Chapter 9: Ye Xiu's Hands

Chen Guo didn’t usually stay up all night. She had just come to check out the new server opening, and after a while, she felt drowsy and leaned back in her chair, dozing off.

This kind of sleep was, of course, not of high quality. Chen Guo just didn’t want to struggle to get up. In this half-asleep, half-awake state, she couldn’t help but notice the sound of the keyboard and mouse clicks beside her. This sound was very familiar to a net cafe owner, but what Chen Guo heard now was different. The sound was sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, and it sounded very rhythmic. Chen Guo had never heard anyone play the keyboard and mouse like they were percussion instruments. Was she dreaming?

Chen Guo suddenly woke up, steadied herself, and listened carefully. It seemed she wasn’t dreaming; the sound was coming from beside her, from the new network administrator, Ye Xiu, whom she had just recruited today.

Chen Guo sat up to look, and the coat covering her body slipped off. She quickly grabbed it and recognized it as Ye Xiu’s coat. She thought to herself that this person was quite considerate, but then, how long had this coat not been washed? It seemed a bit sour.

Chen Guo picked up the coat and sat up, ready to speak to Ye Xiu, but she was suddenly stunned.

A pair of hands that could make anyone weep appeared before her—Ye Xiu’s hands.

These hands looked thin, with long, slender fingers. The joints were not as rough and hard as those of most men, but they were very clear. The fingertips were very fine, and the nails were neatly trimmed, which was seriously at odds with his somewhat sloppy appearance.

Chen Guo wasn’t usually someone who paid much attention to hands, but after a girl with very beautiful hands came to the net cafe, she gradually began to notice. At this moment, she was thoroughly shocked by Ye Xiu’s hands.

The hands were perfect, and the sound they produced was like music. However, the operation... just looking at Ye Xiu’s left hand jumping on the keyboard, Chen Guo had only one feeling: the hand speed was so slow.

Hand speed, or the number of operations per unit of time, is usually measured in minutes, abbreviated as APM. Glory is not a strategy game, but players control a single unit, and the skill usage is complex, with very precise action operations, so there is still a great demand for hand speed.

A player with high hand speed can execute moves faster, and the precision of each key press, the force, and the timing directly affect the character’s movements in the game. This can make the character more versatile in battle. However, this versatility can be good or bad. Some people just keep operating to make their APM look impressive, but those who can make every operation purposeful and still achieve a high APM are all top-tier professional players.

An APM of 200 is a generally recognized threshold in the Glory community. Ordinary players with an APM over 200 are usually just messing around. Even professional players sometimes need a special battle environment to achieve an APM over 200, at least the opponent can’t be too weak, and they need to use an APM over 200 to respond.

For ordinary players, 70% have an APM between 80 and 120, 25% can’t even reach 80, and 5% can exceed 120, constantly striving to reach 200, the professional level. It’s said that some of them can even reach the professional level of 200.

Chen Guo’s average APM was around 120, but since she could usually just reach 120, she firmly believed she belonged to the 5%, the elite among players.

But at this moment, Ye Xiu, in Chen Guo’s eyes, was undoubtedly a hand-disabled player with an APM below 80. Once she noticed this, Chen Guo suddenly found that the rhythmic sound of the operations she had heard before was gone. Now, what she heard was the clear, slow operations of a hand-disabled player.

"Maybe I was just drowsy..." Chen Guo shook her head, trying to recapture the feeling from her dream, but she couldn’t. Now, she was focused on the hand-disabled operations and the beautiful hands that made her jealous.

Chen Guo was so engrossed in looking at the hands that she forgot to look at the screen. But soon, Ye Xiu’s hands stopped, and Chen Guo reacted, looking at the screen. Her eyes widened immediately: "Dark Night Cat Demon?"

As she said this, Dark Night Cat Demon had already fallen from the sky, landing on the ground and dropping a bunch of items.

At the same time, Chen Guo saw a prominent system announcement flash in the information area of the screen: "First Kill of Dark Night Cat Demon in Zone 10:君莫笑 (Smile No More)."

"Damn!!" Chen Guo slapped Ye Xiu’s shoulder: "You’ve got some skills!" Whether he was hand-disabled or not, he managed to get the first kill, something Chen Guo had never achieved in all her time playing.

Ye Xiu was focused on checking what had dropped, and this slap caught him completely off guard, almost making him swallow the cigarette in his mouth. A string of silver ash fell gracefully onto the keyboard. Chen Guo, who had been peeking at his operations from behind, leaned over and, seeing this, completely forgot about the first kill of the hidden boss. She immediately pulled off Ye Xiu’s headphones and roared in his ear: "Who said you could smoke here?"

"Huh?" Ye Xiu still had the cigarette in his mouth, not understanding what Chen Guo meant.

"Didn’t you see the no-smoking sign?" Chen Guo pointed to the wall.

Ye Xiu turned his head and carefully examined the sign on the wall: "Are you kidding? No smoking in a net cafe?"

"This is a no-smoking area. Go to the other side if you want to smoke." Chen Guo pointed to another corner of the net cafe.

"Then let’s go there." Ye Xiu said.

"No, the smell of smoke gives me a headache." Chen Guo said.

"Then what should I do?" Ye Xiu seemed to be in a great dilemma.

"Can’t you just skip one cigarette?" Chen Guo was angry.

"No, but it will give me a headache." Ye Xiu said.

"You, you, you..." Chen Guo realized she was starting to understand this Ye Xiu. He could casually accept the living conditions in the storage room, but this didn’t mean he was an easy person to deal with.

"I’ll go to the smoking area myself. You go rest, boss." Ye Xiu said at this moment.

"Wait, you haven’t explained how you got that first kill yet!" Chen Guo said.

"Nothing much, the team members were all down, the boss had little health left, and I just picked up the kill." Ye Xiu said casually.

"Such a good thing." Chen Guo’s tone still carried envy. She didn’t really care much about the rewards for the first kill of a low-level hidden boss, which were just more experience and money, and no top-tier equipment. But the record would be permanently on the leaderboard, becoming a legendary existence in the server, a feeling many players enjoyed. For most ordinary players, getting on such a leaderboard was only possible during the beginner stage. In the mid to late stages, the difficulty of the dungeons increased, and both the first kill of the dungeon and the first kill of the hidden boss required a stable, high-level team. By the time they reached the Divine Realm, even such high-level teams had no chance, as all the records were held by professional teams in the professional circle.

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