Chapter 890: C171 Train
The train heading to other wormhole points was quite different from previous trains.
First, the train carriages had more content. For example, in the past, there were only passenger carriages and a dining car. Now, besides these two, there was also a separate lounge where players could spend money to pass the time, and the dining car had been expanded from one to three.
Second, the carriages themselves had changed. Previously, they mostly had twenty-four seats. Now, each carriage consisted of twelve small rooms arranged around the four corners, with a common living area in the center furnished with tables and chairs, enough to accommodate twelve people for leisure.
The front and rear door opening and closing mechanisms remained the same as before. The front carriage could directly open the door to the rear carriage, but if the rear carriage wanted to enter the front carriage, they had to ring a doorbell.
Finally, the train's appearance was different. The previous trains had transparent materials on the left, right, and top, but the partitions between the front and rear carriage doors were made of opaque material. You could only see the middle transition carriage and the front and rear carriage doors through the central windows. Now, aside from some daily necessities and decorations, all the walls of the train, including the walls of the rooms and restrooms, were made of transparent material. However, the restrooms and rooms could be fogged up with a switch. The front and rear doors had also been changed to automatic doors that slid open to both sides.
Overall, the entire train felt more technologically advanced. Ordering food was done through a projection screen, and serving was handled by automatic hovering robots. Passengers could choose to dine in their carriage or in the dining car, which no longer had a threshold.
The attendants generally stayed in the lounge. You could call them for special requests, but whether they would actually do anything was another matter. They didn't have a separate passageway; they came and went through the carriages. However, a new chef performance program had been added.
Naturally, the entire train was wider and longer. Xu Huo looked at the floating sign on the carriage wall. He was currently in the sixteenth carriage of the C171 train.
Only one other player had boarded the train at the same station as him. After boarding, he only saw three other players in the same carriage, and one had been staying in their room the whole time.
The player who boarded with Xu Huo was probably also a newly promoted player. After getting on, he first walked around to observe the carriage's layout. Xu Huo didn't hide the fact that he was a newcomer either, learning about the train's changes in the shortest possible time.
Both being newcomers, they nodded to each other in greeting but didn't exchange names.
In the common area outside were two men and one woman. The short-haired female player only glanced at them briefly at first before focusing entirely on the dining car's menu—the train could provide hundreds of different dishes.
One of the two male players was sitting by the window, seemingly admiring the scenery outside. A mechanical dog crouched at his feet.
The other was a one-eyed man. On his blind left eye was branded a circular ring pattern. He looked down on the two newcomers, his gaze frequently drifting towards the short-haired female player.
C-level players generally had an evolution rate of at least 50%, making their senses much sharper. The female player had noticed the one-eyed man's staring from the beginning but hadn't acted on it. When she finished ordering her meal through her terminal and looked up, a giant sword, as wide as a person, flew straight at the one-eyed man. She followed closely behind, leaping up. When the one-eyed man used a defense item to block the sword, she grabbed the hilt, swung her arm horizontally, and swept the sword out!
The one-eyed player wasn't as easy to deal with as he seemed. He slapped his clothes, and six palm-sized hexagonal metal pieces automatically connected to form a larger shield, blocking the sword strike without a scratch.
The short-haired female player used the momentum to leap up, delivering a series of kicks aimed at the one-eyed man's other side. Her shoes were probably a type of item, as a small-scale shockwave erupted from the tips when she kicked!
The one-eyed man immediately raised his right arm to block. His forearm was equipped with a defense item, but the direct contact didn't completely absorb the female player's force. Even from a distance, you could see the muscles on his arm vibrating. Then the one-eyed man took a few steps back to create distance and said, unfazed, "I just looked at you a couple of times. Is that worth killing someone?"
The female player didn't bother arguing about the supposed causal relationship between "looking a couple of times" and "killing someone." She simply and crudely replied, "Do I need a reason to kill? I just don't like the look of you, plain and simple."
The one-eyed man squinted his remaining eye. "I was going easy on you because you're a woman. Don't be ungrateful."
The female player sneered, took out a top, and threw it on the ground. "Single Passage!"
Xu Huo stepped aside and looked down. A semi-transparent walkway appeared on the floor, only one meter wide, directly facing the front and rear doors of the carriage. The female player and the one-eyed man were right in the middle of this "Single Passage," with the space on either side cut off. The female player raised her oversized longsword and swung it down at the one-eyed man's head. After he defended again, she used an item from a distance to kick him out of the carriage.
The carriage doors were fully automatic. Sensing someone approaching, they let the one-eyed man fly through unimpeded, simultaneously triggering the seventeenth carriage. As the doors on both sides opened and closed, two players from the seventeenth carriage appeared at the doorway. The short-haired female player from the front also left the sixteenth carriage and entered the transition carriage.
The two of them were really fighting.
On trains in the past, players usually avoided fighting in full view of others. First, it was easy to expose their trump cards. Second, whether they won or lost, they could get injured, making them prey for other players. But C-level players clearly didn't have this concern.
It looked like it wouldn't be resolved anytime soon. Xu Huo purchased a room at the front door—that's right, the individual rooms in the carriage cost money, five thousand White Notes a night.
The room only had a bed and a desk. It wasn't spacious, but it was comfortable enough for sleeping. When the fogging function wasn't activated, you could see the opposite side from both inside and out.
Xu Huo activated the fogging to block the view from outside, but he could still hear the sounds from outside.
Sitting down by the bed, he opened his personal panel, ready to upgrade his items.
This clearance had two item merge upgrades, plus the one he normally had this month, giving him a total of three merge upgrade opportunities. He planned to use them all.
There were quite a few items he could upgrade. Xu Huo leaned towards long-range attacks and tracking.
He currently had two long-range attack items that were quite useful. One was the "Crimson Sword," and the other was "V. Vanshaw's Tool of the Trade." The "Crimson Sword" was a special item, and special items generally couldn't be merged and upgraded. However, the item upgrade authority unlocked for C-level players allowed him to pay extra to exchange it for a better one. "V. Vanshaw's Tool of the Trade" could be merged and upgraded with the D-level item "Aesthetic of Explosion" into a C-level item.
The lighter could cover a wide area, but the things it could burn were limited, especially now that players were using high-tech protective suits or item protective suits. "Aesthetic of Explosion" could be used for targeted explosions, but there weren't many practical applications for it, and it was hard to effectively target players.
After players leveled up, these two items were more suited for daily life scenarios, like burning things or causing explosions. But that didn't mean they were useless. In situations where human power fell short, they were actually quite good items.