Chapter 58: The Cross-Dressing Game Streamer is Actually… (10)
The sudden surge in viewership in Huo Xian’s stream during the half-hour break was due to a Wan Jian Sect player group established during the closed beta of Immortal Realm. Someone in the group had previously followed Huo Xian. Wan Jian Sect players knew all too well how difficult the trial grounds were; half the group had failed there and were forced to switch to other sects, though their hearts remained with the Wan Jian Sect.
Of course, the trial grounds were difficult, but not impossible. There were plenty of high-level players, but none of them had cleared the Tian-tier trial in under 30 minutes. Huo Xian not only cleared it in a mere 20 minutes but also received an extra 10 free attribute points as a reward. Lured by this temptation, the high-level players wanted to see what was going on.
The influx of new fans drastically lowered the chances of winning the lottery. Huo Xian didn’t increase the number of slots; even at an average of 30 minutes per account, switching accounts non-stop for five accounts would still take two and a half hours. He didn’t want to exhaust himself.
To increase their chances, the viewers frantically sent gifts in the last half-minute before the draw.
However, there were still only five slots.
Huo Xian announced five nicknames, including the top-ranking “Sponsor Daddy.”
Huo Yuan used the management tool to contact the five winners, while Huo Xian said, “Bosses, when you message my partner, please indicate whether you are willing to make your ID public. If you aren’t, it’s best to note the time the streamer can log in.”
All of them unanimously chose to make their IDs public, with one exception. The exception wasn’t about the public ID, but rather that one boss wanted to clear the trial grounds not for the Wan Jian Sect, but for the Demonic Sound Palace.
The Demonic Sound Palace, like Flowing Water Valley, was positioned as a pure healing sect in the game and was one of the easiest sects to pick up. The trial grounds weren’t difficult either, so the Demonic Sound Palace boss’s request was to complete the trial within 30 minutes to get the attribute point reward.
Upon learning that an outsider sect had snatched a lottery slot, the stream nearly exploded.
[Huo Xian, this… what should we do?] Huo Yuan hadn’t expected a fake fan among the lottery winners.
Facing the camera, Huo Xian calmly said, “I haven’t played the closed beta and only briefly looked at the skills of the 24 sects. If the boss doesn’t mind, I might need some time to get used to the feel and controls.”
The boss indicated that was no problem.
“Then for the first account, let’s use my old acquaintance, the sponsor’s account. Sponsor, is that okay?” Huo Xian asked.
A golden message froze on the bullet chat from a high-level VIP: “Absolutely!”
“Alright, I’ll turn off the lights and log in first.” Huo Xian didn’t drag it out.
Huo Yuan gave him the account and password. Once logged into the game, Huo Xian turned the lights back on but then turned off the bullet chat.
Sponsor Daddy’s game character matched his nickname perfectly. Simply put, it reeked of money. A barely level 20 sword cultivator who hadn’t officially entered the sect yet was decked out in crafted purple gear, except for the weapon. His attribute points were mainly invested in Strength, with very few in Agility—completely the opposite of Huo Xian’s character.
Huo Xian adjusted the key bindings, then maneuvered the character to find the NPC and enter the sect trial grounds. The Xuan-tier and Di-tier levels went by just as fast as in the recording, unbelievably quick. However, more players, especially Wan Jian Sect players, were focused on the Tian-tier sword formation. The boss’s character had no Agility attribute bonus; could the streamer still survive?
Huo Xian demonstrated to the stream viewers with his actions—he could survive.
There were gaps between the flying swords. As long as one mastered the paths and flight speeds of the swords, avoiding them wasn’t difficult. However, aiming for a flawless run significantly reduced the margin for error. Fortunately, Huo Xian didn’t make technical mistakes.
17 minutes and 22 seconds. The trial was cleared, even faster than his own 20 minutes by over two and a half minutes.
“The sponsor’s character has high attack power, so it took less time to defeat the puppets. The combo count for [Cloud-Piercing Sword] wasn’t quite high enough, and mana didn’t fully recover at the end,” Huo Xian explained before logging out to switch accounts.
Next came the second, third, and fourth accounts… The gear on these four accounts varied, and their attribute allocations differed, but without exception, he cleared them all within 30 minutes. The group that had initially doubted his skills was left speechless. Many players who were already over level 20 beat their chests in regret; clearing the trial grounds within half an hour awarded 10 free attribute points—how had they missed that?
The fifth account was the Demonic Sound Palace healer account. The Xianyu nickname was “Soft and Fluffy,” and the game character was also a soft and cute girl.
Huo Xian got used to the feel and studied the skills. A level 20 Demonic Sound Palace character also had only six skills including the basic attack. Besides the basic attack, there was only one basic offensive skill. Additionally, there were two heal-over-time skills, one single-target heal, and a debuff that lowered the opponent’s defense, increasing damage from magic-based classes when applied to bosses in dungeons.
The Demonic Sound Palace trial grounds had a total of ten levels, more than the Wan Jian Sect in terms of quantity. However, the Demonic Sound Palace trial grounds were known as the “Idiot’s Trial Grounds.” The difficulty wasn’t high, with only one drawback—it was time-consuming.
While Huo Xian familiarized himself with the skills, Huo Yuan, possessing a large database, explained the Demonic Sound Palace trial mode to him. It was truly simple; basically, each level only required protecting an NPC. Slightly more complex levels required dodging skills and protecting a few NPCs and oneself until the NPC killed the red-named mob.
[Simply put, as long as the red-named mob dies quickly, that level is cleared quickly,] Huo Yuan concluded.
With a plan in mind, Huo Xian didn’t waste time and entered the trial grounds directly, starting the trial.
After the countdown ended, the red-named mob spawned. He immediately applied the debuff to the mob and then attacked. In a few moves, the red-named mob fell, and the second level began.
Level after level, Huo Xian started to feel sleepy… The Demonic Sound Palace trial really had no difficulty. Just heal, apply debuffs, and then start combos—how hard could it be? In Immortal Realm, Agility was linked to the global cooldown of skills; the higher the Agility, the shorter the cooldown. But this healer account had barely any points in Agility, so even the combos were extremely slow. Using his hand speed, capable of ten skills per second, to play the Demonic Sound Palace trial was truly a waste of talent.
Fortunately, Demonic Sound Palace’s attack and healing both relied on Constitution. This account had invested heavily in Constitution, so the damage dealt to mobs was decent.
The final clearance time for the ten levels was still kept within 30 minutes.
After getting the attribute points, Huo Xian logged out of the game, leaving the stream viewers with a sentence, “I’m going to feed the cat first,” before disappearing.
The viewers stared at the empty chair: …
When he returned after preparing food for Huo Yuan, the number of online viewers in the stream hadn’t decreased but increased. The bullet chat scrolled extremely fast. Huo Yuan summarized for him: [The comments are all begging for another lottery. Many players from other sects have come here, asking if you can clear the trial grounds for other sects, and asking if you accept solo dungeon clear orders.]
Huo Xian placed the softened cat food in front of him before responding to the bullet chat content: “We’ll set up another lottery when followers reach 10 million. I haven’t played other sects, so I don’t know if I can clear their trial grounds yet. However, since the officials have a hidden attribute point reward setting, they must have tested it. Players with time and energy can create a few more accounts to try. As for taking orders, I won’t consider it for now. The reason? It takes too much time. My account still needs to level up, and leveling gets harder later on. However, if I solo advanced dungeons later, I’ll record it and make a clip. It won’t be a full guide, just marking the key points.”
On his first day streaming on Xianyu, the peak number of online viewers reached 3 million. Even across the entire Xianyu platform, this was considered massive traffic. Don’t ask why; game streamers are popular, Immortal Realm is too hot, and Huo Xian is too handsome (not really)—mainly, his easy clearance of the Wan Jian Sect trial grounds, ranked No. 1 in difficulty by closed beta experts, was too skillful.
[Huo Xian, your Qingguo stream room has been unbanned, and the customer service manager sent an apology,] Huo Yuan said, his tone revealing a hint of triumph.
Huo Xian’s stream room on Qingguo was banned. He didn’t appeal or argue, but went directly to stream on Xianyu. Not only did he stream, but his data defied expectations, even doubling his numbers on Qingguo. His stream gifts climbed into the top ten on Xianyu for the day. Although Qingguo and Xianyu were rivals, there were insider connections within the industry. Moreover, Xianyu was recognized among the four major streaming platforms as having the most wealthy users; its gift ranking was something other platforms couldn’t hope to match. Essentially, Huo Xian’s departure brought significant revenue to Xianyu—could Qingguo remain indifferent?
So Qingguo couldn’t sit still and immediately unbanned him with an apology, hoping he would return to stream on Qingguo.
But Huo Xian ignored them.
He continued his morning streams doing quests as usual. His questing wasn’t purely about completing tasks but involved following the plot through dialogue. Some hidden storylines were within the main plot, depending on whether players discovered them.
Other Immortal Realm streamers focused on leveling up, but Huo Xian focused on experiencing the plot from a third-person perspective. Then he would lead the stream viewers to explore hidden storylines. Some hint-less quest items could also trigger hidden quests. Both hidden storylines and quests had a certain chance of awarding attribute points.
Although Huo Xian had the full plot obtained by Huo Yuan, he didn’t copy the answers directly. Sometimes exploring the game plot was part of the fun, and occasionally he could discover some plot bugs.
He streamed in the morning, and in the afternoon and evening, he took Yin Pei’s order to power-level him by grinding mobs.
A month later, Yin Pei reached level 60, becoming one of the first batch of players to reach level 60 and even appearing on the player level leaderboard, albeit at the bottom.
Level 60 brought new advancement dungeons, followed by new sects, main quests, and map openings. Grinding mobs on old maps no longer yielded experience. Although Huo Xian leveled Yin Pei to 60, he himself was only level 55 because the last hit on a mob gave 80% experience, and he left the last hit for Yin Pei when killing higher-level mobs.
[Party][Jiangshan Rugu]: Should I wait for you to run the advancement dungeon together?
[Party][Mozun]: No need, I’ll solo it.
[Party][Jiangshan Rugu]: I heard soloing gives attribute point rewards. Do you take solo orders?
[Party][Mozun]: Soloing with a healer takes too much time, I don’t accept.
[Party][Jiangshan Rugu]: Price isn’t an issue.
[Party][Mozun]: Not accepting.
[Party][Jiangshan Rugu]: …Alright.
During the leveling process with Yin Pei, Yin Pei constantly tried to talk to him. But Yin Pei wasn’t a talkative person; even when meeting the original owner at school, they only exchanged a few simple words. Although it wasn’t as awkward online, and he did try to find topics, the conversation always revolved around leveling in the game. At most, there was a little probing, asking about his age, if power-leveling was his job, etc., very conservatively, making Huo Xian want to tell him directly, “I know you are Yin Pei, and I am the person you think I am.”
[Party][Jiangshan Rugu]: You mentioned before that you are also in the Imperial Capital.
[Party][Mozun]: Yes.
[Party][Jiangshan Rugu]: I want to thank you for getting me to level 60 so quickly.
[Party][Mozun]: The power-leveling fee has been settled, no need to treat me to a meal.
[Party][Jiangshan Rugu]: …
Yin Pei: “…”
Huo Yuan, who had been silent, suddenly came online and asked in a spooky tone: [Huo Xian, Yin Pei wants to ask you out. Is this the time I should show some jealousy?]
Huo Xian broke character in a second and laughed out loud, attracting the attention of Zhao Xiyou, who was streaming. He waved his hand at him: “Sorry.” Then he scooped up the kitten to get some water.
Zhao Xiyou watched his back, frowning slightly. For some reason, when he withdrew his gaze, he glanced at Huo Xian’s computer. His eyesight was good, and even from a distance, he saw the ID in the chat box—Jiangshan Rugu.
Jiangshan Rugu, the little healer who had added him before—why was he chatting with Huo Xian?
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