This time I woke up because of the incessant heat pouring through the open windows. It took me a minute to reorient myself before I stopped searching for the A/C controller. But as I saw the familiar medieval and stark room, and saw that it was nearing midday, I immediately shot up from my bed and rushed down, scared that the innkeeper would charge me for the second day of using the room.

The smell of something way better than my failed attempt at dinner last night assaulted me the second I was in the main hall. To my surprise, the yesterday commotion had died quite a bit, and apart from regular villagers, you could already see small groups of players gathering around tables, sharing lunch and whispering to each other.

The players, easily recognizable by their poor choice of equipment and extravagant race choices, turned for a second, looking at me walking down the stairs, but almost immediately they returned to themselves, disinterested in a broke bloke that was just starting his day hours after the sun has risen.

Judging my options, between stale half-burned meat, and whatever was giving that pretty good smell, I instantly rushed to the newbie fields, now renamed rabbit genocide fields, and pummeled at the poor fluffy critters. Seven hard earned victories later, I was back at the leatherworker.

I sold four of the pelts there, earning me a good 2 silvers, and after buying a waterskin recipe for yet another silver, and using another pelt to actually craft said waterskin, I was back in the inn, ready to finally enjoy a decent meal. My last two rabbit pelts were hoarded for when I got a few more wolf pelts for my armor crafting. I immediately ordered what everyone was eating, and my last silver was gone. The menu had a suspicious looking grue, and an even more suspicious, white liquid for a drink. Flavor wise, they were quite decent though. The grue was obviously meat based, but with enough stuff inside to actually give it a decent taste and smell, and the drink, some kind of fermented milk with aromatic herbs in, was actually quite refreshing, and enough to finally open my eyes. Flavor-wise, I would have rated both something like 3 stars, but the weird and disgusting appearance actually lowered the overall enjoyment. Either way, they were both miles better than my half-assed attempt at cooking.

I had ample time to browse the forums while eating, searching for information about our current situation. It seems the game launched with 50 shards initially to accommodate all the prospective players and was steadily adding more shards hour by the hour as the positive reviews kept pouring in. Only one of the shards, mine, had that time difference bug.

The forums were even more of a mess compared to the people in-game. Hundreds of people were raving about how dangerous keeping us in-game was, others were threatening for lawsuits, others were shouting that it was unfair that they couldn't transfer TO this shard, others were pleading people not to quit. The last camp obviously had two different viewpoints, the ones actually thinking that it is an amazing opportunity for mankind, artificially extending our active hours of the day, and the other was obvious players tempted by getting money while playing the game. The last group of people was in a manhunt for guild members, trying to establish strong in-game communities to make it easier for people to keep playing the game.

Mechanics wise, since we were playing at a 10x speed compared to everyone else, it seemed that most of the information about the game was coming from our shard, but there was a Dev comment on that thread telling how, to keep things interesting, each shard had quite a few randomized aspects that differ from one another, which was what caused only our shard to be affected by the time bug, probably some sort of randomized parameters messing up our cognitive ability.

There was a new player guide, posted from the beta forums, but that was over twenty pages long, so I casually skipped that. The one thing people seemed to agree on was that, for frontliners, it was worth it to spend their first few combination point to get at least the “armor master” skill.

That was because each monster gave a set number of skill xp. So, if you got 50 skill xp from a monster that you used your sword, a fireball, and got hit on your chain legs and on your breast plate while fighting, that xp would be distributed to 4 different skills, sword mastery, fire magic, medium armor mastery and heavy armor mastery. If on the other hand you only had “armor mastery” to cover all types of different armor you wore, that would mean more individual xp on each of your used skill. And while the same effect would happen if someone only used one kind of armor, it seemed that the best overall gearing strategy was a mix of all of them, with heavy armor on chest and wrist and shin guards, and maybe helmets, light armor on legs, arms, and generally on stuff that you wanted to keep a bit of mobility, and cloth armor, to my surprise, as an underarmor since it seemed it stacked!

There were even more broken, xp wise, combinations, like combining sword and shield for a “sword and board” style, which further combined with “armor master” for a “defensive specialist”, which encompassed both armor and weapons and shields, giving you basically tons more skill xp for using the same skills. Although people were already whining that going this way didn't have any good sword skills, and with sword skill merged, if they wanted a cool combination skill for sword, like flaming blades and whatever, they had to actively hunt down for sword skill books. That was because training with the sword only gave overall xp to the “defensive specialist”, and trainers wouldn't teach those people since “they had enough expertise with the blade already!”.

There was also a huge debate thread over races, because, unlike closed beta, races with strong racial abilities were given a universal lower xp coefficient, while races with weak racial bonuses got a bonus, with king of the hill being the human, who got nothing of importance and average stats, but was getting a whopping 1.5x xp coefficient. People kept arguing if it was better to have a few strong skills or much faster progression, and obviously, on our locked shard, everyone assumed that the opposite of what he had chosen was clearly unbalanced.

Finishing my meal, I sent a quick email to my father and my mother, explaining what my situation was and asking for their input as well, also asking them to supervise the movement of my body to whatever place they would send us to monitor us if I did, in fact, choose to stay in game. As I stood up, I made a casual stroll towards the fireplace, but feeling a piercing, cold, gaze from the innkeeper, I slowly backed off, certain that I had enough flame burst ammunition for my second delve into the forest.

Exiting the inn, I could already see that the situation outside has stabilized quite a bit. There were quite a bit of villagers walking around, making it look really alive, but only a handful of players still walking around. Most of those seemed to be going on to their business, either to various shops, or talking to villagers, or simply sitting down, with stuff in front of them, yelling prices for their merchandise. A familiar bunch of players, a blondie elf, a dwarf, a white dressed brunette human, a zombie dressed in extravagant clothes, and a raving wizard-looking old man, were right in the middle of the road, arguing and shouting to one another, so I immediately activated both stealth and camo and walked towards the exit, trying to evade them.

One of the good things of the game was that it seemed to give xp for every small thing we actually did. So, apart from the rabbit hunt, I had gotten xp for stuff like skinning the animals, which gave 10 xp for each skin, to crafting my stuff, which gave from 1xp for stuff like the arrows and 5xp for the meal, up to 50 xp for the dagger, and I was even getting 10xp for each Infused elemental I was making. Which had all added up to 1580/2000. Which basically translated that with just two more wolves I would actually level up to lvl 3. Which seemed awesome, until you realized that there were people posting about 5 combination skills and such, which would mean at least level 10 at this point... Furthermore, judging from what I've read, since getting hit would give xp to both cloth armor mastery and toughness, both of which seemed really useless to me, I had to now take down the wolves without even getting hit if I wanted my attacking skills to rise up faster. It really seemed like an unfair advantage for the ranged characters.

Leaving the village, there was a group of three wounded human hunters wielding spears and bows, that seemed to be talking to each other, that I haven't noticed the when I went rabbit hunting earlier. Once more, I tried to circle around them, but one of them spotted me and yelled towards me.

“Hey, you! Wildkin. Stop!”

I stopped and turned towards the advancing hunter, my hand resting on my dagger. Thinking that I really should have read what the PvP rules of the game were.

“What do you want?”

“You look like you are going towards the forest, which of course it's natural for a wildkin to do. But I have to warn you, it seems that for some reason a bunch of people yesterday butchered a ton of wolves. And as a wildkin, you know what this means!”

“Errr... no? Something to do with respawns?” I answered confused as of why I should know stuff like that.

“What? No! What kind of wolf would respawn? They are animals, not monsters! You probably have lived your entire life in the forest what don't you understand?!” He answered, equally confused.

And suddenly it dawned me why he kept talking nonsense, he was an NPC! AN NPC! The first quest was here! I would finally be a REAL adventurer! Switching talking gears to quest acceptance mode, initialize, 3, 2, 1, go!

“Oh certainly! It's just that I'm not from around here, and didn't know the forest. You say there is a problem with wolves dying?” I said as I simultaneously cursed myself for not gathering leather for my armors even sooner if wolves were becoming a rare mob or something, the sky-high prices of upwards of 1 gold for each piece that I saw in the village started making sense.

“Well yes. The wolves of this region were what was keeping the goblin population in check. With not enough of them around to hunt the greedy little bastards, they would swarm us. Those green fuckers multiply faster than even rabbits.”

“Well then, shouldn't they after a bit, when the wolves repopulate a bit, be able to halt them then? You're talking like it's the end of the village for god's sake!”

“It's not that simple. If the goblins manage to overpopulate the forest, they will be able to overpower the wolves, even if new ones are born. They may even completely subjugate them and wolf rider goblins will start emerging then!”

“I see... I see... But what if some heroes kept the goblins in check until then? Wouldn't it be enough?”

“Yes... but who would do that? Tell you what, halt their expansion a bit, and the village is sure to reward you for your troubles. Then we'll see what we can do about the bigger problem.”

“Will do! See ya!” I shouted as I had already started sprinting towards the forest the second the blue system screen popped in front of my eyes.

Quest accepted: Hunt down the goblins. Kill 10 goblins and bring back proof of your deeds to the village hunters. Repeatable. Area Event Initiated: Prevent the goblin tribes from overpowering the surrounding villages until the forest balance is restored. Event completion: 29days 23:59 hours left.

Heh! Quest get! Time to farm some goblins.

Entering the forest this time the sense of dread seemed to have lessened quite a bit. I couldn't tell if this was because this time it was I that actually challenged the area, or if it was because I was somehow getting comfortable with the super realistic environment, or if it was simply because I had grinded and honed my skills quite a bit compared to when I started. But whatever the reason, this time it was me feeling like the hunter, and not like the hunted.

It took me five minutes to leave the light forest on the edge of the town until finally, it started getting thick and dark enough to notice that I was now in the deeper parts of it, in the parts where I've spotted the wolves on my first trip. Unfortunately, that also meant that the timer of Rock-kun was done, and without any solid stone in view, I had to replace him a Dirt-kun instead. I refreshed Windy-chan and the infusion on my dagger, reactivated stealth, and kept going forwards.

After a few steps, I noticed Dirt-kun trying to get my attention, and when I looked at him, he pointed his clay fist towards something on the ground. Looking it closely, I understood that it was a wolf print. Way to go Dirt-kun! That's awesome!

Slowly, with the help of Dirt-kun (ok, mostly due to Dirt-kun) I managed to follow the tracks a bit deeper into the forest until I found a black and gray mass of xp and leather sitting underneath a tree. Somewhere along the way, a system notification had already informed me that I had gained the skill. The wolf looked towards here and it was sniffing the air like it was trying to pick up a smell, which made me a bit self-conscious that I haven't bathed since I entered the game but whatever.

Slowly, almost lazily, the wolf stood up and started cautiously approaching my location. Like he read my mind, Dirt-kun dashed towards the wolf and punched him right on the nose, earning a surprised yelp from the poor animal. Immediately afterward, Windy-chan flew directly over the wolf's head and started a series of blinding fast punches, something that I've realized, after using her a bit, was some sort of stamina based skill attack.

Meanwhile, I slowly circled towards the exposed back of the wolf, and I threw my usual combo, which basically was backstab followed by a stab. The wolf yelped once more, clearly injured, but before it had time to turn towards me, this time I had my secret weapon already in hand.

From point blank distance I threw one of my stone burst pebbles right on his wounded back. Not only did the ensuing explosion seemed like it hurt a ton, but as expected out of my “minimum intelligent” consumable it exploded in a pattern that not one of the shards were launched towards either me or my elementals.

As the pain confused the wolf, I backpedaled out of his range, the goal still being not losing xp to armor and toughness bullshit, and let my elementals finish the job. The second the wolf turned around, still focused on rushing to me, Dirt-kun flashed red, and a tiny bit of the soil around the wolf's paws suddenly enveloped them, holding him still long enough for me to retrieve and throw yet another stone burst pebble which this time hit the wolf right on his ugly mug.

Unlike the suicidal bunnies, the wolf turned tail trying to escape us, but at this point, I just had to do a short dash and stab him again, before he fell flat on the ground.

What is that you say? I should be hunting goblins and not wolves? Killing wolves will make the goblin population even harder to manage and the event even harder to complete? Like hell I'm going to fight goblins without armor! Also, who even cares about what happens a month in the future, I bet by that point a single high level character could wipe the floor with whatever goblin threat this starting forest could possibly throw against him!

One wolf down, two more to go for my armor crafting!

Or... actually, let's see. Skinning the wolf, because this time I'm smart and won't have to carry on all this weight, that's 10 more xp, and then crafting the leather chest... which actually took 15 minutes to finish and made me a bit paranoid doing so in the middle of the forest, but granted me another 100xp!

But now I feel a bit stupid because if I had killed and skinned just four more bunnies I would have leveled already... But it doesn't matter, leather armor! Leather armor! Although I was disappointed that I couldn't actually throw my rags away, it seems wearing the armor directly on top of my skin made me a bit itchy, my Pdef finally had shown a noticeable increase already.

I resummoned my pets, inscribed my dagger once more, and off we go, let's go find those pants... I mean wolves!

I continued on, trying to use both mine and Dirt-kun's skill to find more prints until suddenly I started hearing incomprehensible whisperings from somewhere on my left. Naturally, I approached, with camouflage on this time, and as slowly as I could towards the voices.

In a tiny natural clearing, right in between the trunks of a few huge trees, three disgusting small humanoids were sitting. Even with my height, they would barely reach above my waist if they were to stand up. Their sickly green skin was spotted with patches of brownish skin and their eyes were a pale yellow with red irises. Each of them was grabbing some form of raw meat, using his dirty, razor sharp and pointy teeth to tear on the raw flesh, devouring it. The only thing covering their immodest appearance was a torn piece of rugged leather around their waists. Next to two of them, short sticks, like rough clubs, rested, while the third one had a crude and rusty looking dagger sloppily dropped next to him.

I motioned my two pets to assault the dagger wielding goblin, and they instantly rushed out of the bush I was using for cover.

One of the club using goblins shouted something while he pointed towards the advancing Dirt-kun, and as in sync, all three of them grabbed their weapons and jumped up from their spots, but not before Windy-chan had a chance to unload her punches on the goblin.

Amidst the chaos of the screeching goblins, I sneaked towards the back of the dagger wielding one, and backstabbed and then stabbed it as per usual, readying the pebble on my left hand to be launched towards it. To my surprise, the goblin just fell down, dead before I even had the chance to throw the stone burst.

At this point, a sharp and numbing pain invaded me right from my left knee, where the club of a goblin struck me, forcing me to kneel down to the ground, screaming in pain as a -10 number floated in front of my eyes, the swing of the second goblin landed squarely on my chest, where thankfully the leather armor helped to numb and redistribute the force of the blow equally on its surface, a -5 number appearing this time instead.

Swearing in a hastily makeshift language, I tossed the pebble that was still in my hand towards the goblin that had struck my face, hitting him square in the face before it exploded into a million razor-sharp splinters. The goblin screamed as it dropped his club, backpedaling blinded as his hands moved to clutch his bloodied face. My two elementals were already on top of the other goblin, pummeling him with fists, Dirt-kun finally having an opponent that wasn't like four time his size... this time it was just double!

Before the goblin that had dropped his weapon had a chance to recover, I had already retrieved one of my blasting rocks from my inventory, which was promptly thrown right on his body, leaving a large black burn mark as the goblin fell down dead.

Ignoring the blue screens that appeared in front of me, I quickly used stab which had come out of cooldown on the last goblin, dropped my dagger on the ground, taking two stone burst stones out of my inventory, one in each hand, and threw them, point blank, one after another on his chest.

Looking at the scene of carnage that lay on my feet, I hastily recovered both my dagger as well as the rusty metal dagger of the goblin, and then stared at the three dead bodies, unsure how I was supposed to take proof of their killing back to their village. The whole “cut an ear off”, when looking their disgusting bodies and vile blood, didn't seem really appealing at the moment.

About a minute after I started pondering and fighting with my inner self about cutting parts out of their bodies for proof, something that has never happened when fighting the rabbits and the wolves happened. The bodies of the goblins shined softly for a second and then they started disintegrating into motes of blue and green light that swiftly dived into the earth below them, leaving only the tattered leather they used as clothes, their sticks, and three tiny green crystals behind. The mechanics behind the lore about how monster's energy feeds back into the earth, allowing even stronger monsters to be born becoming apparent. I just hoped that those tiny crystals, actually named , would be enough proof for the quest.

But all this was trivial. One thing mattered way more. Level three baby! Oh yeah! The stat point going once again towards intelligence, and the skill point obviously towards Infused elementals.