Chun arrived at the dock, which was essentially an old cargo ship moored in a lock pool.
As he entered the water, a smooth and flowing sensation swept over him, as if a top-notch graphics card were operating smoothly.
Although Chun hadn't practiced swimming during the public test, he had seen a cybercafe expert dive in to retrieve sea shells. The resistance they faced looked uncomfortable, a huge difference that came from the equipment. Of course, goggles were important too, as the game's realistic settings meant that prolonged exposure to seawater without goggles would redden the eyes, reduce vision, and even cause blindness.
——System Notification: Congratulations! You have successfully triggered "Swimming" skill training. When your proficiency accumulates to a certain level, you will comprehend the "Basic Swimming" skill.
Triggered!
The game's degree of freedom is extremely high, with settings for self-comprehension of skills. Skills fall into five main categories: daily life skills, professional production skills, profession combat skills, folk skills, and academic skills.
Daily life skills include: running, swimming, cooking, climbing, weightlifting, fishing, throwing, etc., and these skills are the easiest to comprehend on your own.
Professional production skills include: mining, gathering, skinning, tailoring, alchemy, forging, gemstone processing, and even breeding chickens, pigs, and flowers—the flowers in the florist are part of the gardening skill.
Profession combat skills are skills that require the player to have a specific profession to acquire. They are difficult to comprehend on your own, and a skill tutor is the best way to learn them. The Knight Physician profession even has divine skills that can't keep up just by learning from a tutor, requiring periodic renewal.
Folk skills are all kinds of strange skills that some NPCs know—extremely varied in nature, covering talents, mastery, and are typically unable to level up. Players need some luck to learn them.
Academic skills cover various laws, archaeology, astrology, arts, and can only be learned with money, through schools or libraries, with little possibility of comprehension. It's beyond player entertainment, but once learned, you can hold a fixed-wage job at an NPC institution.
The major main cities occasionally hold cooking, fishing, and athletics competitions. Typically, only expert level or above can qualify, and getting in the top three is as rewarding as winning the lottery. Thus, during public tests, many players focused on skill comprehension.
Since skills have competitions, the skill level differences are also very evident. Skill levels are divided into six tiers: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert, Master, Grandmaster. Each tier has 10 levels, and with every level increase in life production skills comes a bonus in physical load, while combat skills grant life dodge rate, hit rate, critical strike rate, and anti-critical rate.
This means that if a player grinds enough to bring all known daily production skills to a level that is realistically obtainable, reaching Advanced will add over 1000 points to physical load. The most important attribute in this world is indeed physical strength. Not just for effective mining, but it's essential for team battles. So what if a noob wears divine gear that's impenetrable by sword and spear? If pushed around until they're out of endurance, they're still nothing.
With 1000 load points, one person can push a fully loaded mine cart to fly. Moreover, without a thousand load, some Divine Artifacts like the "Sword in the Stone" cannot even be picked up...
...
The inevitable arrived quickly:
——System Notification: Congratulations! You have accumulated significant proficiency and have successfully comprehended "Basic Swimming" skill level 1. You received an achievement reward: Physical Strength +1, Load +1.
After formally learning to swim, a faint aura of skill effects surrounded Chun, making his underwater dynamics clearly more stable. He could hold his breath longer and had more leverage when harvesting shells. Meanwhile, his Swimming Proficiency skyrocketed!
Chun remembered the cybercafe expert's advice that calm water could only train up to Basic level 10. To break through to Intermediate, one must find rapids to swim against the current, and to reach Advanced, it required more complex ocean environments with waves and vortices. Moreover, one couldn't "skip ahead"; a beginner in Basic Swimming jumping straight into the vortex sea would only make a mess of errors, with no chance of comprehension.
This diving suit's negative load special skill clearly broke through the "calm water" limitation and would surely propel to Intermediate.
10 minutes later, Basic Swimming level 2, Physical Strength +1, Load +1!
Another 8 minutes and 40 seconds, Swimming level 3, Physical Strength +1, Load +1!
...
Nearly two hours later, Basic Swimming reached level 10, earning 10 points in Physical Strength and 10 points in Load. The speed at which these skills leveled up might shock the cybercafe expert into bewilderment!
To this point, Chun moved with the agility of a fish, but his Swimming Proficiency barely increased!
Chun was stunned. Even with equipment, he couldn't break through? How did this game calculate things? Although considering diminishing returns and marginal effects in a game where damage equals "Attack - Defense" might be unreliable, this situation could only mean that the "negative load" wasn't harsh enough.
What else could be done to negatively load?
Chun focused on hunger. This high-intensity work for two hours must be close! Finally:
——System Notification: Warning! Your hunger level has hit 50, and your attributes have begun to decrease. Please eat promptly.
It arrived! The cybercafe expert said: When hunger-induced attribute decline sets in, movements become distorted, often resulting in mining and combat skill failures. However, there's a slight chance of skill breakthroughs! This is what is known online as the "Hunger Method" or "Near-Death Method" for breakthroughs.
After some toiling, proficiency still didn't rise. Was it because the hunger wasn't severe enough? But at that point, movements turned into major distortions and failures—hmm?