novelraw Chapter 10 : Chapter 10
Chapter 10 : Chapter 10
Chapter 10
With Victor’s 【Might Shaking the Eight Wastes】 skill dangling in front of them like a carrot, the labor-reform players’ enthusiasm for work shot up in an instant.
And to be honest, these brick-hauling quests were not all that boring.
After all, players only felt pain at thirty percent of the normal level, so they did not feel fatigue. The only thing that reflected exhaustion was the drop in their stamina bar.
But even after Lightning finished all of the labor-reform tasks, Victor’s favorability toward him did not deepen in the slightest.
The labor-reform tasks were still relatively simple. Their content mainly revolved around repairing the village center. According to the original plan, gathering half the materials on the first day would already have been considered a good result. But no one had expected so many troublemaking players to be involved. They filled the material quota all at once.
Once the materials were sufficient, Victor wasted no words. He took out his wand and chanted a few spells. Stones and timber flew up before everyone’s eyes, and in no time at all, a simple yet imposing village center had been built.
“Wow!”
Everyone knew it was a cutscene, but there was a vast difference between watching one through a screen and witnessing something like a cutscene unfold in front of them as though it were real.
A few especially theatrical players had already started making hand signs and shouting, “Wood Release: Three-Room Castle Technique!”
Before this, the players had not felt as though the stones and timber they carried amounted to much. But now, standing before a castle more than fifty meters tall, they finally realized they had just done something truly extraordinary.
A castle built only from stone and wood could not be called magnificent, but for a structure more than fifty meters high to appear before their eyes just like that, the shock it brought them was no less than Victor’s 【Might Shaking the Eight Wastes】.
“I want to learn it! I want to learn it! Coach, teach me this!”
The players clamored noisily, but Victor’s expression barely changed. In a cold, hard voice, he announced, “Your labor-reform sentence has been completed. I hope that through this round of labor and reeducation, you will truly correct yourselves and not make the same mistake again.”
Immediately, one sweet-tongued player thumped his chest and declared, “With your guidance, Teacher Victor, I will definitely turn over a new leaf and become a good person useful to society!”
【System Notice: Victor Favorability +1. Current Favorability: -98.】
The players themselves did not hear the system notice, but from the slight softening in Victor’s expression, they guessed what had happened.
At once, a whole group of players began loudly swearing their loyalty.
Victor understood perfectly well that none of them were sincere. So aside from the first player, who gained one point of favorability, the rest were merely fortunate enough not to lose any more.
Night Arbiter shouted until his throat was nearly hoarse, yet did not gain even a single point of favorability. Depressed, he clawed at his hair.
Lightning smirked. “Heh.”
That one sound immediately drew furious glares from the other players. Yet Lightning still felt it was not enough. Wearing a pitiful expression, he looked at Victor and said, “Teacher Victor, they seem very unhappy that I want to better myself.”
The other players were so disgusted by his shameless act of trampling others to flatter himself that they nearly vomited.
Fortunately for them, Victor showed no pity whatsoever. He gave Lightning not a single point of favorability and simply waved a hand, teleporting him away.
The other players did not even have time to rejoice before they too were teleported away in the next second.
After this brief encounter, Victor could already confirm that every single one of these players was troublesome. Their labor-reform tasks were finished. If he did not send them away now, was he supposed to wait for them to torment him again?
A whole crowd of players stood neatly at the spawn point, staring at favorability values ranging from a high of negative ninety-nine to a low of negative one hundred and one, all on the verge of tears.
“I was such an idiot, really. I knew NPCs in online games were just piles of data, but I truly did not expect the NPC intelligence in this game to be this high.”
Lightning genuinely regretted his earlier act of trying to rob Victor right in front of him. Instead of enjoying the game properly, he had insisted on becoming a robber. Now look at him. His favorability with the NPC had dropped into the negatives, his equipment was gone, his money was gone, and his stamina was nearly empty. Worst of all, he did not even have money left to buy food to restore his stamina.
“I should have patiently made a plan, lured him away, and only then gone in to steal stuff.” Lightning regretted it so much he could only sob.
Nearby passersby with excellent hearing: “...”
They, who had naïvely believed that players released from labor reform would repent, were truly fools.
After completing an hour of labor-reform tasks, everyone’s stamina had dropped to only 10. Lightning and his teammates, Ten Billion Volts and Night Arbiter, pooled their money together. Between the three of them, they had only ten copper coins.
Ten Billion Volts could not help muttering, “I had 3,562 copper just a moment ago!” Of course, he had robbed it from Victor, only to be killed immediately afterward and lose the original ten copper he himself had owned as well.
“Robbery really does make money fast!” It was just a pity they could not lay hands on green-name NPCs. That was truly heartbreaking.
The nearest shop that sold food was three kilometers away. With their current stamina, they would probably make it only halfway before their stamina hit zero and they earned the “Starved to Death” achievement.
“Damn it!”
A group of players with no money and no stamina simply gave up and started lying flat.
“Have mercy, please. Spare me a little money. Have mercy, please. Spare me a little food.”
Yes, that was right. Their chosen method of giving up was to sit down on the spot and start begging.
Speaking the lines alone did not seem sufficient, so they rolled around on the ground and made themselves look even more miserable. Then they found broken leaves to use as bowls, sprawled crookedly across the dirt. Some crawled around, while others looked as though they had already starved to death.
“I’ll come clean. I’m actually a dragon-slaying hero, but now I’ve been cursed by an evil dragon. I just need fifty copper to recover my strength. Once I do, I can reclaim the dragon’s treasure, and I’ll split half of it with you!”
Some even picked up branches and stones and began roleplaying The Little Match Girl, going so far as to voice their matches when they failed to light.
“Fzzzt—so much delicious food! Egg tarts, pumpkin cakes, strawberry cake, cherry pancakes, savory crepes, hot milk tea... I hardly dare imagine how bright and cheerful a boy I’d become after eating all that.”
Passerby NPCs: “...”
The passerby NPCs could not understand them, so the passerby NPCs chose to quicken their pace and flee this gathering place of lunatics.
Once they had frightened away every NPC who passed by, the players had also largely indulged their theatrical impulses, so they finally began solving the problem.
Night Arbiter handed all of his equipment and money over to Ten Billion Volts.
Then he killed himself.
His health bar, though short, was instantly restored to full stamina, and he then took the money and went to the shop to buy food.
A loaf of ordinary bread sold for three copper coins and restored fifty stamina, which was enough for them to take the simplest brick-hauling quest and collect the reward.
Because of all their antics, the three of them had already wasted quite a lot of time. This time, they did not try anything clever again and instead started honestly hauling bricks.
They gradually completed several simple beginner tasks, and after obtaining 【Mining】, 【Gathering】, and 【Tilling】, they regretted everything even more.
During labor reform, the task content had actually been identical to the beginner quests, but because labor-reform tasks gave neither rewards nor experience, none of them realized what they had lost until they finished their first beginner quest and obtained the 【Mining】 skill.
He silently recited, “【Mining】.”
The stone he was looking at rang with a crisp sound, as though struck by an enormous pickaxe. It flew out of the earth and then vanished into his spatial backpack.
Magic! This was practically magic!
Lightning’s voice trembled with excitement. “Wuwuwu, did you guys see that? I can use magic now! Even though that shabby school called Hogwarts never sent me an acceptance letter by owl when I was eleven, my magical talent is clearly the real thing! I can use magic now! I can use magic now! Hahaha!”
Using magic in games was, of course, an extremely common setting. Very few games on the market lacked skills altogether.
But this game was different from all the others.
He could clearly feel that this change had happened because he had used a skill.
And most importantly, now that he had personally experienced himself possessing magic, all those dazzling abilities he had once seen in novels, games, comics, and television dramas had suddenly become an enormous dream he could actually touch.
Lightning was trembling from excitement, but the audience in his livestream was even more excited than he was.
After all, the streamer was the one actually playing the game, while they did not even have the qualifications for a closed beta account.
【Aaaaaah! I want to play! Game developers, do you hear me? I want to play this game!】
【When is the open beta coming? @OfficialGame stop pretending to be dead and come out already! Just give me a date and I’ll be there the very first second!】
【Game devs, don’t force me to kneel and beg. I’m begging you, begging you, begging you. Let me play!】
【I can’t wait anymore. Give me a closed beta qualification and you’ll be my god, my one true faith!】
Lanoss, who had been watching the players’ movements the entire time, finally let out a sigh of relief when he saw this.
《Legend》 was a game set in a world of swords and magic. If the players were still forced to do brick-hauling quests exactly the way they would in real life, that would have been far too insulting to this high-magic world.
【Mining】, 【Gathering】, 【Tilling】, 【Skinning】... these kinds of skills were all variant spells derived from 【Mage Hand】.
As a zero-circle arcane spell, 【Mage Hand】 had an extremely low entry threshold. But precisely because its entry threshold was so low, countless ways of using it had been developed.
Using it for mining and gathering was merely the most basic application.
Lanoss had not given all of these skills to the players at the beginning, and it had not been because they were difficult to use.
It was because they were simply too poor.
The Norsevi Plane had been ravaged by the Void Demons for over a thousand years. Its area had already shrunk by more than ten thousand times, not to mention its other resources.
Even the copper coins used as quest rewards in the early stages had been scraped together by Saliel and the others from various survivor settlements.
Copper, silver, and gold, the metals used as currency, were also spellcasting materials. After so many years of resistance against the Void Demons, they had long since been used up to the point of near depletion.
Lanoss could, of course, create another vein of ore with divine power, or even mint ready-made copper coins. But using precious divine power on something like that would be far too wasteful.
That was why these variant spells of Mage Hand—【Mining】, 【Gathering】, and the like—were instead used as quest rewards to enrich the reward pool.
Of course, that approach also had drawbacks. If the early manual-labor quests were too dull, they could easily dampen player enthusiasm, which in turn might lead players to quit the game.
But from the moment the game had started until now, not a single one of the hundred closed-beta players had quit over the course of three hours of gameplay.
That proved that this small design would not drive players away.
Only then did Lanoss completely set his heart at ease.