NeoRealm – Staring Back Into the Future

‘5 Days’

‘It took 5 whole days just to get to level 5 from grinding turtles. That is even with my near cheat level trap. People manage to grind that out in the first day even after the tutorial. If it wasn’t for the bottleneck for level 10, I would say I am behind. Totally can see why no one has completed this quest. Honestly, I don’t think the entire time you get stuck in town would be enough to complete this quest even with weapons.’, Sighing to himself Jason heads back towards the Adventurers Guild.

The place actually looks less busy than it was last time. Even the bartender looks a bit bored. Penny on the other hand seems a bit sad when Jason walked in. As he gets to her desk she asks in a despondent voice, “So are you here to give up now? I can’t blame you if you are. 5 days is longer than anyone else has lasted.”

Feeling a bit sheepish Jason quickly tries to fix her misconception of his visit, “Um, I actually finished the quest. Killing nothing else I made it to level 5 on just those turtles.”

Penny gives him a questioning look, “I find that highly unlikely. Even a level 10 adventurer would have a hard time killing a few a day. You would need to kill dozens of them to reach level 5.”

Jason brings up his game menu and with a few clicks shares his quest screen with Penny.

Penny’s eyes widen and a small gasp can be heard, “This is wrong. Even if you have a good weapon nothing at your level should allow you to get past their shell.”

“I didn’t bother with their shells. Just one punch told me that wasn’t the way to go. Instead I used traps with glowy weed as bait.”

Hearing that Penny rolls her eyes, “Traps take mana to set. You clearly don’t have that or the quest would have failed. Even then traps don’t do enough damage. Good idea on using glowy weed though that should have been crazy expensive or taken a lot more time.”

“Uh, not Trap traps but just simple hand made traps. A couple boulders next to each other and a few logs. Quick pull of a rope drops the logs on the turtle's neck trapping it. Then I could just wail away at it.”

Penny’s eye twitches, “That… Its… GAH, no why?! It can’t be that easy! Your method wouldn’t work on anything else! Something less tanky would die which wouldn’t have given experience since it wasn’t ‘your’ trap. Anything stronger and normal logs couldn’t stop it. Just to find someone eligible for this quest takes years and yet I lost so many because of the difficulty. Now you tell me a simple no mana trap takes all the difficulty away?” At this point her face is flushed, and she is breathing hard through her gritted teeth. Throwing her hands up she collapses back into her chair. “Fine, you completed the quest”, growling she adds on a bit under her breath, “Likely changes nothing for me, 5 days is too long for the stupid newbs”. She takes a deep breath and calms herself before looking back up at Jason, “Come on then, we have private training rooms underground. It isn’t a secret skill but I know your type don’t like this sort of stuff being common knowledge.”

With that Jason follows her into the back of the guild and then down some stairs. Eventually they end up at a hall of doors. Turning to face him, Penny starts explaining, “This is the hall of training before the hall of training. I guess we need a new name for it but its just a bunch of reinforced empty rooms. My skill for you doesn’t need any extra equipment but that first room on the right is full of various weapons and armor. To the left a room of training dummies with a range of tricks and mechanical gimmicks. Though do note that while the simple wooden gear and basic dummies are free anything else has a deposit on it. Can’t have you Adventurer types breaking them willy nilly. Anyway we just need the most basic room. Turn around and you will see behind us a wall of keystones. We use enchanted doors as we found magic locks prevent the casually curious thief from picking them.”

The wall behind them is covered in round stones that just float in from of their number. From left to right the stones are labeled with a letter and a number. All the left side of the door is devoted to F rooms while the higher letters on the other side are in much shorter supply. Penny quickly grabs a stone before turning back to Jason and continuing, “Now it Looks like room F-6 is free. If we were learning some attack skill or doing something damaging, then the Guild requires you take a room at least 1 letter grade above either yours or the skills, whichever is higher. If you can’t figure it out from that the letter just represents how hardened the room is. We don’t have any S or higher rooms listed as anything on that level isn’t allowed to be practiced inside a towns borders. So let that be a warning to you. It isn’t a true law but most people at that level have an agreement about it so breaking it probably is worse than offending a whole nation.”

A short walk and they arrive at the door marked F-6. Penny goes up to it and taps the keystone onto the door. With that the door pops open and she enters before turning around with an expectant look.

Walking up to the door Jason looks like he is about to step through before he suddenly stops. Raising his hand he makes a knocking motion which almost seems like a joke. That is if it wasn’t for the slight shimmer that appears in the air where he was knocking. His actions seem to disappoint Penny though she recovers quickly before saying, “Couldn't you have pretended not to notice? Whatever, Room F-6 I invite Guild Member Jason to join me in the room.” and with that the whole door area shimmers before a message appears before Jason.

Assuming that he won’t be smacking face first into an invisible wall Jason finally enters the room. The inside is quite plain though a bit colorful. The floor itself is dark gray while the ceiling is an off white. Each wall though is a different muted color. To the north a soft green, east a fresh yellow, south a warm red, and in the west a cool blue.

Penny closes the door and then continues with her explanation, “These basic rooms all look the same. Each surface is a different color to allow the easy differentiation of direction. Above D grade allows visual changes to the wall. B and above will have simple space enchantments to increase the size and some specialty features like increased gravity options.”

Reaching into a bag that wasn’t there before Penny pulls out a book, “This is the skillbook for Energetic Body Reinforcement. I created this skill and yes I know it is ironic that a tortoise’s personally made skill would be called Energetic. Get over it, the name comes from using Pure Energy. Anyway you don’t get this book. In fact my personal advice is to not use skillbooks ever. I am sure you have heard that some skills are easier to advance when learned instead of granted. That information is actually part of a bigger secret but that can wait until later. For now take a seat and be ready for a nice long winded explanation of the skill in excruciating detail.”

And so Jason sat there for a few hours while Penny lectured. The skill itself is actually simple. All you have to do is channel the energy into some part of your body and it gets strengthened. The turtles instinctively do it with their shell. However the secret to this skill is you can’t just do something like strengthen your skin or fist. To perform it correctly, you need to get the energy to spread through the whole body using the blood system or equivalent. Only by having it reach every single bit of your body can you learn and improve it. The biggest difference between this and a Qi skill though is that it passive. Wrapping up her lecture Penny finishes with, “Now while this skill is impressive you currently can only train it up to Initiate. Apprentice and beyond requires something special. To get to that though I want you to complete my next quest. Simple enough, I just want you to get the skill and reach the bottleneck within a week.”

Being a bit too far down this rabbit hole Jason just clicks yes.

Akhier

Things I wanted to mention but didn’t:

The letter rank of a skill isn’t it’s rarity nor its level. What it represents is the power of it and how much energy (whether this be actual Energy or something like Mana) it takes. A simply fireball would be around D. Mastered that same fireball would depending on the person rank at A or B. The reason why this isn’t simply connected to damage is because of a number of reason. First is what if someone made a fire field spell that only did a few damage but covered miles and miles of land. It only does a little but the power behind it is enormous. Another is if someone tried to cast a powerful healing spell but made a mistake in such a way it backfired. It doesn’t matter if all they meant to do was heal someone, thousands of mana going berserk will cause a lot of damage.

S rank training rooms are rumored to exist. I originally had Penny talk about it but then I realized that she shouldn’t really be saying anything about it to some new guy like Jason. Basically the gist of the rumors is that they aren’t controlled by any Guild (other side fact is that training rooms are standardized between the guilds) and besides being able to defend against low S rank attacks they have time acceleration going on. Also they are insanely expensive to use and even if you have the money you need a few S ranks to vouch for you.