Chapter 9

Aura was in a pickle.

He couldn't decide where to put his first base.

To set up a player base, all one needs is some barrier stones, which will keep all living creatures except for the owner out of the designated area.

But barrier stones don't last forever, so you need to put up a barrier post if you want to stay long-term.

A barrier post is a large item, and can't fit in an ordinary Item Bag, instead, a player must drag it the whole way, while protecting it from monsters and players. Monsters attack it on instinct, wanting to protect their territories, while players want to steal it, since a single post costs 10,000 gold coins.

Barrier stone sets are already ridiculously expensive, since they require a skilled master blacksmith, but a barrier post requires a skilled master carpenter as well as a skilled master alchemist, the price rises accordingly.

Aura knew how to make a barrier post, but he still needed to level his alchemy skill.

Most player bases don't do anything special, just being a private place for a player (some guilds would make the exterior parts of whole areas their private base, just so they could monopolize the resources inside), but some locations offered great benefits, like a high force concentration, or hidden secrets.

In Aura's past life, there was a story about a guy who built a private residence on a cliff outside human territory, because there wasn't anywhere else he could build it. As it turned out, the cliff he had made private contained the home of an ancient god, the place was stuffed to the brim with amazing items and wonderous treasures. The player who made his home there quickly became incredibly rich, and purchased shares in a few promising guilds, eventually becoming the king of his own in-game kingdom.

It was stories like his that made Aura willing to keep playing, stories of ordinary people getting lucky and making enough money to become immortal.

Aura wasn't lucky, but he was smart, he knew that he would need an excellent base to get where he wanted to go, but places like that cliff were rare, hard to find and even harder to get to. Outside of human territory was a place that only high ranking adventurers dared to step, and currently, no player had even reached level 20, much less level 110, which was considered the baseline for players exiting human territory.

Many players had already died, underestimating the realidm of Ascendence, thinking 'it's just a game', then quickly realizing how harsh the game was. A death this early on would mean that they couldn't get anything from the reincarnation system, and they would have to start over with less than they had when they entered the game, since the system wouldn't give you the starting skill scan twice.

As time passed, leveling would slow to a crawl, with only insane people going out of the cities to level for long periods.

Ascendance was harsh and unforgiving, players didn't just have to fear death, they could lose an arm or an eye, be tricked into slavery, be robbed of all their money, and all players could do is start over. There was no save and load feature in this game, you either killed yourself, or took the system's mercy when you hit these circumstances.

In Ascendance, there was very little holding players and NPCs back, with them being able to commit almost any crime (the only crime it is impossible to commit is rape, since the system disallows forced sex) and being able to mostly get away with it.

The guards can't look into every missing person's case.

Players can perservere after being robbed or caught as a slave, but slaves have no freedom, they simply do as told. A slave player has no ability to move their own avatar unless expressly given permission, and a master can give a slave any order they see fit, with the slave being treated as a possession by thr system (you can't rape a possession), so the system allows slave players to, at any time, enter the reincarnation system and let their avatar be taken over by an NPC, with masters rarely any the wiser.

Since a player can stay in the game for years at a time, and the only way to tell a player from an NPC is to see them log out, few ever notice if their slave is a player.

Players who perservere through slavery though, are given extraordinary awards from the system in terms of experience as well as reincarnation bonuses and achievements.