Chapter 37: First Boss Kill

When the half-hour was up, Sykes forcibly kicked all the players in the game offline, including two guys who were hiding outside a certain wall and refused to log off, seemingly staking out an NPC.

It seemed there would always be people among the players who were eager to challenge the rules.

It wasn’t that he felt offended.
They were just a group of cubs with exuberant curiosity.
The oldest among them was only in his thirties, an age where he wouldn’t even be in school in any long-lived race.

It was just a little troublesome.
The merman sighed, holding the two player shells that had lost their consciousnesses, one in each hand.
He casually found an empty room, opened the door, and threw them in.

After dealing with the mischievous cubs, he turned around and came face to face with a giant snail face.

Sykes: “…”

But Tom was very happy.
“Yo, Sykes, come and try it. Your domain citizens actually managed to make some good food. I’ve never tasted this flavor before!”

As he spoke, Tom painfully picked out the smallest white fruit from the large pile in his arms and handed it to him.

“A dull fruit?”
Sykes didn’t haggle with him over the size issue.
Instead, he took the fruit, held it in his fingers, and examined it.

“This taste is indeed not bad. Someone used it to stew soup before. The texture is very thick.”

“This was made by a little girl who can start a fire at level one. To be honest, this talent is quite terrifying,” Tom sighed.
“Is what the fruit is called important! The important thing is that it’s delicious when grilled!”

But Sykes ignored him.
“Ella told me you gave the players two quests today.”

Tom immediately looked around guiltily, changing the subject.
“You said this thing is called a dull fruit? Why, will you become stupid after eating it?”

“There’s no problem with giving quests to players. You did indeed think of something I didn’t. Coincidentally, I was about to give them some guidance on cooking. How many flame pedestals do you still have on hand?”

“You should have said so earlier! You scared me!”
Tom let out a long sigh of relief and drilled his head back into his shell.

He stayed in his shell for a long time, so long that it didn’t seem like he was going to get some item, but was re-making one from drawing runes.
Finally, just as Sykes was about to give up on him, Tom burst out.

“I didn’t expect that fruit to be so popular with the little devils. My aunt and sister snatched all of them from me, all of them!!”
He showed Sykes his empty little pouch with a mournful face.

“They said an adult snail like me can’t snatch food from children, but I’ve only been an adult for a hundred years!”

Sykes expressionlessly stuffed the fruit in his hand into his mouth.
“So how many are left? Is it enough to supply this batch of domain citizens?”

“Enough, enough!” Tom became visibly happy.
Sometimes, a shrewd snail was just that easy to coax.
“My aunt still has over four hundred in her shell!”

“Four hundred? Why did you put so many flame pedestals on her?”

“There was a small rune factory that went bankrupt because the craftsman passed away. I felt so sorry for the remaining children of that family that I packed up all his remaining goods. You know, that kind of small private factory generally can’t make any high-end things, so they just sell small gadgets like flame pedestals,” the snail said as if it were a matter of course.

Sykes nodded.
Although Tom insisted he was a shrewd merchant, he had commendably retained a basic sense of kindness.
This wasn’t the first or second time he had used transactions to do charity.

“Speaking of which, Sykes, why are you planning to teach them how to cook? What about your specialties, alchemy and potion-making? What’s so good about teaching cooking? They won’t need to eat after level fifty anyway, they can survive just by supplementing their magic power.”

“I want to see if they can do it,” Sykes’s answer was very vague.

This confused Tom.
“Do what? Can’t you just say it clearly for once?”

“They will do…” Seeing his old friend holding his breath and concentrating for the answer, the corner of the merman’s mouth curved up, revealing a smile of a successful prank.
“You’ll know when the time comes.”

“??? Sykes! When did you learn this trick!”
Tom’s indignant shout almost spread throughout the entire domain.

The maintenance of Sea Realm lasted for a whole day.

Old Li had just finished posting a quest video and was scrolling through his phone out of boredom when a message suddenly popped up in the chat group.

From the group chat “123 Big Family”—

Flower World Dazzling Eyes: Game share.jpg

Flower World Dazzling Eyes: Everyone give me a like! I don’t believe I can’t get ten today!

[Yan]: Liked.

[Old Li]: Liked.

[Flower World Dazzling Eyes]: It’s still not full QAQ

[Yan]: What is your brain thinking about all day? This group only has three people.

[Old Li]: Hahaha, you can just post it in your fan group and have them like it.

Flower World Dazzling Eyes: That image! How can I let them know I still play this kind of pink and tender game!

[Old Li]: ?

[Yan]: ?

Flower… give my alternate account a like. Don’t you guys have any older brothers, older sisters, younger brothers, or younger sisters? Help me out! Just one…

Old Li turned over in bed, a hint of a smile in his eyes.
He pressed his finger on the screen, just about to forward the link to his younger brother, when another message suddenly popped up in the group chat.

[Flower World Dazzling Eyes]: Holy cr*p? Holy cr*p! Whose relative is so fast? How did it get full all of a sudden?

[Yan]: I didn’t forward it.

The group chat suddenly fell silent.

Hua Yibing was also silent and then he disappeared.
… After a full ten minutes, he finally showed his face in the group again.

[Flower World Dazzling Eyes]: sry, it was me.

[Flower World Dazzling Eyes]: I sent the link to the family group [Subway, old man, phone].

[Flower World Dazzling Eyes]: [Little person hanging.jpg]

[Yan]: [Clapping]

[Old Li]: Just bear with it. A lifetime passes quickly.

Just as he was holding back his laughter and closing the chat interface, a message suddenly popped up in his own family group.

From the group chat “Loving Family”—

[Mom]: Forward [Fifty Ways to Cook Homestyle Dishes, Get a Healthy Recipe in Three Minutes!]

[Old Li]: “…”

He could only say that the timing of this message was a bit terrifying.
Fortunately, he didn’t play any strange mobile games.

Just as Old Li was about to close the chat history, his gaze suddenly fell on the three words “homestyle dishes.”

‘Right, isn’t the new function in the game the cooking function?’

He silently opened the family group share that he had never opened before and read from the first page to the last.

[Old Li]: Mom, are there any others?

[Mom]: ?

[Old Li]: The recipe you just sent, are there any others?

[Mom]: Are you in a relationship?

[Old Li]: “…”

What goes around comes around.
Just as he had laughed at Hua Yibing, now it was his turn to be laughed at by Hua Yibing.

When Old Li posted this matter in the group, Hua Yibing spammed three pages of “hahahahahaha” before he finally felt vindicated, instantly forgetting his own family’s embarrassing incident.

[Yan]: Forwarding post [Did everyone see the cooking competition in the new Sea Realm announcement?]

[Yan]: Stop laughing at him. With your cooking skills that can only make instant noodles, you might as well go look up some recipes too.

[Flower World Dazzling Eyes]: Yan Er’mao, shut up! What’s so good about cooking? I’d rather fight the octopus monster for three hundred rounds.

[Old Li]: The final reward is a “Lord-taught skill.”

[Flower World Dazzling Eyes]: I’m going to memorize recipes right now.

No matter how chaotic the players were offline, when it was time for the server to open, everyone obediently got into their holographic game cabins.

Although the game opened on time, the exchange post still hadn’t opened.
Above it was still the familiar sign and the familiar handwriting—[Restocking, please come again later].

Hua Yibing thought of that arrogant three-no elf loli and sighed—it seemed the recipes they had crammed in before the server opened were temporarily useless.

The 123 team gathered again in front of the gate to the outer lands.
The Ge sisters and Sykes, disguised as Scott, were already waiting there.

“Scott, these are the two new members. This is Ge Jiao, she’s a curse-oriented special-attribute-type. The other is Ge Feifei, a powerful nature magician who can use fire in the sea,” Old Li, as the captain, introduced first to Sykes.

“Scott. I’m good with a bow and arrow,” Sykes nodded to the two of them, then went back to organizing his bow and arrows with his head down.

Old Li patted his shoulder and explained for him, “Hahahaha, Scott is a bit young and not very good at socializing.”

Sykes stumbled from the pat.
Logically speaking, with his strength, it was absolutely impossible for a level-one player to move him.
As long as the merman didn’t want to, even if all the closed beta players added up, they couldn’t hope to move him half a millimeter.

The result now was related to what he had been busy with before—
While Ella was maintaining the system, Sykes hadn’t been idle either.
He had seen a method for splitting a consciousness in an ancient book before, so he had tried it with a research mindset.

Although the process was a bit risky, in the end, he had split off a very weak consciousness.

He had put an energy membrane on the outside of the consciousness, just like the players, and had signed the same contract with his own main body.
From then on, he could enjoy the same resurrection treatment as the players.
When they fought together, he wouldn’t have to work so hard to hide his strength.

After all, asking a lord-level Sykes to pretend to be a level-one player was like forcing a sharp sword to use its blade to cut a bubble, and also having to control the force to only press down a little, and not cut it open!

This was simply asking too much of a fish.

That arrow last time was a huge mistake.

Thanks to the players’ lack of knowledge, they thought it was because he had hit a weak spot that the octopus was injured.
If any other sea race had seen it, they would absolutely not believe that a guy who could force an octopus to spew ink and hide with one arrow was only level one.

After the simple introduction, the group once again came to the vicinity of the shipwreck.
It was still a pitch-black expanse, and nothing could be seen clearly, as it was contaminated by the octopus’s ink.

Old Li took out the powerful disinfectant that the snail Tom had given him from his backpack and sprayed it into this part of the seawater.
Wherever the disinfectant was sprayed, it all returned to a clear, transparent state.

He had sprayed a full half a bottle of disinfectant before he had cleared up the battlefield.

Old Li took a deep breath and looked at the shipwreck.
“Let’s take it down today!”

Yan Shuangwen took out his sword, while Hua Yibing, under his teammate’s instruction, opened his stream room and changed the title to “[Sea Realm Wild BOSS First Kill!]”, once again soaring to the top of the cloud live stream.

This wasn’t their first battle.
They all had some idea of what to do.
But it was the Ge sisters’ first time facing a wild BOSS.

“Sis, what should I do? I, I, I’m feeling a little nervous,” Ge Feifei’s eyes were fixed on the entrance of the shipwreck, always feeling like some terrifying thing would pop out from inside the next second.

Although she was a veteran gamer, those were just 2D paper monsters before.
This was the SS-grade realism Sea Realm!

Just the snake in the novice dungeon had already scared her half to death, orz.

“Don’t worry, it’s all just data,” Ge Jiao, who hadn’t played many games, was far more open-minded than her.
“It won’t hurt if you get hit, and you can resurrect if you die. What’s there to be afraid of?”

“If you’re really scared, just imagine it as a potato,” she passed on the experience from her past interviews to her sister.

Ge Feifei was convinced.
“That’s right, let’s go, let’s go! Today I’m the Peashooter, and I’ll take down the potato wall!”

Seeing that everyone was ready, Old Li, according to the plan they had discussed beforehand, swam towards the shipwreck in a swaggering manner.

It was strange to say.
Even until Old Li swam to the side of the ship, only a step away from the window, the octopus inside still didn’t react.
The expected tentacle attack did not appear.

“Is it scared?” Old Li laughed heartily, lifted his machete, and chopped heavily on the ship’s window!
The rotten wood instantly shattered, and a glaring gash was chopped out on the originally fine wall.

But Old Li didn’t stop.
With a swing of his hand, he also chopped the window next to it to pieces.

“This BOSS won’t run away…” right?
Before Hua Yibing could finish his sentence, he saw a long, black shadow shoot out from the ship with the speed of lightning, heading towards Old Li with a sharp, piercing sound.

“Good of you to come!” Old Li shouted, his face fearless.
He first swung his blade to fiercely repel the tentacle that was lashing at him, then dodged with a flash, avoiding the second one that followed.

Just like that, in the midst of fighting and dodging, Old Li’s position shifted down a bit.

“Is this BOSS only capable of these few moves?”
Ge Feifei was no longer afraid at all.
She eagerly rubbed two fireballs in her hands, just waiting for Old Li’s command to attack with her companions.

But obviously, to be able to be a deep-sea BOSS and occupy this area for so long, the octopus definitely couldn’t only have this much ability, even if it had been seriously injured by an unknown existence with an arrow before.

Ge Feifei suddenly saw something rolling and surging in the black shadow at the bottom of the ship, and she felt a sense of foreboding.

The next second, dozens of slightly thinner tentacles in the black shadow were densely entangled together.
Cooperating with the few thick tentacles that were attacking Old Li from four directions above, they formed an upper and lower net, directly covering the reckless merman.

What a treacherous and cunning octopus!
The initial patience was just to lay this trap to lure the king into the urn, just waiting for the prey to get heated, and then take it down in one blow!

“Be careful!” Ge Feifei, as the first person to discover the anomaly, was also the earliest to react.

She raised her hand, and two fireballs shot towards the tentacle net below.
A few tentacles were scorched by the flames and flinched in pain, failing to keep up with the movements of the other tentacles, thus leaving a not-so-obvious gap in the airtight net.

“Now’s the chance!!” Ge Feifei shouted a reminder.

Old Li also saw this gap.
He decisively poured his magic power into his palm, and a few long, sharp nails shot out, fiercely cutting through more than half of the tentacle closest to him.
Then he pulled back with his hand, using the force of its swing to roll towards the gap.

Successful escape!

The prey that was originally at its mouth suddenly became a true “fish that slipped through the net.”
At the very end, it had even cut off one of its main combat tentacles.
This turn of events almost drove the BOSS mad.

Although it had the patience to lay a trap at the beginning, when the plan failed, its brain, which had been eroded by curses for many years, was immediately filled with rage, and there was no other rationality to speak of.

A scarlet single eye flashed in the pitch-black cabin.
A sky full of tentacles moved in unison and attacked the damn prey.

Old Li’s reaction was extremely fast.
He managed to flip over in mid-air, dodging the most fatal attack, and then was hit by the attack from the other side, his body tilting.
His excellent combat awareness allowed him to quickly stabilize his body.
He slapped the oncoming tentacle fiercely with his tail, using the reaction force to pounce to a more distant place.

When Old Li looked up again, he saw that just a few centimeters from the tip of his nose, countless tentacles stretched to their limit were densely distributed, all pointing at his face.

If someone with trypophobia were here, they would have probably fainted from fear.

But Old Li felt extremely refreshed.

There was no doubt that this position was the greatest distance they had probed last time.
It was absolutely impossible for the BOSS to hit him from inside the cabin, unless…

The monster inside the ship let out a long howl.
The unpleasantness of the sound was comparable to nails scratching hard on a blackboard, but one could also hear the owner’s furious rage.

The cabin cracked open from the top with a ‘kacha’.
The tentacles poked out from all directions, first a pile of wiggling tips, then slowly extending, pulling the crack wider and wider.
The tentacles that emerged also became thicker and thicker, until the intersection of the tentacles was revealed—the BOSS’s torso!

This was the first time the group had seen the full appearance of this octopus.
They couldn’t help but suck in a cold breath.

The octopus’s head was almost half the size of the cabin.
Its whole body was covered in an ominous purplish-black skin, with layers upon layers of dark golden rings on it.
Just this strange color was enough to make one’s eyes spin, let alone the various colored tentacles surging below it.

In the very center of the octopus’s head was a scarlet, giant eye that shone with the cruel and fierce light of a beast, covering one-third of its entire face.

“Hiss! Is this the legendary anime eye?” Huahua said in horror.

He glanced at the stream room, and as expected, the content of the bullet comments had changed direction—

[Bul!! Let!! Shield!! Body!!]

[Holy cr*p, holy cr*p, holy cr*p! What is that thing? My SAN value is dropping like crazy!]

[I’m looking at the takoyaki in my hand, and I can’t bring myself to eat it anymore.]

[What anime eye? Huahua, can you please shut up, ahhhhhhh!]

[Grass (a kind of flower language)]

[Such a tense and exciting battle, and after hearing that one sentence, I instantly lost all interest.]

[Person above, you’re not alone.]

Joking aside, he was just taking care of the stream room’s mood and giving the audience a little relaxation.

After the joke, Hua Yibing had to focus all his attention on the monster.
There was still a tough battle to be fought.

At this time, Old Li was already leading the roaring monster towards this side, dodging left and right with large movements.
He didn’t dare to be careless in the face of the berserk BOSS.

“Go!” Old Li finally shouted.

The few teammates who had been waiting on standby all attacked at once.

“Blinding Spell!” Hua Yibing cast a blinding effect on the monster.
The octopus lost its vision, and the frequency of its attacks also slowed down a few分, which gave Old Li a chance to catch his breath.

Immediately after, Ge Jiao laid a defense-lowering formation at the BOSS’s feet.

A golden sword, a giant hammer, a fireball, and a sharp arrow that shot through the air all attacked the tentacles from all directions at almost the same time, cutting through every tentacle they passed.

“This defense-lowering buff is just like cheating!” Hua Yibing praised, then swung his hammer again, smashing a new tentacle into a pulp.

Indeed, the tentacles that had previously required a full charge of magic power to break through their defense could now be easily damaged with just a little bit of magic power.

The few melee fighters were at the front.
Hua Yibing opened the skill he had gotten from the system’s compensation for himself and his teammates—area-of-effect health recovery.
Although because the skill level was low and there were too many people, the amount of recovery was pitifully low, but it was still a positive buff, right?

The situation was well controlled, and everything was going according to plan.
The octopus, whose combat power was continuously being weakened, let out a frantic roar.
To the players’ ears, this sound was a song of victory in sight.

“Be careful, I feel like it still has a trick up its sleeve!” Old Li said in a deep voice.
The BOSSes in games often had higher combat power when their health was low.
Sometimes they would even have different state changes, or terrifying moves that they had never used before.
They couldn’t let their guard down!

As soon as his voice fell, the octopus suddenly stopped making a sound.
There was no movement at all.
Its blood-red giant eye seemed to be staring even wider, as if it would burst open the next second.

This made Old Li’s heart tighten, and a sense of foreboding spread.

“Retreat!!” He quickly turned and rushed back.
Hua and Yan reacted extremely quickly and also followed.

But they were still a step too slow.

As mentioned before, in this world, besides the merman, this magic-immune race, almost every individual was born with a magic talent from birth.
This was also the reason why magic had become so normalized.

An octopus, this thing, was of course not a merman.

That is to say, it could use magic.

A purplish-black poisonous mist sprayed out from the octopus’s broken wounds and spread extremely quickly in the seawater.
In an instant, it had caught up with the few people nearby and enveloped them.

[Poisoned: A terrible poison has corroded your body. Health -2 per分. Duration: until death.]