After Joining the Game, She Came Out as Gay [Infinite] - Chapter 21

“Let’s stick to defending this single mining point for now,” Qi Cheng said. “There must be other types of monsters roaming this dungeon besides slimes. With our current equipment, it’s too dangerous to go any deeper.”

Not to mention, they lacked the anti-magic and damage-resistant armor typically worn by adventurers.

First and foremost, they didn’t have enough pickaxes.

Every time they attacked a slime, a pickaxe would be dissolved. It was essentially sacrificing their weapons to take down an enemy.

As for other unknown monsters, they didn’t even know if they would take damage from a pickaxe. Furthermore, pickaxes were their essential mining tools; they couldn’t afford to waste them on monsters.

While they could return to replenish their supply of pickaxes an infinite number of times, their original plan was to maximize the load of Magic Crystals they carried back. They couldn’t waste their return trips just on restocking tools.

For the two of them, time was money.

“The ore respawn time is a one-hour cooldown. If we wait here, we can harvest a lot today. For now, let’s focus on maximizing our reputation with the pharmacy. Having various potions will make it much easier to go out and hunt monsters.”

Compared to powerful equipment, potions were relatively cheaper. Anti-poison potions, HP potions, and warding potions could all provide excellent support.

“OK.” Since Qi Cheng put it that way, Xia Lin naturally wouldn’t object.

“Xia Lin, can your stamina hold up?”

“No problem. I’ll use recovery magic if necessary.”

Now that they had a guaranteed supply of MP potions, there was no need to be stingy with her mana.

Xia Lin asked, “What do you need me to do?”

“Use these dynamite sticks to isolate this mining area from the monster patrol routes. We need to avoid continuous combat with slimes for now. I’ll mark several spots on the rock walls; we’ll split up and dig. We just need to make holes large enough to bury the dynamite.”

The barrier didn’t need to be long; it just needed to ensure they could travel safely between the floor entrance and the mining area.

Although the slime’s acid dissolution was strong, they wouldn’t actively destroy rock walls. Therefore, there was no need to worry about them retaliating after their patrol routes were blocked.

Before the detonation, Qi Cheng had Xia Lin retreat to the second floor. Firstly, because the sound of the explosion would be deafening—a disaster for someone with sensitive hearing like her. Secondly, she feared the noise might attract powerful monsters. If it was just Qi Cheng alone, escaping wouldn’t be an issue.

There were warding lamps left by adventurers at the entrance of the third floor. As long as they fled to the vicinity of the entrance, the monsters wouldn’t approach.

“It went smoothly.” Ten minutes later, Xia Lin returned.

Qi Cheng’s directional blasting was extremely precise. The collapsing boulders formed a long, massive wall, splitting what was originally one path into two. Moreover, the original path wasn’t heavily affected.

Though miners learned the basics of dynamite blasting, Qi Cheng’s high level of precision was something she had learned from her master, “Old Man,” back when she was still alive.

As the rumbling of the falling rocks gradually faded into silence, Xia Lin tilted her head to listen. She found no sign of any creatures approaching.

After all, this area was close to the warding lamps and was part of the initial section of the underground floor, so the number of wandering monsters was very small. Most monsters preferred to settle deep within the dungeon.

And at that moment, the high-quality Magic Crystals happened to respawn.

One week later. The Pharmacy.

“Did I hear that right?” the Dwarf shopkeeper exclaims. “Are you sure? 100 MP recovery potions and 20 HP recovery potions? Do you two even have that much gold?”

“Thud!” Qi Cheng slammed a bag of gold coins onto the counter, answering his question.

“Don’t go underestimating us two excellent miners,” Qi Cheng said with a rogue-ish grin. “The company just gave us a public commendation yesterday. If we couldn’t even produce this much pocket change, we’d be an embarrassment to the company.”

Even when not within the company’s grounds, one must always kiss up to the company. That was the rule of this world.

“Shopkeeper,” Xia Lin said, “to create even more profit for our company, we intend to go deeper into the dungeon to mine Magic Crystals. Do you have any other good potions to recommend?”

The gold they had prepared far exceeded the price of those 120 potions.

“Going deeper? You two really are something. Then you must prepare several warding potions and antidotes. Also, all-attribute enhancement potions would be helpful! Those are best-sellers in this shop, essential for adventurers. They can boost all your attributes by 10% for 24 hours. They’re only 320G a bottle. How about it? Isn’t that a bargain? Besides, since you two are old friends of the shop, I have a special potion to recommend.” The Dwarf shopkeeper smiled broadly.

Qi Cheng and Xia Lin exchanged a glance.

Excellent. Their favorability rating had finally reached the threshold today.

As expected, purchasing a large quantity of goods at once caused the NPC’s favorability to rise much faster.

Ever since they started mining high-quality ore on the third floor, they had visited the pharmacy once a day, repeatedly saying the same lines: “To create even more profit for our company, we intend to go deeper into the dungeon to mine Magic Crystals. Do you have any other good potions to recommend?”

Until just now, the Dwarf shopkeeper had never mentioned a “special potion.”

“Oh? What’s this good stuff?”

The Dwarf shopkeeper gave a mysterious smile and asked them to wait. He went into the alchemy room behind him. A moment later, he returned, holding a small purple bottle.

“This is an Invisibility Potion. Drinking it will make you invisible for three hours. If you’re only active on the third and fourth floors, drinking this makes you practically invincible. Even a Floor Boss won’t be able to find you. Only certain monsters with detection abilities on the fifth and sixth floors can spot your tracks.”

“Monsters with detection abilities?” Qi Cheng raised an eyebrow. This was the first time they had heard this piece of information.

The Dwarf shopkeeper said, “For example, Magic-corrupted Worker Ants or Pit Beetles. But they like to live in the deeper parts of the underground; they won’t come up to the upper floors. How about it? If you buy them along with the warding potions and antidotes, I can give you a discount.”

Qi Cheng took out the Mimicry Potion and said in a calm tone, “By the way, we found this while mining in the dungeon. We assume some adventurer dropped it. Can you tell what this is?”

The Dwarf shopkeeper took it carefully and studied it for a long time, but couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

Finally, he handed it back to Qi Cheng with regret. “There seems to be magic contained within, but I cannot tell its effect.”

No way?

Xia Lin was stunned.

If even the pharmacy owner couldn’t recognize the Mimicry Potion, where were they supposed to get more?

Qi Cheng curled her lip. “Hey, you aren’t intentionally hiding things from us, are you? This is a potion carried by adventurers. Don’t they buy their potions from your shop?”

“But this truly isn’t a potion from this shop! All the potions here are brewed by me personally; how could I possibly fail to recognize them?” the Dwarf shopkeeper said, his beard bristling with indignation.

Qi Cheng and Xia Lin looked at each other.

The guy didn’t seem to be lying.

If that was the case, was it possible their favorability still wasn’t high enough?

“Fine,” Qi Cheng sighed. “Then calculate for us how many of those other potions we can buy with the rest of this bag of gold, excluding the HP and MP potions. And remember to give us that discount.”

In the end, they walked away with 20 warding potions, 30 antidotes, 10 all-attribute enhancement potions, and 4 invisibility potions.

The price was indeed fair.

“We managed to gather this many potions in just one week; our progress is pretty good, right?” Xia Lin said as she counted the potions while walking out of the shop.

More than just “pretty good”—their performance was likely much better than any previous participants.

While mining high-quality ore, they had hit the jackpot with two “Exquisite” grade ores, which multiplied their commission by dozens of times.

It was just a shame that the information regarding the Mimicry Potion still hadn’t appeared.

Xia Lin sighed dejectedly. “We’ve been grinding favorability for so long and it’s still not enough… Could it be that the God of Calamity didn’t even set an NPC who knows about Mimicry Potions?”

The gods were always full of malice when designing these games.

“No.” Qi Cheng was very certain on this point. “The rules of the game are absolute. Once something is written into the rules, even the gods must abide by them. The Mimicry Potion definitely exists; we probably just haven’t found the right NPC.”

“But we’ve basically asked at every shop in this town.”

They had even asked at that kind of shop.

Aside from the pharmacy, there wasn’t a second NPC who understood herbs and alchemy.

Qi Cheng was silent for a moment before suddenly saying, “Xia Lin, tomorrow you should continue to move with the other miners. It’s possible that one of those miner NPCs is hiding information about the Mimicry Potion.”

Xia Lin’s eyes lit up. Right, how could she have forgotten the NPCs?

When they were grinding favorability with individual NPCs before, those NPCs did indeed possess knowledge in other fields. It was just that none of the ones they contacted back then knew about herbalism or alchemy, and once they got information on the third floor, their attention shifted quickly to the high-quality Magic Crystals, leading them to ignore the remaining miner NPCs.

Xia Lin looked deeply at Qi Cheng and nodded. “Okay, then I’ll go directly to the first floor tomorrow morning. I’ll take some of the MP recovery and all-attribute enhancement potions so I won’t have to worry about failing the daily quota while grinding favorability.”

She told a lie.

In truth, given her constitution and communication skills, she was perfectly capable of completing the daily quota while simultaneously maximizing NPC favorability. She was nowhere near as weak as others imagined.

Xia Lin’s excuse for taking a large portion of the enhancement potions was actually to prevent Qi Cheng from venturing alone into the 4th, 5th, or even 6th floors for exploration and mining.

Before they could truly win this mining game, earning high commissions through “business trips” to deeper floors was necessary.

She knew Qi Cheng too well.

Therefore, while asking for the enhancement potions, Xia Lin also mentioned needing the MP recovery potions as a cover.

After all, MP recovery potions were useless to Qi Cheng. The reason they bought so many was for Xia Lin. It was to ensure that if they encountered powerful monsters while exploring the 4th and 5th floors, she would have the mana to provide Haste and support magic.

Now, her request for the MP potions seemed legitimate and reasonable; Qi Cheng shouldn’t be able to see through her intentions.

Qi Cheng said, “You don’t need to mine. For the next few days, I’ll continue to report that both of us are going on a ‘business trip’ together.”

As long as you produced results, the mining supervisor didn’t care which floor you wandered on. If you didn’t produce results, you simply wouldn’t receive that day’s 10G salary.

With Qi Cheng around, how could she let Xia Lin go hungry?

Moreover, Qi Cheng was determined to take on Xia Lin’s share of the work all by herself.

This was exactly what Xia Lin didn’t want to see.

“Don’t do anything reckless!” Xia Lin said sternly. “I know that splitting up is the most time-efficient plan right now. But there’s no need for you to risk your life going to the fourth or fifth floors!”

Xia Lin was truly worried.

Qi Cheng’s gaze, however, fell upon Xia Lin’s hands, which were as fair as cream. Her hands were originally beautiful, but now the palms were covered in callouses from mining.

This made Qi Cheng feel incredibly pained—though she never showed it on her face.

Xia Lin was a favored daughter of heaven. Qi Cheng knew she wasn’t fragile, but there was truly no need for her to suffer like this.

Thus, she was willing to bear the burden alone.

Qi Cheng wasn’t at all surprised that Xia Lin could see through her intentions. She had always been brilliant.

“I know,” Qi Cheng smiled. “I’ll wait for you for the 4th and 5th floors. But I still have to do the mining on the 3rd floor; our funding cannot be cut off at this stage.”

“…”

“Don’t trust me? Sigh… Then you keep all the enhancement potions. That should make you believe me, right?”

The enhancement potions weren’t needed for the third floor.

It wasn’t a matter of trust. It was that Xia Lin didn’t want Qi Cheng to carry so much weight. Even without exploring the 4th and 5th floors, mining high-quality Magic Crystals alone was an exhausting task.

But Qi Cheng’s eyes were resolute. Xia Lin knew that no matter what she said next, Qi Cheng would not back down.

The only breakthrough would be from the NPCs on the first and second floors. Only by finding the NPC they were looking for as quickly as possible could she lighten Qi Cheng’s load.

“…Fine,” Xia Lin sighed reluctantly. “Then I’ll leave the mining to you. Qi Cheng, don’t overexert yourself, okay?”

“Yeah, don’t worry.”

But the next day, Qi Cheng appeared on the fourth floor of the dungeon—a floor the company had yet to conquer.

“Sorry for lying to you.”

She had been a liar for a long time, anyway.