Chapter 24
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Many farming games feature dedicated tools for chopping wood, breaking rocks, or digging holes.
Although in this game everything can be replaced by "Armament Haki," Liyue’s Armament Haki is of too low a level, resulting in poor efficiency. If she were to combine axes, pickaxes, and shovels with her Haki, would it be more efficient?
Come to think of it, Newgate previously seemed to have infused his "wooden bed" with Armament Haki. Theoretically, this idea should be feasible, right?
Liyue held an iron pickaxe and simultaneously pressed the button for "Armament Haki."
[Your Armament Haki has not reached the required level; you cannot use "Ryou."]
[Your Armament Haki has not reached the required level; you cannot use "Ryou."]
...
The system issued a prompt.
...So it really was feasible; it was just that she couldn't execute it because her level wasn't high enough?
Liyue had no choice but to give up.
Facing "Iron Ingot Rock," while the iron pickaxe could be used, the number of strikes required was only slightly fewer than using Armament Haki alone—it took 106 hits.
Conversely, using Armament Haki to destroy the stone took 110 hits.
However, using the iron pickaxe yielded no experience points. 110 clicks would grant +1 proficiency in Armament Haki; even the smallest scrap of meat is still food.
Liyue chose to honestly cultivate her Armament Haki, starting to punch the rock.
Although she inwardly cursed the game developers a hundred times for their inhumane settings—is tormenting players really that fun?—she still persisted through the tedious time with her excellent willpower. A hoarder must fill their inventory to the brim with materials!
In the game, despite the dull and repetitive daily mining routine, Liyue enjoyed herself with a relaxed mindset.
It is a farming game, after all. There is no urgent main storyline, no cumbersome or complex mission objectives; players do whatever they want. Once she grew tired of one task, she could immediately jump to the next.
For example, after mining 666 pieces of ore, Liyue would wander around like a king with nothing to do, calling it "patrolling the island and exercising my Observation Haki along the way."
Indeed, the process of patrolling did increase her proficiency in Observation Haki. In that sense, leveling up Observation Haki was much simpler than Armament Haki.
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One day, roughly when the game system prompted: [19 days until the Day of the Full Moon], a Homie informed Liyue that it had discovered a strange hole on the ground in a certain area.
Following the Homie's lead, Liyue found the star-shaped pit.
Based on her experience playing Animal Crossing, such a star-shaped mark meant that treasure was buried underground!
Liyue habitually wanted to start digging with her Armament Haki, but after a moment's thought, she felt that was rather unrefined. Only then did she remember the iron pickaxe, which was almost gathering dust in her inventory.
She tapped it just once with ease—Liyue felt she had definitely been gaslit by this game; she had actually grown accustomed to the intensity of punching a rock 100 times!
The fact that the treasure could be dug up with just a single tap made her feel somewhat unaccustomed. Her first reaction was: "It wouldn't be some piece of junk, would it?"
As it turned out, she never expected it.
[Congratulations on discovering an SSR-grade item: "Stone Slab Containing Mysterious History!"]
—What, it’s actually an SSR grade?
A square stone block as tall as she was appeared in front of Liyue.
...What use could a stone block possibly have?
She continued to tap on the system prompt:
[Mysterious Stone Slab collected: 1/30.]
She hadn't even finished collecting her previous cooking recipe book, so why was another collection element popping up now?
Isn't the directory of this game's encyclopedia a bit too vast? How many years and months will I have to grind to finish this!
System prompt:
[This item cannot be bound, cannot be destroyed, cannot be used, and cannot be stored.]
...Then what is it for?
Is it truly just to add a collection element to increase player playtime?
For a fleeting moment, Liyue even considered putting it into a pot to cook it, and she stubbornly tried to do so just to be sure.
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As the system prompt stated, other than being able to lift, put down, and move it, no other operations had any effect.
It really was just a decorative object meant to occupy space.
Liyue checked its information again.
[Description: Records lost historical information in mysterious characters. Aside from specific scholars, no little animals can understand it.]
Liyue’s curiosity was piqued, and she clicked on the stone to view it.
A dense block of text immediately appeared on the screen. It looked like a letter written by someone named "Joy Boy."
Liyue glanced over it and immediately felt dizzy from the wall of text. She quickly closed the message and glanced back at the system description.
Although she hadn't read the content carefully, wasn't this clear and explicit text information? Why did the system say "no little animals can understand it"?
...Ah.
As soon as this doubt arose, Liyue seemed to have found the answer.
—Because they are little animals that have never gone to school!
Of course, little animals wouldn't understand complex human language!
Thinking this far, Liyue was completely relieved.
She figured such a stone was likely created specifically for a player’s obsessive collection habits. It had no other major use and couldn't even be put into a backpack; it could only serve as a pure decoration.
Liyue wasn't interested in useless items, but for the sake of it being an SSR-grade item, she moved it into the chicken coop.
"I know you've been lonely lately, so I've brought you an egg. You can try to hatch it."
After tossing those words aside, Liyue turned and headed back into the forest to continue her grand infrastructure project.
She left the Oviraptor staring at the large stone slab in its nest... but it still, for the time being, followed Liyue's instructions and sat upon it as if it were hatching an egg.