The question which route to take bothered me, just a little. That it was only a little was mostly due to a lack of information, it was hard to consider which route more suitable if the only information we had was that one went through the mountains, while the other circled around them. Most likely, the circumvention would be the longer distance while going across them, we’d be facing more difficult terrain. There were certainly a lot more questions to consider, especially regarding potential enemies but without outside information, making a decision that was more informed that your average coin-flip was simply impossible.

There were two sources of information readily available to me, one was Olivia while the other was the Road to Purgatory-Forum and the knowledge aggregated therein. After a moment of consideration, I decided to ask Olivia later and check out the forum beforehand. Maybe someone had found and uploaded a map of the area or something along those lines. That would make the whole planning-thing a lot easier.

After confirming my plans with Lenore, I triggered the log-out and returned to my capsule space. There was more than enough time before I should head out of the capsule for my training with Mrs. Wu, so I moved into the throne room I had created a while back, sitting down on my comfortable throne of ice and pulled up the simulated peripherals. It was still a bit of a weird experience, to sit on what was deliberately made to look like a magical throne, fit for the Queen of Ice and Darkness as I imagined such a being, while using a softly glowing, floating keyboard to browse a game-forum. The disconnect between the fantastical, the futuristic and the utterly mundane made the whole thing peculiar.

Shaking off the odd feeling, I scanned over the various hot topics, chuckling a little at the impressive conspiracy people had imagined into existence around my magical fireworks, but it was ultimately meaningless. What warranted a little more attention was that Howardlight, the Paladin/Holy Warrior type who had decided that targeting me would give him and his guild the right kind of publicity, had apparently set sail on the Inner Sea, the wide ocean between Daiea, Aretia and Valkar. While I had no idea just how he planned to track me down, it wasn’t like Aretia was a small place, just the fact that someone was deliberately hunting me was a little disturbing.

Compared to the various feuds and conflicts I had taken part in back when I had gone by the handle Titania and played Craft of War, this felt more real and personal. It was most likely merely a trick of perception, due to the incredible realism of Road to Purgatory but when it came to feelings, psychosomatic experiences were as valid as reality. Amusingly enough, my biggest concern with being hunted wasn’t that they were aiming for Morgana but that they might permanently harm Sigmir. Worst case, for Morgana, would be a respawn with spawn-camping. And even then, if things got out of hand, I had confidence in Pantheon and their ability to handle things. On the other hand, losing Sigmir would hurt in ways I didn’t even want to imagine. Ways that I couldn’t imagine.

I would have to make sure that if they came for me, they would rue the day they decided to use me as their objective. PR on the forum, I could deal with that, hell, I was even willing to play along to a point, after all there was no such thing as bad publicity, other than your obituary. But the more I thought about real, ingame conflict, the darker my thoughts grew..

In order to forcibly break out of the fantasies of revenge and destruction I was beginning to lose myself in, I searched for information regarding Aretian geography, political information and everything along those lines.

The results were expectedly varied, with hundreds of threats filled with information that needed to be sorted or filtered with better search criteria. This would take some time.

And time it took. After a good four hours of reading, sorting and searching, I had a slightly more comprehensive image of things. It was still far from perfect or even confirmed as reliable but I felt like I had exhausted the time I was willing to spend on this particular project.

Overall, what I learned told me that Aretia was not quite as chaotic as imagined, at least not the western part. There were bastions of order, the various, often dwarven, city-states with a myriad of villages and towns scattered between them. The land between cities was patrolled and while near the ancient, imperial road we were travelling on, it was quite safe, a lot safer than the north where I had started. On the other hand, once you left the patrolled vicinity of the road and got into the actual wilderness, into the deep forests, the mountains and valley, and the swamp and rivers, there the competition for food and power, for survival and territory was a lot more fierce. With many monsters forced into a smaller space, forced back by cooperation and coordination, the monsters were rapidly forced to gain power, turning those places into death-traps from which the monsters could hardly be uprooted.

Even a rat would attack a cat, once it was cornered. And here, what had been cornered weren’t rats but a variety of monsters, from wolves and large cats to bears and a variety of fantastical beasts.

Some of those places might even have been turned into Dungeons, the Astral River turning the surrounding area into a morass of power, infusing and fortifying the monsters, turning them into something else. Just that process was something I would love to study at some point, to figure out and understand it, maybe even learn to control and master it.

The Grandmother had created the Barrow Den, to seal those she despised, to act as a magical counterweight and likely as a way to train others. Maybe, in the future, I would be able to do something similar but it was a very long-term project. At the end of the day, reaching the level of mastery the Grandmother possessed was nothing that could be accomplished in a short time, if at all.

Similarly, the Winter Wolves had turned their den into a dungeon, binding themselves as monsters, however that worked. But there was a price involved, their souls bound to the dungeon, possibly in a way similar to the way a soul prison worked, only that the souls inhabited bodies within the dungeon. The beings we had fought in the Barrow Den seemed to have retained some of their personality, at least they had the mental activity to tell us a, possibly their, story. If that was the same for a creature that willingly bound themselves to a dungeon or a creature that linked to the dungeon by virtue of proximity was another interesting question.

It went on the list of things I wanted to investigate and understand but didn’t have the time to, at least during the beta. That particular list was growing at a faster rate than any other, the intricacies of the magical system of Road to Purgatory fascinating and complex, capturing my attention in a way that my university studies never had managed. I enjoyed working with numbers and finding patterns, but what Pantheon had created allowed me to look at such patterns in a wholly different way, with different eyes. And it allowed me to freeze those who annoyed me, or teleport or turn invisible. Well, the last two were very much work in progress, but the excitement that the magical abilities in Road to Purgatory brought to me was wonderful. Even better than flying through the skies on Lenore’s wings.

A look at the clock prompted me to close down the last few windows and trigger the log-out from the capsule-space, to return to the real world. It was time for another wonderful torture-session with Mrs. Wu, with me trying to push my body just a little further, to stretch my muscles in ways nature had never intended them to move. But for some reason, whenever I thought my body couldn’t do something, but Mrs. Wu insisted that it could, she was always right. And, as I had noticed, the pain and exhaustion was slowly bearing fruit, allowing me to move my body in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible. That alone, the feeling of accomplishment that came with doing what I would have considered impossible, it drew me and I craved it.

That the skills she taught me were rather nefarious in nature didn’t bother me any longer, just the feeling of accomplishment, and the times she praised me for doing better than expected, those mattered. Just the knowledge, just the ability, they didn’t mean I would start actually using them on people.

And having more knowledge and more abilities was always a good thing.