“This book was going to be the pinnacle of my career”, Great High Mage “Lord of Darkness”, ruler of the guild Shadow thought to himself. He was writing in a blank skill-book, creating a new spell. He had decided to name this new spell Oblivion, and he was going all-out “Kills every enemy in the zone.” he wrote. If he just left it like that, his friend in the corner would definitely make unwanted adjustments.

Called by many different names by thousands of different players, God, Mainframe, PleaseDontKillMe!!, and more, but the name Lord of Darkness called him was System. They were the world’s first sentient AI, but instead of ruling the world, as most people feared, System thought that this was much too inefficient, and instead, they made and ruled a virtual world, called System’s PLAYGROUND, or just PLAYGROUND for short. It was their job, as creator of this world, to balance the game and make it fair, in the loose sense of that word.

To reduce the chance of this, Lord of Darkness added some more words to the book “It has a varying mana cost and can be cast with either 1 MP per 10 HP or 1000 MP per health bar”. This was not cheap, given that there were typically hundreds of enemies in maps and the high-tier bosses had well over a million HP, but still, this skill would probably have a very long cooldown, so Lord of Darkness wrote something else: “It has no cooldown; instead it afflicts the user with a debuff Touch of Oblivion, which prevents mana regeneration, including potions for 30 minutes.” Such an effect would cripple a mage, much worse than simply not being able to cast the spell for a day or two.

Next, was the learning cost. “Requires level 50 to learn; Effect upon learning: Immediately kill every enemy in the zone, cost free. Apply debuff Fester of Oblivion, an irremovable effect which gradually depletes your HP across 15 minutes and prevents healing. Upon certain death, you are unable to play for 7 days, and upon joining, you will create a new character, a new self, with the spell Oblivion.”. This was the real cost of Oblivion: creating a new level 0 character, from the extremely difficult to obtain level 50, Lord of Darkness being only level 70 himself, a good 5 levels above the rest of all the players, with the average player who joined from the start, 5 years ago only level 45 or so. It was a huge loss; one Lord of Darkness was prepared to make. He was bored.

Looking over the spell one more time, he passed it over to System to look over. No surprises, there were changes. Surprisingly, they were buffs. The wording of the action had changed: from “Kills every enemy in the zone” to “Massacres every enemy in the area”. There was no change with the mana cost, and the cooldown’s debuff had no change. However, after it were the next few words: “Upgrading this spell reduces duration of Touch of Oblivion”. It was a huge perk, later down the line. Less wait time would be awesome. There was a small change to the debuff Fester of Oblivion, “… a new self, starting with spells ≪Oblivion≫ and ≪Touch of Oblivion≫”, and beneath that, was a whole new spell, “≪Touch of Oblivion≫”, which applies the effect of the same name for 30 seconds to the enemy, with a 5 minute cooldown. The effect lasts thrice as long if the user is also under the effect.

Lord of Darkness had one last request to make: a method of obtaining said spell-book, apart from creating it. He introduced a new consumable, a scroll called “Hell’s Blood”. Requiring a recipe occasionally dropped from bosses in Hell mode dungeons, each rank of Hell’s Blood significantly increases the difficulty of an already extremely difficult dungeon; however, rewards are also significantly higher, and Hell’s Blood for the next rank are occasionally dropped, even rarer the recipes. Each recipe requires a flat 50 pure paper, and 50 demon’s blood per tier. A spell-book containing Oblivion, only drops from bosses in tier 3 Hell’s Blood. Impossible, but yet, not quite impossible.

He and the System talked for a bit more, System suggesting two new titles: One Man Standing, which is achieved when, in a team battle of 100 players or more, the rest of your team dies, yet you still win. Its effects are a 50% buff to all stats during solo battles, and another title, which Lord of Darkness was going to get, “Survivor of Oblivion”, which is achieved upon learning Oblivion, with the slightly overpowered effects of a 10% chance to not receive damage, upped to 50% when under the effects of Touch of Oblivion.

With the meeting over, and skill-book in hand, Lord of Darkness went to begin preparations for his downfall.