Chương 47: Treasure

Where the spawn point was, a chest is waiting. I've never seen a platinum chest before, but I'm pretty sure that's what this is. It's a silvery white color, but it looks more stylized and expensive than the silver chests look, so I'm going to guess that it's platinum. I just hope I have enough lock picks to get it open. I don't break the picks as often, which helps, but it's a close call, leaving me sweating when my last lock pick finally gets the chest open. You have opened a platinum chest!

You gain 10, 000 experience! You find 13 platinum, 52 gold. Bone bow (recipe), spear of brutality (recipe), knight's shield (recipe). Axe of bravery, ghost blade dagger, chain vest, belt of the giant. Ability scroll: chop, ability scroll: distract, ability scroll: trick shot. Spellbook: heal II. Spellbook: shield of faith. Potion of ability (rare). Necklace of shimmer, ring of shadows, 45 magic crystals. That's enough experience for another level.

Put three points into strength, three into agility, and three into willpower. Then it's all a question of who takes what from the treasure chest. Obviously, we each get 4 platinum and 17 gold. I then take the ghost blade dagger. El takes the axe of bravery, and Gigi takes the belt of the giant. So I take the distract ability scroll, then El takes the chain vest, and Gigi takes the shield of faith spellbook. I take the trick shot ability, El takes the potion of ability, and I take the ring of shadows.

Gigi takes the heal II spellbook, El takes the necklace of shimmer, and we split the magic crystals between us. I check out the items that I'm keeping for myself. Ghost blade dagger. Very rare dagger 20/30. Damage: 48-52. Ignores physical armor. Strikes ghosts for full damage. Ring of Shadows: +5 sneak. You can only wear one ring per hand. Distract. Uncommon Ability 1/10. Stamina cost: 10. Casting time: instant. Cooldown: 30 seconds.

Create a distraction far from where you are hiding, drawing enemy attention away from you, allowing you to get surprise attack. Does not work once combat has commenced. Trick shot. Uncommon ability 1/10. Stamina cost: 50. Casting time: 2 seconds. Cooldown: 120 seconds. Make a non-damaging shot that would be otherwise all but impossible.

"I told you this was a good idea," El says, playing with her new axe.

"It was a little on the close side," Gigi says.

"And we definitely can't do that against anything of a higher level."

"It feels like we're always saying that we need to do more damage," I say.

"Enemy hit points are getting a bit ridiculous. That legendary advanced guy had five hundred times his level in hit points."

"But they don't deal much at all," El says, flipping the axe around and trying to wield one axe in each hand.

"They do like fifty damage per hit. Who cares if they have ten times as many hit points as we do when they do that little?"

"If I were doing five hundred damage per hit, I'd agree with you," I say.

"But if they're doing fifty and I'm only doing a hundred and fifty, then them having ten times my hit points matters a little bit."

"We've got healing spells," El says.

"I wish we had a dedicated healer," Gigi says.

"But we can't afford one with just the three of us. We really need to find the others."

"Or recruit someone new," I suggest.

"But I agree with you; we were better off when there were five of us. Vincent wasn't a dedicated healer, but he was a dedicated caster, and that would make a lot of difference."

"So let's hope that one or both of them are in the land past the edge of the forest," Gigi says.

"And let's get there as soon as we can." We travel East from the temple. That should be the shortest line between us and the edge of the forest. As we go, I noticed that my sense of smell keeps warning me about animals nearby and about the age of tracks and trails. My survival goes up to four, and I'm left wondering how else I can improve that particular skill. It's the skill I need most to unlock another class. Ranger will unlock for me as soon as I have ten points of survival and twenty points of tracking.

And the tracking seems to be going up practically by itself. The trails that I'm spotting are more clear, and I'm able to follow a lot of them with my nose as well as with my eyes, if not even better. My tracking is at sixteen, but I'm guessing it will jump up again before we finish traveling for the day. I also need to learn to set traps if I'm going to unlock the scout class and see where things go from there. I'm thankfully just one spell away from unlocking the spellsword class. Maybe I want to go that way.

My MP is up pretty high, and my magic resistance promises that I'll be able to ignore spells about one time in three. Maybe I want to go that route and see what it unlocks. It seems like the classes unlock a new feature every ten levels or so. In two more, I'll unlock a new feature for tracker. I'll also unlock another talent. I should maybe start thinking about that one now. What do I want to be better at? To answer that question, I really need to decide what I want to do.

So far, we've been just running around gaining levels. But if it's true that we're already higher level than most, if we're already the most powerful players in the area, then leveling itself is not enough of a goal. We can try to widen the gap, but that still feels like a short term goal. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. At some point, I need to put the gamification aside and figure out what I want from this life.

I've been given a new chance and a fresh start. What do I want to do with it? How do I want to interact with this world? Do I want to just become more powerful, constantly fighting with this world in an attempt to conquer it somehow, to win? Or do I want to find a place in this world that makes me happy, one that isn't pushed by a constant pressure for competition and advancement, but which has its own goals and its own endgame? Basically, how do I want to spend my endgame?

In some games, there's a maximum level that you can reach. Once you get there, experience no longer matters, and grinding to get to a higher level becomes literally a waste of time. Then you have to rely on endgame content. Maybe it's a matter of getting better gear. Maybe it's just a matter of being able to do quests that you couldn't do before, and maybe it's a matter of being able to go around and explore. I think that's what I really want. I want to explore. This is a whole new world.

I don't know how big it is, but my impression is that it's at least the same size as Earth. The gravity feels the same, there's just one sun and one moon that I can see, and the sky looks the same as it did on Earth, stars notwithstanding. So it's probably the same size. Which means it is absolutely enormous. I did a fair amount of traveling around Earth in my life, but I never even saw ten percent of it. And that was when I had the ability to travel at speeds far exceeding what we can hope to do in this world.

We're basically limited in speed to the speed of our two feet. While I do have a twenty percent speed bonus that lets me keep up a faster pace for a lot longer, it's still nothing compared to a car. We've been moving at a decent enough pace, probably five miles an hour, all day. In a car, I could cover the same distance we've covered in about an hour. I look up at the sky. The moon is still high. I'm guessing it's only about midnight.

It took us a few hours to clear out the temple, but we haven't really lost all that much time. Right now, we're just putting a few miles between us and the temple before we set up camp. But we'll probably stop in another hour or two and rest for the remainder of the night. If we ran full out, not paying attention to our surroundings in more than a cursory way, we could probably maintain a pace of ten miles an hour. That's ten consecutive six minute miles. A fast pace, but still nothing compared to a car.

We could maintain that pace all day and do maybe ten hours of running, assuming our stamina kept up with us. That would be the equivalent of driving out of Minneapolis for an hour and a half. That's not even far enough to get to Duluth. We might be able to get some steeds that could go twice or even three times the speed we can on foot. That would still be slower than a car, and probably couldn't maintain that pace for that many hours. This world is big. Unfathomably big.

This forest could be a thousand miles across for all I know. Though if that's true, I doubt Elmspire will be the only city in the forest. Cities tend to crop up in predictable distances from one another. You might have two hundred miles between cities, but you probably won't have three or four. Cities grow up roughly three days from each other. That keeps them centralized enough that they can grow, but spread out enough that they don't grow into each other.

So if this forest is a thousand miles across, there are probably at least three cities contained within it. I want to find another city. Right now, we're assuming that Elmspire is in the dead center of the forest. What if it isn't? What if it's a day's travel in one direction and eight days in another? Did we pick the wrong direction? If not another city, we should find a village soon. We're maybe fifty miles away from Elmspire at this point. That's more than a full day's travel for most people.

We're going pretty fast. Probably can't keep up this pace for very long. Will we get the edge of the forest tomorrow? The day after? I decide to start looking out for more biped tracks. If there is a village, I want to be able to find it. Odds are, there will be at least one hunter from the village who is crossing the trails that we're using to travel. So odds are I'll find one eventually. My tracking did go up to 17 before we finally stopped and made camp.

We set up next to a small stream, and I built the fire quickly and efficiently. My survival spiked to five when I lit the campfire with flint and steel, catching a spark on my first try and blowing on it, coaxing it into a little flame that I could put at the bottom of the tepee fire I had built. It isn't meant to burn for very long; just long enough for us to settle down and relax, and maybe cook something if we want to. Once again, I take first watch.

I'm still not overly tired, so I take the opportunity to strip a few straight branches off a nearby tree and start making new shafts for arrows. Arrowheads last a lot longer than the shafts I attach them to. Once I have the bark stripped off of the branch, I can attach the arrowhead and the fletching from a broken arrow, usually using strips of that same bark to lash things together, using the sap as a sort of glue and producing a few extra arrows.

My fletcher skill increases to 4, and I complete the Secondary Skilled quest, gaining another five thousand experience points for hitting my fiftieth point of secondary skills. I really like how many skills I've developed. I may not have as many spells or abilities as some, but I've got skills in spades. I've got them at all sorts of levels, with five of them in the twenties already. I don't know what each level of each skill does, but I can tell the difference between having them and not having them.

My sword fits more easily in my grip, and I'm more aware of what it can do, than I ever was before. I think back to my clumsy playing with my sword collection and I'm kind of embarrassed. I really had no idea what I was doing. And the same can be said of my other skills. A bow feels much more natural in my hand than it once did. I can aim with it as easily as with my bare hand, and I know I'm getting really good with it. I practically never miss anymore.

And now that I'm building my own arrows, I'm seeing a whole other level of confidence. I'm getting to the point, I think, where I'm going to only rely on arrows that I make myself. Which also puts into mind that I might want to make my own bow soon. Maybe I should take some time and do some crafting. If nothing else, I should make Wanderers Boots for Gigi and for El. The speed boost will mean that we can all travel at a faster pace, which will make it easier for us to get everywhere we want to go.

Travel is all well and good, but it gets boring. There's a reason so many games have fast travel options. When you're running through the woods for ten hours, it's really boring, unless you come across something that breaks up the monotony. It would be so much better if you could just press a button and already be at your destination, even if the time still passed. I go to sleep after waking up Gigi for second shift.

She once again comes awake quickly, with just a brief quizzical chirp when I put my hand on her shoulder to wake her. Once she sees it's me, her pupils go from wide to comfortably narrow, and she smiles and gets up without a word. El, of course, sleeps through the whole interaction, nestled deep into her bedroll and completely unaware of the world around her. I don't know how Gigi wakes her up for her shift. But I imagine it isn't as quick a process as when I wake up Gigi.