《SwordGate》Chapter Seven
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I woke up a few hours later still underneath the tree. I could appreciate the lack of ants and other small forest bugs. However, as I noticed now, it was nighttime. My stomach rumbled again.
I should probably get to an actual inn. I’ve barely made it two miles away from the abbey much less closer to a town, I thought to myself. I packed up my kit that was laying on the ground, mostly just my bag, secured it to the pony and saddled up and went on my way.
For quite a while I listened to the birds chirp and just trotted my pony down the road. The road had to lead somewhere so I wasn’t too worried about where I was going. I just slowly trotted down the road for what seemed like a couple hours. I may have nodded off in the saddle a couple times due to the leisurely pace and such, but nobody bothered me. I felt like that stood as a testament to how large this world really was, that I could nod off for maybe 30 minutes while riding my horse, auto-pathing down the road, deep in the wilderness where there may or may not be people, and be completely fine, PvP fines notwithstanding.
I took a minute to really explore my UI, now that I had a minute away from opening chests and weird NPCs and really cool armor. There was: An EXP bar at the bottom of my screen for my class, right in the bottom middle. Not too heavy-handed for placement, just a thin bar filling with green EXP. I currently just had a 75% full EXP bar for opening those chests, so I guess you get EXP when you find treasure.
Which totally means I could probably power level up to at least ten if not fifteen if the EXP didn’t scale with my level, which to be honest, most games nowadays did have scaling EXP levels from monsters and quests and such, so…
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I had a few buttons in the bottom right hand corner of my screen. Character, Inventory, Collectables, Professions, and Skills. I had a feeling more would be added as time went on. I opened up the Professions window by willing it open, but it was an empty window with a background image of a fountain pen and some lined paper. The window was empty, besides that.
On top of my EXP bar was my Skill bar. Right now there were ten slots, with the first one having an “auto-attack” skill on it and the next having a “Heal” skill. I glanced at the skill so the tooltip for the skill would come up.
Skill: Heal
Heals the user or targeted player for 150 HP.
Speaking of HP, I didn’t even know how many points of Constitution equaled my current stats. I pulled up my character window, which I probably should have just done in the first place.
Setari
Level 1 Naz’catec Cleric (75%/100%)
Str: 7 (22)
Con: 7 (15)
Agi: 7 (12)
Int: 7 (10)
Per: 7
Cha: 7
Lck: 9
Health and Mana values are hidden by default, enable these in the options menu.
Additional stats are not listed, such as Movement Speed, Vampirism, and Armor, etc. Stats boosted from armor are listed in the parenthesis.
My clothes (chestpiece, pants, et cetera) were plain noob clothes as well as having 4 empty trinket slots and 5 empty ring slots, an empty necklace slot and an empty cloak slot, as well as not having a belt or gloves for the moment.
I was surprised they didn’t list the additional off-stats, but figured those probably weren’t on a lot of pieces of armor and I just got lucky with that rare piece. However, I was extremely curious about the unidentified Trinket, but unfortunately the text color of the trinket wasn’t indicative of the actual rarity, it’s just how the unidentified items were colored, otherwise I would have thought I’d had an in-between rarity (between Legendary and Epic) item or something. Previously having looked up some beginner information on the forums was already paying off and making me look like less of a noobie, mentally anyway. To nobody in-particular, I thought to myself.
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I saw a stick standing out of the ground ahead of me through all of my translucent windows in my vision. I willed all the windows to close and before pulling up to what looked to be a signpost giving directions, opened my options menu and made sure all notifications were minimized, including chat notifications. Didn’t want those popping up in the middle of a fight and killing me with “You’ve leveled up!” notifications. I had watched many a video of people dying to those things. Not me, no sir!
I pulled up to the sign and read the two signs, judging by my map, both going opposite directions to the north-east and north-west. The north-west sign read ‘Alakar’, and the north-east sign said ‘Eunuch’.
Who names an entire city ‘Eunuch?!’ I thought to myself. This was a strange game indeed. However, one thing I had learned about the game from browsing the website and the forums was that most cities were player-run. NPCs may have set up shop in the cities, but the cities were ruled by the players. NPC-run cities were very rare, but tended to be in better shape than the Player-run cities. But the Player-run cities definitely had more of a homely feel to them, whereas the NPC-run cities were more orderly and defined.
I turned my mount towards the city of Eunuch and spurred my pony onwards.
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