Chapter 381: A Dangerous Line of Thought
[This update to the Dimensional Chat Group adds five new features in total —
First: within the Arena, alongside the existing "Solo Mode" and "Versus Mode," a new "Dungeon Mode" has been added.
"Dungeon Mode" is exactly what it sounds like — functionally identical to a video game dungeon. Countless NPCs, wild monsters, quests, and more, set across a sprawling map. Currently, only one map is available.
"Dungeon Mode" costs a flat 10 Points per hour. Neither Basic nor Premium VIP free-hour allowances apply within Dungeon Mode.
"Dungeon Mode" offers three difficulty settings — Easy, Hard, and Hell — freely selectable.
Death within "Dungeon Mode" grants only five Point-based revivals. Once all five are exhausted, the member will be forcibly ejected from the mode.
A 24-hour cooldown applies before re-entry is possible.
Note: gear and item drops obtained while killing monsters in "Dungeon Mode" carry a 0.0001% chance of manifesting in reality.]
...
"A new 'Dungeon Mode' inside the Arena? Sounds like they've carved out a pocket world within the Arena itself and rewritten its rules to function like an online game?"
By the time Ryū finished reading through the first new feature, his expression had shifted into something close to disbelief. He genuinely hadn't expected a feature like this to show up.
And drops from killing monsters inside it had an actual chance — however slim — of coming out into the real world!
That part was genuinely impressive.
If some absurdly powerful piece of gear dropped in there and the odds actually hit, wouldn't that be an enormous windfall?
Of course, the drop rate itself was migraine-inducing. 0.0001%? What kind of number was that?
The corner of Ryū's mouth twitched involuntarily. Even someone with luck as absurd as his own probably wasn't triggering odds that low anytime soon.
For someone with genuinely cursed luck — Yukari, say, or Tony Stark — they could conceivably go their entire lives without ever pulling a single item out of that dungeon.
Ryū figured the whole "bring the loot into reality" mechanic was basically decorative — who was actually going to hit those odds? The group barely had enough members to begin with, and setting the rate this low all but guaranteed it would never trigger for anyone.
The rest of Dungeon Mode's mechanics were genuinely solid, though. Compared to the solo battle mode, this gave members actual plot, actual NPCs to interact with.
Functionally, it was basically just playing a video game — a fully immersive, holographic-simulation kind of game, at that.
[Second: the Dimensional Chat Group is introducing "Tier Titles." Tiers are assigned based on a member's strength, ranked from Tier 1 (highest) to Tier 6 (lowest).
For example: Admin "RawrSoFierce" and Moderator "Eternally Seventeen" rank at Tier 1; members "Kaguya Shinomiya" and "Senbei Is So Tasty" rank at Tier 2, and so on.
Tiers will shift dynamically with a member's actual strength. If "Senbei Is So Tasty" grows powerful enough to match the Tier 1 group, they'll be promoted to Tier 1. If their strength drops sharply enough — say, down to Tier 4 levels — they'll be demoted to Tier 4 accordingly.]
...
Honestly, Ryū found himself a little baffled reading this one. What was the actual point of it?
Just sorting members by a rough power scale?
Was that really all this was for?
On second thought, though, he figured it probably wasn't quite that simple — none of the previous major updates had ever added something purely decorative, after all.
He kept reading, and the third new feature made his expression shift again, this time into open surprise.
[Third: the Dimensional Chat Group's quest system is being restructured. Group quests will now be assigned according to a member's Tier Title.
A Tier 1 quest, for instance, will only be open to Tier 1 members; a Tier 2 quest only to Tier 2 members, and so on — the goal being genuine "balance" across who can participate in each quest.
Going forward, the overall trigger rate for group quests will also increase somewhat, giving more members the chance to actually take part.
This allows a wider range of members to grow stronger using the Points earned from group quests.]
...
The third update clearly built directly on the second. This tiered, structured approach to quests was obviously meant to close the growing power gap between members.
It meant members sitting near the bottom of the group's overall power scale would no longer be entirely locked out of participating in quests.
And with the trigger rate itself increasing on top of that — if the group used to see maybe one or two group quests a month, three at most counting invitation quests — after this update, that number could realistically jump to four or five a month. Maybe six, seven, even ten.
Ryū understood exactly what this update was really aiming for: propping up the group's weaker members without holding back or restricting the mid-to-upper-tier ones in the process.
Which meant, of everything in this update, this was the part that mattered most for newcomers — a genuinely rare, substantial windfall for anyone just starting out.
Ryū had no objection to any of this, of course. Newcomer growth had been a real headache for him for a while now — all sorts of compounding factors had left new members growing far too slowly.
The gap between them and everyone else just kept widening, further and further.
Left unchecked, that trajectory would eventually split the group into two extremes — the strong getting stronger, the weak staying weak — and that ran counter to everything Ryū had actually wanted for the group.
He couldn't speak for anyone else's priorities, but as far as he was concerned, he wanted every single member of the Dimensional Chat Group to have the chance to grow as fast as they possibly could. He didn't want anyone's growth artificially capped.
This update addressed exactly that concern. Weaker members, going forward, should see their strength climb at a genuinely rapid clip.
[Fourth: Group Files is receiving a comprehensive overhaul. Beyond images, documents, and videos, members will now be able to share memory recordings, games, music, and more.]
...
[Fifth: the Group Red Envelope system is being upgraded, with two new types added — "Idiom Envelopes" and "Voice Envelopes."]
...
[This update will take a total of 12 hours to complete. Update now? Yes/No]
This latest update genuinely deserved to be called major. What actually triggered these updates in the first place, though, Ryū still had no idea.
If he'd known the actual trigger conditions, he'd have been chasing them nonstop by now.
Maybe more feedback triggered them somehow?
Should he start submitting five, six, seven pieces of feedback a day, just in case?
Of course, that was purely idle speculation on his part — there was no telling what actually set off a major update in this system.
Having read through everything in the link, Ryū didn't hesitate for a second before selecting to update.
There wasn't really a downside for him either way, and refusing meant he'd simply lose access to the chat group entirely.
It was basically the same as most online games — different versions couldn't run alongside each other, and staying on the old version generally meant getting locked out entirely.
[The Dimensional Chat Group is currently updating. Admin "RawrSoFierce," please stand by. Time remaining... 11:59:59]
Once he confirmed the update, Ryū read the timer message with a rueful little laugh, muttering to himself, "Twelve whole hours, huh. Well, guess I'll just wait it out. Twelve hours isn't that long, really."
"Not like I'm some youkai sage with a chat-group addiction who gets restless after one hour offline. Twelve hours is nothing for me."
Might as well use the downtime to actually get outside for once — he'd been cooped up at home for days on end.
Ever since killing those Void Beasts in the Naruto world, he hadn't stepped outside even once — a full eight days holed up indoors.
Not that he was physically suffering for it or anything, but getting some fresh air sounded like a decent idea regardless.
Well — honestly, the real reason was he was just bored out of his mind at home. He normally passed the time chatting in the group, or grinding in the Arena.
The manga and movies he'd borrowed from Kaguya and the others, he'd already burned through entirely. Nothing left to fill twelve straight hours with.
And he wasn't remotely tired, either — no chance of actually falling asleep if he tried. Lying in bed would just mean staring at the ceiling, doing absolutely nothing.
Watching the countdown ticking down in his mind, Ryū let his consciousness slip out of the chat and turned his attention to the streets of Konoha outside.
Maybe it was the unusually warm weather today, but the snow had finally stopped falling.
It had only really come down on and off for about half a month before petering out entirely — nothing at all, it seemed, since the day before yesterday. Most of the accumulated snow had already been cleared away, and a fair amount of what remained had started melting.
Dressed in short sleeves, Ryū didn't feel the slightest chill.
He kicked idly at a small pile of shoveled-aside snow, thought for a moment, and set off in a particular direction.
His destination turned out to be Ichiraku Ramen — somewhere he hadn't visited in quite a while.
Come to think of it, he hadn't stopped by even once since Orochimaru's defection from the village.
Huh. That thought suddenly felt a little... intense, somehow. Ryū swore up and down that he had absolutely no lingering feelings toward that Snake Prin— ahem, toward Orochimaru.
None whatsoever, in any capacity. Ryū considered his own tastes to be perfectly ordinary, thank you very much.
Even if Orochimaru, post-gender-transformation, was admittedly rather striking to look at.
...Nope. Nope nope nope. Shutting that particular train of thought down right now.
☆☆☆
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