"

"I really want to go outside the hallway and pick up a stone to smash you to death."

"Okay... I was wrong."

Feng Bujue also put the notebook into his bag and said, "Let's go. I'll tell you what this script is about as we go..."