Author's Note: I've gotten feedback from people, so I've decided to respond to them with some improvements that I've added to the Author's Notes.

Also, have you seen the new cover for the book? All thanks go to MeepFlare and his friend (both from wattpad) for making it!

An easy guide to the story (tells you what it means if I put things in bolded brackets, and stuff like that).

Spoiler :

EASY GUIDE TO THE STORY

(* *) means author's note (which I generally use to make comments as inside the story chapters).

[ ] refers to a skill or ability that is used. Right now there are no different markers for passive and active skills

'things in italics' Things in italics with the little apostrophe marks are someone's character's actual thoughts

***** If the asterisks form a small line and the next sentences start a line or 2 below it, it means either:

A) A change of viewpoint

OR

B) A time-skip

(which basically means stuff happened in-between 2 events, but I'm skipping over it to get

to whatever is happening in the present)

------------------------ Dashed lines in bold refer to where the chapter starts and/or stops

I'll add more if I do more things.

An easy guide to the different measurements (for people that are familiar with the metric system, and vice versa)

Spoiler :

GUIDE TO THE DIFFERENT MEASUREMENTS

10 feet is around 3 meters

1 mile is a little more than 1.5 kilometers

I'll add more if I find out more

A short description of each character that appears in this chapter (unless this is their debut chapter, or that it's a surprise for them to be in it). This is because people have been telling me it's hard to remember who each character is.

Spoiler :

Characters:

Zhang: Arrogant, greedy, manipulative and smart, with a surprisingly protective side when it comes to Misa. Likes to play the warrior/tank role, but is actually an unspecified (no class), which means he is a jack-of-all trades. Thinks that Wahshi (although he calls him "Washy") is an NPC which will lead him to a great quest. Still, he won't hesitate to use him for his original intended purpose (to be a meat-shield) if things get too rough. Currently suspected of being over level 200

Misa: Bloodthirsty, sadistic and uncaring, except for when it comes to the people she likes (which currently includes only Zhang). Has the overpowered hidden class Sun Mage which is supposed to focus on peace and pursuit of knowledge. She uses it to do whatever she wants, which usually ends up getting her in trouble with the Sun Spirit, whom all Sun Mages are contracted with. A mysterious event involving at least herself and one other person seems to have shaped who she has become. Currently suspected of being over level 200

Alexa: Cautious but with a good heart. A mysterious event seems to have caused Zhang and Misa to hate her deeply, but she still sees them as her 2 best friends who have been there for her for a long time. She struggles to try and make up for whatever happened in the past, causing her to more than once overlook Zhang and Misa's hatred and wrongdoings, even if it hurts herself in the process. Rogue-type player (actual class not mentioned yet). Currently suspected of being over level 200.

Wahshi: The Main Character. Real name Raes Bastion, framed for a crime he didn't commit and separated from his daughter while he was sent to prison for 20 years. What he wants to do now is earn enough money through the Virtual Reality game so that he can start searching for the daughter he lost, and maybe a little revenge on the way there against the people that framed him. Recently survived a trip through the Mist of Souls, which gave him abilities no other player has. He suspects that its not normal for a player to have started out that way. Currently an unspecified (no class). Currently level 1.

And a short recap of what's happened so far.

Spoiler :

CURRENT LOCATION:

Walking through the 2nd layer of the Boundary Forest where they managed to survive a battle with opponents that were over 60 levels above Zhang and his crew. They are now lost, and have no idea whether they are heading deeper into the forest or out of it. Everyone but Zhang hopes they're headed out.

ON TO THE STORY!!

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A chilly breeze blew past, making me wish that I had on more than just the robe I’d borrowed from Zhang. Goosebumps covered the skin of my naked arms as we walked on. It had started to get colder as the trees grew closer and closer together, and as less and less of the sunlight was able to get through the tree canopy. The plants and vegetation we were seeing now, all looked older. Bigger. Stronger. I wasn’t an expert on the wilderness or anything, but it was starting to look pretty obvious that we’d gone the wrong way. We were clearly headed deeper into the forest.

When we were walking through the 1st layer of the forest and into the 2nd, the vegetation had also gotten more crowded, all the trees looked bigger and taller, and there were more exotic plants to be found as well. Clearly the same thing was going on right now.

But if someone like me, who’d lived the city life his entire life could tell that we were headed the wrong way, these guys who’d been playing the game and been travelling all over this medieval fantasy world obviously should’ve noticed as well by now. Say what you want about them, but none of them were idiots.

‘So why the hell is no one saying anything about it?’

*******

“Alexa, scout around us while we keep moving. I don’t want us to end up in an even worse situation than before.” Misa ordered.

Of course, I didn’t refuse.

Grass crunched silently under my feet as I activated [stealth], and as we kept walking. While everyone else was walking in a straight line, I was walking in a big circle around the group.

It was already getting darker overhead. There were animal calls and the sounds of birds, grasshoppers, and everything else that you’d normally hear if you went walking around in an old forest with no modern roads. I have to admit, it was pretty nice. I have to admit, the company that made all of this knew what they were doing.

‘It’d be perfect if only this leather armor I was wearing didn’t chafe so much!’

They’d made the game too realistic in some ways!

‘I’m a level 200+ person with high quality troll-hide leather armor. You’d think that someone somewhere would’ve been able to make it comfortable to wear. Even if they could only make it a little more comfortable around the chest, I’d be willing to pay a lot more for it. This thing is killing my breasts!!’

I tried to keep it out of my mind by focusing on something else.

Zhang was at the front again, but this time Washy was following right behind him.

‘I feel bad for him. Parents in this age just can’t be more creative, I guess. Like the smith from back when I’d first started the game. It turns out that his only name was Smith. It’s what his father was, and what he wanted his son to be. Talk about having your future planned out for you.’

I could only imagine what his parents had actually wanted him to do for a living. Maybe he was a retired dishwasher at some inn or tavern?

Zhang was sure that we’d stumbled onto some kind of quest, but I wasn’t fully convinced. It was hard to be sure though. Quests in Awakening weren’t like quests in other games. You’d never know you were on one until you finished it!

Unlike other games, a Quest Notification window wouldn’t pop up, letting us know about any possible rewards if we finished it (or any punishments if we failed it). You wouldn’t know if you were on a C-Ranked quest to save a town or an E-Ranked quest to sweep the floor at a store unless you paid attention and put all the pieces together yourself. You couldn’t just hit a YES or NO button to accept or decline it either.

In short? Use your wits to figure everything out on your own.

At least the game developers hadn’t completely tried to make everything like reality. If you finished a quest, you’d at least get a Notification window telling you that you’d finished. It’d even have a short summary of all the actions you’d done that affected the quest, what the rewards were, and what Quest Rank it was.

I looked over at Washy.

‘Poor guy.’

He looked like he’d been through a lot. His black hair had more than a few streaks of white in it, and his lightly tanned skin already had a few wrinkles. I didn’t even want to look in his eyes sometimes. For whatever reason, I could tell that there was a lot of pain buried under there. It didn’t look like it was something he’d share, so I didn’t mention it.

Other than that though, he looked pretty healthy for a guy in his fifties.

Those weren’t the only reasons why I felt sorry for him though.

I knew what Zhang and Misa were going to do to him in case we ran into too much trouble. THAT’S why I felt sorry for him.

But what could I do? They were already dead set on it, and there was nothing left to talk about. I hadn’t had much of a vote in things ever since that night, and I was still trying to make it up to them somehow.

I didn’t want to lose 2 of the best friends I’d ever had.

The only thing I could do was hope that nothing big would happen, otherwise…

Putting that thought out of my head, I started thinking about the last battle that we had. Looking back, it was obvious what we were supposed to do.

The druids had obviously made the illusion and forced to think that we were all going to die of hunger. Then a mama bear and her cub suddenly walks past us?

It was too much of a coincidence. Like they say though, hindsight is in 20/20.

Obviously, we were supposed to have let them go. The bear had a kid that still needed her after all. But we didn’t let her go. Zhang killed her in one strike, in front of her cub.

True, it all turned out to be an illusion and a test (one that they said we failed), but I wondered if that made us bad people?

Even if you ignored that part, the way the battle ended was really weird though. Why’d they all start attacking each other? Thinking back, even if it looked like they didn’t like each other, everything was almost perfectly coordinated. (Except for the part with the giant roots smashing down on everybody, but that was because of Misa’s spell stopping the Druids halfway through their long chant).

They were more than 60 levels above us, they outnumbered us 25-1, AND they were better at fighting and magic. There was NO WAY we should’ve been able to win that fight.

But we did…. Somehow.

‘It was supposed to be impossible. Misa was almost down for the count. Her [Solar Flare] spell’s rebound should’ve been so bad that she’d have died from one hit, and with almost no mana to do anything about it.

Zhang’s already told us about why he didn’t jump in to do anything before Misa used her spell. I didn’t even know you could get status debuffs that way…

And I was running around them in circles, throwing out needles covered in Alpha Slime Acid at any of the monsters that came close. Just a short time after all of that, the monsters started to kill each other, and we all just stood on guard and watched.’

Wait a second…

‘Where was Washy during all of this? I saw him slipping a knife out of his boot at the start, but he disappeared during the battle.’

She scrunched up her eyebrows in thought.

‘He wasn’t in league with the monsters…. Was he?’

As soon as the thought popped into her head, she just as quickly dismissed it.

For an old village man like him to be in league with monsters? It was like suspecting a morbidly obese sumo wrestler with dozens of ripples and layers of belly fat to actually be a skinny man in a fat suit. It was so ridiculous that you wouldn’t even be able to hold it in your mind for less than a second.

Still, as she kept circling her friends (and Washy), she couldn’t quite get the suspicion out of her mind.

‘If he wasn’t in league with the monsters, then what was he doing while we were all fighting for our lives?’ It wasn’t an easy question to answer for her.

There were only a few things she could think of, and none of them sounded realistic to her at all.

‘We were in the middle of a clearing surrounded by a hundred monsters, and being stampeded towards by almost half of them.

He either slipped past the wave and survived somewhere in the middle of that crowd that wanted to kill him, caused some kind of misunderstanding somehow between the 2 types of monsters that were there, or Zhang is right and he’s more than what he looks like and has some sort of special skill.’

She shook her head slightly.

‘Get a grip Alexa,’ she admonished herself. ‘You’re reading WAY too much into this. He’s just an old man that we’re helping to find his way back home. Odds are, you were just too distracted by all the monsters to notice him.’

Still, it couldn’t hurt to check with someone else, right? Even if it was as ridiculous as it sounded, she was the group’s voice of reason and caution. It wasn’t like Misa or Zhang could do it after all, and no matter what they thought of her now, she still thought of them as her 2 best friends that had been there for her through thick and thin.

With that in mind, she did one more lap around the group, this time a little farther out, until she was once again near Misa. Had to make sure that we weren’t going to fall into an ambush or a trap.

Or more likely a giant Venus Fly Trap that ate people. Hey, this was a game world full of magic. Anything could happen.

And in case there was something going on, Misa would definitely have to know about it. Cancelling her [stealth] skill, it looked like she appeared out of thin air next to her friend. Anyone else would’ve been surprised, but Misa didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

*****

“Misa,”

Like a ninja, Alexa suddenly appeared right next to me.

I’d always felt like jumping whenever she did that, but I made sure that it never showed.

“What?” My tone was brisk and a little harsh as I answered. I didn’t care either.

Alexa didn’t look surprised, so she was probably already used to it by now. There was a lot she was probably already used to getting from us by now. She deserved it too, the little sh*t. Still, if she had stopped walking around to make sure that we were safe, then it must’ve been important. It probably wasn’t something she wanted Washy to hear, or she would’ve just told all of us at once.

Since I didn’t even hear it over the [Party Chat], it was safe to assume that she didn’t even want Zhang to know about it.

My mage robes fluttered in the small breeze that kept passing through. It was getting darker overhead too. Whether it was because the gaps in the canopy above us were getting smaller and couldn’t let as much light in, or the fact that we’d been in this forest for hours and the sun was going down, I really didn’t know for sure. It was probably both.

It didn’t really matter to me either way. My robes were enchanted with Solar Energy, so I’d be warm as long as it didn’t get too ridiculously cold. I could even be my own flashlight if I needed to.

The darkening shadows and the cold air all helped to make a strange atmosphere around us, as it helped to give Alexa give a serious look about her.

"In the last battle, do you remember seeing Washy at all?”

The question caught me off-guard. I arched an eyebrow and stared at her. “What’s with all the sudden interest in Zhang’s latest pet project?”

“It might be nothing, but I can’t remember seeing him at all after the battle started. The whole thing was pretty fishy already, and the way that it ended was even weirder. I can’t help but think that there’s something about the old man….”

I caught on. It wasn’t difficult to follow. We were suddenly ambushed, in a battle that even I knew it shouldn’t have been possible for us to win… and then suddenly we did. All the monsters started killing each other off, and we just had to stand there and be on guard for any strays that might’ve come near us.

I felt a chill on the back of my neck.

It wasn’t because of the breeze either.

It was because I really hadn’t seen where that NPC had gone. I was too busy being drained and somewhat helping Zhang keep our enemies off us with small fireballs. I knew there was no way that Zhang could’ve known where Washy had been either, since he’d been protecting me the entire time.

So then where the hell was Washy during all of this?

I looked over at said ‘NPC’. The muddied back of the old robe that Zhang had given him was all I saw, but suddenly I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to let him be so close to somebody I cared about.

Alexa caught my gaze.

She looked back at me and understood exactly what was going through my mind. I didn’t like how quickly she picked up my train of thought, but that wasn’t something I could change. Unfortunately, we’d already known each other for too long.

There was just too much that didn’t add up. I had a feeling that this ‘NPC’ might not be all that he said he was.

Alexa tilted her head slightly, and I nodded in confirmation. We were definitely going to have to watch this ‘Washy’ more closely. If there was even a hint that he was dangerous, we were going to take him out before he could do any damage at all.

It was just too bad that we couldn’t let Zhang in on anything. Knowing him, he wouldn’t believe anything we said at this point. He’d already convinced himself that he was on the trail of a great quest, and that Washy was his ticket there. Trying to change his mind now was like trying to stop a train by punching it with your bare hands.

We already knew we’d lose.

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Don't forget to RATE/REVIEW/COMMENT!!

Author's Note: So what did you think of the chapter? Anything that's missing, or could be better? Let me know!

Also, what did you guys think about the other stuff i put in the beginning Author's Note? Was it useful? If it was annoying, then I don't have to put it down each chapter.

Should be up by end of this weekend or by end of Monday

Wahshi's Status:

Spoiler :

STATUS WINDOWNAME:WAHSHILEVEL:1RACE:HUMANGENDER:MALECLASS:NONEMONEY:0G 1S 0C, $0

TITLES:FIRST-BORN OF THE MISTFAME:100INFAMY:0HEALTH:105 (+5)MANA:120 (+100)

STRENGTH:18 (+10)INTELLIGENCE:10 (+10)(+3)DEXTERITY:10 (+10)(-2)WILLPOWER:2 (+10)(+7)VITALITY:10 (+10)CHARISMA:0 (+10)AGILITY:10 (+10)DEFENSE:10 (+10)(+1)LUCK:7 (+10)

Wahshi's Skills and Abilities:

Spoiler :

SKILL LISTPASSIVEFIRST-BORN OF THE MIST:

ELDEST: YOU ARE THE OLDEST CHILD OF YOUR CLAN, AND THEREFORE THE STRONGEST. +1 TO ALL STATS FOR EVERY MISTBORN IN THE WORLD, EXCLUDING YOURSELF (CURRENT NUMBER OF MISTBORN: 1 [YOURSELF])

PLAYER:

PERSEVERE: YOU HAVE GONE THROUGH INCREDIBLE PAINS TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOAL. WHEN HEALTH IS LESS THAN 50%, PAIN DECREASES 1% PER ADDITIONAL PERCENT OF HEALTH LOST

ACTIVEBORN OF THE MIST:

SOUL ORIGIN (BEGINNER RANK): YOU HAVE ACCOMPLISHED A FEAT FEW WOULD KNOW ABOUT, AND DISCOVERED THE BIRTHPLACE OF YOUR SOUL. TRAVEL TO THE MIST OF SOULS IS NOW POSSIBLE UNDER CERTAIN CONDITIONS, IF THE COST IS PAID.

ACTIVATION REQUIREMENTS: ??? ACTIVATION COSTS: ???

ABILITY LIST[tr]PLAYER:

MENU: Access to a game-like interface

RESURRECTION: May be re-born 10 hours after death (game-time)

INVENTORY: Access to a small, pocket-dimension which can hold belongings up to a certain limit

LOG OUT: Return to your original world

BORN OF THE MIST:

MIST FORM (LVL 1): FIRM CONVICTION IN WHAT YOU THOUGHT WAS TRUE ABOUT YOUR ORIGINS HAS ENABLED YOU TO TURN BACK INTO THE MIST THAT SPAWNED YOU

AT 1ST LEVEL, TURNS YOUR ENTIRE BODY INTO MIST. HIGHER LEVELS WILL ALLOW YOU TO CONTROL WHAT PART OF YOUR BODY YOU WISH TO TURN.

AT 1ST LEVEL, MIST FORM CAN STAY ACTIVE FOR A MAXIMUM OF 2 SECONDS. ABILITY MAY BE CANCELLED AT ANY TIME.

ACTIVATION REQUIREMENTS: NONE

ACTIVATION COST: 2% of Max Health

TITLE EFFECTS

FIRST-BORN OF THE MIST: +10 TO ALL STATS, ACCESS TO MISTBORN ABILITIES WHEN DISCOVERED, ACCESS TO UNIQUE ABILITIES GIVEN ONLY TO THE HOLDER OF THIS TITLE (IF DISCOVERED), PASSIVE SKILL “ELDEST”

Wahshi's Equipment:

Spoiler :

UNKNOWN SCHOLAR’S ROBE (MODIFIED)[NO LEVEL REQUIREMENT]A ROBE OF UNKNOWN STYLE AND DESIGN. ONCE, IT GAVE OFF AN AIR OF SCHOLARLY NOBILITY. CHANGED TO MAKE IT BETTER FOR BATTLE, IT IS NOW PROOF THAT EVEN THE LOFTIEST OF SCHOLARS WILL FIGHT IF NEED BE.DEXTERITY -2, INTELLIGENCE +3, WILLPOWER +7, DEFENSE +1

TRUSTY IRON KNIFENO REQUIREMENTSA GIFT FROM THE SPIRITS OF THIS WORLD, TO ALL WHO HAVE COME TO ITSTRENGTH +1

BOOTS NO REQUIREMENTSA GIFT FROM THE SPIRITS. ALTHOUGH LOW QUALITY, IT MIGHT LAST IF YOU TAKE GOOD CARE OF IT. IT WON'T DO MUCH BUT SLIGHTLY PROTECT YOUR FEET THOUGH.