3 Aiym Forest
(Author's Comment: I decided to try and wrap my head around a unique questing system for monsters. Since they cannot receive quests like normal from cities or NPC their quests come in the form of territory expansion. If you have other ideas in the comments on quests that monsters players can do, please comment about them. I need ideas to expand on this system and the majority of this story will be during Yggdrasil's run time.)
Treech opened his eyes groggily. His eyes were unfocused as he glanced around him. His thoughts were sluggish and slow.
'Where... am I?' He sat up from the dirt floor.
Surrounding him were tall redwood trees, similar to the ones he first saw in Yggdrasil, but this time he seemed to be in a different location. He noticed a few moving trees near him. Treant's 5-12 meters tall swayed around near him. They were moving positions around a nearby stream of water.
(Author's note: I made it so Heteromorph players will spawn near their racial classes/monsters area. Those monsters will not be immediately hostile to Heteromorph players. Ex: Vampire players respawn near vampires.)
He noticed the HUD was still in the corner of his view. A notice prompted him from his daze.
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You have died.
Beginners' protection period prevents level loss. Time left: [20:35:32]
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Treech's eyes widened and he let himself sprawl out onto the ground again. He stared past the notification prompt and saw the dark blue sky of Vanaheim.
"I am still here..." He held his green hand in front of his face.
"Haha" Treech let out a quiet laugh.
He knew he should be dead. He felt the poison affecting his brain, so what the hell happened? Did his human body recover from the suicide serum? Did that dealer give him a faulty product?
He looked over at the HUD section for Logout. He felt completely defeated. Even when he planned for so long to get a hold of the suicide serum for a painless death. He still couldn't die. He selected the [Logout] option on his character screen and prepared to face the reality of the situation.
He would have to commit suicide another way. He might have irreparable brain damage and he doesn't plan to live his life anymore anyway.
He waited until a full minute passed, but he still hadn't logged out. He clicked the [Logout] button again just to be sure.
...
'What is the matter. Why is it taking so long?' Treech thought to himself. He continued to click the logout button every few minutes. He watched the Treants settle their roots fully into the sides of the river bed as eventually, a full 30 minutes passed.
Treech now was fairly certain something had happened that was not supposed to. He couldn't log out... He began to think through everything that had happened, trying to organize his thoughts. He picked up a small twig from nearby and began using it to write on the dirt ground. He always needed to write down his thoughts when making big decisions or faced with complicated situations.
A few minutes passed before he threw the twig to the side and rubbed out his notes.
"I succeeded, I guess," Treech said. His voice was gritty like bark with an ethereal slight echo.
Treech had a thousand thoughts going through his mind, but the most prominent one was that he felt he had succeeded in escaping his life as a slave for Tesla. He guessed that something had happened at the moment of his death. Perhaps... PERHAPS his mind was kept alive in the game character he had just created.
"That shouldn't be possible, right? But then how am I here. Why can I not log out?" Treech concluded that for now, he would assume that he has died and that his new life had started inside Yggdrasil.
He realized now... he may be stuck here... forever maybe... in a world of adventure... exploration... nature... danger... magic...
"Haha haha" Treech laughed. It was almost creepy. It was a soft laugh, like a man laughing without smiling. A man who hadn't smiled in almost a decade. But it was his laugh and it was genuine.
Treech sat up again and grabbed a handful of dirt.
"Ha haha hahaha!!" Treech had a smile that stretched across his face.
The treants from earlier glanced over at him before ignoring him.
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[Race]: Treant
Level: 23
Hp: 38
Mp: 23
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Treech felt an interest deep in his heart: A blooming flower of excitement and expectation. He stood up from where he was and closed the prompt telling him he died.
"I AM ALIVE!" Treech screamed before running down and touching the redwood trees as he had before.
It felt the same. He still couldn't smell or taste anything as the technology didn't have that previously, but he could feel everything still! He was now a ghost in the machine: Living data or perhaps something more, but he finally felt more alive than he had ever felt.
Suddenly, a small goblin tribe charged toward him from the right side. They appeared from around the bed of another redwood tree he was nearest. Treech stopped his celebration and looked at them. he received a notification from his HUD that he had entered a 'combat' state so he took account of the situation. There were a little over 40 of those creatures. Excitement surged in his heart and he hurriedly searched his inventory for a weapon. Unfortunately, there were no weapons from the Gachapon he won earlier so he just charged at the goblins with his fists and the canopy branches above his shoulders swayed as he attacked.
He bashed his hard fists against the goblins, their weapons barely even pierced his defense. It gave him light scratches if anything. Some goblins hurled stones towards him and the treants near the stream. The treants were annoyed and also started attacking the goblins alongside Treech. The goblin's health dropped one by one with his punches.
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[Race]: Goblin
Level: 1
Hp: 8
Mp: 3
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-2 hp
-2 hp
-2 hp
-3 hp
-2 hp
The goblins continued to lose health, from Treech's attacks. He would kill them after only 3-4 blows. Meanwhile, Treech saw the damage numbers from the goblin's weapon attacks on his HUD:
-1 hp
-1 hp
-1 hp
-1 hp
-1 hp
-1 hp
-1 hp
His HUD continued to flash a slight red near the edges when he received damage. He glanced at his HP bar in the top left of the HUD and noticed he was already down to 30% of his HP left.
*Crash* *Fwush* *Fwoosh*
The treants nearby swished their branches around the small goblin tribe and scooped them up. Killing the majority of them off after a few attacks.
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Congratulations! You have leveled up to level 2.
You have [Class 3] + [Racial 3] => [6] Total Skill Points to spend.
Please attribute them before continuing.
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(Author's comment: It is very easy to level in Yggdrasil as the experience was often used as currency for certain spells, like the [Shooting Star] ring, and crafting equipment. As someone commented in the previous chapter that I gave Finch overpowered items like the High-Class dragon and the [Shooting Star] ring, however, both of these have huge limits on them and these were already a part of cannon within Yggdrasil. [High-Class Dragon] requires a significant portion of data from data crystals to use and the [Shooting Star] gives you a list of random wishes based on the experience sacrificed. They are not as good as you would think and they were pay-2-win items that were common to buy in Yggdrasil. )
He looked at the new menu in front of him. But he minimized it immediately as he noticed a larger red dot closing on his map from where the goblins first entered. A rotten-looking treant stepped forward from the brush. The goblin tribe was definitely fleeing from it earlier and ran into Treech by coincidence.
Its face opened up like a gaping maw of a beast from horrors unknown. Splinters of black wood shot off as spikes of the wood acted as large teeth. A dark red light flickered in its eye sockets.
*ROOARRRR*
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[Race]: Malwant
Level: 32
Hp: 44
Mp: 14
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The rotten malwant bit down on a treant that was nearby. It caused over 10 damage to the treant in a single bite. The goblins had long realized their foolishness and scattered away. And now that they took a moment to look back over their shoulders, they saw the monstrosity behind them and ran even faster.
'This game is quite fun actually. To think, your actual physical powers in-game are all free-form attacks. Too bad I never trained in any self-defense activities.'
Treech looked over the new creature with curiousity. This creature was way beyond his level. It also looked disgusting as it had rot, worms, and maggots hanging off of it. Thankfully, this was still a game and it was just graphics and pixels. It couldn't fully render it in all its horrors.
The treants started to scatter as they let out deep groaning cries, like a whale's call. Two of the treants had already fallen to the malwant monster and it chased after the others. Treech didn't do much and just stood his ground. He didn't have to do anything and the malwant passed him to chase the treants. The danger had come and gone in but a few moments.
Treech sat with his back against one of the giant redwood trees. The ground around him looked spotless as if the battle had never happened. There was no blood or corpses as they disappeared into specs of light when defeated. Now that he could gather his thoughts the level-up menu reappeared when he was considered out of combat.
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Congratulations! You have leveled up to level 3.
You have [Class 3] + [Racial 3] => [6] Total Skill Points to spend.
Please attribute them before continuing.
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He clicked a link to his character page and started looking through the options he had. Yggdrasil encouraged player choice and role-playing ability above all. The skill point and class system was a revolutionary method in gaming that focused more on character roleplaying and individual build, than any cookie-cutter class system. The class levels had a limit of 15 levels and encouraged players to diversify and pick many classes to build their characters.
A player leveled his classes the same as the level of his stats, with skill points. This makes the management of skill points, all the more imperative as it was a finite resource. Players would have to choose what they wanted to level first: their raw stat values, their Job class, their character class, or in heteromorphic and demi-human races: their racial classes.
Of course, Treech was a complete noob to all of this. He originally played this game without care on his mind so he opened up a guide menu for leveling up written by someone named [Dark Covenant] on the Yggdrasil forum.
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Leveling Outline for Dummies
by: [Dark Covenant]
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[Character Class]:
The character class is a class that can limit or change your character. by opening new avenues of power or adding special skills that would normally not be available for use. An example of this would be the [Qi Fighter] classes' use of [Qi reinforcement] passive and later use of Qi in general. Taking this class unlocked the use of Qi and focuses on physical defense. Then I would also suggest pairing this with the [One Fist] class to create a decent synergy with Qi and martial arts.
I deduce that with both these classes maxed, there may be another class that becomes available. Following this line of logic, we can assume that our builds can follow similar patterns. For Magic Casters, character classes can unlock a branch of magic that would normally be closed.
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[Job Class]:
The job class is an important production class that allows us to produce and craft items. We are limited by the rank of the items we craft with the levels we put into our job classes and it also seems to affect the success rate of crafting such things.
As [Bully's Wife], a blacksmith 'pure' claiming expertise on such things, has noted that the material he can use to craft is limited by his level in the [Blacksmithing] job. He also noted that he could increase his success rate when he put his skill points into the related job [Artifact Crafter] when creating items. Perhaps some jobs open up avenues of crafting and raise the data limit of materials we can use to craft, while others improve our chances of success? This is food for thought.
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[Racial Class]:
The racial class is a class that provides racial inherent skills and abilities that come with leveling up the class. It is debated if it is good to level up such a class when you could spend your stat points on raw stats instead, and I doubt that any of you want to go up against an argument with [Bullwark's Collapse] on that matter. His arguments famously give people headaches for a few days. If you are more into role-playing than actually competing, I highly recommend putting points into these classes.
As you know, monster affinity is certainly a thing for heteromorphic players. As for what racial abilities you gain from the levels... I don't know much but for me, I gained [Fire resistance] and [Flame Eater] skills from leveling up my Racial class [Magma Slime] as a good example. This is not a very good trade-off for the 6 skill points I spent as both of these abilities could have come naturally with an item equipped. Perhaps this is the balance for heteromorphs being unable to equip certain items? My final evaluation is that this is up to you, but I for one will focus on character classes for their utility versus racial classes.
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Treech read through everything thoroughly and considered his options for his skill points wisely, with his back against the redwood tree.
(Author's Note: Comment what you think we should do for the skill points. Racial class first? Raw stats? Character Class? or Job Class?)
