The first six items on the List in my WeeCee were the same as those enumerated on this piece of paper—all except for Goal #1’s end part that it should be completed playing in Nornyr Online. The original List only stated:

I will become the best tank, crush everyone, and remain standing after every battle.

“Is this actually the original?” I whispered to myself, holding it up against the light as if that’d tell me something. What was I doing? Checking a counterfeit warbler bill? There was a better way.

I grabbed my old notebook, flipped it over, and opened its back cover. I positioned the torn paper and pushed it to the remaining piece of the last page, doing it slowly for dramatic effect. The tear perfectly fit like a jigsaw puzzle.

And it was inside the physics book that came from the second box, so the timelines also lined up. I hadn’t opened that box since the day we left Egret City; I avoided my friends’ mementos because they’d remind me of the life I left behind. That was all in the past. Seeing them now brought happy memories—I was glad I had made peace with that part of myself.

But why was this missing page there? I wracked my brain and couldn’t recall why. I must’ve absentmindedly slid it inside the physics book after copying the List somewhere else.

And I didn’t even correctly copy it.

I bet I just rewrote the List from my faulty recollection—that’d explain the error. It was akin to singing a song from memory and checking the actual lyrics to realize you had been singing it wrong the entire time. I may never know how this huge mistake came to be, but that wasn’t important.

“I can finally complete it!” I triumphantly yelled, drumming hard on the table before pumping my fists in the air. “Woooh!”

Since Goal #1 wasn’t specifically locked to Nornyr Online, in keeping with the spirit of the Goal, I could, and should, complete it in Mother Core Online. Back then, the biggest MMORPG was Nornyr, now it was MCO. When AU Corp. started developing their VR Helm, they also planned to make a game for it. I had read on the news that they acquired the parent company of the developer of Nornyr—which had long shut down by then—to help them with the development.

In a way, MCO was the revival of Nornyr Online.

Things are indeed coming full circle.

I fell back on the bed with a deep sigh. I stared at the ceiling, processing everything. The ends of my lips curled up in a wide smile. I raised the torn page with the original List, my hand trembling in excitement as I reread it, again and again, to make sure it wasn’t a hallucination. A promise to myself that I had resigned to never fulfill—well, it was now possible.

Completing it was another matter altogether.

Nothing that Herald Stone can’t do.

“Already on the way.” I checked my WeeCee after a notification beeped. A projection of the city map unfolded and zoomed in on a tiny blip that had just left Phoenix Wings. Mr. Armand’s wings were good so I ordered them for dinner.

When I planned my builds in Nornyr, calculating away on my notebook while checking the details I had jotted down at the PC Café, I usually snacked on fast food—burgers, pizzas, wings, fries, you name it. To commemorate those ancient days and celebrate the start of my journey of completing Goal #1, I decided I’d relive that experience. My WeeCee indicated that it’d take the delivery guy about twenty-three minutes to get here in this heavy evening traffic, so I turned my attention back to my research.

Twenty-six base races had so far been unlocked in MCO. After half an hour of reading up on them, I was no closer to deciding which to pick.

Their variants and how hard they were to find presented another factor to consider. Furthermore, there were Ocadules, including very good ones for tank builds, obtainable only through questlines of specific races. Captain Edmund, the Amberkeld Guard NPC, did say all Ocadules could be used by all races, but he omitted that not everyone could get everything—another life lesson from a game.

How about I narrowed down the choices by searching on the internet, ‘Which race is the best tank?’

The top answers were secret variants I likely had no hope of obtaining like the trump card giants of Victores Sors guild. “This is useless,” I said with a sigh. I could try something more specific like, ‘Best beginner tank race and build’, and then work from there.

An overwhelming number of matches came popped up, including dozens of guides and videos. I clicked my tongue in annoyance. I didn’t have any experience in MCO to discern if these were correct.

False advertisement and fake news were rampant in this age of internet hyperconnectivity. That undoubtedly also applied to these MCO guides. Nornyr players had also made guides with wrong information. They were either scammers intent on affecting the price of items on the market or hapless players who genuinely didn’t know any better.

Only with hundreds of hours of game time under my belt could I confidently sift through those guides—not that I needed any at that point—and say which ones were useful and which were bullshit.

“Ugh, right. Those bastards…” I massaged my head, recalling a group of Nornyr whales who made guides touting new meta builds that were actually rubbish. It turned out they only wanted to sell trash items they had hoarded after wiping them off the market at floor prices.

Investing in financial instruments also had similar lying parasites, those supposed ‘analysts’ using clout to entice people to buy their ‘recommendations’, pumping up its price and reaping tremendous profits. I could spot them from a mile away. Funny how I applied a lot of my learnings in computer games to real life. Maybe I should tell that to Mum, I jokingly thought.

Anyway, what was I doing browsing meta guides?

I should take a page from my younger self and go the other way!

The food delivery guy came and left a happy man, a couple of hundred warblers richer—I did my no-looking-at-the-wallet tipping schtick. As for me, I was also happy with a dozen chicken wings, fries, and a large soda. Unlike before, I didn’t have any paper to get grease on because I was just typing in the air.

With the power of chicken wings—they were delicious, but I couldn’t say if they were the city’s best because I hadn’t tried other places—I had narrowed down my choice to two base races. And they were the ones mentioned by Bonk, the Expeditionary Legion guy.

The Aviarii and Mardukryon.

These two were included in the original ten races available when MCO opened. More than a year later, as Bonk had mentioned, their respective Gates still hadn’t been Linked to the Warp System because their respective players couldn’t find a way out of their starting areas.

The harpy-like Aviarii lived on top of the giant trees of Gogmagog.

These trees were massive, each one having a trunk circumference wide enough to fit Amberkeld Town inside it, and grew high into the sky. The clouds gathering around the tree trunks had magical properties—they’d occasionally shoot bolts of lightning that instantly killed anyone coming close, housed end-game level boss monsters, and had mysterious puzzles yet unsolved that trapped players.

A huge headway in cracking the Aviarii’s plight was made a couple of months ago. The Gogmagog trees were found by some random schmuck who was then fabulously rewarded by the Expeditionary Legion. Unfortunately, neither the Aviarii above the magical cloud line nor the players below had yet discovered a way to get past it.

On the other hand, the icy tops of a dangerous mountain range were the abode of the Mardukryon tribes.

A cross between a bull centaur and a lava golem was how I’d describe them—weird that they lived in a cold environment. Mardukryons looked very badass, a race I personally wanted to play based on appearance alone, which was why they were a popular choice when MCO started despite having a reputation of being so much tougher to level and build than other characters.

They suffered the same situation as the Aviarii. Corralled by a parade of boss monsters, maze-like cave systems, and extreme ice environmental hazards, the Mardukryons couldn’t go down their mountain.

But unlike with the Aviarii, no one had a clue where the Mardukryon’s mountain was located. There were plenty of unexplored mountain ranges in Hierakon, and more undiscovered. The Mardukryons could be on any of them. As time passed with no progress made in escaping their mountain prison, most Mardukryon players gave up on their chosen race and switched to something else.

The Expeditionary Legion and their affiliate guilds had placed solving the Mardukryon main questline on low priority, focusing their efforts on more worthwhile endeavors like the Aviarus main questline that, by their estimate, would take another month or two to solve.

I was searching for the cheapest ‘good’ items on an external auction site, thinking of doing a variation of my original plan for Nornyr Online. And then I found the Aviarii and Mardukryons. Their items were dirt cheap not because they were off-meta or gimmicky, but because they were isolated races—the only two in the entire game.

Since they couldn’t interact with the general player population, their in-game auction systems were isolated from the main auction house that all the other players could use. They had essentially closed economies. An Aviarii player may find an incredibly powerful magical staff while exploring the expansive canopies of the Gogmagog trees, but he couldn’t get the ‘correct’ market price for it because the whales who’d want it couldn’t bid for it.

In the same vein, they also couldn’t sell items for real money as demand for those on external auction sites was non-existent. How could a Kobold player claim an item he bought offline from a Mardukryon player if the two of them couldn’t trade inside MCO because the latter had his ass trapped high on a mountaintop?

It was like they were in a different game.

“Aviarii or Mardukryon?” I pondered as I nibbled on the bone of a chicken wing. “Hey, I’m eating this. Maybe I should go for Aviarii?”

They may not look as fearsome as the Mardukryons, but they could fly. And that was something I wanted to try.

According to forum posts, guides, and videos I found, the Aviarii Cidule and their exclusive Ocadules include good tanking skills. They weren't actual tanks, it was that they had an array of formidable shield spells courtesy of their magical background. Mardukryons, on the other hand, while having good survivability, had their skills divided between DPS builds, healers, and tanks—the holy trinity. Mardukryons would be better suited for a tanky DPS, more like a bruiser.

Another plus point for the Aviarii was that they would soon be connected with the rest of MCO. In a couple of months, I’d be able to explore the rest of Hierakon, find better Ocadules, and—

Is that truly a plus point?

The words of the dwarf food merchant came back to me. He wished to find the ‘fabled six-star recipes’ ‘to catch up’. And that also applied to me.

I had played Nornyr Online since its open beta stage, and I had barely caught up to the whales. Truth be told, I didn’t catch up to them. At all. I could only compete because of my outlandish strategies, but my gears were lightyears away from theirs. For MCO in comparison, I was more than a year late to the game.

I need to do something drastic…

If the Aviarii homeland—home tree?—was opened to the general player base, there’d be fewer chances for me to discover secret quests and the like. Even now, many players, old and new, were picking Aviarii with the expectation that the puzzles to get past the magical cloud barrier would be solved soon. Current Aviarii players were also starting to hoard their good items to put up in the main auction house once their Gate was Linked.

The Gogmagog trees weren’t the promised land of opportunity.

To the icy mountains of the Mardukryons I go...