CHAPTER ELEVEN- CHICKEN FARM

Rewards- 10 honeyed buns, 10 cookies, Grandma's affinity increased to 'dear child'. XP- 200.

Ding. ' Due to Fairy Reena's blessing - "Do good to be good!", the bonuses have doubled. Grandma Esla has decided to teach you cooking. Now you can learn Cooking from her.

You have leveled up. You have leveled up.

Free stat points -2, Skill points-2.

Ding- Due to Fairy Reena's blessing - "Do good to be good!", the bonuses have doubled. Free stat points -4, skill points -4.'

Now Nia was level two player. She needed 300XP more to be level three.

Giving water to Al without quest meant, she could learn Alchemy without doing serial quests. She received no extra XP for it. Come to think of it, may be Al decided to teach her under the influence of Fairy Reena's blessing.

The gaming company knew that the players actually did not have patience to follow the real steps in lifestyle skills. So they had created a cheat code of sorts.

While enjoying the breeze outside, Nia came in terms of Fairy Reena's blessing and decided to see if there was any difference between Alchemy which she had learnt from Al just now and Cooking which she had not yet learnt.

In the status panel, she could see two symbols hovering- a cauldron (for alchemy) and a wok (for cooking).

Alchemy- level zero. 100 points to next level.

Cooking(Yet to learn) - level zero. 100 points to next level.

Sighing at the points needed for level ups in lifestyle skills, she went in.

After few minutes, Al stopped his lessons. [Did you get parched again, old man?Or may be you are hungry after working so long.]

In a good mood, he gifted her a tiny iron cauldron,small health and mana potion recipes and told her to practice and to come by if she had any doubts. The default skills of 'Inspect' and 'Forage' were also given, making it easier to collect the items.

Normally, the chief or the other initial quest givers would gift these skills for the benefit of players. But Nia got it even after jumping and running to another line.

The lifestyle cheat code was like game interface. Choose a recipe, it will show the necessary ingredients. If the ingredients are present, a "CREATE" button would form at the end of page. you just have to mentally or manually click on it and the items are formed in the respective receptacles. You could also make items in batches, though it depends on size of receptacle. If receptacle, in case of alchemy- a cauldron, had capacity of 10 times, you can't make 11 items in a batch as each batch would have only ten items and quality of each item would be different.

Nia checked the recipe cards. Thankfully, the ingredients needed were all in the level 0-3 map region. While wondering if she could meet few lifestyle worker NPCs, she finally decided against it. A bird in hand is better than two in bush, after all.

After metaphorically pushing her sleeves, she finally entered the low level map region.

Nickname given by players- 'Chicken Farm'.

Reason- Monsters here were mainly level zero chickens, level 1 or level 2 hens and level 3 roosters. The roosters in the farm were intelligent enough to know unity is strength and thus never barged into another rooster's area or hens. And they started attaching players if more than half of hens under their care died.

'Let's see, the meat of monsters, their feathers, beaks, oohh... their blood too, their body parts..yuck, thankfully not many are needed. Hmmm, I can collect these grasses and flowers here. Maybe, even make few pots of potions if i'm not disturbed?' Thinking ways of geniuses like Nia can't be understood by simple folk. Only she would think of making potions in open maps with players and monsters roaming all around.

Nia's default weapon was level 0 staff with attack range of 1-8. Unfortunately, she had yet to learn any spells, so the staff had suffer the abuse of being using as a beating stick. She was already level 2, so she massacred all the little cute chickens and barely adult level 1 hens. Level 2 hens were a bit difficult, the difficulty increased as the aggro range [the range of area where monsters would focus on all players present and fight the ones which has pulled their aggro i.e, hurt them.] of level 2 hens overlapped.

Monsters over higher maps were more diverse and vicious than these 'farm animals'. If one could not fight these, one would not even know how they died when facing a higher level monster.

When she got tired of fighting, she would rest at some place which would not pull aggro of animals nearby. Then she would denude the area of all the flowers, grass and other herbs. It did not matter if those items were required for her consignment quest[ In case you had forgotten, Aurrum, the shopkeeper had given her a bunch of quests together instead of series of quest which was the norm.]

Her storage capacity was more than double of others thanks to the borrowed storage bag. So she would rest, the areas around the resting place would become empty and she would move to next area to fight the hens and their brethren.

It was a strange sight in the Chicken Farm. The AI managing the game was supposed to be more hi-tech than leading hi-tech AIs. [Isn't it an exaggeration, though!] What it meant in the game was the players did not have to wait for monsters to re-spawn and kill them as soon as they are born, they did not have to fight with others to get such meager XP too.There was no default re-spawn rate. That rate depended entirely on players clearing the field.

So it was normal that a single player or a party of player who choose one spot and start killing those animals, at least till they got tired, their storage bags are full or their levels increased that killing these tiny things would no longer give meaningful XP.