The fighting had been tough after the gate had crashed, and quite a few players had died. Including One-Eye, Robert and Petals. In the end, Blue Lotus had come out on top of the guild leaderboard, and had been awarded 1,029 guild reputation points in Blackport. Which counted as 102 points in the Kingdom of Astia, 10 points in the Empire of the Endless Sky and 1 point in the World.

Guild reputation influenced how likely it was that a guild quest would be offered to your guild. The system would take all active guilds in the area where the guild quest would take place, and tally up the combined reputation points. Then it would calculate how many percentage each of the guilds had, and then randomly assign it based on that chance.

If Blue Lotus moved to another city in the kingdom, we would not start from scratch, since we had our reputation in Astia. Instead of starting at 0, our Kingdom Reputation would be used until our city reputation was higher. Bigger guilds had an easier time to earn guild reputation, which meant they had a higher chance of getting guild quests.

On the individual leaderboard, Robin and Ed had placed second and third, while someone named Sir Miller had taken first place. From what I could gather, he was the leader of the Knights of the Squirrel. As far as I could recall I had never heard of him or his guild before.

I had placed almost last on the leaderboard. With only 65 contribution points, there were only two players with less contribution than me: Lord and Lady Dust. As soon as the fighting stopped, a frenzy to collect and loot as many rabbits as possible began. The guild collected more than I could hope to butcher before they spoiled. Instead Nise and Phil looted the low level rabbits, leaving the high levelled rabbits for me to butcher, which included some level six and seven rabbits, which was normally only found in the Rabbit Warren.

“I’m going to pop out for a moment,” Ed said after the craziness was over.

“Oh, what’s going on?” Kira asked, to which I nodded. I wanted to know as well.

“I just unlocked my class, so I’ll be teleported to that weird deity’s library. Any suggestions on what I should take?” he asked me.

I had to think about it for a moment, “To be honest I can’t remember all the choices, but I remember someone using Premature Severing to great effect. Basically it blows up the elemental, the damage depends on how much mana is left in the manastone and how strong the elemental is. However, if you ask for some guidance they should be able to find some good skills for you.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said and two seconds later he was gone. After thirty seconds of silence, it started getting awkward.

“So we just going to wait for him here?” Marion asked, stifling a yawn.

Robin looked at her girlfriend. “Yes, though we can discuss what we should do next.”

“Well, we don’t need to babysit on the resource run today,” One-Eye said and motioned to the empty plain. The wave had dragged all the rabbits on the plain in as well.

“Even if you hadn’t just pissed off the Bears, letting our crafters go unprotected is a bad idea,” Kira chastised her brother.

“I wonder why they didn’t just reroll,” Blaze mused. “They’ve been humiliated several times, and lost all their gear.”

“Most likely because of the downtime on reroll. If not because Petals had done it on the first day, she would have had to wait seven days. Seven real life days, Which is all the time the game has been up for. So if they had rerolled their characters after we trashed them, they would still be a day or two from being able to rejoin the game,” I reminded him.

He frowned a bit, then nodded. “Right, I had forgotten that.”

“Forgotten what?” Ed asked, surprising all of us. He had come back without any of us taking notice.

It was Elize that supplied the answer. “The penalties for rerolling characters.”

“Ah.”

“So what did you take?” Marion asked eagerly.

“What Damian suggested, there were a few other nice ones, but this one seemed like a good fit. Might be expensive to use, but it gives some extra firepower,” Ed answered before turning to me. “Can you fuse Essence Shards?”

“You got Essence Shards?” Blaze exclaimed loudly.

Nodding, Ed said, “Yeah, because I was the first to get Elemental Summoner I got enough shards for two crystals, as well as a crystal.”

“Which is enough for a race change,” Blaze muttered with jealousy dripping from his voice.

Shaking my head, I reminded Blaze, “Only the first of nine steps.”

“What race is it?” Nise asked quietly.

“Draconian,” Ed answered with a smile. “But can you make them into a crystal?”

“I would love to, but I would need a lot of time to craft all the manastones needed. I would need one hundred stones per crystal. If you want to do it now, it would be better to go to the Temple. They’ll probably charge around two platinum per fusion, but you don’t have to wait,” I said.

“How long would it take you?” Ed asked.

“Two weeks at least, where that’s all I’m going. That’s a thousand mana per attempt. With eight mana imbued per cycle that’s two hundred and fifty cycles whi—”

“Is a lot of time. Can I withdraw some coins from the guild to help pay?” Ed interrupted me with his question.

“I say we let him, would be another win for the guild,” One-Eye said.

Thinking back to the message from Marcus, I began to doubt. However, I had also decided not to give into my first instinct, which was what he was expecting. Though he had warned me, a few titles should not be too upsetting to his plans. Not yet at least. We had already garnered another World’s First, and would probably get another one later in the day. Pulling up the guild contribution points, I noticed that he had enough to cover it.

In the end I decided to go with, “Okay. That can be arranged, but first we need to get the resource run over with since we’re already here. And then we have the daily runs in the Sewer Dungeon.”

Ed gave a nod. “Sounds like a plan.”

On the way to the sour joys and the forest, we met not one rabbit. It was completely quiet and empty. It was a bit disconcerting. Feeling a bit more secure than normally, we split up even before we had reached the first patch of sour joy. The newer members stayed with me and Nise, while Ed escorted the father and son duo to the forest.

“So, want to teach me Herbalism now that you got your class?” Marion asked.

“Sure, though what about Message, you should earn that spell scroll soon?”

“I can always learn it later, boost it with free XP if needed. An empty skill slot doesn’t help me get there faster.”

“You’re not wrong,” I said. She was already level eight. It definitely helped fighting with higher levelled people. Also helped that she had not died in the six days ingame days she had played.

“I can already guess what I need to do, but you talked about a skill you wanted,” she said and shook me out of my musings.

“Right, sorry. So basically Mentor takes effect with me explaining you how to perform a skill in which I’m five levels higher than you. You get a small bonus to your XP. At Beginner it’s only ten percent extra. So on these plants, it will mostly likely not mean a lot, because they round off.”

“How do you earn XP?”

“Well, I’ve to be within five meters of you, and I get ten percent of the XP you earn in a session.”

“Session?”

“Yeah, let us say we work together on this patch, but you suddenly stops for longer than a minute, or go do something else like fighting. That ends the session. As will us getting more than five meters away from each other,” I explained.

“Okay, lay it on me, Teach,” Marion said with a grin.

“So what you want to do—” I started explaining the simple process of plucking a flower. Ridiculous, but needed by the system to grant me the skill I wanted.

You’ve unlocked the skill Mentor, do you wish to learn this skill at this time?

Yes/No

After saying yes, I turned my attention to gathering sour joys.

Elize suddenly asked, “Can you teach me Butchery?”

“Not right away, I only have one student slot at Beginner level, and there’s a twenty four hour cool down on switching students,” I said.

“Okay, maybe some other time then,” she said, and we fell into companionable silence.

After a few minutes, Marion stood up and said, “Damian, you do know what this means?”

“What?” I asked confused.

“That I’m one of your students now.”

“I guess.”

“That means that this,” she said and ran her hands down her body, pulling the robe taut and accentuating her curves. “Is out of bounds from now on.”

I just stared at her with wide eyes, and it took me a few seconds to properly react to her implications, which was most likely a joke, I hoped. I then turned beat red, eliciting loud laughing from Marion and Elize. Nise had the decency to try and stifle her laughter behind a hand. Robert shook his head in disgust, while casting a glance at Marion’s figure.

“You’re a wicked woman,” I grumbled with a grin. My cheeks still red with embarrassment.

“I know,” she just laughed impishly. “But it’s not like it would ever happen. You’re the wrong gender.”

I just shook my head, and settled my concentration on the sour joys in front of me.

The trip was pretty good for me, I managed to level up Herbalism, bringing me to level 10 in that skill. It also propelled me up to a character level of 11. I had quite a few points left over from when I reached level 10, which enabled me to bring my Strength up to 25. It was really the most useful attribute for me at the moment, since it increased the damage done when I was Mining, and it expanded my personal inventory space. I left two points in reserve, so I would have enough to increase Spirit by one, the next time Meditate levelled up.

After we returned to the Blackport, the guild treated everyone to a lunch at the inn. Mostly because I did not have any meat for making lunch, and using only the vegetables would be too expensive. The lunch was separated into two tables though, since I wanted a word with Robin and Ed. Really wanted to include Kira and Marion as well, but it would have to be an officer meeting so as not to appear too suspicious to the rest, or make anyone jealous.

We rented one of their meeting rooms, which at this stage of the game should be safe from anyone listening in. Robin was the first who said anything, “So why the private meeting?”

Clearing my throat before I said anything, I informed them of the threat I had received from Marcus, and added, “A few achievements should hopefully not set him off, but we need to figure out what course we should take.”

“And you want our input,” Ed stated more than asked.

“Indeed.”

“Okay, so he’s warning you lightly, we can only hope that it doesn’t set him off that Ed got, or will get, a few achievements,” Robin said with a groan.

“And Kira is getting one as well later today,” I added.

“That’s just great,” Robin sarcastically said.

Ignoring her sarcasm, I said, “The way I see it is that we’re pretty darn safe inside the hotel.”

Ed was quick to point out, “He threatened you in a meeting capsule.”

“Yes, but the difference in security is high. The capsules are only monitored by a low level AI trained to observe criminal behaviour or medical emergency. It’s not that hard to fool. The AIs running the security inside the towers, on our floor, is the same AIs that Masters is using for the game and his new security androids.”

“His last release of androids were over ten years ago,” Robin protested.

“You remember our chauffeur when we picked up Sarah?” I asked her.

“Sure.”

Turning to Ed. “What about you when we picked up your father?”

“Yeah, he was pretty unremarkable.”

“Both of them were androids,” I said.

“No freaking way,” Ed protested.

“I’d prefer you take me on my word, but I’m sure if we ask the staff nicely they’ll confirm. Probably want to know how we knew,” I said sardonically.

“I guess you’re right. So what you’re saying is that we’re fairly safe inside the hotel, as long as we stay away from the public area,” Robin said.

“Will be a problem if we start sharing floors with others again,” Ed pointed out.

“True, but we’ve been alone on the floor ever since the incident, so there’s a good chance it’ll be the same in the future. I think Masters suspects something, since they’ve separated us from everyone else. And as we grow bigger, we’ll fill out the floor on our own.”

“Okay, so you what do you want to discuss specifically?” Robin asked.

“Him being a time traveller put a wrinkle in my plan. Which I admit was flawed, it was all too cautious and passive. The way I normally play things,” I admitted.

“I can see that. Though it makes sense to give up a win, to position yourself much better to win the next two battles,” Robin said.

“Yeah, but I can’t guarantee that he doesn’t change Aragoth’s passwords, which would nix most of the plan to get into a better position. And even if he doesn’t, we would have to check to see if the plan is worthwhile pursuing. Checking would most likely compromise further access, so that goes out the window.”

Ed grunted his agreement, “So the question is, when do we need to make an obvious move if we want to win the whole thing?”

“We should be able to keep a pretty low profile until after the destruction of the main continent. But then we need to expand massively and start participating a lot in the main quests, otherwise we’ll start trailing.”

“So three months of building up our forces?” Robin asked.

“Yes, but ingame it’s six months.”

Ed nodded. “With Kira on board and the right people we should be able to build a strong foundation that could allow for rapid growth.”

“We should see if there’s anyone we could grow close to, to stand with us,” Robin added. “Everything will be easier with friends.”

“True, but what if our friendship makes them a target?” I asked.

“I see your point. And that brings up something more important. Whoever we chose to add to the guild, we need to ensure that we bring the entire family into our folds,” Robin added.

Just to clarify for myself, I said, “So, focusing on people who were orphans and people with small families. How big is Petals’ and Nise’s families?”

“Don’t know,” Robin said, and Ed just shrugged.

“So our immediate problem will be bringing the rest of their families in. Which can be hard since we don’t know how large a family they have, and as far as I know both sets of parents have work.”

“So we need to show them it’s more profitable to join us in the game than it is to stay on the job market,” Robin suggested.

We were silent for a few minutes, when Ed asked, “I know it might be a bit dangerous, but what about HannahVixen?”

“What about her?” I asked.

Robin pounced on it immediately, and said, “From what you said, Marcus has some vendetta against a former time traveller, and takes it out on her. You foiled it once, but he’s probably going to try again. You said so yourself.”

“I can’t just go up and say to her, ‘Hey, there’s this insane time traveller who wants to kill you, because you were lover with another time traveller hundreds of time loops ago, Oh and the reason I know this is because I’m a time traveller myself.’, yeah I don’t see that going over very well. I mean you barely believe me, maybe even just indulging my delusions. Blaze and One-Eye don’t believe me at all,” I said with a headshake.

“Well we could try a bit more subtle approach,” Robin said with a frown.

“Like what?” I asked. Ed just shrugged his shoulders.

Robin looked irritated when she said, “I don’t know, let me think about it.”

“Okay, I guess that’s fair,” I said with an apologetic smile.

“So to sum up, right now we focus on building a strong foundation and look to see if there’s any guilds out there worth partnering up with?” Robin asked.

“Yeah. That’s pretty much it.”

“Okay, so what do we need for a strong foundation?” Ed asked.

“Our own village slash town would be the optimal.”

“How do we get one? Just go out and build one?” Robin queried.

Shaking my head, I gave my answer, “We could do that, but it would not be a recognized village. Just like all the villages on the new continent. None of them are recognized by any of the kingdoms, much less the Empires. Which means they can be seized. Of course the players will be compensated, but still.”

“How do we get to build a recognized village then?” Ed asked.

“I can’t remember if we need five hundred or a thousand reputation points with the Lord of Blackport to get permission. Probably a thousand,” I said.

“Total or one of us?” Ed asked.

With a wry smile, I answered, “One of us. So we’re a good way from that. We can start with a guild house in Blackport.”

It was Robin who asked, “How far away are we from that?”

“Well, because of my new achievements, we’re almost there. Just another two repair runs,” I said.

“Two days then.”

“Unfortunately not, remember that there’s only five nodes normally. They take a week to deteriorate. So we’ve two days with no run.”

Robin shrugged. “Four days then.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell the Phils to start stockpiling timber, and get their Carpentry as high as possible. The more crafting points available, the better.”

“Okay, I guess we got a plan. I’ll start vet candidates to join us when we’ve secured funding, the information packets provided on the people in the coffins should help,” Robin said.

Ed added, “I’ll pass along to Kira that we’re stepping up training. I’ll keep running the squad through the dungeons, grind out quests and get guild points.”

“And I’ll just keep on grinding,” I said. “At least until I get my shipment in five ingame days. Then I should be able to provide you with some delicious magic trinkets. And they should be worth a pretty coin.”

“Aren’t you afraid it’ll strengthen our opponents by selling them?” Robin asked.

“Not in the first batch, unless they pay an insane amount of money for it,” I said with a grin.

“Why do you say that?” Robin wondered out loud.

Still with a grin, I asked her, “Imagine that this never before seen item appears in an auction. Of course the NPCs will be interested in it. The craftsmen will go bonkers for the Lucky Charm. Because it doesn’t matter what your skill Tier is, or what material you work with, the Luck bonus still counts.”

“Oh, the NPCs can buy as well?”

“Yup.”

“I see,” Robin said with a nod. “Anyway, I’ll go join my girl for the rest of our lunch, if there is nothing else?”

“I think we’re good,” I said. She grabbed her plate and left the room.

After a minute of silence as we ate, Ed finally asked, “What bonuses can I expect if I start turning into a dragon?”

“I can’t remember the third advantage or any of the penalties. But two of the advantages you can choose from will be to be a better Runesmith, or be better suited to learn Elemental magic.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“Better Runesmith gives you more crafting points when you use Runesmithing.”

“Not really useful for me,” he said with a dry chuckle.

“No, but if you go pure Draconian, you’ll have to pick it up.”

“What about the other?”

“It means you learn elemental magic quicker.”

“That’s pretty good, but what about penalties?”

“Can’t remember exactly, but you’ll probably gain XP penalty to some other skills.”

“Okay, but why would I want to go through all nine step to become a pure Draconian if there’s something I don’t need or want?”

“Because a pure Draconian got a pretty one minute transformation into a small dragon once a day.”

“That doesn’t sound that great.”

“A small dragon would barely fit in the square outside. Dragons are immense creatures. An ancient dragon would probably crush a town twice the size of Blackport by just laying down to take a nap,” I said.

Whistling in appreciation, he whispered, “Holy crap. That’s large. Are there any of them in the game?”

“Yes, one of the end bosses is one. And if you’re unlucky you run into one in the Storm of Memories.”

“Let’s go join the others,” he suggested, after a minute of silence.

“Sure thing,” I said and left the private room. Though I had been speaking a lot, I had managed to finish my lunch.

“So, what did you plan in there?” Kira asked when I sat down next to her.

“Just a few plans for the direction of the guild,” I said and filled her in on the details about the guild house, followed by the guild village. No mention of any time traveller stuff in mixed company.

After I had sated her curiosity, I turned to Phil. “Phil, did you manage to get to the auction?”

“Yeah, doesn’t look good,” he said with a frown.

“How bad?”

“Almost three hundred platinum heading to Blackport.”

There was an intake of breath from Robin, Kira, Ed and me. We all knew what that meant; Dawnguard had to have poured a lot of coins into the island. Blaze and One-Eye looked up at hearing it, but seemed to lose interest pretty fast again.

“Did you recognize any of the players as you entered or left?” I asked.

“The bitch from—” Phil started, but an angry throat clear from his mother stopped him. “Sorry, the hussy—”

“Phil,” his mother warned him.

“Fine. That woman from across the road, she was there. Also saw someone from a guild called Al’s Almighty something,” he said with a look of shallow contrition.

It was Robin who corrected him, “Almighty Al’s Assembly of Adventurers.”

“What a ridiculous name,” Robert scoffed.

Blaze disagreed loudly, “No that’s an awesome name. We should have been called something like that, instead of some lame flower.”

“The blue lotus is the symbol of rebirth and hope,” Elize said. “I think it fits the guild quite nicely, especially with the goal we have.”

The others just stared at her. She looked back at them, and said, “I like to read ancient history. Wanted to be an archaeologist. Until I found out that they only worked with the centuries leading up the Scare. There’s no interest in the ancient cultures any longer.”

“Yeah, no appreciation for the really old history any longer,” I said with a nod.

“Anyway,” Phil said, “Those were the only two people I saw.”

“Okay, so we can expect them to continue the price war,” Philmore grumbled. Turning to me he asked, “What are you going to do about it?”

“To be honest, not much. The few coins I lose each day by the business they sell is not something to fret.”

“But only me and my boy is selling anything. And there’s not a lot of archers,” the elder Ewers protested.

“You’re forgetting Nise. And Damian’s potions sells like hot cakes when he got them,” Phil said.

“You’re right, I’m not selling a lot. Not to them. But I earn more than half a platinum each day on the rabbits I buy with guild points. Of course if subtracting that, earn only a gold or two. Nevertheless, don’t forget that I supply the feathers and glue,” I said.

Elder Ewers looked like he wanted to object, so I added, “And I got something that could potentially earn us hundreds of platinums coming in with a ship in a few days.”

“What’s that?” he asked with an eager glint in his eyes.

“If you’re lucky, you’ll see tomorrow, if not you’ll have to wait,” I said, and pointed out the inn’s patrons sitting close by. He looked upset for a second, but then seemed to understand. Lunch broke up, and I headed to first the Rabbit Warren and then the ancient dwarf outpost with Ed’s party.