2 Back home

Samar was unbuckling his belt, taking out the electronics, gadgets, belt and putting all of these into a tray, and placing them in the conveyor belt for airport inspection. Mihir was also doing the same thing. But Mihir remembered that he had found a button in the sword pendant so the pendant might have electronics in it and was worried that his pendant would be caught by the airport authorities but Samar wasn't troubled with such thoughts. Mihir then thought the confidence Samar had about the pendant not being detected was the right move to make as he remembered passing with many different objects in hand while going through airport security.

Samar had safely crossed the metal detector and had reached an inspector for further inspection, the inspector found the pendant hanging on Samar's neck, but let it go as it seemed like an ordinary pendant with a little blue light. Mihir was now confident about the security and similarly crossed the security. Mihir was now convinced that the material that the pendant was made of wasn't metal and it had advanced electronics.

Both the friends were on a flight- Kathmandu to keshmer, As they were on the plane they had put their phones on airplane mode.

Samar opened his Incremental game, There was a text

" <Level- 1>"

"<Strength- 100>"

"<Vitality- 1000>"

"<Agility -100>"

At the bottom of the screen, where there were various tabs, one of the tab was black karma which was available, all the other tabs were hidden.

Samar clicked on the Black karma, the new tab opened:-

" <You earn black karma by bringing remorse, pain to others while you lose black karma if someone inflicts pain, injury, or remorse to you.>"

"<You can spend black karma to buy strength incrementer 1 costs 150: black karma>"

"<After unlocking strength incrementer 1 you will unlock various upgrades>"

"<Black karma: 0>"

Samar thought over what he had just seen and remembered this sword pendant is a black sword so he thought black karma must be related to it. But he was unhappy that he had to inflict pain to others to gain black karma which was also difficult for him.

But he wanted to try it so, he pressed the "Activate" button on the screen and then pinched Mihir, Mihir thought Samar had done it playfully and ignored him and went black to sleep. Then Samar gazed back into his phone to see 25 dark karma added to his previous zero, then he thought that does only physical pain count or saying hurtful things also gave black karma so he poked the passenger in front of him and said: "Ma'am I know you farted could you please stop doing so or go to the lavatory to do such smelly business." This was a childish act, but the experimentation was important. The passenger ignored him but when Samar checked his phone he found out that he had earned 10 black karma.

Samar was now curious about what was in Mihir's incremental game so he woke him up and asked him to open his incremental game. The basic interface was the same as that of Samar's game but Mihir didn't have a black karma tab instead he had a white karma tab. Mihir opened the white karma tab:

"<You earn white karma by providing service and material goods to people and bringing them joy while you lose white karma by taking service and material goods from others>"

"<You can spend white karma to buy strength incrementer 1 costs 150: white karma>"

"<After unlocking strength incrementer 1 you will unlock various upgrades>"

"<White karma: 0>"

Mihir was shocked by seeing this and thought he didn't understand the text properly, he thought that any service he took would have to be paid for. So it would be very difficult for him to earn back so much karma, but then he thought about his desk job of making computer applications which are bought by many people so he thought he would also earn big. But still, he didn't start the karma calculator as he would have gone into negative karma as the pilot and the crew were offering their services and Mihir was accepting it.

Both the friends planned that after they reached keshmer they would head to their flat. Both friends lived together.

...

James picked up his coffee and took a large sip and the caffeine kicked in, James was working an extra night shift, he glanced into his phone to see

" <Level- 1000>"

"<Strength- 1e6>" (e6== 10 raised to the power 6 that is 1000000)

"<Vitality- 1e7>"

"<Agility -9.8e5>"

"<skill-*****************>"

"<*********************>"

"<*********************> "

James's phone buzzes and a chat message appears. "Stacy- Two new players have Logged in and we don't know who these players are but we do know that they must have stumbled upon the game artifact."

James texted," James- then it should be no problem for us, see if they show up in the in-game chat, else we will have to pin down their location and visit them and invite them to our guild ;-) ;-) before the 'Guardian Angels' takes action. "

"Stacy - we need to be the first to contact them, it's already very rare that a player joins the game but here we have had two players join in"

James continues working in the office to grind white karma.

…

Mihir and Samar reach their home and get comfortable and take a long-awaited sleep in their soft bed.

The next morning Mihir activates his White karma calculator and heads to office where he was sure to find someone to serve and something to make, Mihir continues to work on the UI of the app which gave him 300 white karma and he also did a couple of debugging which gave him 700 more karma. When he reached home late at night he was left with only 500 karma, the rest of the karma was expended on people and the essentials he bought.

Samar, on the other hand, had already activated the black karma calculator and now he wanted to earn 150 black karma, so he said many hurtful things to strangers and also threw stones at dogs which gave him 55 black karma in total. From all the nuisance he created, he got 155 black karma.

Mihir wanted to see if his karma calculator goes to negative karma, but currently, he had 500 white karma so he would have to wait and see if it reaches zero and then try taking services and material goods from others.

As soon as both Samar and Mihir reached the 150 karma requirements, they bought the incrementor1 of strength. Then they learned that this incrementer gives 1 strength every hour so both the friends had got 12-13 strength points from idling the night, as they went to sleep for the night.

The next day early morning they saw that they had other incrementer buying options unlocked for agility and vitality too in the new tab "Shop".

Also, they had unlocked the Monsterland and In-game chat.

The boys had believed till now that the sword pendant was not of this world, it might have been an ancient artifact that has evolved into a modern world or it might be an alien technology which the aliens might have dropped while checking out the tallest mountain of them all.

Still, the pendant/game was vastly unclear in what it did. So Mihir was checking to see if he could know more about it on the internet, but like the usual games which had information on how the game works and also had good community support with discord or whatever, this game had nothing as such. When Mihir googled "the Incremental games" he didn't get any info about this game instead he saw many incremental games. The only option he was left with was joining the in-game chat.

The in-game chat at this hour was filled with players requesting others to solo the dungeon with them so that they could accumulate exp, Mihir didn't understand what it meant as he didn't have any such( option of the dungeon ) options in his game at the time, but he saw someone named Stacy reply to such request asking for gold coins in return. The in-game chat was newly unlocked and Mihir and Samar didn't have much time to check it out, it was their first time entering the chat. Some people were also flooding the chat with a request to add them as friends but the boys didn't do any such thing..

There were many others in the chat too. "<TheSuperman1944: We welcome all the members of the level above 100, guild tag is #12wqemak, Happy Hunting>" was spammed in the chat.

While two of the players were debating about the meta of the game and were debating that black karma users benefit more from the violence in the game while the white karma users have to be a picky fighter.

There was also a chat going on about the existence of aliens but the odd thing about this chat was THAT only one guy was pressing on the point that the aliens were a myth and the rest were supporting the existence of otherworldly creatures.

Samar was looking into Mihirs's game and both Samar and Mihir were overwhelmed with all the content in this peculiar game. They thought that this in-game chat is not the place to talk at the moment as there were too many people already in the chat.

So they made sure to check out MonsterLand.