Level 1 Fallen

After leaving the palace, I once again met up with Bella and Diane, explaining to them my idea with Nuoda. Diane listened to the explanation, lowering her head thoughtfully. “I suppose that it’s not a bad idea. Even if the game’s popularity has been going down a bit lately, there are plenty of resources for players to be able to design cities.”

“The game’s popularity has fallen?” Bella asked in concern, causing Diane to look up at her.

“Right. It’s not to the point that services will be discontinued or anything. It’s just that the game is a lot slower paced than many players enjoy. The fact that the world has such a large scale, and settlements are so far apart is something other games don’t have. While it increases the immersion, it also turns some players away.”

Diane then went on to explain. “Most players don’t have all that much time to play. They want to be able to come home, log into the game, and go on an adventure right away. If they spend all of their game time in a carriage traveling between cities, it’s normal that they would get bored.”

“You never seem to have that trouble, though?” Bella pointed out as we walked towards the tunnel leading to the east.

“I’m not exactly an average player,” Diane countered, shaking her head. “I don’t have a job or any form of a life outside of gaming. I can play as much as I want, and due to my situation, the game is my life. That’s why I don’t mind the intense realism. I actually find it to be quite nice.”

“But, because of how the game world is structured, only die-hard roleplayers, or those with special interests will keep playing the game if changes aren’t made. For instance, if travel between cities became more convenient, without having to spend a large sum to buy a vehicle that could be destroyed in battle.”

“The developers have probably considered this, as well. A lot of players on the forum think it has to do with why they delayed the next patch, since they want to include these quality of life updates.”

I nodded along, thinking about what she said as we got into the car at the mouth of the tunnel. The easiest way to handle that update would be to make the teleportation points between cities free to use. That would be no different from having players able to fast travel between cities. Then, the only times when they would need to manually travel long distances would be over country borders.

However, if they did that, it would mean that the various nations would lose a substantial source of income. To prevent the coffers of every nation from starting to run dry, they would need to take extra measures, such as increasing the drop rate of coins, or creating some sort of benefits package for kingdoms based on how many players they had.

Certainly, trying to get all of this set up would be a pain for whoever had to balance all of it, so I could understand if they had to push the update back because of it. “Oh, there’s one other thing I heard about,” Diane remembered as I began driving down the dimly lit tunnel. “It’s about the forbidden areas we mentioned before.”

“What is it?” I asked curiously, briefly glancing over at her. Unsurprisingly, there were not very many people using the tunnel, so it was easy to drive without worries.

“Apparently, they have been a lot of glitches in Feycross, due to how wildly the inhabitants there use runes. It was bad enough that the devs posted a response saying that they were actively working on the issue.”

I couldn’t help but blink when I heard that. Glitches could be utterly terrifying when you got caught in them. For an entire realm to be plagued with them, that alone would put it as the most dangerous realm for me.

Though, I was still unsure what could be done to fix these glitches in Feycross. All I could do was speculate. Maybe they would change some part of how runes worked, but that would cause problems for Diane, who had recently begun integrating runes into her fighting style.

“By the way, Drake,” Diane spoke up, snapping me out of my thoughts. “What are your plans while we’re grinding techniques?”

“Huh? You don’t want me to go with you to share the experience buff?” I asked in confusion, glancing over at Diane again.

“I mean, it would probably save us some time, but you would be sacrificing a lot of your own training to do that. Lately, it seems like we’ve been coming closer and closer to fighting actual grandmaster-level enemies. If I get lucky and have enough advanced information, I can take on a lower-ranked grandmaster out. But, if we were to go up against a stronger one, our only real hope is to rely on you.”

I pursed my lips in thought at that. Realistically speaking, we shouldn’t be encountering such high-level adversaries so often, but they had appeared in front of us one after another in recent events. “I can do some simulation training, I suppose? I’ve managed to get the simulated experience up to fifteen percent now, so it’s more useful than it was before. If I use it during my dragon king transformation, I might be able to get about the same progress as I would without my King of All Trades?”

Diane’s eyes widened slightly. “That’s already really good, you know?” she spoke up in surprise. “That means that you can get the same level of skill training that we get without needing to actually fight monsters. The only thing that you don’t get is the loot.”

I hesitated, but ultimately nodded my head. It felt a bit sad to split up with them for a few days while we all trained, but this was all to prepare for the upcoming challenges. I looked back at Bella, and she gave a warm smile of reassurance. “We’ve got this. Now that we’ve leveled up, the slime dungeon won’t be any trouble for us. We might even be able to handle the bamboo river dungeon on our own.”

Diane’s ears perked up when she heard that, and I could tell that she was immediately interested. “As I recall, that dungeon has a mix of mages and ninjas, right?” I asked, and her hands began to fidget in her lap.

Seeing this, Bella put on a playful smile. “Looks like the bamboo dungeon it is.”

“Well, I’ll at least drive you to the dungeon,” I told the duo once we had emerged from the other side of the tunnel, flying up into the air to bypass the foot traffic of the city. “I can find somewhere to handle my personal training once I’ve dropped you two off.”

The two happily accepted this arrangement, and I let them off outside of the dungeon, where Diane’s friends seemed to have already been expecting her. Given that they controlled this dungeon, she probably sent them a message when she knew that we were coming here.

Rather than sticking around to chat, I drove back towards the tunnel. In order for me to get the most out of my simulated training, I had to also be in my dragon king form, otherwise I would use a large portion of the experience buff. Thus, I proceeded to carve out a rather large cavern for myself near the tunnel, big enough for me to comfortably transform within it.

Then, after transforming, I covered myself with Ghost-X, and the entrance of the cavern with Ghost Zone. With this dual layer of protection, I should have had no trouble avoiding detection while training. The last thing that I needed was an over-zealous player finding me and thinking that I was a normal dragon.

With my training space hidden, I began to set up my standard training plans, constructing orbs of the various elements that I could control with my projection skills, as well as Vitality of the Forest-X and other skills that I could simply turn on and train in the background. Only then did I allow half of my consciousness to sink into the simulation.

In the simulation, I went all out, training all of my various attack skills that I normally couldn’t work on. Admittedly, this method was fairly decent at leveling those neglected skills, though it was still the skills that I had set up in reality that leveled up the fastest.

For instance, one of my background skills, Black Flame Mantle, evolved near the end of the first day of training, turning into Infernal Shroud. This returned the mantle to a skin-tight aura of black flames, and allowed me to store the energy it absorbed for later use.

On the second day of training, two more skills evolved, both of these to the grandmaster tier. The first was Dark Intent, which evolved into Shadow King. Its effects were self-explanatory, just a darkness version of my other King skills.

The second grandmaster skill to evolve on that day was actually one of my oldest skills, Ghost. This was one that I had been most looking forward to, and it turned into an unusual skill called Beyond the Veil. As for its precise effects… I wasn’t entirely sure about them myself. I’d need to get Diane’s help understanding it.

With that in mind, I did not immediately begin my third day of training, instead waiting for Diane to log on before asking her to meet me. I told her that the Ghost skill evolved, and wanted her opinion on it. When she heard this, she was more than happy to help me test the skill.

We met up at the edge of the city, with me back in my normal form. Diane was practically bouncing on her heels, eager to see the grandmaster version of the skill that she herself was training. When she spotted me, she ran over, stopping once she had arrived in front of me.

“Are you ready?” she asked, and I nodded my head. I took a deep breath, activating my new Beyond the Veil skill. Usually, when I activated Ghost-X, my body seemed to become blurry in my perspective, as if made of smoke. However, when I used Beyond the Veil, it was the world itself that seemed to become ethereal.

I could see the misty form of Diane standing in front of me, her eyes glancing from side to side. Without warning, she pulled a short sword out of her inventory and stabbed it towards me. This was part of the tests that we had agreed upon, so I simply braced myself to not dodge out of the way.

To my surprise, the sword seemed to pass through my body, as if it was just an illusion. Diane pulled her weapon back, inspecting the blade before speaking aloud, her voice seeming to echo against nothing. “You didn’t avoid that, right?” It sounded like she was talking through a layer of water, but I could still thankfully make out her words. “Well, I guess you might not be able to answer me right now, so let’s move on to the next part.”

After saying that, she took her own defensive stance, her arms crossed in front of herself. I clenched my fists, throwing a punch towards her raised arms. However, my punch seemed to harmlessly pass through her, causing me to stumble forward. “Any time you’re ready,” Diane muttered, having clearly not felt any sense of an attack.

The skill description of Beyond the Veil stated that it would cause the user to step fully into the world of spirits, erasing their presence in the physical realm. It would seem that meant that I was both impervious to attacks and also unable to attack myself, unless I stepped back into the physical realm.

I focused, trying to solidify myself enough to throw that punch. This time, I noticed Diane’s eye flick towards me just as my punch landed. Had I gone too far, and made myself visible?

I turned off Beyond the Veil, consulting with Diane about the strange state that the skill put me in. She seemed surprised, mulling over the details. “You’ll need to do some focused training to get used to fighting with that skill, I think.”

I sighed in agreement, before shaking my head. “It’s too bad that the area version won’t get the ‘perfect’ grandmaster result, since I created it at the master tier. Though, I guess that will show me what the imperfect evolution of Ghost would normally be like.”