A dockyard, swarming with passengers disembarking from a recently arrived tradefleet.

“I told you that I’m not interested,” Henry said, drawing his hood even further over his head, attempting to walk faster.

“Consider it one last time, brother!” yelled a blue-haired NPC bulldozing in his direction.

Henry sighed, as he attempted to slip away from his pursuer.

This place...these people

Elsewhere on the ship Henry’d ridden, there had been an NPC Merchant by the name of Ga. At a glance, Merchant Ga's model bore a striking resemblance to Henry’s current disguise.. Aside from Henry making his obese, they shared the same azure-coloured hair, skin the colour of alabaster, and noses with nostrils large enough to allow the entrance of a thumb and two extra fingers. Their shared appearance corresponded to the inhabitants of the mountainous, Scottland-esque island of Togavi, a region almost as trash as Suchi. Henry, during the boat ride, had used special magic to disguise himself as an NPC in order to leave his base without detection from nuisance spies that followed him everywhere. A consequence of the disguise was that this Merchant NPC, mistaking Henry for a fellow countryman, had tried to cosy up to him and even offer him a chance to join a smuggling operation to sneak weapons into Suchi’s Slums.

Saana was always giving one these kinds of hassles, trying to them into random, elicit schemes, or 'Quests' as normal players might describe them. Henry blamed poor game design.

Escaping the NPC through the mass of disembarking passengers, he joined one of two queues for customs inspection, hiding his face in a novel.

A minute later, however, the Merchant had skipped ahead to squeeze in beside him.

"I'm not interested," Henry answered with a stern rejection of the weapons smuggling offer, his frustration rising at all of the guards around them failing to maintain the queue order.

Merchant Ga laughed as heartily as Karnon, Togavi's joyful trickster god. “All right, all right, brother. If a man does not want the world, then I’m not going to be one to force it upon him. Just don’t come begging when I strike it rich.”

Henry, ignoring the trader, flipped to the next page of his book, concentrating on a story that had absolutely nothing to do with Saana. Many books from the real-world had been imported into the game as 'Tomes of Rapid Language Absorption', enabling player characters to quickly learn Saana's thousands of NPC languages for which the system would then automate translation. Henry, though, read for leisure. His current choice was an Uzbek novella, The Dead Lake. The story, set in the 20th century, focused on a genius violinist whose physical growth stopped in childhood due to exposure to radiation from Soviet nuclear testing.

With Henry’s present predicament in Suchi, he had a lot of sympathy for the stunted protagonist. In a way, he and everyone else here was wasting away in their own toxic mire.

“Never mind then, brother!” Merchant Ga patted Henry's rotund belly, causing a ripple of fat to propagate outwards.

“Don’t do that," Henry warned.

The Merchant chuckled. “Don’t be so frigid, brother!”

Their queue moved much faster than the other. Theirs was for passengers who’d paid the travel fare in full. For them, the inspectors only asked three or four questions, before checking their Attention Identification Emblems. These IDs slash passports slash discount cards were necessary for accessing the many services offered by The Attention East Saana Trading Company, such as passage on their vessels.

The second, slower-moving line was for subsidised passengers. In addition to the identification check, they were also taking turns to summon various goods from their Spatial Bracelets. The inspectors were weighing these items, spinning them around or spinning around them if they were too large, all while stroking their chins contemplatively. If nothing were amiss, the inspectors would then order the dockworkers to transfer the goods to the local Trading Post and reward the passenger with a bag that jingled ever so sweetly.

As to be expected in this lawless zone, Henry saw one player get caught and fined for drinking a case of expensive beer and diluting them with saltwater.

The Merchant prodded him. “Brother, isn’t their monopoly a crime? The Company should spread the wealth to some of us smaller traders.”

Henry lifted his eyes from his novel to throw the Togavian a tired glance. “If you're envious, you should have set up a competing service.”

Should have - this Merchant would never get the opportunity to correct his poor life choices, having picked the single worst person in Saana to invite into a smuggling deal.

Merchant Ga scoffed. “Sure, and while I am it, I’ll also marry a Rangbitan princess and tame an Imbahalaala to hand-feed grapes to our mocha-skinned children. What a ridiculous suggestion!”

The Merchant had solid ground to refute him. The materials to build a fleet, the wages of the sailors, supplies for pioneering a safe travel route through the deadly oceans–all of this required unfathomable amounts of capital. And say you did manage to scrape together the initial cost, one storm, one pirate raid, one minor king in need of an emergency navy, one Hyperborean Kraken, and all your investment would be like the petals of The Great Togavi Tulip Sea when The Maelstrom makes landfall, spirited away in seconds.

Henry gave a lazy shrug, raising his shoulders barely an eighth of an inch. “I'm just saying I’ve seen these things be done." After a pause, he clarified. "Not the taming of an Imbahalaala. That would be...difficult."

The Imbahalaala were demonic monsters that could predict and dodge the path of all attacks and telepathically explode the hearts of enemies. They were more powerful than the game's Gods. In a previous adventure, Henry'd found a way to approach these creatures safely and even learn their language, but taming or killing one was far beyond him. The Imbahalaala seemed to be related to one of this game instalment's final questlines.

Henry's queue moved fast even for an unsubsidised fare. Unlike at others ports, their inventories went unchecked. With the openness of the savanna and the chaos of The Slums, there were too many ways to sneak contraband past this point if one intended to, like the Merchant. Instead, goods would be given proper scrutiny when entering the gates of the Central City, where law and order began.

It wouldn't be in the comfort of the city that Henry'd be training these two upcoming weeks before the tournament. His school friends, and in turn himself, had joined The Slum 'Empire', joined a subsidiary gang of Australians once known as the '3-23 Westside Boyz' but renamed 'Byzantium Village'.

He was trying not to think about that. It should be irrelevant to his duelling efforts, Henry being able to ignore Suchi's politics like he was the NPC trader tailing him.

He was soon freed from the Merchant, who was apprehended by a squad of soldiers and taken away for questioning and execution.

Henry, despite the Merchant acting buddy-buddy during the voyage, had ratted him out without hesitation.

Unfortunately for Merchant Ga, the specific place he was smuggling weapons from happened to be Henry's in-game kingdom. The cities where the weapons were forged, the fleet on which they'd sailed across the sea, the customs inspectors, the guards, this dock - all this belonged to the guild he'd built over the past two years, The Company. They were quite a big organisation, spanning Saana's digital globe with hundreds of thousands of player members and an even larger NPC force, involved in trade and other things. It'd been through this enterprise that he'd amassed the filthy riches with which he could retire happily at 17.

The Merchant, by propositioning Henry, had accidentally chosen death.

Henry, heading from the docks to one of his guild's Trading Posts, met up again with the squad transporting the smuggler and handed over evidence, the Merchant screaming at him for the betrayal.

During the exchange, Henry noted several peculiarities with the soldiers' handling of the case. Firstly, they failed to abide by the standard operating procedure of binding the criminal, an especially disconcerting fact because Ga's Martial Class was a Cutthroat like Henry's friend Abigail, designed for escape and stealth kills. Secondly, the soldiers walloped the Merchant simply for using foul language. Thirdly, while Henry was leaving, the guard captain approached him privately with a request to identify himself in order to collect his reward for snitching and get listed on a special honour board. This last oddity alarmed Henry the most, given that he was still disguised as an NPC. His guild went through immense effort to safeguard the anonymity of native informants, who, in The Slums especially, were at constant risk of retaliatory assassination and who, unlike the players, didn't respawn when they died.

In the past, Henry might have investigated these peculiarities further. However, having retired, he chalked everything up to corruption from this corrupted zone, and he moved on with a shrug.

To hell with Suchi, he thought, to hell with the guild. These problems were no longer his responsibility. Snitching on a weapons smuggler would be his final good deed.

As he was leaving the exchange, the Merchant to his back being dragged away swearing at him, a floating dark-blue eyesore popped up in the bottom-left corner of his vision to stop him.

The quest Forging a New Path has been updated to Save Merchant Ga!

Quest Title: Save Merchant Ga!

Description: A fellow clansman from Togavi approached you with a benevolent offer to join him in pioneering a new trade route between the repressed craftsmen of the Kingdom of Chayoka and the burgeoning Slum Empire of Suchi. For some reason, you leaked his plans, and now Merchant Ga has been apprehended by the Tyrant of Saana’s agents. Although you seem to have erred, there is still a chance to redeem yourself. Before Merchant Ga is executed, find a way to break into the Trading Post and liberate him from the abominable clutches of The Company.

Rewards: Merchant Experience. Reputation with the Lis Clan. A new trade route.

Conditions: Quest will end if Merchant Ga is murdered before you can rescue him.

Henry squinted with disdain at the biased flavour text.

Who exactly was the game system calling repressed? His kingdom’s craftsmen? His craftsmen?

Their labourers had the longest lifespans, were the freest of illness and war, were the most productive, had the greatest number of leisure hours.

They couldn’t sell their products to whomever they wished, so what? In exchange, they received free housing and food, generous wages, subsidised crafting materials for practice, access to mentorship programs and opportunities for career promotion. If they didn't like the arrangement, they were free to go elsewhere on his fare-subsidised ships.

This smuggling quest was just another example of unfair demonisation against his guild's regime. What always seemed to be neglected in the criticism of his regime was the alternative. Saana looked nothing like modern world. In its medieval fantasy setting, might alone proved right, life was nasty, brutish, and brief. The soft of heart had their kingdoms overrun and their citizens put to the sword or the whip. Your average NPC king treated his craftsmen like pack-mules. As for player-run regions, one could just imagine how hellish an actual kingdom would be, with semi-realistic political dynamics, when managed by overlords who viewed their citizens as 0s and 1s.

"Repressed...ridiculous game." Henry swatted away the quest box like a fly too fat for its wings.

Guilt-free, he strolled up the shoreline and roamed a short distance into Suchi's Slums, which covered the whole expanse between the port and Central City.

The Slums were about as trash as when he'd last visited over half a year ago. He passed through the narrow, pot-hole-strewn streets, past the driftwood shacks of the locals. Down one alleyway, he spotted a boar-sized rat shoulder-deep in the guts of a dog it'd killed. There were no criminals out yet, the days being a tad safer, but, come nightfall, the streets would teem with bandits and deranged players roleplaying as serial killers.

The main change was the greater presence of players with their 'Villages' scattered throughout the Slums. These encampments, lacking any consistent architectural style, were demarcated by ludicrously-tall 'Achievement Pillars' - on some of the towering structures could be spotted Villagers trying to grow theirs by climbing with heavy blocks of wood strapped to their backs. The players' carefree manner made for a bizarre contrast with the NPCs living in squalor around them.

This lawless dump, this was the alternative to his guild, what it meant to not be 'repressed'.

Henry, despite not venturing particularly far, had to dodge barefoot children in what appeared to be stolen clothes and a rowdy parade of loin-clothed players carrying the bus-sized carcass of a Golden-Horned Wildebeest. He also encountered a group of drunken imbeciles shooting arrows and spells at seagulls. Annoyed, he tossed food crumbs at the brats, causing them to get swarmed.

After finding an empty tent in a Village whose members were offline, he discarded the disguise used for the voyage, swapping his obese Togavian avatar to his real body and swapping his user ID from the NPC one, by which the Merchant had mistaken him as a compatriot, to a normal player ID.

The first swap wasn't noteworthy, the game having arcane engineering devices to dismember and reconstruct a body. The second, however, would be very unusual to most players, as it required a unique Legendary identity-spoofing ring artefact. In his past quests, Henry had acquired a ton of rare and strange game-breaking cheat items - dozens right now were just sitting casually in his inventory. One might say he'd come a little overprepared for a noob Starting Zone, but that would be failing to understand the tremendous difficulties of this hellhole and game.

While changing his avatar, his mind kept turning back to the oddities with the guards during the Merchant's arrest. To purge himself of these thoughts, he contacted his guild's spy-network to report his observations. Having already quit the guild and his former leadership position, he gave no official orders, they could do with the information as they pleased.

But that deed—he renewed his commitment to Wu-Wei—that had been the last and only official action he would squander his precious time on. Henry, the retiree, refused to be enslaved further by the demented ideology of Doing.

The adventure ahead, if one could even call it an adventure, was strictly about duelling, about winning a bet, about valiantly quitting.