Chapter 63: The Deep Sea Exchange

Since the meeting over at the Great Swallow was still a week away, Chen Lai had some time to kill. He could look into picking his next dungeon, or perhaps ponder how to resolve the conflicting nature of Heavenly Restriction and the Six Eyes.

When it came to choosing a dungeon, Chen Lai was in no rush. He was far more concerned with building up his powers right now.

Previously, Jashu had advised him to abandon conflicting powers and focus heavily on a single side. After all, a player's energy was limited, and one didn't always manage to extract items with the [Unique] tag every time they cleared a dungeon. Instead of spreading his enhancements across multiple abilities, it was wiser to thoroughly master a single build first.

The logic was sound, but Chen Lai was different from ordinary players. If he carefully selected his dungeons, he could indeed pull out top-tier red items every single time. He didn't have to worry about wasting his money, nor did he need to fret over a lack of [Unique] items to strengthen his build.

However... ability compatibility was genuinely a major issue. If he possessed abilities from four different systems and they ended up conflicting with one another, he wouldn't become the King of Rogue Cultivators; he would just turn into a walking bug.

Therefore, he needed to find something as soon as possible that could reconcile everything and harmonize the conflicting powers within his body.

In this deep-sea game of infinite possibilities, such an item certainly existed. But searching for it one by one was still too troublesome. If there were ready-made ones available, players could trade with each other. Zhang Long seemed to have mentioned something about player-to-player buying and selling earlier. What was it again?

With this in mind, he opened his private chat with Zhang Long once more.

[Great Mighty Heavenly Dragon: Bro, where do players buy and sell things from each other? Are you setting up street stalls on Penguin Island?]

[Isekai Dump Truck: Got something on hand you want to sell?]

[Great Mighty Heavenly Dragon: Looking to buy. How common is it for players to sell Unique items?]

[Isekai Dump Truck: Plenty of them, bro, plenty. A lot of the Unique items produced by the Great Whirlpools aren't all good stuff. Some come with curses or unbearable side effects. If you use something like that as the foundation of your ability build, your whole life is basically ruined.]

[Isekai Dump Truck: The place you're looking for is on the north side of Penguin Island. It's called the Deep-Sea Exchange. They mostly do bartering; cash transactions are rare. After all, the Deep-Sea Corporation buys things back at full price, so if you just wanted money, you'd sell it directly to them.]

After carefully reading Zhang Long's reply, Chen Lai gave a slight nod. That made a lot of sense. Trading between players was either done to swap for a Unique item belonging to their own system, or to look for a more suitable build... If it were just for money, direct buybacks were much more convenient.

With that thought, he closed the private chat interface, informed Fushiguro Toji, and left the undersea warehouse.

The way from the undersea warehouse to Penguin Island was different from escaping out of a Great Whirlpool; a chibi jellyfish would emerge from the deep sea floor, which players affectionately called "Little Snail."

The jellyfish would carry you upward until you finally reached the ocean surface, and right before your eyes would be Penguin Island.

"Escort services for a thousand bucks! Escort services for a thousand bucks!"

"Winter vacation deep-sea tour group! 1,998 per child, come and take a look!"

Penguins stood in front of various whirlpools shouting at the top of their lungs, and the entire island was teeming with waddling penguins... It seemed there were actually parents bringing their kids into the game to sign up for tour groups.

After all, traveling in the real world was both expensive and lacking in cultural distinctiveness. It was different in the game; from ancient times to the future, you could find any scenery or cultural landscape you wanted, and it even carried a certain educational value.

Thinking about it that way, signing up for a tour group and paying someone to escort a child was actually quite normal.

As Chen Lai walked and observed, the more he looked, the more interesting the Deep-Sea Game seemed. Players exercised their creativity and imagination here, coming up with plenty of jaw-dropping, hardcore stunts.

For instance, some players were looking for "death-matching partners," determined to walk through every single Great Whirlpool and experience different ways to die... Naturally, their money wouldn't be enough, so they needed partners to help them retrieve and salvage the gear they dropped upon death.

Other players had organized a guild called "Ice," gathering a large crowd of people interested in contraband. Their sole purpose upon entering a dungeon was to seek out special drugs within it; the neural stimulants from [Cyberpunk] had once enjoyed a massive craze among them.

And so on and so forth. This game world accommodated too many people and housed countless bizarre dreams.

Chen Lai also had a dream. He wanted to push all four branches of his enhanced build to absolute perfection, becoming the freest person in the entire Deep-Sea Game!

This feeling was probably similar to someone grinding for peak efficiency and body-forging in the Arena of Solitude, squeezing every last coin out to push their abilities to the absolute peak.

Walking as he thought, Chen Lai crossed the penguin mountains and seas, heading all the way toward the north of Penguin Island.

Not many people were around on the northern side of Penguin Island. The most popular services in the Deep-Sea Game were actually right next to the whirlpools; professional scavengers and gold-miners were usually the ones who needed places like player trading markets.

The five large characters [Deep-Sea Exchange] were scrawled carelessly across an Eskimo igloo. The entrance to the igloo was very narrow, just about wide enough for a single penguin to squeeze through.

Chen Lai saw clearly as a few penguins with furrowed brows walked inside in a hurry, only to come out a moment later with their brows still tightly knitted, presumably failing to resolve their issues.

He didn't watch for long. With a waddle, he slid right into the igloo.

Who the hell designed this? It looked like a door, but once you got inside, it turned out to be a slide.

The slide twisted and turned through eighteen bends. When Chen Lai finally reached the end, his field of vision suddenly opened up.

Countless cutting boards and stalls were pieced together. On top of each stall sat either gold or red items. Behind some stalls sat penguin bosses, while others were completely empty, with only a sign hanging there that read: "The boss has gone down to the sea."

"Gone down to the sea... to the Great Whirlpool, I suppose?" Chen Lai found it hard not to吐槽 (react with exasperation); the players were as abstract as ever.

He randomly picked a stall to look at. The stall owner was selling a [Bloodthirster]. It was a Unique item, glowing gold.

"A Bloodthirster... It steals life, right? Is this thing actually hard to sell? Wouldn't the enhancement class want something like this?"

Chen Lai started chatting with the owner. The penguin, who had been browsing the Deep-Sea forums, immediately sat up straight.

Hearing what Chen Lai said, the expression on its face turned constipated: "It steals life, all right—only it steals your own. If it stole other people's, it would've been sold off ages ago, damn it."

"?" Chen Lai scratched his head. No wonder. It figured nobody would want to use such a half-baked, chicken-rib ability as their build or foundation.

"Then what are you hoping to trade it for?" Chen Lai continued to ask the owner, wanting to figure out what the penguins in this exchange actually wanted.

"What do I want to trade for?" The penguin owner gave Chen Lai a profound look. "Any side-effect-free Unique item, anything will do, even if it's damaged."

"..."

Chen Lai bid farewell to the owner and browsed a few more stalls. The demands of these owners were largely similar; basically, they had managed to acquire items with severe side effects from the Great Whirlpools and desperately wanted to trade them for a genuinely usable Unique item.

Things like [Heavenly Restriction] + [Gift of Fushiguro Toji], or the [Six Eyes]—those were the things of their dreams. They were virtually side-effect-free and exceptionally powerful.

The more he browsed, the more Chen Lai felt that finding what he wanted would be rather difficult. Most of these [Unique] items were just mediocre chicken ribs, completely lacking any property that could reconcile conflicting abilities.

Just as he was gradually losing his patience, a gaunt, skin-and-bones penguin appeared before him. Its stall was completely empty... No, wait, embedded in a groove on the cutting board was a single spell rune, which looked to be a deep-red item.