Ling Mo was still thinking about the dungeon. “Do you have to play the warzone mode in this game? Can you... handle that kind of pain?”

Girls were supposed to be afraid of pain, right?

Xia Xinyan shook her head like she didn’t care. “As long as you’re with me, I’m not scared.”

Ling Mo paused.

He still had zero resistance to lines that direct.

So he just accepted what she said. “Okay... then I’ll play with you.”

His mood right now was complicated.

What Xia Xinyan had told him sounded a little too fantastical. But after hearing all that, it was hard not to overthink. Even if he knew there was nothing much about an ordinary college student like him worth targeting, the feeling was still strange.

...Even if Xia Xinyan had approached him for some kind of purpose, was it possible... just like she said, that there was at least a tiny chance she had approached him because she liked him?

After all, he’d only just experienced the feeling of being in love for the first time. To have that fantasy cruelly shattered right away was hard for a kid in puberty to take.

And also... also... even if it was embarrassing to admit...

Xia Xinyan really was exactly his ideal type of girlfriend.

In every way.

“Alright.” Xia Xinyan let go of him, stepped back two paces, and said with a light laugh, “We cleared our first dungeon. Now we can check the rewards.”

Ling Mo gave a quiet response and opened the game menu to look through it, partly to distract himself.

Xia Xinyan then sat down on the spot and summoned the system panel.

She wanted to fade her dungeon memories.

The game had that function. You could choose how much to blur your dungeon memories. If you pushed the effect to the max, it would make the whole experience feel like a dream, tinged with unreality, minimizing the psychological impact on the player.

As for why she wanted to do that...

Because she was afraid of pain. Even the memory of it was something she didn’t want.

In her previous life, she really had clawed and fought her way forward. She’d been injured plenty of times, and died plenty of times too. She’d experienced it all, both in the game and later in reality.

But that didn’t mean she’d gotten used to pain.

Anyway, she believed no one in this world could ever truly get used to pain. Even if you experienced death countless times, the pain of dying wouldn’t lessen by even half a point the next time. However much it hurt, it would still hurt that much. Maybe not even the ultimate masochist would come to like that feeling.

And she had always been someone who feared pain, both before and now. If she had to name one improvement, it was that her tolerance was much higher now than it used to be.

That was all.

That was why, the moment the game announced the dungeon clear, she had left so quickly.

Too bad she didn’t have the absurdly overpowered ability from her previous life anymore. She’d probably end up getting hurt far more often in this life than she had before.

That made her feel vaguely annoyed.

Of course, it was only the level of grumbling to herself. At this point in time, Ling Mo hadn’t done anything wrong at all. If she really had to blame someone... then it was all that Tianji’s fault.

[It’s not Tianji, it’s Tianji.]

‘Sure, Tianji. Let me see your points shop.’

[...]

Tianji silently opened the system points shop in Xia Xinyan’s mind.

This shop looked almost exactly the same as the in-game store, but the list of items for sale was completely different. After a rough glance through it, Xia Xinyan’s impression could be summed up in two words—

Total cheat.

A complete cheat.

Realm of Divine Descent could awaken a player’s ability, but it didn’t provide any progression path. If players wanted to improve their abilities, they had to figure it out on their own. But in Tianji’s points shop, the upgrade options for both her and Ling Mo’s abilities were listed out directly. It even included the specific ways to use those abilities.

As expected of a system.

Tch... if this system had activated in her previous life, she never would’ve died such a miserable death.

[Host, why keep dwelling on this? It was only a system bug.]

Xia Xinyan ignored it.

In this dungeon, Ling Mo had gotten 16 kills. Adding the 2000 points for clearing the dungeon, her final total came to 4600 points. And since the dungeon rating had landed exactly at S-rank, she also got one extra draw chance.

Besides that, the rewards from the game system itself were pretty good too. Other than the base rewards, both of them had performed well in this dungeon. So in the end, Ling Mo received 14,000 game points, while she received 9,000.

That also included several rifles they had brought out with them.

“Hiss... these game points can really be exchanged for money?” Ling Mo seemed to have just discovered some game rule, and sounded a little shocked. “A 10-to-1 exchange rate? That high?”

Xia Xinyan paused, then said at once, “Don’t exchange them. It’s better to use them to improve your physical stats.”

“Hm?” Ling Mo wasn’t too impulsive about it. “Oh... I know.”

After what Xia Xinyan had told him earlier, he no longer saw this game as just a game. And if he thought about it carefully, it really was suspicious. A free-to-play model, an economy system that practically paid players back, and technology far beyond the current era—those were all glaring red flags.

But the temptation really was huge...

14,000 game points. Converted into cash, that was 1,400 yuan. If he ran one dungeon a day, he could easily make over ten thousand a month.

“Use all the game points on physical stats?” he asked after looking at the stat enhancement panel for a while.

Xia Xinyan nodded. “Yeah, use all of them. Try to level the stats evenly. Don’t leave any obvious weaknesses.”

The game’s physical stats covered all kinds of things, like endurance, strength, stamina, immunity, and more. Every increase cost game points, and the farther you went, the more expensive it became. It was basically a bottomless pit. But once enhanced to a certain level, even without using an ability, a player would probably be comparable to a superhero.

Of course, the amount of game points needed for that was enormous. No player could afford to pour all their points into it. So in her previous life, even by the time the catastrophe broke out, only a handful of players had reached that level.

But at least in the early stage, investing all game points into physical stats was absolutely the right choice.

Hearing that, Ling Mo felt a little reluctant about spending that 1,400 just like that, but he still obediently put it all into physical stats.

After that, Xia Xinyan stood up from the ground. “Log off and rest for a bit. This game drains a lot of mental energy. One warzone dungeon a day is enough.”

With that, she left Ling Mo’s personal space and returned to her own.

Her personal space looked like a pale-colored forest, like a fantasy wonderland from a painting. In the very center of the forest was an open clearing, and the wooden cabin standing there was her house.

She sat down by the wooden table in front of the cabin and opened the game system again.

There was one more important thing.

And it was something she didn’t want to check in front of Ling Mo.

Her ability.

The ability unlocked by clearing a dungeon for the first time was a power that would stay with a player until death. How strong or weak that ability was directly affected the player’s innate combat potential.

To help players get familiar with their abilities, the game system displayed a direct summary of them.

So after opening her character panel, the first thing Xia Xinyan saw was the ability section—

[Beastification · Black Cat]

“...”

[Suggestion: Host should use this ability to cosplay a catgirl. Based on projections, this could increase the original host body’s favorability toward the host by up to 300%.]

[Oh, correction. Host is already a catgirl.]

“?”