Sword Among Us

Compared to the situation in the beginning when Happy was chased by numerous forces of power after he became famous, he began to live a very satisfactory and relaxing life.

For three consecutive days, he stayed in Red Fog Forest to train and master his next low-level sword technique. He was in a high-level training ground in Wuhu, so no one came and bothered him.

By then, his qi was at 159.4. If the martial realm he was practicing could reach another realm, he would fully master the skill, and he would reach the third qi realm—Mystical Realm.

Even though the number of insanely powerful people on Dragon Rank and Phoenix Rank who had multiple high-tier martial arts in Grandmaster Realm had increased and there were also people who had reached Mystical Realm, Happy was not too bothered by it. The ranking on Dragon Rank and Phoenix Rank was still made based on a person’s qi realm and the realms of their high-tier martial arts. Those two things were used as the basis of strength, and because of it, the ranking system was still a prototype. It was not perfect yet, and it did not matter whether he was on the ranking board or not.

As of then, there were still plenty of people who did not understand the fact that some martial arts reinforced each other while others countered each other. Many people just searched for high-tier martial arts with high damage and believed that the ones with the highest damage were the best. Of course, high speed did not mean supremacy either. Deliberately practicing speed would not allow anyone to reach the peak.

Happy only wanted to train in peace based on the training method in his previous life and go a step further to quickly become stronger.

Right then, his Flowering Knights’ Song and Stormy Shadowless Kick had reached Grandmaster Realm. He could easily handle a normal martial artist, and he did not have any problems against some of the more powerful ones. There were few who could be his enemy among the many players…

One emperor, two empresses, and the few people from among the three kings and the seven dukes who had not registered for the Sword Among Us Tournament at Mount Hua for some reason were such.

However, Happy believed that with his experience and abilities, even if those people inherited the ultimate martial arts beforehand, they would not be his opponent. Those people would only slowly reveal their strength and rise above others during the later stages of the game.

‘I’ll wait for you to appear in this life.’

Happy’s gaze was firm. He lifted his Silver Wolf Emperor Breaker Sword in the refreshing and pink peach blossom forest and flung away two female bandits with pink veils and curvaceous bodies in an earnest manner. It was a very easy action for him.

Whoosh! Whoosh!

Red light flashed, and two darts struck Happy, but they were sent bouncing away by the flashing golden light of his body fortification technique.

Golden Bell Cocoon flashed madly, and its light became slightly dimmer. The strength of the darts did not lose to the full powered strike from a high-tier martial art.

As one of the outer sect forces of Shifting Flower Palace stationed in Wuhu, the pink-veiled female bandits had reached the later stage of Mystical Realm, and they were not to be easily provoked. Red Fog Forest was an area the players in Wuhu did not easily approach. Even Happy had to use his full strength and act carefully inside it.

However, it was a very good choice to train his sword technique and also increase the realm of his Golden Bell Cocoon.

*****

“Hurry up and stop it!”

“Good, we lured it to the forest—”

“It’s too sturdy. We actually didn’t manage to hurt it! We’ll have to deal with it slowly in the forest!”

“We’ll be rich this time, it’s Nian! Haha! Hurry! If someone else sees it, it won’t be good for us.”

On a government-made road that was rather far away from Wuhu were around ten players. They were surrounding a strange-looking yellow creature with an honest expression, and they looked very excited and worked up. While attacking nonstop, they yelled and chased the creature into the forest three hundred and thirty feet away.

“It’s running!”

“Idiot! Open up a gap in our encirclement! The people standing in the direction of the forest, move! Chase it into the forest and don’t let others see it!”

The group took action while talking all at once.

Those people were all members of the same sect. They had formed a party to carry out a mission in an area near Wuhu, but they did not expect that a strange-looking creature would suddenly rush over from outside the government-made road as if there was nothing going on around it. It did not treat them as anything important and just grazed on the grass outside like a normal cow.

The party originally did not treat this as anything important either. The only problem was that the yellow creature was too eye-catching, and there was also a very clear Chinese character for year[1] carved on its forehead!

“Nian!”

Once the group approached it, someone cried out, and the entire party instantly burned with excitement.

For the last couple days, the people in the game and the official forums had been talking about Nian.

It was rumored that it respawned at different spots in the server and was very rare. However, each Nian seemed to have quite a lot of good items.

There were even some people who said that they could get pure gold ingots from Nian. When they were sold, the player would get supreme grade coins worth ten thousand taels of silver crumbs. The Nians were not strong either, but incredibly tough. The players needed quite a long time to kill one. However, one Nian would drop at least three gold ingots and some random manuals, medicinal pills, weapons, and other items.

It was said that some of the normal players with quite good luck but had really bad abilities had obtained ten gold ingots and an entire set of high-tier martial art manuals that could be practiced at Blessed Realm through Nian. Then, they received the invitation from a few sects, which was something that many players found very awesome.

Because a Nian was very easy to deal with, a person could become rich and powerful overnight. This led to a hot trend of searching for Nian in World of Martial Arts.

Once they recognized Nian, the players had become incredibly excited, but they soon calmed down.

They deliberately let Nian run, and the startled beast panted as it fled. It did its best to run into the direction of the forest in an attempt to shake off the “monsters” that were swinging their weapons savagely behind it.

The party chased after it in excitement and ran into the unknown forest. When they entered the depths, they surrounded Nian again.

“We’re rich! We’re going to be stinking rich!”

“Heh heh, I wonder what Nian will give us.”

“It’s a pity there’s only one.”

The pitiful and honest-looking Nian was surrounded by a group of people while they talked to each other nonstop. It raised its hooves and paced around uneasily. It was shaking from its terror.

“Enough with the bullcrap! Let’s just kill it before anything else!”

“Attack!”

All the players activated their qi realms. Most of them were Blessed Realm, but one of them even revealed the astonishing presence of a martial artist in Mystical Realm. A Ghost Head Saber showed up, and it was incredibly domineering. When the player swung it, it shone with a saber glare that could easily slice through anything. The damage the saber dealt was higher than the overall damage of all the others on Nian.

“As expected of a grade one masterpiece.”

The party noticed that every time the person in Mystical Realm attacked, the pained cries from Nian would be abnormally loud, as if it was truly hurt. Their expressions grew wary because of that.

Even though they were together, only the person who dealt the greatest damage would be able to obtain the loot from the corpses or carcasses in the game. If the others wanted to get the loot, they would have to wait for three minutes before the loot protection went away.

Unless something happened, once Nian died, the items that it dropped would definitely belong to the Mystical Realm player.

Nian had plenty of golden ingots that were worth a huge sum, and it also had high-tier martial art manuals! The temptation of more than ten thousand RMB was very fatal to a normal player.

When Nian was injured rather badly, the joy on the Mystical Realm player’s face grew more prominent, and he worked even harder to attack it, as if he had already obtained the system’s notification telling him that Nian’s items belonged to him. His actions became faster.

The others attacking Nian in the encirclement hesitated, and they slowed down their attack speed.