Chapter 34: Triple Drop Rate—Grinding Soul Stones Like Crazy!
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Lu Ming walked over and picked up the gemstone that had fallen to the ground, along with the seven copper coins dropped by the necromancer.
He glanced at the gemstone.
[Soul Stone] (Special Item)
[Purity: 13%]
[Description: A stone condensed from fused souls, possessing powerful spiritual energy. It is said that the forging merchants of Starshine City are purchasing large quantities of these...]
Soul Stones were the most valuable resource in the Ghost Tower map!
Players could submit Soul Stones to the forging merchant in Starshine City in exchange for rewards.
Moreover, as long as they had enough Soul Stones, they could submit them indefinitely, repeatedly claiming the rewards!
That was the core reason the Ghost Tower map was so popular among players of the Second Heaven!
Wealthy players and tycoons who could not be bothered to farm the map themselves would simply spend money buying Soul Stones from other players, then repeatedly turn them in to the forging merchant to level up rapidly.
In addition to generous experience and large quantities of copper coins, there was also a chance to obtain Bronze-grade Soul Set equipment!
The higher the purity of the Soul Stone submitted to the merchant, the more generous the reward—and the greater the chance of receiving Soul Set equipment.
Thus, Soul Stones were valued according to their purity. The purer they were, the more expensive they became.
On the current market, Soul Stones like the one in Lu Ming’s hand, with a purity between 0% and 40%, were considered fifth-grade goods and were worth roughly twenty yuan each!
Those with a purity between 41% and 70% were fourth-grade goods, selling for about fifty yuan apiece.
Purity between 71% and 90% made a third-grade stone, worth one hundred yuan each!
Purity between 91% and 99% made a second-grade stone, worth three hundred yuan each!
If you managed to obtain a perfect Soul Stone with 100% purity, you would be rich.
A perfect Soul Stone could sell for as much as one thousand yuan!
Because of the tycoons’ demand, Soul Stones were perpetually in short supply on the market. Many players even made a living from them, spending their entire lives farming Soul Stones in the Ghost Tower to support their families.
Someone had once calculated that, provided you had enough money, you could spend roughly one billion yuan buying Soul Stones and rise effortlessly from level 10 to level 50 in a single day!
For someone like Lu Ming, who would bow his head for even a modest meal,
“Better to keep my feet on the ground!”
The drop rate for Soul Stones was extremely low, only around ten percent.
Furthermore, the lower the plane, the lower the probability of obtaining high-purity Soul Stones.
In the first plane of the Ghost Tower, where Lu Ming currently was, the undead monsters between levels 11 and 15 dropped mostly the lowest-quality fifth-grade stones.
However, Lu Ming won through sheer quantity.
He possessed a legion of undead, and his killing speed was dozens—even hundreds—of times faster than that of other players at the same level!
At that moment, 240 Tier Two undead warriors had formed a double formation under the effects of [War Stomp] and [Life Fortress], launching a massive slaughter throughout the sprawling camp.
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It was no exaggeration to say that the undead warlords’ astonishing 1,672 attack power was even higher than the health of the undead monsters in the camp!
Cutting them down was as easy as chopping vegetables!
Battle notifications rang incessantly in Lu Ming’s ears.
[Ding! You have slain a level 14 undead knight. Experience +78!]
[Ding! You have slain a level 13 undead knight. Experience +68!]
[Ding...]
When two players formed a party to kill monsters, each received eighty percent of the experience.
The final blow made no difference. Lu Ming still received the full one hundred percent of the kill rewards.
In other words, even with Lin Youwei along, it was no different from farming alone. His own interests were completely unaffected!
At the same time, the Soul Stones in Lu Ming’s inventory were increasing at a speed visible to the naked eye.
Before long, he already had dozens of them!
Lu Ming took a look.
Although most were low-purity fifth-grade stones, with only one fourth-grade stone appearing for every ten, quantity more than made up for quality!
One had to understand that even professional farmers who had been grinding in the Ghost Tower for more than a decade could obtain only ten to twenty Soul Stones in an entire day, even when luck was on their side!
“Something’s not right!”
As Lu Ming searched online for information about Soul Stone drop rates, he suddenly noticed a problem.
“The drop rate for Soul Stones is only ten percent, which means that one should appear only after killing ten undead.”
“Why does it feel like my drop rate is much higher than that?”
According to the kill records, the undead warlords had slaughtered nearly one hundred undead in total.
Yet the number of Soul Stones in Lu Ming’s inventory had already surpassed thirty!
Thinking back, even the copper coins dropped by those undead seemed abnormal.
Under normal circumstances, a monster between levels 11 and 15 should drop two or three copper coins.
But every time one of the undead warlords under Lu Ming’s command killed an undead, it submitted nearly seven or eight copper coins!
“What’s going on?”
Amid his surprise, Lu Ming suddenly remembered that when Lin Youwei had shown him her account panel, her talent seemed to increase drop rates!
With that thought, Lu Ming opened his skill panel. Sure enough, he found a temporary party-shared skill there:
[Increased Drop Rate] (Increases the drop rate from monsters by 10%)
What Lu Ming had not expected was that this skill, shared through Lin Youwei’s talent, could actually be enhanced by his own talent, [Comprehensive Amplification]!
The original ten percent increase to monster drop rates had been amplified to two hundred percent!
It was precisely this two-hundred-percent increase that had raised Lu Ming’s drop rate to three times its original value!
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Thus, the Soul Stones that normally had only a ten-percent chance of dropping now had a thirty-percent drop rate in Lu Ming’s hands!
The copper coin drops had also been tripled!
Case solved!
Lu Ming glanced back at Lin Youwei, who remained completely unaware of what was happening, and could not help feeling delighted.
“Looks like bringing her along really was a wise choice!”
How could she be a burden?
She was practically a lucky cat!
Of course, this only worked because she was paired with Lu Ming, who possessed the ten-star talent [Comprehensive Amplification].
If she shared her talent with anyone else, it would still be practically useless.
Thus, with the threefold drop rate and the slaughter carried out by his undead legion, the Soul Stones in Lu Ming’s inventory rapidly accumulated at a speed visible to the naked eye.
The number of copper coins surged as well!
“At the market price of two yuan per copper coin, that means every monster I kill earns me fifteen or sixteen yuan. That’s enough to buy a bowl of beef noodles!”
Lu Ming had never imagined that one day, making money would feel as easy as picking it up off the ground!
Meanwhile, the undead warlords spread throughout the camp, with their terrifying killing power, naturally drew the attention of many nearby players.
One after another, the players cast shocked and awestruck looks toward the undead warlords.
“Damn! Whose summons are those? They’re insanely powerful! They’re cutting down level thirteen- and fourteen monsters like chickens!”
“They look kind of familiar. Could they be that Formation Trickster who went viral on Douyin yesterday—the one who took down an Iron-tier boss in ten seconds?”
“Holy crap! Where’s that Formation Trickster? Hurry up and go curry favor with him!”
...
Over on the other side, Lin Youwei, who did not have to do anything and could only watch her experience bar skyrocket, was utterly stunned by the speed of her progress.
Lu Ming, however, was not idle either.
Although he did not need to kill monsters personally, he still drew his sword once every minute, casually killing a monster while increasing the proficiency of his [Sword Draw] skill.
More than an hour later.
After drawing his sword one hundred times, the skill’s proficiency finally reached one hundred points.
[Ding! Congratulations! Your [Sword Draw] skill has advanced to E-rank!]
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