The situation in the second room was stranger and creepier than the first. The walls, ceiling, and floor were covered with the drawings of human faces. The room was empty, and that only accentuated the drawings that filled up all the surfaces. In the middle of the room, sitting on the ground was a safe.
"This puzzle is rather obvious, isn't it?" Feng Bujue walked to the safe and squatted down to study it. "Hmm… After all, this is just Training Mode; they were probably worried that the players might not be able to notice this in their frightened state if they hid it."
From his words, it sounded like he was complaining that the difficulty was too low.
Wang Tanzhi followed him into the room. At the moment, he only felt the faces looked creepily alive, and there were no two faces that looked the same. It was like there were more than hundred pairs of eyes looking at him, which made a chill run up his spine.
"Brother Jue, how about we move this safe out of the room to study?" Wang Tanzhi suggested.
"Give me three minutes." Feng Bujue stood up and took out the six drawings that he had picked up earlier. He held them to his eyes and started to compare them to the drawings on the wall." When I got close to the safe, there was a system notification that told me to key in six digits to open the safe."
His eyes stopped. "Yes, that's the one."
As he walked over to the wall, Feng Bujue titled his head to the left. "Most of the human faces are to confuse the players.
"Look, six human faces lined up together, and they are identical to the six drawings on the paper."
He compared them directly to the human faces that Wang Tanzhi had difficulty looking at. From left to right, from top to bottom, according to how the faces were arranged on the wall and the numbers on the edge of the drawings, he uttered, "416352."
Feng Bujue returned to the safe to key in the password. "If we didn't explore the first room closely, we would not have found the clues of the drawing. In that case, we would not have solved the puzzle of the safe in this second room."
He turned to look at the six faces again.
"Actually, the answer is fairly obvious. When you first open the door, the six faces are the area where the light from the corridor hit first. However, without the clues from the drawing, you wouldn't have known what to do with the safe."
Then, the safe was opened. Two things sat inside, a key and a card.
"Something's wrong." Feng Bujue looked at the attributes of these two things.
"What's wrong?" Wang Tanzhi seemed to be affected by Feng Bujue's calmness because his Terror Points had returned to his original three percent.
"We should be able to use the key soon, but this…" Feng Bujue handed the card to Wang Bujue.
———
Item Name: Explosive Punch
Skill Attribute: Active Skill, will disappear after two uses.
Skill Type: Fighting
Effect: Create an explosion after hitting target to cause fire damage.
Consumption: Fifty Stamina Points
Learning Requirement: Fighting Mastery F
Remark: BOOM!
———
"I thought the reward would be equipment, but it's a skill card," Feng Bujue said.
"Er… The type of reward aside, Brother Jue, how did you know that there would be a reward?" Wang Tanzhi asked.
"Isn't it obvious? Even though this mode provides no additional rewards other than EXP, to ensure playability, the scenario still offers the players two ways to clear the scenario," Feng Bujue explained. "We're currently attempting the puzzle-solving route instead of brute-forcing our way through it."
He pocketed the key and led Wang Tanzhi out of the second room.
"Those who choose to brute-force their way through the scenario will only need to overcome their fear and face their enemy calmly and conduct the battle effectively to level up their mastery. As the character level rises, more fighting techniques and skills will open up, and they will be able to gain more Skill Points from battle.
"For players like ourselves, however, we place our focus on our overall gaming efficiency, instead of just focusing on combat ability. Through puzzle-solving, the difficulty of the scenario and the ratio of battle will be lowered through an understanding of the scenario background. However, this kind of player will be lacking in terms of mastery, and thus, the system will compensate them in other ways. Normally, that should be more Skill Points."
Wang Tanzhi understood it, and he concurred by adding, "But since there are no Skill Point rewards in Training Mode… if the player choses to puzzle-solve, the scenario will normally provide them with equipment as compensation."
"Bingo." Feng Bujue tried the third door. As he expected, the door was locked. He tried using the key to open it, and it matched. After that, the key disappeared.
The third room was really clean. Leaning against the wall was a study table, and there was a notebook on the table.
"By the way, how many masteries have you opened already?" Feng Bujue asked while he picked up the notebook.
"Both my Fighting and General Ability are Mastery F. What about you, Brother Jue?"
"I've only activated General Activity." Feng Bujue already started to flip through the notebook. "How did you manage to activate your fighting mastery?"
"I was assaulted by monkey-like creatures in my tutorials. After killing them, the system told me I'd reached Mastery level F for fighting," Wang Tanzhi said as he went through his memory. "But the mastery for General Ability only showed up after the tutorial was completed."
"Hmm. Looks like we need to find a chance to activate all six masteries as soon as possible," Feng Bujue said. "After you gained the mastery, the Skill Bar on the menu should have opened, right? Since you meet the requirements, equip the Skill Card. We might have use for it soon."
When Feng Bujue picked up the Skill Card earlier and looked through its attributes, the system had notified him that his Skill Bar had been activated.
In Thriller Paradise, the character had twelve boxes in their Skill Bar. Players could adjust their skills only before the scenario started. In other words, no matter how many skills a character owned, before entering a scenario, they could at most equip twelve of them.
Furthermore, once a Skill Card had been equipped, regardless of whether it had been used or not, it was bound to the character and could not be traded anymore. Therefore, if a player found a Skill Card and wished to sell it, then they would have to store it inside their inventory and not equip it to their Skill Bar. Once equipped, the physical card would disappear as it transformed into a set of data inside the character's menu.
There was another limitation where a Skill Card could only be brought out of a scenario but not taken into one. This was to prevent players from bringing in extra cards when their Skill Bar was already full. There was only one exception, which was when the player found a new Skill Card during the scenario and met the learning requirement, but their Skill Bar was already full. In that case, the new Skill Card could replace one of the equipped skills, and that replaced skill could only be reequipped once the player was back in the log-in space.
"I've unlocked the Skill Bar, but why does this Skill have limited uses?" Wang Tanzhi was confused. This told Feng Bujue that his friend did not read the game manual closely.
As Feng Bujue flipped through the notebook, he replied, "The attribute of the Skill Card is the key. There are two types of Skills, passive and active. For active skills, there are three more types: Permanent Use, Limited Time Use, and Consumable Use. For passive skills, there are only Permanent Use and Limited Time Use.
"That card is obviously a Consumable Use, and the skill will disappear after two uses."
"It feels like we're being cheated…" Even though Wang Tanzhi complained, he still equipped the skill to his Skill Bar.
"No, actually, it makes a lot of scene," Feng Bujue countered. "With your current Stamina Points, even if they're full, you can only use the skill twice. This means that you have to use it at the right time. The scenario won't need you to use the third punch, or maybe you won't need to punch at all.
"Furthermore, if this was a Permanent Use or Limited Time Use card, I don't think the learning requirement and consumption would be so low, or else 'Skills' would be too common and pedestrian. For example, can you imagine a level fifty player with a Permanent Use skill. If the learning requirement was only Fighting Mastery F and it only exhausted fifty Stamina Points, he would have no problem using the skill one hundred times in a row. Would that be fair?'
Wang Tanzhi thought about it and was persuaded. "Hmm… You have a point. If it is a skill that a character with Fighting Mastery F like myself has but consumes 101 Stamina Points, then something is wrong with game design."
"By the way, I have to remind you," Feng Bujue said. "For mastery level F, the success rate of using the skill is only twenty percent, so… when a low-level character obtains a skill, whether the skill can be used or not is still quite dependent on luck."
"This is just cheating, pure and simple!"
"That's why I was hoping for equipment. I've been to the official website. The closed beta started this afternoon, but there are guides already. A few level ten players on the forum said that the best thing to help with leveling up is equipment, but equipment that is above the quality of Excellent is extremely rare."
Feng Bujue chatted with his friend, but at the same time, he had also almost finished with the notebook.
"That is probably because you'll be able to get past level ten easily in this game, and that is going to be even easier if you have a good equipment when you are low level. This is because you can skip through the puzzle and use pure strength to cut your way through the scenarios, which will be faster. To counter that, the game probably doesn't have much extremely powerful low-level equipment.
"Other than that, beyond level ten, even low-level elite equipment would become useless trinkets, and since the trading post is still currently closed, keeping them around will only take up unnecessary inventory space."
Feng Bujue closed the notebook and suddenly snapped his finger. "Wait, I did something wrong earlier…"
"What's wrong?" Wang Tanzhi was made worried. He gripped the fruit knife and turned to look at the door. Other than the bloody palm prints on the wall, nothing seemed out of place.
"I forgot… If there are things related to opening chests in the future, you should do it. I just need to tell you the password or the method to open it," Feng Bujue said.
"Pfft, and I thought you had something important to say," Wang Tanzhi groused. "But why would you do that. This is all a case of probability. In fact, you should keep opening these chests to see whether you are really that unlucky."
"Do you want me to go back to the corridor to grab the stone and whack you in the head?"
"Fine… My bad."
"Come on." Feng Bujue put the notebook into his backpack. "While we walk, I'll tell you the story behind this place…"