New Spell

Roland bought a piece of freshly made honey bread in Lake View Tavern. He was about to eat it, when the game world paused and turned monochrome.

Twenty-four hours had flown away so quickly. Roland sighed and exited the game. It had been years since he was so addicted to a game. Most games on the market today were too similar. He grew bored of every new game after playing it for several days even though they were all AAA games, because he always felt that he had somehow played them before.

However, World of Falan was different. It was the first immersive MMORPG worldwide. By casting their consciousness away from reality, the players were able to have adventures in an alternate world under a different identity.

A world so broad that one might not be able to see the whole of it in their entire life, billions of lifelike NPCs, and a hundred countries of different races… Roland was excited by the thought of it.

He felt lucky that he made up his mind to buy a game cabin. There were only five hundred thousand of them worldwide. People who missed the purchase window had to wait for a long time before Penguin Corporation released the next batch.

After he exited the game, Roland worked out on a treadmill for half an hour as usual. He then had breakfast and checked the forum again.

As he expected, many people were encouraging Penguin Corporation to sell the next batch of virtual cabins. Some were even offering to pay ten thousand more bucks to buy a second-hand virtual cabin.

After reading a few random threads, Roland went to the Spellcaster Section and posted the profiles of Hand of Magic and several interesting nodes. He also announced that players would receive a Backpack when they leveled up. After that, he browsed through other threads.

He never thought that he was the smartest player in the game. After all, many people knew mathematical models. It was just that a lot of Mages, who were highly intelligent in reality, never thought about that before. Now that Roland had opened a door for them, they could certainly walk through it.

As Roland had expected, new threads on spells appeared in the section. One particular thread drew his interest.

"As long as you remember the nodes of a spell and successfully cast it once, you will be able to learn it. I'm a Mage specializing in enchantment, and I only know Hypnosis, Animal Control, and Mind Influence. I learned the chart of nodes for Inferior Fireball on the forum by heart. After dozens of failures, I successfully cast Inferior Fireball, and the icon of Inferior Fireball appeared in my Magic Book. It's evident that spells can be learned. I've managed to record the nodes of Hypnosis and posted them here for you. In the end, respect to Roland the Pioneer."

The Pioneer… Roland felt rather embarrassed. He tipped the female player named Serena ten forum coins, before he copied the four charts of Hypnosis down.

He then copied the charts provided by another three Mage players on the forum. Of course, he did not forget to tip them ten forum coins each.

Now, he had four new charts of magic nodes. All of them were level-one spells, namely Hypnosis, Strengthening, Ice Ring, and Arcane Bullet.

Roland copied the profiles of the four spells into his game cabin with a flash disk. Then, he realized that his new post had received thousands of bucks' worth in tips. Looking at his forum coins, he had never thought that making money could be so easy.

After that, he left home on a bike and hung around with his friends in the cold drink bar. When the night came, he crawled into the virtual cabin again and entered the game.

In the game world in the following days, Roland mined in the morning and studied new spells with the profiles of spells he obtained from the forum in the afternoon and at night.

It was not until he had real practice that Roland learned how difficult it was to pick up a new spell. Unlike the existing spells in the Magic Book, which would automatically generate a 3D graph of the magic nodes in his consciousness, the new spells offered nothing. Roland had to construct a space of magic nodes with his magic power on his own, before he correctly filled the magic nodes in with his mind.

Constructing the models of magic nodes with the charts he copied alone had taken Roland a lot of time. The chart of every spell required more than ten hours and a dozen failures. It was not until he learned the new spells that their icons would appear in the Magic Book.

Then, to be versed in the new spells, Roland still had to test and infer the effects of the magic nodes.

After several days, four bright gold icons appeared in Roland's Magic Book. After grasping the four spells, Roland reached Level 2, but he was not very happy, because he realized that there would be fewer and fewer Mages in the future.

Life for a Mage was too hard. Learning a new spell required a good sense of space, understanding of math and logic, and tremendous patience.

Roland knew that a lot of people in the game must be smarter than him, but not all of them were Mages. After all, there were many classes in this game, and different people had different preferences.

There must be a lot of Mages who were weaker than him in terms of comprehensive abilities. They would run out of patience if it took days or even weeks for them to learn a spell.

Some of them might not be able to learn new spells at all due to lack of spatial awareness or logical thinking. Even if they managed to grasp level-one spells, there were still spells of higher levels and difficulties. Would they have the patience to learn such spells?

When they noticed that Warlocks and Priests could wield powerful spells with a simple chant without having to memorize it, and that new spells automatically appeared when their levels increased, the Mages would be even more dissatisfied and would even complain.

Then, they would demand the game producers reduce the difficulty of Mages on the forum.

However, Roland did not think that their attempt would work.

After another day in the game, when Roland left the game and opened the forum, he realized that the Spellcaster Section was indeed a mess. Many Mages had posted that if the game producers did not change the setting and lower the difficulty for Mages to learn spells, they would delete their characters and ask for a refund.

Roland sighed. Things had happened exactly as he expected. It remained to be seen how the game producers would handle it.