Note: Only entry-level.
The continent had many mage towers. Mages of different disciplines had their own preferences, but for the most part, towers of the same discipline clustered together. In the beginning they were built to fend off wicked devils; over time, they grew into academies.
When Arthur graduated from the mage tower two years ago, he had still been an ambitious young man. Two years later, he had fallen so far as to scrape by in Lakeside Town on ale freeloaded off Old Joseph, day after day.
“Need people to come…”
Arthur muttered under the hood of his mage robe.
He reeked of booze from head to toe, but the blue eyes beneath the hood were bright and clear.
Not a drop of drunkenness in the way he carried himself.
“No address, though. It’s a scam, isn’t it?”
He really had acted on impulse back there.
The black-haired Arthur muttered to himself, casually crumpling the quest paper and tossing it over his shoulder.
The furrow between his brows proved he was nowhere near as careless as he pretended.
Then again…
Arthur’s vision abruptly went black.
Arthur: ?
The sudden darkness pressed down until he could barely breathe. A vast building flickered into view before him, filling Arthur’s entire field of vision.
The crushing, squeezing sensation made him dizzy enough to vomit, as if he had been stuffed into a barrel and shoved down a long, narrow flight of stairs.
Swaying candlelight cast shadows across the blood-red carpet; the reliefs seared into the milky-white walls depicted, in lifelike detail, fearless warriors slaughtering evil dragons.
But in the moments when the light shifted, the warriors’ eyes seemed to brim with venom and savagery, writhing like living things. Arthur shuddered from head to toe, staggering back two steps as an invisible suffocation clamped around his throat.
Those two steps back finally let Arthur make out the huge characters on the wall.
The Adventurers’ Guild.
Arthur’s eyes rolled mechanically upward, and he saw an enormous, magnificent milky-white building.
“Hahh… hahh…”
He clutched at his throat, gulping air.
Where was this?
“Are you the one who took the quest?”
A voice, mild and cool and gentle, sounded through that deep, cold atmosphere.
And just like that, it seemed to shatter the restraint that had been clamped around the spatial mage’s throat. Nameless fear and inexplicable dread still echoed in Arthur’s chest as he covered his throat and coughed, hard, again and again.
As if, had that voice not sounded, Arthur would surely have died.
The wide copper doors gaped like a beast’s maw, swallowing everything; the flickering, dappled candlelight made it hard to see.
At the border between light and shadow stood a white-robed youth, delicate as a doll.
Arthur was a mage, and mages were a lean lot by nature; of course he couldn’t match the height and presence of knights and fighters, yet this youth barely reached his chest.
But when Arthur looked the white-robed youth over properly, a sudden shiver shot up his spine.
He was beautiful.
It was a beauty that could not be put into words, ineffable, faintly ethereal, impossible to describe. Exquisite in every detail, lovely in every line, crystalline-clear like “The Unnamed One.”
“You…”
Clunk.
Arthur’s mouth opened and closed, and his hand clenched around the quest paper that had somehow reappeared in it.
Wusu saw the quest paper in the mage’s hand.
This is the one who took the quest, Wusu “thought”.
He stepped back, clearing the path into the Adventurers’ Guild.
“Come in.”
Arthur had never seen an Adventurers’ Guild so grand and so eerie. Gnarled tree stems intertwined like living things, twisting freely into every shape imaginable; apart from the red carpet, the hall floor was woven from countless crisscrossing roots, and the faintest step gave the illusion that it was wriggling.
The rest area on the left alone was enough to leave Arthur reeling, and the clinking quest area on the right made him want to keep away even more.
Not that he wanted to stay away.
It was more that some ancient aura weighed on him, as if he neither wanted to nor could approach.
Arthur looked down at the quest paper, soaked through with sweat, and his throat went dry.
He kind of regretted this.
What place had he barged into?
Wusu’s white robe trailed at his heels; all that tumbling through the ruins had left its pure white without a single blemish.
Arthur followed step for step, not daring to let his eyes wander, doing his best to ignore the rough, faintly wriggling feeling underfoot. At least it wasn’t a slimy, disgusting one.
Wusu rounded the counter and hauled himself up onto the tall chair with some effort, and from behind it, the little white-robed youth gazed at the mage standing stock-still in front of the counter.
Arthur stared blankly at Wusu, then with great difficulty tore his eyes away and glanced at the quest paper crumpled beyond recognition in his hand. “I’m here. For the quest.”
His throat was even drier than he’d expected.
“I want,” Wusu began, in complete earnestness, hands folded obediently on the counter, “people to come here.”
This was the first sentence Wusu had ever started with “I.”
With a quest involved, Arthur finally reacted a little faster. “People to come here?”
He risked a glance around the spacious, hollow Adventurers’ Guild hall. “You mean… you want me to build a teleportation array?”
Wusu knew teleportation arrays. Those five Travelers had come out of one, an array brimming with dazzling colors and mana. If there were a teleportation array, then people could keep coming in.
Wusu “thought” it over and over, and then Wusu nodded.
Arthur let out a breath of relief. “With my ability, the best I can manage for now is a small teleportation array. One or two people at a time.”
As soon as he said it, he flinched at his own poverty and low rank, then puffed his chest back up, a trace of uncertainty and hesitation on that green but determined face. “If I complete it, will you really give me the quest reward you mentioned?”
“A healing scroll?”
Wusu fished a delicate scroll traced with fine patterns out from under the counter.
“Yes.”
Arthur’s blue eyes lit up.
When I Don’t Eat Eggplant logged in, something felt off.
The Bell-Chime Tree bathed the broken Divine Temple in its familiar pearly white; the desolate air of the ruins swept past on the cold wind, chilling the elf into a shiver.
“Realism value’s set way too high…”
I Don’t Eat Eggplant muttered, utterly unrepentant. You played games for the realism. Why else would you bother?
What’s missing, though?
Where’s the NPC?
I Don’t Eat Eggplant didn’t find the NPC where they’d left him when they logged out, but they all knew this game’s freedom by now. He didn’t think much of Wusu wandering off; it just made him harder to find.
“Getting an NPC to complete the quest himself, honestly…” I Don’t Eat Eggplant grumbled, heading out of the broken temple, and within two steps he was stopped dead by that grand milky-white edifice in the distance.
When did that show up?
Before he could think it through, a sudden thunderclap of noise pierced his eardrums, followed by a shriek sharp enough to split his skull. With his pain sensitivity at 100, the elf doubled over, ready to carve his own ears off then and there. Screaming for the settings menu inside his head, he scraped together his last shred of sanity and dragged both the realism value and the pain value down to 0.
After the boom, the racket died.
Sa… saved…
I Don’t Eat Eggplant swayed and leaned against a broken pillar.
Slap.
Talk about irony.
This was one of the warnings Otherworld Company displayed before every game session: realism values set too high could damage a player’s mind. The good news was that if it actually happened, the gaming pod, sensing the player’s physical state, would immediately kick the player offline.
Clutching his head, the elf dragged his feet toward the commotion. At the very least, he had to find out what had happened!
The middle of the ruins, or roughly what counted as the middle.
Blazing light flared and swallowed itself, again and again.
Roaring tendrils of light twisted like captured worms, bound and restrained, torn at and dragged back down to the earth.
A six-pointed star magic array, brimming and overflowing with light, was etched onto the freshly cleared ground, its blood-glistening lines mixed with all manner of magical materials, giving off a strange fragrance.
The radiance that had nearly burst out of the Secluded Forest flickered several times and finally dimmed, settling meekly along the array’s lines. The dazzling white flashed again… The spatial mage beside the array stared hard, pulling materials from his robes and tossing them in, one after another.
Arthur looked calm, but inside he was rattled to his core.
His mana was being drained without end. What was wrong with this damned array! The energy it swallowed was nothing like what an ordinary entry-level teleportation array could compare to!
The elf stared at the scene in shock.
Dazzling radiance filled his eyes; a gorgeous, blinding beauty flared to life in an instant, as if branding a vivid phantom onto his retinas. Even as a player, I Don’t Eat Eggplant had rarely had the chance to appreciate dancing, crystalline lines from this close up.
“This cutscene really is gorgeous.”
The elf murmured. This was the second time in a short span that the game had stunned him with its cinematics.
Last time, it had been the Bell-Chime Tree blooming at Wusu’s feet.
Every last drop of Arthur’s mana had been sucked away by the six-pointed star magic array. Any more, and the spatial mage would have been drained into a husk.
This had never happened before!
He staggered, barely able to stay upright; all that sudden, commanding composure vanished, leaving behind only a thin, frail silhouette.
The spatial mage looks like he needs help, Wusu thought.
He walked forward a few steps, and the ever-present cool wind abruptly sharpened, whipping Wusu’s black curls loose. Sand and grit scattered through the air, and Arthur swayed in the wind, on the verge of collapse.
Yet with every step Wusu took closer, Arthur only seemed to look worse off.
Then… Wusu said to I Don’t Eat Eggplant, who was hurrying over. “Can you hold him up?”
【Random Quest: Please help the mana-drained spatial mage Arthur recover.】
【Quest Reward: Enhance any weapon +1】
I Don’t Eat Eggplant: ?
I Don’t Eat Eggplant: !
Fck!
On it!
Arthur swayed, about to go down, when a powerful force behind him suddenly caught and steadied him. A cool voice came from behind. “Vigor potion.”
Vigor potions were common items in the game, sold in every sort of NPC and player shop, effective for restoring both stamina and energy.
The thin spatial mage’s head throbbed fiercely, and his mana-starved body ached all over, wearing down his wariness as he accepted the potion from this stranger.
The vigor potion’s effects were immediate. Arthur’s exhaustion receded a little; his drained magic core faintly began to brew fresh mana, and once that sliver of mana spread out into his limbs, he at least had the strength to stand up straight.
Wusu looked down at the teleportation array and tried walking toward its center, and a prompt immediately popped up.
【Please select teleport destination: Lakeside Town or ? or ? or…]
The rest was nothing but question marks. Right now, Lakeside Town seemed to be the only place he could teleport to.
Little Wusu pressed his lips together, obedient and thoughtful.
He had been cradling two healing scrolls in his arms this whole time. Once he had confirmed this, Wusu turned and walked to Arthur’s side, and this time no invisible barrier stopped him. He crouched down to look at the spatial mage sitting cross-legged on the ground. “Quest complete.”
He pushed the two healing scrolls into Arthur’s arms.
Arthur’s mouth opened and closed several times; in the end, he just hugged the two healing scrolls and stared into space.
The quest-complete chime rang in I Don’t Eat Eggplant’s ears, followed by the System’s notice.
【Please wait until the Secluded Forest’s workshop has been built. Players may then redeem rewards at any time.】
Remarkably, the silver-haired elf did not fly into a temper.
He had made peace with this back when he accepted the quest. In the Continent of Divine Silence, apart from the intangible things every game came equipped with, like skill points, channels, and maps, everything that touched reality had to be done with your own two hands.
Like the vigor potion he had just poured down Arthur’s throat. A vigor potion had to go through material gathering, purchasing, an apothecary’s drying, crafting, shaping… The entire production chain behind even this one item was fully traceable, with zero chance of anything simply popping into existence.
On the forums, a top player who had completed the entire Illustrated Codex had once tracked the whole thing down out of curiosity, and in the end could only marvel at the game’s realism. Even the most minute detail was polished to the extreme, leaving nothing to pick at.
So… was it really so strange that weapon upgrades required a workshop?
That was a basic requirement!
Wusu looked down.
Beneath his white, tender little feet lay the teleportation array.
The first condition was complete.
In his mind, Wusu opened the blank “Wusu’s Checklist” and crossed out the single line written there.
Do a good job.
Then his eyes curved, warm with contentment.
The silver-haired elf murmured in wonder, “So you can smile.”
Wusu thought.
Wusu thought earnestly.
Wusu stood obediently in the teleportation array, thinking earnestly.
He closed the “Wusu’s Checklist” in his heart, and then asked, slow and deliberate, “What does ‘smile’ mean?”
Oh dear.
The fractured glow, scattering and dissolving, was like an ancient presence in the depths letting out a soft, soft sigh.
