Getting out of the capsule is painful with his strained muscles, and he is quite glad that the lid to it opens automatically rather than having to push it up. He shambles his way to the dining room, a mixture of lack of sleep and the workout that the capsule gives him making him feel like he is dying.

He arrives as the massive hardwood table, with plates already set up, a roast lamb set up on a platter in the middle of the table. His sister soon copies the shuffle he had done earlier as she makes her way to her seat. His father is seated at the head of the table, and everyone is grouped up on that half of the table, his mother and sister two the two sides of his father, with Sen slightly further out next to Lynna.

His father soon distributes the food, and everyone starts to eat, both Sen and Lynna devouring the food as fast as they can, the exercise from the capsule making their appetites very heavy. The meal is held in silence for a bit, until everyone starts to slow down for conversation.

His father places his knife and fork to the sides of his plate, and wipes his napkin before starting. “So the both of you stayed up all night playing that new game I take it?”

Sen and Lynna wince in sync. Their parents aren’t fans of their gaming, and only allow it because they both do an excellent job with their studies. Sen looks up, expecting to see disappointment, or annoyance in his father’s expression, but instead is greeted by a worried, pensive look.

“Do your best in that ‘game’.” His father says, focusing his speech on the word game so that the word is almost twisted into something else. “I’m not allowed to tell you anything, but that ‘game’ is going to be very important soon.” Tien says, again pushing the pronunciation of game.

Sen thinks for a moment, his father is one of the senators for Centrum, and has quite a few connections. He clearly knows something but isn’t allowed to say it. Sen’s brow creases, what the hell is going on? His father has always allowed them to play games, but he would never, ever, encourage them to play them.

“I still expect you to keep up with your schoolwork, but I suggest you spend as much time as you can in that damned thing,” Tien says in a defeated tone that matches his face. Jiu seems to be as confused by the revelation as Lynna and Sen are, her eyes practically bulging in surprise. She is the only reason Lynna and Sen are even allowed to play games, so seeing her husband encouraging them is utterly mind boggling for her.

The rest of the meal passes with everyone in confusion, and Lynna and Sen decide to go to bed, as it’s late enough in the day that their sleep schedules won’t be too messed up. Sen plops down onto his queen mattress with a plain blue comforter, and tries to come up with any reason that his father will be encouraging him to play fifth dimension.

He starts to feel like a conspiracy nut as he wonders if maybe it actually does have to do with aliens or a government conspiracy, but with his father’s position, those ideas may not be too far fetched. He tries to get some sleep, but even with the exhaustion he’s feeling from the lack of sleep and exercise from the capsule, he can’t seem to drift off into the land of dreams.

Getting up, he hops onto his computer, looking through the forums for any information about the game that would have caused his father’s reaction. He doesn’t find what he’s looking for, but everything being talked about is a bit too… clean. All of the conspiracy theories about the company seem to have disappeared into thin air, and he can’t find a lot of the posts that he had looked at before.

Clearly, there is something going on that is important enough to have some kind of cover-up. He starts looking at new posts in an attempt to find things before they get censored, but nothing shows up, and even making a post himself it disappears into the internet without actually being posted.

He eventually gives up and goes to bed even more stressed out than before, and drifts into a restless sleep filled with dreams of aliens and secret government projects. Waking in the morning is misery to him, the alarm he’d set to play more going off far before he’s had enough sleep. He slowly opens his eyes, and the fuzziness of the world fades into the sharp contours and bright colors of his well-lit room, the lights having come on with the alarm.

Looking outside, it’s still dark, and his muscles are aching from all the exertion yesterday, but he’s determined to spend as much time in game as he can for the rest of this weekend, even more so now that his father has encouraged him. His father saying something like he had the night before meant that doing well in the game is definitely going to be important, and with his highly competitive nature, this will simply drive him even more to be the best.

He does a quick stop by the restroom to keep up his personal hygiene, before walking back to his room and lying down in the plain white capsule and pressing the button for it to close over him. Once he’s back in game, a quick look over his physical condition shows he probably won’t be able to do much hunting today.

The question becomes what to do if he can’t be hunting for too much. In a week or two he’ll have adjusted to the strain a bit better, but for now he needs a restful day.

“Hey Tir, what should I do if I’m not hunting?”

“Join a school, play the market, learn a trade.”

“What trades are there?”

“The big three are alchemy, energy smithing, and array formation.”

“And those are?”

“Alchemy is using plants and monster parts to create potions, pills, and powders which have a variety of effects. Energy smithing is learning to input energy in certain patterns into a blade as it is cast or forged. Array formation is creating objects that cause energy resonance with each other to create various effects.”

Sen isn’t particularly interested in the first two, he’d tried alchemy and smithing before, and found it was usually overly simplified, or stupidly complicated. He had the feeling that this game would definitely be the latter. He hadn’t heard of array formation though. “Various effects?”

“Arrays can do anything from increasing the control one has over their energy, to creating areas that will bewilder or even kill anything that steps inside.”

Sen was starting to get interested. Increasing his control over energy would be massively helpful with practicing bones like air, and setting up arrays to lure monsters in could be quite fun as well. “So where would I go to learn arrays?”

“A school of course.”

Sen will have banged his head against a wall if he isn’t standing in the middle of an open square. “Why would you say there’s three options when I have to go to a school to learn a trade?”

“Arrays are the only trade that require a school. The others you learn in the commercial district.”

Sen grunted. That sort of made sense. He asks Tir a bit about the different schools he could learn arrays at, and eventually settles on a school named “Mountain’s Peak”. The reason he chooses this school isn’t actually for arrays, as all schools will have classes to learn arrays from, but because this school is one of the two which focus on two handed sword techniques. He’d decided on Mountain’s Peak instead of Inferno Ocean simply because Mountain’s Peak is only a single building down from the Lotus school.

He has Tir call him a vehicle, and is soon being driven to the part of the city that held the schools. He can see the Lotus banners waving in the breeze a couple complexes down, and looks to the school he plans to join. The buildings seem more squat than those of the complexes around, with dull red roofed tiles atop each of the buildings, and a mountain peak in the clouds upon a maroon color for their banner.

He stepped inside along with quite a few other people, and soon sees an old man behind a counter off to the side, with a short line in front of him. He gets in line behind a tall, bulky man, and is soon at the front.

“Hi, I’d like to join the school?”

The man behind the counter glances him over, nods his head, and passes over a booklet and a pin. “The rules are in the booklet, wear the pin on you at all times, class times and map are also in the booklet. Get along.”

Sen is a bit confused at how brief the conversation was, but steps off to the side and opens up the booklet regardless. The first few pages were a map with a guide to what each of the buildings was for. They have a trading area for trading in loot drops and energy crystals for contribution points, and paying contribution points for different skills and items, there is an array area, where they could use contribution points to enter arrays that would assist with the flow of energy, perfect for practicing skills, and a few classrooms.

The next two pages are class schedules, which will be hands on teaching for skills. Most of the classes are free, but only teach basic skills, while the more advanced ones also require contribution points. Interestingly, the skills that modify your body are one of the free options, but seeing as how there are only two short classes a day, it will take ages to learn it that way.

The last few pages are rules, which are just common courtesy things, like don’t run around naked, and don’t murder your schoolmates. He is about to close it when he sees a “Competitions” page at the very back.

There are both within and without school competitions, which will be held at the city’s arena, where there is no death penalty for losing. Sen is instantly interested. He hasn’t known how the competitive PVP would work, and while there is no ban on open-world PVP, he’s always been the type to prefer a competitive environment rather than the free-form PVP experience you get from the open world.

The prizes vary from skills to rare energy crystals, all of which interest him as well. At a quick look, the first competition will be tomorrow, and Sen instantly decides to enter in it. It is extremely unlikely that anyone has a stat over rank E at this point in time, so his swordsmanship will give him a massive advantage over the rest of the playing field.

Going back to the classes portion of the booklet, he notes that there will be an “arrays for beginners” class in thirty minutes, so to burn some time he heads over to the trading area of the school. Once he arrives, he sees a bunch of terminals, so he goes over to one, and sees that they have a list of different things that you could trade in your contribution points for.

A rank G core will get you five contribution points, a rank F will get you one hundred, a rank E will get you two thousand, and so forth. For a rank F skill, you need five thousand contributions points, which is much cheaper than buying a skill at the player market or one of the stores in the trade district.

With a quick question to Tir, he learns that you can only trade in cores and drops that you have hunted yourself for contribution points, to make it so that you can’t game the system by amassing all your cores on one person. While you can still give your cores to one person, they will have to pay the increased price at the player market or the NPC stores in the trade district.

He is enjoying looking through all the skills available, until his alarm he had set to get to the array class goes off.