Chapter 65 - A moment of error wasting a lifetime effort

Ever played fire in the mountain game? Does it match to what happens when there is real fire in mountain?

Saachi was now playing catch me if you can game....with a herd of mega goats. Only...it was thousand or more times dangerous. If not for the pendant, he would have died long back. The pendant was absorbing most of the skills thrown by mega goats. But even then, suffering from less than 10% of damage was enough to turn his HP bar red. He kept on chugging high efficacy HP potions as soon as CD ended and was running mindless, wherever there was free space to run and dodge especially.

It might seem he would die any moment. True enough. It might seem he would fail the assessment. Not true. Thanks to special properties of the pendant, which Saachi had tried to identify but failed, it was absorbing the evil energy permeating in the map and also slowly absorbing demonified energy from those special monsters.

So only thing he had to do was to survive, survive till all the evil energy was sucked from monsters and the map.

It took a long time. It must be remembered that he came into the game early and had just checked few difficult monsters. And he was still running when the alarm beep reminding to log off, he ignored it completely and continued running.

Though this game was supposed to second world, the game developers had done their best to restrict few things too, to help the newcomers, newbies. That's why even a novice clothing and weapons were still gorgeous. Not to the extent of those blank , purchase by cash only, accessories but they were good. They looked clean, nice and felt good too.

Likewise the monster hunting was PG-15 rated. The blood and gore was not too much. The issues of stamina, fatigue were also vague, to support the newbies.

So inspite of running around, climbing and jumping for few hours, Saachi was okay, not good but okay. Few moments of terror where he barely scraped by. Few moments of near vertigo when jumping from high cliffs. Many many moments of his HP bar turning red. In between were system alerts for hunger, stamina loss and fatigue.

Niyam (Saachi's avatar in game) turned into bulimic patient working on recovery. He would eat voraciously whatever he found from his bag and run around, working out.

(A/N - Forgive this author for not penning paragraphs about aerial acrobatics and running done for hours. A trailer of such moves can be read or seen but unless one is facing death continuously and standing in knife's edge, the description would be just that ..a boring description.)

Saachi was in a quandary. His high efficacy and normal potions were depleting. He had no idea if the food and water would last. He was getting tired mentally to be focused for so long. But ...he had spent so many hours and wasted so many consumables ,so he did not want to give up. The game had no marker or scale to describe the mental burden due to excessive and constant focus. If not for the fact that the magical attacks were becoming less and less in frequency and attack rate, he would have given up completely.

Finally.... finally, the quest log showed he had completely removed evil energy. He jumped and ran towards spirit bearer hoping against hope that the mega goats would not attack him too. His wish turned true. Few of the mega goats which had come near the border of the map were pacified by NPC, (Saachi did not hear or watch the process. He did not have enough strength for that) and NPC turned to face Saachi with a beaming face. Did those crazy mega goats say something?

If this was real life, Saachi would be barfing and collapsing, thankfully, in the game, he simply collapsed. He desperately wanted to log off and rest, but... greedy heart! He had worked off hours and swallowed some many consumables! The quest reward should be worth it.

Quest for strength - Purify

Difficulty- S+

Rewards - X2 times

Saachi's eyes glossed over EXP and other things, they were just numbers right now. He skipped to other portion - An orb 'A moment's error'. An exceedingly rare object. Even his 'identify'skill turned out to be useless.

The description was so vague that Saachi had to ask NPC for details. ...blah blah blah....our rich heritage....only rarest prodigies are allowed to use..... lots of idioms were used like 'crocked bottom leads to crooked top', 'a moment of error to waste away effort of lifetime '...Long story short, it was something to correct the error in learning. If a skill or physique or....fill the blanks with whatever, was used and person was unsure it was correct way or not, he could use the orb, a mystic object to learn more about it. Basically, it made video of that timing and showed what had gone wrong, what could go wrong and if errors are small enough, how to correct them.

NPC was still going on and on about his cultural heritage when Saachi logged off, due to system interference. His mentally fatigued brain could not bear the burden of having a mystic object and it shut itself off and the game went to autosave mode. In rare cases when player has to log off due to health issues or other issues (like burglary, fire, flood etc), the auto save mode would occur. The game would be frozen at that moment. (similar to what Saachi and company had faced during update)

A/N - The next chapter is 'Why Saachi should not die in game '