Extraordinary Player

Once Qin Guan cleared Fruit Cutter, he asked Su Xiaoyu about her progress. After all, with the Social Interaction Platform, it was much easier for them to chat with each other, and they even saved up on data charges…

He learned that right after Su Xiaoyu cleared Fruit Cutter in Hard Mode, she decided to continue challenging it in Despair Mode.

She also faced the same problem as Qin Guan—she still could not receive the reward for clearing Hard Mode.

Qin Guan then knew that his system was not trolling him by not giving him the rewards. Everyone was in the same boat.

He also noticed that Su Xiaoyu had a very important function: she could help him set a benchmark, and she could help him measure his abilities…

While thinking about it, Qin Guan noticed that Su Xiaoyu belonged to the group of rather exceptional players due to her talent, but he was still ahead of her by two levels of difficulty.

This made him rather happy.

It was mainly because Qin Guan had almost began to wonder about his talent in gaming after the suffering he had to endure. He also often compared himself to the pro in the battle records, and it was easy for him to feel extremely defeated when he did so.

However, when he compared himself to other people, Qin Guan suddenly realized that he had surpassed them by many miles.

This made him very motivated, and he wanted to continue improving his high score in the two trials.

‘Don’t be rash, don’t be overconfident. Get stronger first, then you can go out and fight against a mob.

‘More importantly, I want to activate that [Change contents] system and find out how I’m supposed to use that function.’

While Qin Guan was cutting fruits, two system prompts popped up at the bottom left corner of his vision.

[Transcended Gamer Forum: Ranking system activated.]

[Transcended Gamer Forum: Holographic video function activated.]

Qin Guan was shocked. ‘They launched a new function again?

‘They sure are launching them very often. Looks like these mobile AI systems are constantly renewing and perfecting themselves. Their contents are also becoming richer.

‘But why does it feel like a new function is launched every single time I finish a trial?

‘And… ranking system? Holographic video? What the heck are those?’

Based on the names, they should both be functions of the forum. Once Qin Guan cut another round of fruits, he returned to the real world and opened the forum to take a look.

Just as he expected, a rather eye-catching subforum was added to the forum, and it was named [Ranking Board]. There were two threads inside. One of them was for Jump!!, and the other for Fruit Cutter.

Qin Guan clicked on the latter and frowned. “Why is the user ID and username icon so familiar… Wait, wait, wait, isn’t that me?!”

There were ten pages on each ranking board, and each page contained fifty records, which meant that only the top five hundred were recorded. The scores would be renewed once every thirty minutes; in other words, twice every hour.

And the ranking board was an international one. Different threads could be found on different language zones on the forum, but there was only one ranking board; there were no multiple ones because its user spoke different languages.

“So… that means… I’m at the top of the top five hundred players in the world?!”

The feeling of happiness came too suddenly, and Qin Guan found himself unable to digest the information.

Over the course of the last couple days, he had been utterly defeated by the pro in the history records, and now, he suddenly found that he was way ahead of the others. This made him feel a little elated…

However, Qin Guan immediately thought of a question. ‘Why are the high-leveled players like Professor Li and Du Wei not among the top ranks?’

Once he thought about it, he formed a hypothesis. It was likely that when they went through the trial, all the people had to clear it based on the body’s base attributes. The additional stat points brought by higher levels could not be brought into the trial.

Qin Guan looked at the two ranking boards and found that he was ranked first place in both trials. There was also a huge difference in his Useless Person’s score compared to the people in second place.

On Jump!!, Qin Guan’s record was the 100th platform on Crazy Mode with a completion rate of 65%, while the person in second place had not even cleared the 96th platform in Despair Mode.

On Fruit Cutter, Qin Guan’s record was 3,007 points, while the person in second place had only scored 1,922 points.

He was far ahead of everyone.

More importantly though, if people looked at the name, they could not tell the player’s nationality. With the existence of the mobile AI system, all the user IDs everyone saw were translated.

Qin Guan’s user ID could be taken as an example. He had entered the Mandarin words for Useless Person as his user ID, but the Transcended Gamers who spoke English would see the English version of his user ID. The speakers of other languages would also find themselves looking at the translated version once their mobile AI systems automatically translated it into their language.

Because of it, Qin Guan, too, could not tell how many players on the ranking board were from his country, and how many players were from other countries.

Besides, those with English IDs might not necessarily be players from other countries.

There was a drop-down triangle next to each name on the ranking board, which meant that each name had a drop-down menu attached to it.

When Qin Guan clicked on the triangle behind the name, a new panel was shown. A square frame occupied most of the left of the panel, and the right was for people to leave their comments.

A line of words was shown in the empty square. [The user has yet to upload a holographic video.]

Qin Guan was instantly mystified. “Are you Bilibili?”

‘The layout is exactly the same as in danmaku websites [1]… The left is the video, and the right for the viewers to comment and make sarcastic quips…’

However, strictly speaking, these were not simple videos, but holographic ones, which meant that viewers could watch them from any angle they liked.

Qin Guan went to the last few pages of the ranking board and found that someone had already uploaded his holographic video. The content of the video was of his playthrough of Fruit Cutter Hard Mode.

The viewers in the moving subtitles were crying out about how awesome the player was.

[Wow, pro! Your sword skills are too great! You’re so epic!]

[Your reaction speed is just too fast!]

[Wow! I thought he was going to cut the bomb, but he managed to avoid it! So amazing!]

[Thank you for teaching me, pro! I learned a lot from you!]

Qin Guan looked unimpressed. ‘You call this a pro?’

While he watched the player’s movements, Qin Guan was reminded of Azis’ dances—clumsy and absolutely appalling to the eyes…

Jump!! was no better. Qin Guan watched the holographic videos belonging to the people on the last few pages on the ranking board, and he found their movements to be similar to hens flapping their wings. They had no aesthetic to speak of.

Only the players on the first page had rather pleasant-looking movements. However, since Qin Guan was used to observing the fantastical movements of the pro in the history records, he felt like the system had been forced to pick the best from a group of normals to fill up the ranking board…

“Ah, I’m just saying it. I’m not the one who wants to be arrogant here. You’re the ones who are forcing me to be arrogant…”

Qin Guan happily clicked on his drop-down menu to see how people praised him.

[Which pro is this? He actually managed to rank 1st in both trials!]

[That’s too crazy, right? How can he be so far ahead of the 2nd place? He’s not a normal human, right?!]

[Heh, he’s definitely cheating! I can’t say for Jump!!, but he actually managed to score 3,000 points in Fruit Cutter? That’s impossible!]

[Let’s go. Most probably, there’s a bug in the system.]

[Perhaps this isn’t a real person? Why else would he not upload a holographic video?]

[That’s right, he’s probably fake.]

Qin Guan was instantly displeased. The comments at the start were at least still somewhat sensible, but why was the trend of the comments becoming increasingly different the further he read?

‘Hmph, humans. Your noob abilities limit your imagination. What’s wrong with 3,000 points? Do you want me to tell you that the full score for Fruit Cutter is 5,000 points?’

Qin Guan continued scrolling down and found something very interesting. 𝑓re𝘦𝔀𝗲𝘣𝘯𝘰νℯ𝒍.c𝗼ｍ

The character the players used to start the trial with were tagged behind their user IDs, and he found that he was the only person who had used the useless person among the five hundred names.

Without a doubt, most people started the trial with the athlete character. The rest had chosen the student character or office worker.

Qin Guan was the only one who had started the trial with the useless person character on the ranking board.

There would certainly be others who had started the trial with the useless person character, however. Even if the ratio for it was extremely low, the number of players in the world was huge.

However, those who chose to start the trial with the useless person character had to have had a bad compared to the others, since they could not rank among the top 500.

“I can’t let this continue! The useless person character is the best character to start the trial with! I must motivate the people who also chose to start the trial with the useless person character and awaken their confidence!”

Note:

[1] Danmaku websites: websites with a real-time commentary subtitle system that displays user comments as streams of moving subtitles overlaid on the video playback screen, visually resembling a danmaku shooter game. These subtitles are called “danmaku”.