Eztli’s view came back into focus and he was in the main square in Tenochtitlan, at the base of the Pyramid. All this playtime had just been what amounted to character creation. Now he could see other characters throughout the square, it was absolutely flooded with people. There was a huge crowd at the steps of the pyramid watching the human sacrificing going on, likely new Aztec priests trying to gain blood magic affinity, or some knowledge about the gods. He saw hunting parties forming everywhere.

Mark took a moment to check his skill trees, the casting conditions of the skills and their effects. He had the blood magic affinity to unlock the whole blood magic tree, however his level was too low. His HP and MP had taken a big hit as well, now that he was out of character creation. All he had access to in the tree was Blood spear, Blood Casting, and Blood Field. It appeared that casting the spells required a hand motion holding a ceremonial wand. There was even a video displaying the casting motion.

The Ritual Curse and Bless tree was much more locked down, with just one point in shamanic magic affinity he could only cast the basic curse and bless spells from it, from what he remembered of that tree and those spells they were hardly worth the effort to learn so he shelved the tree for now. There were much better spells at the later levels, and curse and bless themselves got better the higher his affinity for shamanic magic, so it’s not like they were worthless, just not worth using at level 1 with a +1 affinity for the magic. The final tree was why he chose to ditch archer in the first place 30 years ago.

One of the biggest problems facing new characters, especially in the “Aztec and south American zones were the lack of travel options, meanwhile the level one option in this tree was “Hawk Form” allowing him to move around the map far faster than any mount will allow until much later in the game. He remembered how Shamanic magic was loved for this low level form of movement causing melee characters to splash in shamanic magic just for this ability.

He read the casting conditions then sighed as it seemed the casting conditions also required a hand motion of sorts with a ritual wand, he also needed to sacrifice a hawk to unlock the skill. The other forms in Quetzalcoatl’s animal form shamanic tree were Python, Panther and if he managed a +100 affinity for the tree, level 500 character level and sacrificed a feathered winged serpent he could shapeshift into a feathered winged serpent like Quetzalcoatl. This was one shape shift form he didn’t get last time around mostly because he never found a winged/feathered serpent.

He checked his inventory and noted the only thing of value on him was his cotton cloak and ceremonial Macuahuitl. So he walked around the square until he found a merchant selling the type of wand he needed. It was a bone wand made from a human arm bone with colorful feathers tethered to the end with a leather cord. All in all it looked rather barbaric.

Eztli pointed at the wand and spoke “How much for that?”

The merchant simply looked at him.

Mark pondered a moment then watched the others around the square purchasing items to see how it’s done. Then sighed. It seemed the AI still wasn’t that advanced.

Eztli grabbed the wand and placed it in front of the merchant, the merchant then spoke “500 cacao beans”

Eztli removed the cotton cloak and handed it to the merchant and said “300 cacao beans, I’ll pay you the full cloak if you can find me a Hawk in a cage.”

The merchant smiled at his windfall and quickly hurried away from the stall, Eztli examined the wand closer.

Bone Wand (Poor) - A required component for spell casting

+5 affinity with all Shamanic, blood and nature based magic

+10% damage with all shamanic, blood and nature based magic

Attack Bonus: 0

Damage (if used as a club): 50-100

No Critical Chance

Durability: 50

The merchant returned with a wicker cage holding a half dead looking hawk. Not bothering to waste any time, Eztli opened the cage door and seized the hawk by the neck, pulling it out of the cage, then pulled out his ritual dagger, and read one of the basic sacrifice prayers he had in his journal next to his knowledge “Aztec gods” skill. “Oh great Quetzalcoatl accept this sacrifice” then plunged the dagger into the chest of the half dead hawk. A small golden light flashed and the bird vanished from his hand and the skill “animal shape: hawk” became available to use on his skill tree.

Mark then pulled up a friends list and checked for Holly’s status. He saw she was grey’ed out meaning she was either still in character creation or in an instanced dungeon. He then waved the bone wand above his head, following the example shown in the small video with the animal form: hawk skill. He knew he probably looked like an idiot, as it took him 3 times to match the motions correctly before a blood red light covered his vision and his body changed shape into that of a large robust looking hawk.

A number of the players stopped what they were doing around the square staring in disbelief when a player suddenly shone with a red light and changed shape into a hawk, their level of awe was greatly reduced when the Hawk spread its wings and hopped a couple of times as if trying to figure out flying.

Mark spent almost 3 minutes trying to figure out the motions for flying it was surreal as his body literally transformed into a hawk. Eventually he managed the wing motion and launched into the air, soaring above Tenochtitlan before turning south. He had two more animal forms to unlock and about 100 levels he needed to grind before he left the Aztec region for the north. The eyes of the hawk were outrageous and Eztli soared higher and higher into the sky he glanced from time to time to the upper right hand side of his vision to peak at his magic points. It looked like his current points could only maintain this form for an hour or two at the rate it was being depleted. On the bright side the speed of this hawk form was no joke and he covered a huge amount of territory flying south for about 40 minutes, until he saw the hunting ground he wanted to monopolize.

Folding his wings he dove to the ground, spreading them at the last minute then landing in a tree’s branches on the edge of a clearing. For a first landing he felt it went pretty well. Then he canceled the spell.

Changing back into a human was much less eye catching then changing into the bird, and didn’t come with a blood red light, his eyesight got so much worse he felt he needed glasses it was an awkward moment where he almost felt half blind after enjoying the eyes of a hawk. He quietly dropped from the tree to the ground and started to make his way west. He had seen the hunting ground he needed to the west of where he landed.

After moving through the jungle for about 10 minutes he came to a cliff’s edge and under it was a large group of Caimans resting on a river bank. These were foes ranging from level 30 to level 100. He knew this was a famous low level grinding spot for shaman and other ranged dps thanks to the Caiman’s poor movement range on land, and the small cliff face you could attack them from.

Shaking the wand as instructed in the video he cast blood field around himself, then activated blood magic, then with a flick of the wrist created a blood spear

Blood Field: creates an area approximately (Affinity/5) meters in diameter centered on the caster, in which all creatures which die while in this field provide ((affinity+level)/1000 to a max of 1/10) of the target’s HPs and MPs to the spell caster. Casting Consumption -50MP/Min

Blood Magic: allows the caster to use HP in exchange for MP when casting a spell.

Blood Spear: Automatic Hit Magic Attack, Range 50 Meters, Damage (100*(level/10+wisdom/50))*Affinity, Armor and Reflex as well as level adjustment can mitigate damage. Cost 50MP Causes “black magic” type damage for the sake of immunities and resistances

This was where his fraudulent Blood Magic affinities he earned in creation will really shine. Normally the level adjustment from a level 1 character attacking a level 30 mob would be so severe he could spend all day attacking it and never kill it. However now, he had a base damage of 46k or so, even with a 1/30 reduction in damage from the level shift he’d still do 1533 damage. The trick was what type of armor or reflex mitigation he’d face.

Eztli waved the wand over his head and cast a blood spear at one of the smallest Caiman he could see. Generally level was directly proportionate to size in these mobs. A damage number of 404 popped up over the head of the small caiman. Eztli winced, apparently these monsters had a high resistance to this magic. It roared and started darting across the shore, eventually ending up under the cliff face inside his blood field. Smiling Eztli waved the wand again casting out another blood spear. He kept an eye on his own hit points, he was spending them to cast this, mostly because Caiman’s didn’t have mana so he’d recover none of his mana back from killing one. Another 404 popped up over its head. He did the math in his head and realized he’d have to turn off blood casting in order to kill it, a level 30 basic mob should have around 6000-9000 hit points. He waved the wand again and hit it for another 404, then one more time and 404 popped up again. He deactivated blood casting and continued to cast with mana this time.

404

404

404

…

By the time he cast the spell for the 20th time he had grown rather proficient with the basic motion, and no longer needed to think about it to cast. The Caiman suddenly let out a pained roar and collapsed. +800 HP, +200 MP popped up along with a whopping 253,500 xp points. He leveled up a number of times in a row; ending at level 11, with 33,500/66,000 xp needed for level 12. He quickly dumped half his 100 stat points into wisdom, the other half into constitution.

The he cast blood magic again and took aim at another small Caiman, then attacked. The first attack did 4216 damage and more than half the Caiman’s life vanished. He waited for it to enter range of the blood field and cast again. Killing the caiman and restoring the 150 life he lost between the field and two spears when another +800 HP, +200 MP prompt popped up. This time a 160,550 popped up for xp, leveling him up two more times to level 13, with 55,050/91,000 toward the next level. Grinning at the delectable hunting, he then examined his spell list spells that might have become available with the level up, sure enough at level 12 “Blood Ball” was enabled, blood ball was basically a version of fireball providing some solid AOE damage at the cost of some health for the caster.

Eztli carefully waved his wand as he copied the wand motion from the small video and a large ball of blood floated into the are in front of him, selecting where to drop it wasn’t too hard he just had to focus his eyes where he wanted it to go, then point his wand to make it go. Blood ball wasn’t a great AOE spell because it did damage to the caster and it was an untargeted AOE meaning it would harm allies if carelessly used. However, it was fantastic in this situation.

Blood Ball – creates a ball of blood, which explodes dealing damage to everything inside 5m radius, damage determined by (Affinity+level+100)*(Wisdom/10). COST: 250HPS, 500MPs causes black magic type damage (for the sake of resistances and immunities)

The ball blew up right over the head of the middle of the nest of Caiman, a series of damage values ranging from 1 to 500 popped up on every Caiman in the group became hostile to him including a couple of the big level 100 ones, and made their way over to the cliff face. Then Eztli started to rain more Blood Balls down on the Caiman at the bottom of the cliff, sprinkling in some Blood Spears to quick kill some of the weaker targets and recharge his MP and HP. His level started climbing like mad and the damage he did to the Caiman started to climb with his level.

With careful management of his health and magic using the blood field for full effect he kept his health and magic basically full while he cast a continuous stream of magic down on the heads of the slow Caiman. As they respawned on the riverbank (they crawled out of the river) he would cast more blood balls to draw their agro. After casting a certain number of blood magic spells, he got a prompt his blood magic affinity increased by +1. Once he saw that he started to throw the currently useless “Curse” magic at the caiman too, meanwhile he was dumping all his attribute points into Wisdom and Constitution at an 8 to 2 ratio. He didn’t need a lot of extra constitution and he knew adding too much too early could gimp him going forward, he just recalled at the pain and effort he went through getting constitution buffing items in the late game due to a lackluster constitution stat. When using blood magic constitution was as good as wisdom and while he would eventually rely on other spells and many of his blood spells will get put on the back burner, he would need the high constitution if he wanted to dominate in pvp and late game raids like he used to. Finding items for Shaman which buffed wisdom was childsplay. Finding items which buffed constitution was not. So, he sacrificed a little power now for bigger rewards later

His casting got rather proficient, he was now waving his wand quickly. There were no cooldown timers in this game. The limits to spell casting were the relatively long casting times, and how easy it could be to be interrupted. While the old VRMMO didn’t use hand motions to cast spells it did have casting timers. He strongly suspected the bigger late game spells would have elaborate hand gestures to guarantee a long and easily interruptible motion for non-spell casters to fuck with your casting. On the bright side most of his favorite spells really didn’t have long casting times, and many of them had some added advantages when his build got complete.

He basically put his mind on autopilot while he was destroying the Caiman population at this point in the river. Eventually he started to get prompts about his Shamanic magic getting a +1 affinity after casting a number of curses, so he kept raining the borderline useless curses at the caiman. He had to admit it was fun casting his blood magic like this. He felt like he was exploiting the heck out of the game, when he remembered how painful it was for him to correct his old archer build. The first hundred levels took forever for him. Of course, there was nothing fraudulent about this build, he just wasn’t used to playing the low levels with a properly min-maxed build. When he got tired of casting spells, he took a break to check out the LM_STARS forum. It was there he realized that he wasn’t fraudulent in the least. The other members of LM_STARS were all leveling up like mad like he was right now, judging by the forum posts. Leo was already level 100 apparently. He was just level 67, which put him about in the middle of the group. He frowned thinking about leveling efficiency and decided to finish off the 2 level 100 caiman and change his strategy up to catch up a bit to Leo.

Standing up he checked out his spell list and noted several new spells in the blood tree were available. Blood Wound and Blood Puppet. He grinned, as his favorite blood spell was on the list. Then he cast blood puppet on the less wounded lvl.100 Caiman. The Caiman howled in pain and then became ridged, Eztli felt the great burden controlling such a huge monster was on his mind, and directed it to attack the other level 100 caiman. Suddenly the huge monster launched itself at the other large Caiman and they both started to battle without need for his control. He relaxed the control and watched the show. Sure, enough the healthier one, won landing him 73,880 experience, however since he needed nearly 2.2mil experience points to get to level 68, his experience bar didn’t fill. Then he commanded it to attack the next biggest Caiman. Using blood puppet, he slaughtered all the remaining Caiman. He examined his experience bar and sighed, it looked like level 68 would take a bit more time.

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Character: Eztli

Age: 18

Social Status: Aztec Nobel

Level: 67 (1,798,325/2,211,000)

Hit Points (0.5): 10,753

Magic Points (0.8): 48,240

Defense: 105

Strength: 110 (5%) = 116

Agility: 100 (5%) = 105

Constitution: 292 (10%) = 321

Wisdom: 818 (10%) = 900

Intelligence: 220 (5%) = 231

Charisma: 100 (5%) = 105

Willpower: +15

Poison/Disease Resistance: +3

Pain Resistance: +3

Reflexes: +1

Skill Trees: 3/8

Blood Magic

Ritual Bless and Curse (Shamanic Version)

Animal Form (Quetzalcoatl Version)

Skills: 0/10

Bonus Skills: Cannibalism, Intimidation (+22)

Language: Aztec (10/10), Mayan (10/10), Inca (10/10)

Knowledge: Religion: Aztec Gods (Max)

Affinities: Blood Magic (+98), Shamanic Magic (+22), Air Magic (+1)

Items: Sacrificial Knife (Obsidian), Ceremonial Macuahuitl, Bone Wand (Poor)

Relations:

(none)

Accolades:

Perfect Clear: 5% to all attributes

Top of the World (Tenochtitlan): 5% to Constitution

Tattoos (Magic):

Quetzalcoatl: 5% to Wisdom, +1 Affinity with Air Magic, +1 Affinity with Shamanic Magic