Ronnie left the room and moved forward along a dimly lit corridor with red fluorescent lights on the walls. Three more players were moving behind him: a fifth-level girl, and two guys, tenth-level and first-level accordingly. No one looked at each other. Five minutes later, Ronnie found himself in the main hall, which was fifteen thousand square feet in size. The bright white light reflected otherworldly spots on the glossy floor and blinded the eyes. The space was filled with the loud hubbub of first and second-level players. They played musical instruments, chatted, had fun, did various acrobatic tricks, and so on. An inscription on the billboard next to the arena said about the one-on-one tournament in two days. The number of registered players was already more than five thousand.

Ronnie walked through the crowd and noticed interesting glances pointed at himself. Several people immediately wrote to him in PM with a request to buy weapons for real money. He ignored all the messages and walked away towards the exit, where there were massive wooden gates fastened with metal beams that opened automatically on request. For the first time in months, Ronnie saw the capital. There were new buildings here and there that he had never seen before and many players. They wandered in chaotic directions along a cobbled street made of irregularly shaped stones, bumped into each other, got acquainted, traded items collected from different parts of the explored territories of the continent, and someone even staged fistfights for everyone's amusement.

The main structure behind him looked like an enlarged Fort Knox, which since the beginning of the twenty-second century has turned into a historical military museum, where Ronnie went on an excursion with his father at the age of ten, but he still remembers his eager emotions, as if he had been there only yesterday. At the opposite end of the street were three-story houses. Behind them, about five miles away, a soaring tower-type building rushed into the sky in a slender pyramid, divided into a series of decreasing floors. The work has not been completed yet. If you looked closely, you can see how scaffolding made of metal beams and wooden platforms surrounded the façade of the building. The top of the tower was hidden behind a thick layer of white clouds. The owner of these structures is a Fremaho player. To the west of Ronnie was a park with Ausayula trees, their white leaves illuminating the area with ghostly, full-moon light. The new buildings were noticeably different in their architecture: roofs in the form of glass domes, each second floor was accompanied by a long balcony with a parapet, and tall bay windows replaced the usual boring walls, at the entrance, there were monuments dedicated to various strong monsters from the bestiary.

"AI."

"At your service."

"What happened to the city? I've never seen anything like this before."

"If you wish, I can recount the happenings that took place in your absence."

"Yes, please. Just build a route to the craft area to my workshop first."

"It shall be done…"

A virtual arrow appeared in the HUD, guiding Ronnie through the labyrinths of Otron. He went ahead along the winding road to the north of the capital, and the AI began the tour:

"At the moment the city is still developing. Many guilds with their architects and builders have appeared. Unlike most players, their task is to earn as much money as possible. They spend their strength and resources on construction and then pay off the order thanks to an in-game reward and rent for the removal of the premises. In this way, they are competing for the "Economic Victory". The game's features allow players to build structures in different styles in specially designated areas. The architect creates a project plan, selects a location on the virtual map, sends a request to the AI, and then gets the permission only if the location is chosen correctly and does not bother anyone. Spontaneous construction is punishable by disconnection from the network with a fine for death.

Due to the large influx of those wishing to have their home or guild headquarters, Otron expanded its borders, and as a result, was divided into sectors that are fenced off from each other by a stonewall. Now you are in the central part of the capital and you can observe the buildings created by the style of brick Gothic. This decision is due to the shortage of building materials and technologies the city faces at the moment. Many town-planning guilds hire merchants into their ranks, they in turn extract clay, send it to workshops, where they create red bricks from it. Initially, the players wanted to create houses from timber. But the bark of the trees turned out to be so strong that they could not be cut down or felled easily.

The boundless ocean washes the south and west of Otron. Now there are abandoned docks there. Residents of the capital gave up trying to surf the waters a few months ago because of the presence of dangerous creatures in it. In the north and east of the capital, there are guild headquarters, tournament arenas, shooting ranges, as well as taverns, temples of knowledge, a market, a post office, and a huge conference center. The players did all this. There is an airport in the northeast of the capital. There you can pay 500.000 CP and choose the destination you need. AI controls aerial vehicles which fly only to certain designated places without the possibility of course deviation. As an alternative to expensive and fast transport, you can use a train that is not as safe and can be attacked by monsters during the journey with a higher probability, so be ready to fight back! You can check all the routes of Vanguard transport with me or in a special tab in the interface."

"Thanks for the information," Ronnie replied and yawned.

"You're welcome, I'm always at your service."

Ronnie walked the last leg of the way to the sounds of construction and watched as a flock of Baraoreb - birds with red plumage on the wings and black on the body, a long beak, and blue glowing eyes - flew north. Three dozen yards ahead in an alley on the right side, an elderly man began firing a Mauser rifle at a small creature with a tiny lizard body and microscopic wings on its head. It ran away, hissed, and did not let the rainbow grass out of its mouth, strewn with sharp fangs.

"Stop eating my herbs, you… parasite!" The man shouted in a hoarse voice.

When Ronnie came closer, he noticed the young tramp, nodded in greeting, and asked if he wanted to come into his alchemy shop.

"No, thanks."

"The bigger the city, the more parasites there are in it."

"Are you talking about Caernogens?"

"Yes," he answered, paused and shook his head up and down, "about them."

Ronnie shrugged and walked on. It took him about twenty minutes on foot before he reached his workshop, fitted in a small one-story room. Inside, chaos reigned: dust covering different weapon manufacturing machines, drills, and so on. Screws, bolts, springs were lying on the floor. Ronnie opened the window to the plowing and started cleaning. A few hours later, he finally finished, all sweaty, sneezing every two minutes, his eyes watering, in a word, he inhaled dust enough for a hundred years ahead. At the end of the day, he opened the interface and looked at how much it would cost to re-order the missing parts for Barrett. As expected, there was enough money back-to-back, but only now did the realization come to him that it would take at least a month to create a new rifle because he would have to work alone on hard metals. It'd take too long.