Chapter 20: “Lesson”
Before just now, she should have been able to respawn without problem. There had been ants everywhere, though, so she wasn’t actually respawning completely problem-free.
“But still, now it’s someone’s private area so I can’t respawn anymore. I had only been looking at the message board for like twenty minutes, and in that time, someone… did they buy a whole plot of land, including that cave? Or like, can you buy land? Once I get better at this game, I totally want to buy a house for me to rest my bones.”
But that first cave should have had a ton of ants in it. Can you buy land even when there’s still monsters there? If so, then as long as you had enough money, you could beat all those monsters without fighting. If you had the budget of a country at your disposal, then you could just buy up all the land in order to get rid of monster territory. However, the human countries and the monster territories were constantly fighting for land.
“Normally you’d think that if someone were already there, then you can’t just become the owner of that area. That means that in the however long I was dead, someone was able to kill off all the ants?”
Was something like that even possible? Even if there were players who had started the instant the game became available, the game had only been out for about half a day. She didn’t think anyone could possibly get strong enough to farm those super-strong ants in such a short amount of time.
“Ahh, I get it. There might be people who’ve been living in this world all along who are that strong. I just assumed it was a player, but I guess NPCs can also have personal areas. Or like, if NPCs can do it, then monsters should be able to do it too; maybe the ants themselves were the ones who had owned the place first.”
If they were like regular ants, then it wouldn’t be strange for there to be a queen ant. The ants could have been in the process of taking control of the cave at the queen’s orders. Blanc could have been an intruder that happened to suddenly appear out of nowhere. Then, while she was dead, their extermination force could have eliminated all other remaining enemies, turning the cave into the ant’s territory and thus rendering Blanc unable to spawn.
“That seems like the most likely explanation. But this happened while I was trying to accept the rez, meaning my corpse should have been there. I wonder what would happen if someone rezzed me after the ants had taken control of the zone…”
Blanc tried to look it up in the Help documentation, but she couldn’t figure out which section might have the answer. The Help console’s suggested questions spanned too many different categories, and her vague search terms weren’t enough to lead her to an appropriate Help topic.