John returned to his farm 15 coppers poorer, having bought 30 of the meal cakes. He immediately set back to work, and by the time night rolled around he’d finished clearing almost half of the last quadrant. In addition strength, constitution, intelligence, and wisdom all ticked up by another point. The biggest gain of the day was another rank up.

[Mana Drawing has Ranked Up due to continued use. Apprentice à Journeyman]

[350 Leveling Points Banked]

During work the next day John got a similar message along with an extra point in both strength and constitution.

[Mana Imprinting has Ranked Up due to continued use. Apprentice à Journeyman]

[350 Leveling Points Banked]

After eight hours of work on the tenth day, the plot was finally fully cleared. And as a bonus Mana Sight had ranked up to Journeyman early in the day, netting him another 350 points, putting him at a nice 3,375.

As John took the obligatory hour-long break from the game, he decided to browse the forums, specifically the game guides. Much to his disgruntlement, many of the guides were locked behind pay walls, the people who’d written them unwilling to share without monetary compensation. However, after a bit of searching he found a few gems. One was a list of feats and their unlock requirements, and the other was a brief introduction to Enchanting.

John gave the feats list a cursory glance, seeing only a few that seemed applicable to his situation. Dynamo would double his mana regeneration, Deep Pool would double his mana pool, Endless Stamina would double how long he could go without tiring (though that felt redundant with his high con), Increased Size would multiply the volume and area of his spells by 10, and Bigger on the Inside would quintuple his inventory capacity. Other than those, most of the feats involved fighting in some fashion, or were race specific. Interestingly some of the feats appeared to be one offs, meaning they didn’t have advanced levels you could purchase.

The guide to enchanting was short, giving only a few basic enchantments to work with. The author did note that if you had the Blueprint Module and the Enchanting skill you’d gain access to the ‘Enchantments’ tab. This would allow you to design your own enchantment blueprints, provided you knew the correct runes and sigils. The most helpful part was by far the part at the end.

One of the things you should know about enchanting is that it’s more like circuitry than anything else. Those lines, swirls, flares, and whorls all serve a purpose. Some of them slow down mana, some of them speed it up, others make it harder for mana to pass, meaning it has to reach a certain power threshold to activate. While the runes themselves determine what the mana will do, the lines determine how and when they activate, making them of paramount importance to the structure of a well-designed enchantment.

After that paragraph it went on to explain many of the connecting lines in great detail, describing how they worked and giving examples of their use. After that there were several common runes and an explanation of what each one did. After reading for several minutes, John realized his hour was well and truly up, and he logged out of the forums, and into the game.

Once back in the game he looked around the now barren patch of ground he was calling a farm. Currently it had a storm cellar, and a wall that enclosed about an acre of land. John decided that the first thing he needed to do was enclose the entire area in a wall. Four or five feet tall should be sufficient, but it also needed to extend underground a few feet, in order to give it a solid foundation. So the first order of business was digging a trench.

Getting to work, John spent the next two hours digging a trench all around the perimeter of the farm. The trench was approximately five feet deep, one foot wide, and 520 feet long. Next he began filling it with stone. Each trench was filled, and then the stone was extended upward, five feet above ground level, to create a solid plug with a total area of 520 feet in length, one foot in width, and ten feet in height. The creation of each section took four hours, which unfortunately meant he didn’t finish the final two sections until noon the next day. However, he got a nice bonus in the form of Create Earth increasing to Apprentice rank.

After that was finished, he decided to work on creating garden plots. At first John wanted to just dive in and start building, however a moment of thought brought forth the idea to design the plots in the Blueprint Module first. Doing so would allow him to better place and space the plots, as well as giving him a template to fill, instead of just winging it. So he wandered down into the cellar, sat on his favorite straw bale, and began to design.

John emerged from the cellar two hours later, layout in hand, and got to work. He began by projecting the garden plots onto the northwestern section of the land, the same area that already had a wall in it. Ghostly images of the plots appeared, each one was 30 feet north to south and 85 feet east to west, to enclose a total of 2,550 square feet. The walls were three feet high, but they were more for delineating the area, rather than keeping anything out. There were six plots to a side, with a gap of about six feet between each plot, and an aisle running down the center of the plots that was almost 40 feet wide and ran the entire length of an acre, almost 209 feet.

He began by digging the trenches, with each trench being five feet deep and a foot in width. He then moved all the stone from the original fence into the first two trenches, creating two enclosed plots with a wall five feet high and a foot thick; perfectly fitting the displayed dimensions of the plot. He then spent the rest of the day, and all of the next day, filling the trenches with stone; and gaining another point in both wisdom and intelligence for his efforts. As he finished filling the last trench he got another unexpected popup.

[Congratulations on increasing your level! 3 à 4]

[You have received 400 Leveling Points, please distribute them now]

“Bank 400 leveling points,” John said immediately.

[400 Leveling Points Banked]

Next John pulled up his character sheet to take a look at his progress.

[Name: John]

[Race: Basajaun]

[Level: 4]

[Mana: 440]

[MRegen: 22/minute]

[Leveling Points: 3,900]

[Attributes]

Strength: 37 Constitution: 37 Dexterity 10 Intelligence: 44 Wisdom: 44

[Skills]

Engineering – Novice Farming – Apprentice Inspect – Novice Light Armor – Novice Mana Drawing – Journeyman Mana Imprinting – Journeyman Mana Manipulation – Apprentice Mana Sight – Journeyman Measuring – Apprentice Meditation – Apprentice Swordplay – Novice

[Spells]

Create Earth – Apprentice Create Water – Novice Control Flame – Novice Control Water – Novice Evoke Flame – Novice Hasten Decay – Novice Hasten Growth – Novice Move Earth – Journeyman

[Racial Perks]

Disaster Prognosticator Megalith Mastery Plant Tender

John grinned as he saw the number of leveling points he’d banked. Four feats next level were an absolute certainty, and if he could get two more skills to Journeyman, or five more skills to Apprentice, he’d even be able to buy five. Looking at his sheet he decided that there was little to no chance of getting two skills to Journeyman in a timely fashion. However, if he focused on his spells he could probably get to apprentice in most of them in a week, a week and a half at most. Shaking his head, John logged out.

Taking the headset off, John set it on the bedside table. He then stood and did the recommended stretches and exercises meant to ward off muscle atrophy. As he worked out he considered what to do next. He wanted to sit down and grind out spells, but he was already strapped for time, and really couldn’t waste a week to do so. On the other hand, having five feats at level five could be a game changer. Grandma Loren had implied that each feat was a force multiplier, and he wasn’t sure that he could afford to miss out on something that may well help him make more money in the future.

Finishing his exercise John wandered out into the kitchenette and nuked a frozen meal. While he waited he continued his internal debate. By the time the microwave dinged, he’d come to a decision. He wouldn’t focus on his skills. He could save the extra points for level ten, and maybe scoop up an extra feat then. Besides, if he gained more than one ranked feat he’d want to level them up at ten anyway, and he may need the extra points for it. Satisfied with his decision, he ate his meal, and went to bed.

***

After logging in the next morning, John decided he had some decisions to make. He had cleared the land, prepared the plots, and now he needed to decide what to do next. He could plant a crop, but odds were good it’d turn out like his last crop. He could start paying for monster bodies and parts, but he had nowhere to store them nor did he have a way to cook them in order to prevent parasites and disease from infecting his crops. Further he needed a way to determine if they were toxic or not.

What John wanted to do was learn Ritual Magic and Enchanting. Both, he felt, would open the doorway to better ways to manage his crops. The real questions was, however, did he dare take the time to learn and train them? He’d been playing for 38 days and what did he have to show for it? Basically nothing but a cleared patch of land. This was a far cry from where he imagined he’d be at this point. Sighing John sat on one of the garden plot walls and considered.

Pros and Cons, He thought to himself. Pros: Ritual Magic and Enchanting are cool, they can do lasting, ongoing magic without needing me there to use it directly. Ritual Magic and Enchanting may have the ability to give me unique solutions to common problems, or help me better raise and protect my crops.

Now for the Cons: Time! Time, time, time. I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time doing nothing, I need to show forward progress. Yes, all the time I’ve put in is an investment in future gains, but I can’t be positive Enchanting and Ritual Magic will grant future gains. The cost in mana for the Enchantments is going to be high, I don’t have a mana well so I’d need to use mana stones. John paused in thought, was that actually true? Hadn’t Ex shown him something that could ameliorate the cost of mana stones? If he could purchase Mana Cores from the other players, he could refill them himself. He ran his fingers through his beard as he considered.

Finally he came to a decision. He sat himself down on one of the low, garden plot walls and took out the book on rituals. He would start by giving it a brief read through, and if he didn’t see anything applicable he’d pass on rituals for now. Opening the book once more he began to leaf through the drawings and diagrams, skimming the contents of the descriptions. There were several rituals that looked like they might be useful, such as the Ritual of Green Growth which improved the health of plants within its radius. The Ritual of Cleansing which cleaned things put inside. The Ritual of Purification which would condense something into a purer form. The Ritual of Unification which would fuse like objects to create a new whole.

John paused as he read the last two rituals, they were in the back and clearly more advanced than the rest of the manual. Purification and Unification, those remined him of something Ex had said; Alchemists and some Mages could purify and unify Mana Cores to create better versions. If these rituals could do that, they might be extremely useful to him in the long run. However, by the look of them, he’d need to do more than merely dabble in ritual magic to master them.

Flipping back to the Ritual of Cleansing, he looked it over and considered. It said it removed contaminants, poisons, diseases, and “other detrimental substances and energies”. As he considered it, John realized this was exactly what he needed. If he used this to clean monster corpses he could be sure of them not having a harmful impact on his crops. The requirements were odd though, requiring four different items representing cleansing or cleanliness, and indicated that the stronger the representation, the more powerful the ritual became. The other requirements, sources of fire, life, death, and water mana, were easy enough to get.

He pondered the ritual for some time, considering what objects or items he might use. Soap was an obvious choice, but what else? He could use Lye, but that was present in a lot of primitive soaps, so did it really count as different? If this were the real world there’d be all kind of options in the form of cleaning supplies. Maybe a cleaning implement would work? In that case a broom would be an appropriate item. Honey had antibacterial properties so that could work, and a quick google search showed that wild garlic had multiple properties related to health and healing. If he wanted to set up the ritual he’d need to pick up some things from town, that’d have to wait.

Putting the book away John considered what to do next. He wanted to learn enchanting, and with that forum guide he was pretty sure he could. Pulling up the web interface he found the relevant page and read it once more. He then held out his hand and created a flat disk of stone about the size of a dinner plate. Using the site as a guide and move earth to carve, he carefully traced oversized runes and patterns into the plate. When it was finally finished, he Inspected it.

[Name: Light Plate]

[Quality: Poor]

[Description: This is a Novice’s first attempt at an enchanted device, and reflects their lack of precision and skill. If given enough Mana it will generate light. This device has no mana storage of its own and must be provided with mana from an outside source.]

[Total Efficiency: 100%]

[Mana Consumption Rate: 11.25/minute]

[Skill Gained: Enchanting]

John fed the device some mana and regretted it immediately. The light it gave off was stark and brilliant, powerful enough that he could see it clearly through closed eyelids. He stopped feeding it mana but that failed to turn it off. He flipped the plate away from himself then opened his eyes. John blinked furiously, as if that would somehow help clear the afterimage.

“I should have put in limiters,” he muttered to himself as he smoothed out the plate, destroying the active runes and causing a massive instant burst of light. Apparently destroying an ongoing enchantment would release all the mana at once, good to know. With a sigh he melded the plate into the wall he was sitting on. “And I need to get a Mana Well so I can run things.”

What had Grandma Loren said? Apprentice in enchanting to follow the instructions, Journeyman to actually design and build? He didn’t have eight consecutive days he could just spend on enchanting, and he certainly didn’t have the points to buy it outright. John grunted in frustration. There were so many things he needed and not nearly enough time or resources. And none of this musing even touched on who was going buy his stuff, he still hadn’t figured that part out.

[Quest: Build It and They Will Come]

[Description: You’ve noticed a startling lack of commerce in what should be a thriving dungeon town, and determined the likely cause is its far off and out of the way location. You’ve also heard tell of a device that could solve this problem by allowing instant travel from one location to another. You have one month to build or commission a Portal and Portal Anchor.]

[Rewards: System Granted Ownership of the Portal, 2,000 Leveling Points]

John frowned at the quest, all well and good to entice him to do something he already wanted to do, that didn’t fix the issue of not having the knowhow. There was something weird about that reward though.

“Help, what does ‘System Granted Ownership’ mean?” he asked.

[Answer: System Granted Ownership cannot be taken away from a person by force of arms and is legally acknowledged to supersede all other claims to a location, item, or place. Such things can only be given away by the owner’s direct choice, at which point System Granted Ownership is revoked, and local legal precedent takes over.]

“So, it’s a lot like the ‘Soulbound’ attribute of other games.”

[Answer: Correct.]

John ran his fingers through his beard. This was basically an impossible task, he didn’t have the time to do it himself, and there was no one in Runic Rock with a high enough enchanting to do it for him.

“Help, is it possible to receive an impossible quest?”

[Answer: No, it is always possible to complete a given quest.]

Well, that was something he supposed. Alright, so if the system had issued a quest, that meant there was a way to complete it. What did that mean? If he devoted the next 12 days to learning to Enchant he could reach Journeyman rank, was that enough to create a portal? Portals sounded pretty advanced. But maybe he didn’t need to know how to make a portal, just how to follow the instructions? He’d need a blueprint then, one he was sure the system would be willing to sell him.

[It appears you’re considering the construction of a Portal. Would you like to purchase the Portal and Portal Anchor blueprints for 30 USD or 30 gold?]

John waved the message away. So a blueprint was available, which meant he could probably use it as a Journeyman to build a basic portal. But it would cost him money, he’d already spent too much without seeing any return. It would also be using up time he should be using for farming. Farming that was useless without a portal, because he needed to be able to sell what he produced.

John groaned. He was going in circles. He needed the portal so he could sell things, he needed the time to grow things. He could just plant seed and hope for the best, but that’d produce poor quality crops, which wouldn’t do him any good. There was an alternative of course. He could just bite the bullet and buy the Auction module. It was how much?

[It appears you’re looking for the auction function. Would you like to purchase the Auction Module for 20 USD or 20 gold?]

Dismissing the message, he considered his options. The auction module would immediately open him up to anyone else who owned it, but that alone could be a problem, how many other people had purchased the module?

“Help, can you tell me how many people have purchased the Auction Module?”

[Answer: To date, only 3.2% of players have purchased the auction module.]

“And how many players are there worldwide?”

[Answer: 367,594,875 accounts have been registered worldwide.]

John knew that number was actually fairly impressive for any game. At the height of its popularity (forty years ago) World of Warcraft had only 100 million accounts, not even active players. Still, in a world of 10 billion people it seemed small. And 3.2% of that came out to about 12 million people. That was more than enough people to make the purchase worthwhile in his estimation, and the number would only grow. Nodding to himself, john made his choice.

“Purchase the Auction Module for 20 USD,” he said.

[Verifying Purchase]

[Purchase Approved]

John immediately pulled up the Auction tab to find an orderly list of items for sale. Each item had a picture, a name, and when examined, a description. The current filter was set to ‘newest first’ but he found that he could filter the auctions by just about any criteria he might want. Contrary to its name, however, the Auction didn’t just deal in actual auctions, there were plenty of fixed price items mixed in with the actual auctions. Wondering how delivery worked, he decided to purchase something cheap.

John did a quick search for seeds, and was surprised to see a fair number of listings come up. More, a button called ‘similar items’ had lit up, and clicking on it showed a list of seed-adjacent results, specifically plants. Turning back to the seeds he quickly perused the listing. He didn’t need wheat, or corn, so he excluded those two from the search terms, which left him with about half the original list, maybe twenty items in all, most all mundane. The was one entry however called ‘Mystery Seed’.

Intrigued, John examined the listing more closely. It had a picture of a thumbnail sized seed that shimmered with an opaline iridescence. After examining the picture closely he read the description.

Right, so I have no idea what this seed is, I got it as part of a reward for a quest, and my Inspect is too low to identify it. It could be really valuable, or it could be complete garbage, no clue. I’m tired of it taking up my inventory space and it’s way too expensive to store things at a bank, so I’m putting this up here.

John looked at the picture and then back to the description. His inspect was too low to identify the seed? Hadn’t the system told him that rank impacted the ability to inspect higher tier items? Even if the guy was just a Novice, that could indicate the seed itself was rare or valuable. John dithered a bit, but then finally decided he’d take the chance, the cost was a silver and he needed more crops anyway. What was the worst that could happen? He clicked the purchase button.

[Purchase Complete, 1 silver has been deducted from your funds, please make room in your inventory for your purchase.]

[Inventory space detected, depositing purchase, purchase deposited. Have a nice day.]

John opened his inventory and looked inside. There, was the seed, sitting pretty as a picture in one of his inventory slots. He took the seed out and carefully looked it over, attempting to Inspect it as he did so.

[Name: ???]

[Description: ???]

Shrugging he put the seed away and stood up. First thing was first, he had a Ritual of Cleansing to set up. Taking out the ritual primer he made his way to the south eastern corner of his plot, well away from everything else. Here he created a large, circular expanse of stone with a diameter of 20 Feet. The Ritual of Cleansing was fairly simple, at least in comparison to some of the later rituals in the book. It consisted of a platform covered in interlocking glyphs, sigils, and patterns, with four pedestals or altars at the cardinal compass points.

Having no trouble finding true north (thanks to his map), John lined up the first of the four constructs at the very edge of the circle, using first his eyes, and then the twine to measure the distance from the center of the platform. He then started to create stone. What began to take shape in front of him wasn’t a mere plinth, or altar, but instead a monolithic piece of stone, six feet wide, three feet thick and 12 feet tall, with a slight concave curve in the front. Through the center of the Megalith was a large hole two feet in diameter, right at eye level.

John knew, intellectually, that what he was doing was dangerous. Modifying a ritual like this on the fly, without the skill to advise him, could end pretty poorly. However, he’d noticed while looking over the rituals earlier that it was all math, precisely calculated geometry, and John was good at geometry. Whether his confidence in his skill was well placed… well, time would tell.

The first monolith completed, John moved on to the second, positioned to the west, then the south, then the east, with each one being a physical copy of the first. When he was finished with the monoliths (which, all together, officially created a megalithic structure) he started in on the actual carvings of the ritual. Taking out his measuring strings, he got down on hands and knees, and began to create precise markings in the stone.

Four hours of work later, John stood up and surveyed the platform. It was covered in large lines, runes, and sigils forming geometric designs that interlocked in precise patterns. After a careful last inspection of the design a pair of prompts popped up.

[Skill Gained: Ritual Magic]

[Skill Gained: Mathematics]

John frowned, why had he only just gained the Mathematics skill, he was doing math all the time… On a calculator. For a moment he felt incredibly stupid, he’d been doing all his math on a calculator, of course the game wouldn’t recognize that as a skill. Shaking his head, he Inspected the megalith.

[Name: Megalithic Ritual of Cleansing (Inactive)]

[Quality: Common]

[Description: Though made by a Novice, careful care and dedication was given to the creation of this megalith, making it a cut above the average. Further, this megalith was designed and constructed by someone with Megalith Mastery, making it 25% more effective at its given task, which is to clean that which enters its confines.]

[Activation Requirements: Four (4) Items of Cleanliness, 6,285 Fire Mana, 6,285 Life Mana, 6,285 Water Mana, 6,285 Death Mana]

John grunted in annoyance at the cost in mana. He’d known that scaling it up would increase the mana cost. The original ritual was only 5 feet in diameter after all, this one was 20; that made it almost 65 times the volume and thus carried an equal increase in mana cost. Hopefully he wouldn’t need absurdly large amounts of reagents.

Opening the Auction once more he began searching for qualifying items. Soap was the first item he purchased; someone was selling it for ten coppers a pound. The next item was an alchemical potion (called Krystal) which the seller swore would clean anything; that cost 50 coppers. The final item he bought was another alchemical item called Pure Philter; ostensibly the potion could cure many low-grade poisons and diseases, it also cost 50 copper.

Once he was finished with his little shopping spree, John realized it was about noon, so he logged out for lunch.