The Truth of Magic

Chapter 17: Realistic Game

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

Even after three days had passed, Zhao Xu was still unable to calm down after hearing what Antonya told him.

Even the blow that he was dealt when he transmigrated wasn’t as severe as this matter.

Transmigration was just a chance. Arthur was so complex, and there was nothing that Zhao Xu could do about it.

Even if he was able to persuade his parents to put everything they had into Arthur, the players at the beginning of the game were too poor to really exchange for anything valuable.

Zhao Xu himself had just gone back in time and he could only think of a general idea in order to give himself a clearer direction for the future.

That night, he read the book on magic until he was tired and went offline to sleep. He lay on his own bed and thought through everything that had happened earlier, and slowly began to realize that he had actually gotten lucky twice.

Zhao Xu’s two other dormmates had logged out of the game earlier than him. The one in charge of the dormitory, Zhang Qi, had chosen to be a Fighter. He was the one who had sold that +2 Strength belt to Zhao Xu in his previous life.

By the time Zhao Xu logged off, Zhang Qi was still traumatized by the Fighter training course.

Basically all the players who chose to be a Fighter that night went through the same training course. After being threatened, their mentors started beating them with a wooden bat and all the Fighter trainees had to dodge their attacks.

The bruises weren’t fatal, but Zhang Qi was in a daze after being hit like that.

There was no way Zhao Xu would be able to persuade Zhang Qi to switch to something more powerful.

In his previous life, Zhang Qi’s Fighter character had carefully managed to keep 4 revival stones for a while, but he lost them all in the Battle of Meteorite Lake that would occur in two months.

That battle was the first time the players led and were involved in a large scale battle. And the magnificence of that battle was the thing that led to the first peak of the game after its servers had opened.

After that, Zhang Qi had tried switching Character Classes, but none of them gave him the motivation he had with his first character, so he eventually went back to being a Fighter.

Basically almost everyone who logged off that night was complaining about Arthur’s training system.

A lot of people were complaining on the online forums that TC was too arrogant and too full of themselves, and was outrageous for playing the consumers like this.

The reviews of Arthur were also very poor because a lot of players had given it low ratings.

After three days, there were finally some Character Classes who completed their training. After the players were able to go out and engage in some activity, the wave of poor ratings slowly quieted down.

TC was also strangely quiet and didn’t come out to explain anything. Instead, they started publicizing a new major release.

It was as if Arthur was nothing but a beautiful accident, and it wasn’t the main MMORPG that the company was focusing on.

Basically, after Arthur fever reached its peak on the first night the game servers opened, it went into a period of calm.

When morning rolled around, the game was still in its first 24 hours of opening, so Zhao Xu told his parents a white lie in order to make them register for an account and got them to just log in to the point where they reached the Palace of Character Creation and they could log out after that.

Of course, Zhao Xu wasn’t going to stupidly say that he came from a future ten years later, or that Earth would be destroyed in one year’s time and everyone would have to live within the world of Arthur.

If he said that, his parents would drive him to the nearest mental hospital to get his head checked.

And even if Zhao Xu’s report came back normal, he could forget about playing this game for the rest of his life.

So Zhao Xu just said that he could tell that this game had a bright future ahead of it, and told his parents to spend a little money to buy an account, and the account’s value would rise in the future.

Before logging in the night before, Zhao Xu had a plan to buy up these Testing Accounts.

But, after he discovered that his Testing Account landed him in one of Arthur’s top organizations and might develop into something more dangerous later on, he decided against the idea.

It was like how many parents who were doctors didn’t want their children to become doctors. It wasn’t that being a doctor was anything bad, but they would rather their children earn less and live a more peaceful and safe life.

After Zhao Xu’s parents heard his explanation on how these accounts had collector’s value, they didn’t really care about how much the value of these accounts was going to go up by.

But this was the first time their son had displayed an eye for such things, so they supported him wholeheartedly. Forget paying for an account – even if it cost them ,999, they would have done the same.

Over the next two days, Zhao Xu was completely immersed in playing Arthur. He logged in every morning at 8 AM and only logged out at 4 AM.

In between, he would log out two or three times only to eat.

The players were considered just projections in Arthur and so they didn’t need to eat.

The consequences of that were only realized one year later after everyone had transmigrated into Arthur.

Zhao Xu’s blatant act of truancy was quite shocking to his dormmates.

But, since they weren’t his parents, they could only try to advise him and cover for him.

Zhao Xu didn’t intend to keep this up forever either. He just felt that the beginning part of the game required more time on his part.

Perhaps it was also because of the way the organization, The Final Scroll, had assessed him that Zhao Xu just immersed himself in Arthur every day with the exception of meals, and at night, he would study the magic textbook that Antonya had given to him fervently.

In the day, he would attend the lectures on magic that were held in the floating city. These were all selected by Antonya.

But Antonya didn’t let him touch on anything regarding the preparation of spells, and she didn’t let him touch on anything about spellcasting either.

Zhao Xu could also tell that Antonya was using the method that the native characters in Arthur used on their wizards to train him.

Unlike how the other players were being trained, she didn’t spoon-feed him information while he was still at a level where he couldn’t cast spells.

Most of those lectures on magic were too difficult for Zhao Xu to understand.

Even though Antonya had selected mostly lectures that were on theory and philosophy, he was still pretty confused.

But, at the same time, Zhao Xu didn’t dare to take them lightly. Zhao Xu had seen several of these lecturers’ names recorded in the history of magic.

For all he knew, one of these lecturers might be the head of The Final Scroll.

Zhao Xu didn’t lie to his two dormmates about what Character Class he chose, but he just said that he had been allocated to Mystra.

Then he just repeated how the wizards of his previous life described their training course online to his friends.

His two dormmates gave him a look of ‘oh, so you wizards get it hard too’, and they could understand why Zhao Xu only spent a few hours in deep sleep every day and spent the rest playing the game.

Most people wanted to conquer the game.

But in the face of a game that tortured its players so much, some people chose to just give up.

Some of them endured the training process before turning around to complain that the game was trash and wasn’t fun at all.

You couldn’t say that anybody was right or wrong. Everyone just made a different choice.

Even Zhao Xu himself had no idea when he would finish reading those books on magic.

He could only try to remain patient and quietly observe the activity on the online forums.

There were players with Character Classes that were good at melee battles, and as long as they stayed logged in for most of the day, they would complete their training and hit Level 1 within three days.

There was a small peak in the Fighter and Barbarian classes, and there were players in practically every town who had completed their training.

But, after completing their training, the players realized that there were no NPCs coming round to give them any mission. There was no mission to beat up any pests at a neighbor’s house or anything along those lines at all.

All of Arthur just treated them like they didn’t exist. Or rather, the world just treated them like any other character in the game.

The players weren’t special, and some players had already begun to notice this.

There were some experts online who had started to analyze the situation and felt that TC had a grander scheme and was using this new game as a step toward a particular direction in the future of games.

But to someone who had come from the future like Zhao Xu, this sort of theory was a joke to him.

If a player hadn’t proven himself and become famous enough, plus he stayed in a well-protected and safe town, and didn’t have any special channels to go through, there wouldn’t be any missions for him to take on.

After about half a year, the players would become well-known enough and there would be plenty of missions.

Every time Zhao Xu took a break to eat, he didn’t waste any time in scrolling through the online forums, even though Arthur did circulate some newspapers.

But, just after Zhao Xu had finished the last bit of his stir-fried pork and was about to throw his takeout box into the trash and go back into the game, he suddenly noticed a new post that was trending, and it was posted less than 20 minutes ago.

Zhao Xu quickly clicked on the link to read it.

The post’s title was highlighted and bolded: Be careful when you take on a mission, this game does not come with a map for noobs.

“My dormmates and I have characters trained for melee battles, and since we were all done with training, we agreed to go into the wild to fight some monsters together. We happened to hear some sounds of battle out there, so, since there was a mission on our doorstep, we naturally went for it.”

“We ran into ten goblins, of which six of them were holding a mace, while the other four were holding javelins and they surrounded another group and were attacking them. Since we’re humans and the goblins weren’t, of course, we went ahead to attack the goblins.

“But even after the four of us had cooperated with the other group and managed to fight off five of the goblins...”

“Suddenly another 100 goblins freaking came out of nowhere and some of them were even riding wolves. They were enough to cover the whole place and rushed toward us.”

“And that group we were helping were also a bunch of assholes. They didn’t say anything, just made a run for it, and didn’t even call us along.”

“But the biggest problem is, if the game places 100 monsters around the noob village, then how are we going to level up? Doesn’t that mean that the players have to band together in groups of a hundred or more in order to even leave the village?”

Zhao Xu was quiet as he read the post from this player.

There were ers who asked what happened in the end. Of course, this was self-explanatory – they lost a revival stone.

Some players in the game still thought that the game contained a noob village.

It had already been three days and they were still stuck in this delusion.

As for the characters native to the game, forget running off and leaving their fellow fighters in the lurch – there were some who betrayed the players or even ran off with their mission rewards.

That was because this game had characters with an evil alignment.

The players had to suffer losses for up to a week before they understood this.

That was also why many players would rather take on missions from major leagues or major organizations.

Or they would take missions from NPCs with suitable alignments and trusted Character Classes.

There were many players who ed that this game was seriously realistic.

Zhao Xu just laughed bitterly at this. In his previous life, the game was so realistic that it had caused the death of his entire family. It was definitely extremely realistic.

But after Zhao Xu finished reading through this post, he noticed another post had started trending. “I need help! I got locked up after I killed an NPC, so I deleted my character and made a new one, but I was immediately assigned to Chaotic Evil alignment and now I can’t become a Druid anymore. What can I do now?”

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