Each passive ability on a race's list was shared by four other races. To put it another way, each passive ability was on the five race's lists.

However, it was not as though Chan Si could just pick whichever two passive abilities she wanted, and then find the race that had that combination. This was because there were ten passive abilities overall. With 10 passive abilities, 10 races, and 5 per race, some combinations wouldn't be possible.

This simple fact was something that had already long ago been discovered and thoroughly analyzed by the existing player base.

In essence, there were five passive ability pairs that would never be an option; you couldn't pair either of those options together, but you could pair them with any other ability on the list of the 10.

Thus, Chan Si planned to make her decision of which race to play solely on which of the five pairs had the greatest option for the class she was going to play it on, but also the lowest loss by not being able to select its paired ability. The passives granted by race were some of the smallest bonuses in the game, and most players simply select the race they thought looked best, but Chan Si was not most players, and would squeeze out every ounce of advantage she could to meet her goal.

The first exclusive ability pair was between Adaptable Attitude and Stubborn Will. Adaptable Attitude increased the duration of all buffs on the player by 10%, rounded down. This meant a buff had to last at least ten seconds to have any effect from this passive, and it would increase the duration by one second for every ten seconds it normally lasted.

It was a very popular passive as it would never be useless, as buffs were plentiful in Guild Tree Online.

The opposite ability, Stubborn Will, gave a 10% debuff resistance. Whenever a debuff would be applied, it would look at the target's debuff resistance %, and that would be chance the debuff applied would be a weaker version than usual. There was also a chance, equal to 10% of one's debuff resistance, that the debuff would be ignored entirely.

To put it another way, Stubborn Will granted a 9% chance to receive a weakened debuff, and a 1% chance to receive no debuff at all, whenever a debuff would be applied. Of course, this was only if the source of the debuff had no special advantages, there were many debuff sources in the game that had bonuses to their Debuff Strength, from which Debuff Resistance would merely subtract from. Going over 100% in Debuff Strength gave the source a chance to apply increasingly powerful versions of a debuff.

Chan Si considered this pair.

Both buff duration and debuff resistance were special stats that could be found on gear. Debuff resistance, as a statistic, had no cap. Buff duration also technically had no cap, but buffs themselves could not last longer than 24 hours, no matter how much buff duration one had. Chan Si would be unlikely to gain gear with either of these properties for a while, however, and even if she did it would not be the deciding factor for her and she would likely sell it. Thus if she decided on either of these options, it would be based on which she felt would have the most utility for her.

Adaptable Attitude would have the most benefit immediately for her, especially since her provisioner could cook common dishes. Stubborn Will was less immediately useful, as one needed large quantities of Debuff Resistance for the statistic to truly shine.

However, there was a reason that although Adaptable Attitude was more popular, Stubborn Will was more highly represented in top level players. The Debuff Strength of late game monsters was just too powerful, the debuffs they applied too strong! Without enough Debuff Resistance, it was equivalent to committing suicide. By late game Chan Si would finally start properly gearing her other characters, so perhaps it would be good for her to place Stubborn Will on one of them? Specifically she was thinking of her True Totem Demon, who was her main tank and escape method. Stubborn Will was a great choice for this class.

For any of her other classes, if she picked one of these two, she would pick Adaptable Attitude, she decided.

The second ability pair were Industrious Outlook and Wanderer's Wondering.

Industrious Outlook increased favor gain from NPCs for completing quests by 20%. Favor was a mostly useless mechanic, as most NPCs were not important enough that increasing their favor would do anything. There were two main uses. The first was for merchant NPCs, higher favor would decrease their shop prices, and let the player sell for more. Selling for more to an NPC was nearly guaranteed to be useless, as players would pay money for the same items, but purchasing items for less could be useful if the item couldn't be obtained elsewhere. However, this was dependent on the NPC in question having related quests that would increase their favor, it was by no means a guarantee.

The second use was unlocking secret quests, and certain secret quests had hidden favor requirements with certain NPCs. While this use of Industrious Outlook might seem useful to Chan Si, she didn't like it. She didn't plan to be doing many quests with which to gain favor in the first place, and even if she did, 20% bonus to favor gain wasn't very high, she could just do more quests.

Meanwhile, Wanderer's Wondering increased base movement speed. It wasn't a large increase, but because it affected base movement speed, buffs to movement speed would have a greater effect as a result.

The only other source of buffs to base movement speed were passive [Skills] of certain classes. The True Totem Demon was one of them, like all Body Cultivator type classes. Had she chosen the Free Soul, that class would have received a base movement speed increase as well.

She didn't really want to stack the True Totem Demon's buff to base movement with another, as it was significantly larger than that from Wanderer's Wondering, and True Totem Demon was fast enough for her needs already.

She also did not want to apply Wanderer's Wondering to any of her other classes, as the movement speed buff would be near meaningless for her group unless she applied it to all of them that were not the True Totem Demon, and she felt that would be a waste.

Chan Si decided she wouldn't select either of these abilities.

The third ability pair involved Elemental Reasoning and Physical Focus.

Elemental Reasoning allowed a subchoice of selecting one of the five Chinese elements. Damage dealt of that element by the character would be increased by 10%, and damage taken of that type by the player would be decreased by 10%. To Chan Si, the damage boost was more important than the damage decrease, and that was the case for most players.

This selection would only have any real impact on her Light-Fire Dual Elemental Master, in which case she would choose Fire of course. It was a solid but basic choice.

The other passive, Physical Focus, also had a sub choice. The player could select any of the three basic physical stats - Physique, Reflexes, and Hardiness. Physique governed both strength and health, but notably not physical defenses or stamina. Hardiness was the statistic for those. Reflexes gave minor bonuses to many things such as attack speed, dodge chance, critical damage multiplier, and such. This selection would receive a boost of 10 points immediately, and a boost of 1 point each level thereafter.

A boost of 1 point per level wasn't super high - each class had its own natural stat growth in addition to the free stat points that could be assigned anywhere, the average class would get overall fifteen points per level between these. A stat heavy class like the Ballista received twenty two per level! But this bonus could still be useful in allowing one to focus one's build more precisely, or make up for weaknesses.

Chan Si was more interested in the initial 10 points than the 1 point per level, as this would make her early game smoother. The Ballista and True Totem Demon could both make good use of this bonus.

The fourth ability pair had Luck Reliance and Grudge Holder.

Luck Reliance was a very small increase to a very minor statistic, Item Drop Rate. Specifically, it increased the value from 100% to 101%, a 1% increase. This meant if an item normally had a 10% chance to drop, now it would have a 10.1% chance. It was not a large increase at all. At best, when farming items with a 100% drop rate, it would give an extra 1% chance of getting a second item. In other words, for every 100 items you would farm normally, you would instead get 101!

It was such a small bonus, even for the amount of farming that Chan Si planned to perform, she wondered if it was really worth it over another passive that could increase her farming speed. She wouldn't need to place the ability on more than one party member at least, as only the highest Drop Rate in a party applied.

Other sources of increasing drop rate were incredibly rare, the modifier couldn't even show up on Common or Uncommon gear, only Rare or Legendary gear. Most of the super guilds would include one player with Luck Reliance and the most Drop Rate gear possible, but even then the highest drop rate any of them could achieve was 114%! 14% was nothing to sneeze at, but it showed how difficult it was to find on gear.

If Chan Si truly found drop rate gear, she felt she would be better off selling it for money.

Grudge Holder had a very unique effect that could not be replicated by any items, only certain classes in the game might have similar abilities. It allowed one to continue fighting past reaching 0 health, for precisely 1 second, before dying! One couldn't benefit from any healing during that time, the chance of dying was set in stone once one's health reached zero, just it would be delayed for 1 second.

This was a greatly tempting ability to Chan Si for two reasons. First, thanks to her precise coordination, no matter which class she placed Grudge Holder on, she was sure she could make use of it. She might even be able to use that time for item hot swapping. It was very flexible. Second, Grudge Holder was the passive that had the history of the most bugs related to it.

Of course, the AI had already fixed those bugs, but who knew what other bugs lurked out there related to the ability, that it had yet to find? If Chan Si could stumble across some, they could help her in breaking the game. It was a tempting choice for sure.

The fifth and final ability pair: Burden Carrier and Prosperous People.

Burden Carrier added additional item slots to the character. Besides gear, the number of items a character could carry by default was twenty five. Burden carrier increased this by an additional eleven, to a total of thirty six. Of course, each character could also equip up to three pouches, which would increase their storage space further.

Common pouches, the type that Chan Si would be able to make with her provisioner, would store four more items each., but burden carrier could increase this further as well, from four to nine!

Each storage space was always a multiple like that. Four items was the smallest, nine items was the next size, then sixteen, then twenty five, then thirty six, and so on, up to the largest possible pouches, which could store 100 items, or 121 with burden carrier.

The main storage of a character could also be upgraded with a larger pouch; having the largest sized pouch and burden carrier for all four possible pouches meant a total storage of 505 items, compared to the maximum without burden carrier being only 400. That was slightly more than an extra pouch's worth!

Of course, only Legendary pouches had 100 item slots, and they were among the most expensive items in the game. Chan Si, with how much farming she planned, liked the idea of Burden Carrier a lot, as it would increase the direct amount of time she could spend farming without going back to empty her items.

It was something she would take on every single character if she didn't feel like another option gave her a greater definitive advantage.

Prosperous People would make the character's Default Gear uncommon, instead of common. All classes got a set of ‘Default Gear’ that would still provide them some light bonuses if they unequipped all their gear, even ensuring they would still have a weapon. The Default Gear would have no effect if they equipped something over that slot, but at the very least the Default Gear would always level with the character, ensuring it provided appropriate stat bonuses for gear of that quality and level.

Being uncommon meant the Default Gear would have higher stat bonuses, and also some special abilities. The initial Default Gear, at level 1 and with or without Prosperous People, had already been recorded for every class by the existing player base - it wasn't random like gear that would be dropped. Most players did not care about Prosperous People, because they could easily farm equivalent uncommon gear fairly early in their leveling. The main use case was for players who expected to engage in a lot of PvP, as there were numerous abilities that could disarm an enemy weapon or temporarily disable their gear, in which case Prosperous People would shine, and could mean the difference between life and death.

Some monsters had similar disarming abilities, but they were much rarer. Although it would improve Chan Si's initial boost and she valued that, it was even less useful to her than most players. She didn't have plans to do much PvP, and her gear needs for everyone other than her main character were already fulfilled by selecting the True Totem Demon.

Thus, Chan Si decided to make a list of which passives were useful to which classes.

Ballista: Adaptable Attitude, Physical Focus, Grudge Holder, Burden Carrier

Dark Weaver: Adaptable Attitude, Grudge Holder, Burden Carrier

Light-Fire Dual Elemental Master: Adaptable Attitude, Elemental Reasoning, Grudge Holder, Burden Carrier

True Totem Demon: Stubborn Will, Physical Focus, Grudge Holder, Burden Carrier

She could easily select both Grudge Holder and Burden Carrier for all four, but she didn't feel that would be best. Both only had uses in specific instances, and would not apply to most combat situations.

Since her Ballista was her Provisioner, and also her main character who she would want to buff the most, Chan Si decided she would select Adaptable Attitude as one of their passives.

She also decided she would go all in on focusing on the class's combat stats, and selected Physical Focus, from which she selected Hardiness. Ballista was a class which focused most of its physical stats into Physique, to allow it to wield its oversized ranged weapons effectively. Of the twenty two stat points the class received per level, six were free-placement. From the remaining sixteen, twelve were placed into the physical statistics, of which an amazing ten went into Physique!

Reflexes and Hardiness each received only point each by default!

She did not need any more physique, and in fact did not plan to place any of her free points into it - her Ballista would be dealing enough damage already. Its primary weakness was its slow attack speed, but then why did Chan Si not select Reflexes?

In truth, she didn't plan to place any points into Reflexes either. The attack speed bonus from reflexes was very low, since the stat governed so many different substats. Those other substats of reflexes were not very useful to her. She would be unlikely to dodge due to oversized weapon, so adding additional dodge chance wouldn't help very much. Plus she was a ranged character, so she only had to worry about ranged attackers as long as she had a tank. Extra hit chance was equally silly, as her oversized arrows were simply more difficult to dodge due to how large they were.

And critical hit damage? What, was beheading the enemy with a giant arrow not enough, did she need turn their entire body into a fine red mist? It would be overkill.

So she would just get her attack speed bonuses from gear, when she felt she really needed it. Hardiness, on the other hand, would be great for her, and where she planned to put most of her free stat points there anyway, when she did not have some reason to put them into one of the non-physical stats. It was a good stat because she already had a lot of health from Physique, so increasing her effective health further with good physical defense would help her Ballista stay alive.

Furthermore, it would boost her total stamina. Almost all combat [Skills] used stamina, mana, or both. Stamina was the main resources for most of the Ballista [Skills], but by default they could not use many of them before running out. Among Ballista players, Hardiness was a popular statistic to place free points into for that reason.

For her Dark Weaver, she didn't care much for Adaptable Attitude, so she resolutely selected Grudge Holder and Burden Carrier.

Chan Si wanted Adaptable Attitude for her Light-Fire Dual Elemental Master, though. Her two Elementals would share the increase in buff duration, so even though they could not eat, buffing them in combat would still be a good choice. Adaptable Attitude was a popular choice for pet master classes for this reason - the only other passives that also effected pets were Stubborn Will, Wanderer's Wondering, and Elemental Reasoning.

Chan Si liked Adaptable Attitude more than Stubborn Will for her elementals, had little use for Wanderer's Wondering, and so was mostly trying to decide between Elemental Reasoning, or one of Grudge Holder or Burden Carrier. Increasing the damage output by 10% sounded good, but the purpose of her Dual Elemental Master was healing, not damaging - damaging was merely an option.

Grudge Holder had weird value - if her healer died something was going very, very wrong already, yet also an extra second of healing could potentially turn the tide. Meanwhile, Burden Carrier was a straight forward value.

She considered it, and selected Grudge Holder. It didn't work on the Elementals directly, but it would allow them to sustain themselves for a second longer if the Dual Elemental Master died, instead of dissipating immediately.

Finally, her True Totem Demon. As the main tank, she selected Stubborn Will without hesitation. That left Physical Focus, Grudge Holder, and Burden Carrier.

As True Totem Demon was her main method of escape, she discounted Grudge Holder, an extra second of escaping wouldn't be greatly useful. Burden Carrier though would help carry more items while escaping, if she did an item hot swap.

Alternatively, Physical Focus would make up for some of the True Totem Demon's abysmal base statistic. The average class received fifteen overall points per level, but the True Totem Demon only got twelve! And only two of those were free points!

Of the ten other points, the True Totem Demon received 4 in physique, 4 in hardiness, and 2 in the mental statistics. The main idea of the True Totem Demon was that despite its poor base statistics, its had the ability to replace its own bones with monster bones, and the resulting stat bonuses would more than make up for it.

And that was true, but she would need to collect enough high quality monster bones in the first place. Eventually it would not be an issue, but early on, it could be. Plus, Chan Si had a certain build in mind for the True Totem Demon, a build that was considered trash for the class, but which really suited her needs.

She planned to place both her two extra points per level, every level, into the class's mental statistics.

The reason most True Totem Demons had such poor [Skills] from monster bones is most monster bone [Skills] were magic based, not physical based, and monster bones could either supply [Skills] or stat bonuses, but not both!

You could have tough bones, and you could have magic bones, but you could not have tough magic bones.

So relying on magic skills with such abysmal magic stats, it wasn't worth it. And if a True Totem Demon tried to use Chan Si's build, of sinking their spare stat points into mental statistics instead of physical ones, their base class skills would suffer, on top of not performing as well as either a tank or DPS. Even the scroll crafting True Totem Demons did not sink every spare point into their mental statistics, it would ruin their long term growth too much, as most they would spare a few points.

Since this was Chan Si's plan, she needed a way to make up for it, so in the end selected Physical Focus, and placed it into Reflexes. This was another oddity in her build. Most True Totem demons would focus on either one of Physique or Hardiness, or split between them. Reflex-based True Totem Demons did exist, but they were considered inferior.

But Chan Si already knew precisely why she was focusing on reflexes, and it was the same reason she was going to dump all her spare points into mental statistics. Of the physical monster [Skills] granted by bones, most keyed off [Reflexes], another reason the class tended to not want to add skill bones, focusing mostly on stat bones. If Chan Si wanted any chance to exploit the monster skills at all, she had to be prepared. Plus, this filled a gap in her team composition.

While the Ballista could slowly pick off enemies one at a time, and the Dark Weaver could use its AoE to kill several weaker enemies at a time, what if there were hidden monsters, launching a surprise attack?

Reflexes would allow the True Totem Demon to react to new and unexpected developments like these more quickly, as high enough Reflexes could decrease the cooldown of physical [Skills]. Since this was her escape method, this was important. When she filled her True Totem Demon with bones, she wanted to focus on Reflex-improving bones at first. Only when she found bones that gave her actually useful [Skills] would she add them, on top of potentially adding mental statistic increasing bones.

Now she just had to select the actual races from which she could obtain these combos of passive [Skills].

For her Ballista, she had two choices, [Human] or [Dwarf]. She selected human simply for aesthetic purposes, as she was going to select the Provisioner starting area for the many free items it provided.

For her Dark Weaver, she had only one choice, [Beastkin]. Of course she picked it. Her Dark Weaver would begin in the Dark Weaver starting area, as it was the closest of her options to the Monster Queen's nest.

For her Light-Fire Dual Elemental Master, she could select [Human], [Dwarf], or [Elf]. She selected elf - her Dual Elemental Master was a woodcutter, and the elven starting area was even better than the woodcutter starting area for training early levels of woodcutting.

And finally, for her True Totem Demon, she had [Orc], [Beastkin], and [Ghouls] to choose from. She already decided she was going to put the character into the True Totem Demon starting area for its abundance of bones, so it was purely about what she wanted the character to look like. Ghouls were humanoids with stubby bodies but long limbs, slightly translucent pale or gray skin, and sharp teeth and big eyes. She didn't like the look of it. She already had a beastkin though, so she decided to mix things up and pick Orc.

Chan Si couldn't care less about the more detailed appearances of her characters, she just hit the random buttons, which spat her out a male human Ballista with a naturally scowling face and tired eyes, a female Beastkin Dark Weaver of the rabbitkin subtype with bright orange fur and big smile that totally contrasted her pitch black robes, a female elf Light-Fire Dual Elemental Master who looked totally ordinary besides her red and white swirling class robes, and a female Orc True Totem Demon with a smug toothy grin.

Of course, there was nothing to customize in appearance for her Monstrous Character.

There was only one choice left, naming her characters. She could make this random too, and it really didn't matter, but she wanted to have a little bit of fun with it.

The Ballista she named [Gearme], for the fact she'd be giving the character all the gear. She pronounced it like Jeremy.

The Dark Weaver she named [Pickapart], because she had the dissembler background but also would slowly grind out a lot of of enemies at once.

The Light-Fire Dual Elemental Master she named [Sunshine]. Light-Fire, so it made sense, and she just thought it sounded cute.

The True Totem Demon she named [Ulna], it was a type of bone and sounded like an orcish name.

The lack of uniqueness of the names wasn't a problem, as the system automatically placed a faint string of letters after every character's name as a unique identifier. There were three different characters named “Weed” in the top 100, although people referred to them by their rank instead, so people would call them “Weed 17", “Weed 33”, and “Nice Weed”.

Of course, again she could not select a name for her Monstrous Character, that would come later, after her first evolution.

That was everything! Chan Si had finally made all the choices she had to make, for now. It wasn't easy coordinating the creation of a party of characters to take down a rogue AI you accidentally created, but she had done it. Well, the creation part anyway, she still had to do the taking down the AI part.

She didn't immediately log in with all of her characters. Chan Si planned to stagger her first log ins by a random factor of a few seconds to a few hours. That was enough variation that the AI shouldn't pick up on any suspicious data.

She generated her random values.

She would log into Gearme, wait 10398 seconds, log into Pickapart, wait 8840 seconds, log into Sunshine, wait 6789 second, log into Ulna, wait 3868 seconds, log into her Monstrous Character. After that she would never need to log out, outside of an emergency. The game allowed its play while sleeping, and the pods could provide nutrients and remove waste while playing. Of course, she wasn't going to be in a pod, she would be in the real world and would eat and sleep normally. This wouldn't look suspicious to the AI, at worst it would just think she was five game-addicted freaks.

Chan Si was ready, and logged in with Gearme.