[NR] Less Aggression - Chapter 528

The trio end up talking much of the night away, going into detail about various things, with Courtney occasionally dipping out to fact check. And surprisingly, Jason was correct whenever it came to the most basic facts. Sure, some of the high level details varied, but not basics such as the range limit on conjured spells.

Then, as the next day dawns, they pack up and steel themselves. The start of this journey has ended up much more stop and go than any of them wanted. So they planned to focus on getting some distance over the next week or so.

Of course, despite this drive, it would still take multiple months to reach their destination. There was no way around it. The world was big and only growing bigger as people wrested more space away from the Deep Wilds. An interesting thing, considering that NeoRealm was originally designed to match their planet in size.

In fact, if anyone went up high enough, it would still appear that way. It is only once you start approaching one of the spatially warped regions that it starts to reveal itself. Though in theory this should make travel quicker as you can just go up high to skip over large tracts of land. If only the upper atmosphere wasn’t one of the most dangerous regions to explore.

The only good thing is that, like trying to take a deep-sea fish to the surface, those dangers high above couldn’t survive near the ground. Just like there is less atmosphere higher up, there is less world energy. The colossal beasts that make that region their home thus have developed to hold on to every single drop of power they can get a hold of. To try and dive to the surface would see them popping like a balloon well before they even get halfway.

There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, but even those tend to only barely reach the upper parts of various extreme mountains, high floating structures, and existences like world trees. Oh, and in case this didn’t make it obvious, the atmosphere had also gotten warped at some point. There truly was a heaven above the heavens. Some scholars even believe that parts of it might be a counterpart to or a section of the Deep Wilds.

Anyway, Jason and the rest had more than enough time to ponder such things as the days blurred by. Though at first they were a bit worried. The entire tenor of the fights they came up against has changed. Jason had noticed it first, but the rest weren’t far behind.

As for what the difference was? Well, monsters weren’t as bloodthirsty. Though some might mistakenly think they were more cowardly. In the end, it was a simple change. Rarely was anything a true fight to the death anymore.

Single monsters would only fight until they felt the fight wasn’t going their way. Even groups of monsters would leave after only losing a couple members. This made it quite hard to earn experience, though most of the monsters were too low of a level to matter, anyway.

This had confused Rosha while Jason had a guess at the reason. Courtney? She just did some research. The results of which didn’t have any nailed down reasoning behind them, but to Jason, basically confirmed his guess.

Locations closer to nexuses of player activity had more aggressive monsters. In fact, everything was more aggressive. Monsters, bandits, bugs, and even terrain features seemed to want to drag you down. Of course, if it was as simple as more players equals more danger, the locals would likely feel less inclined to have them around.

So the System didn’t make it a direct correlation, instead making such areas and directing players towards them. There were even long-standing player packed areas that didn’t feature this. Except anyone with half a brain would quickly notice a pattern.

Though, of course, the locals had one major handicap in that matter. The System didn’t want them to notice, so they mostly didn’t. Also, it allowed the more suspicious rules to ban players from coming to their kingdoms if they wanted to. Of course, doing that doesn’t mean the System returned those areas to normal.

No, in fact, the System did the opposite. If an area wasn’t being meddled with enough, it would only grow in danger. Sure, locals could handle things just as well as a player could. The only problem is that players can recover from death after stumbling onto something a little too dangerous.

So yeah, the locals could handle it, they just weren’t really equipped for it. Those of a high enough level that such an endeavor wouldn’t be dangerous have bigger fish to fry. And locals of a more appropriate level would much prefer not fighting monsters which were looking to fight to the death.

All that said, Jason boiled it down to the System screwing with everything for a more game-like experience. Though the fact it didn’t just force the locals to not notice, interested him. There had already been characters like Andrew who actively questioned the System. Not to mention those like the lady who trained him in the War Stomp skill.

The System wanted everyone to think it had had the entire world under its control. That clearly wasn’t the case, though. Rather, it kept a tighter leash on the areas frequented by more players.

On one hand, Jason figured being out of the Systems direct area of control could only be good for him. On the other hand? Travel took on a much more familiar tone, that of boredom. Jason and the group were all still only level 25, but despite the level cap of 499, it still meant a lot more than many players assumed.

To get a better feel for their place in NeoRealm, it would be better to go off of bottlenecks instead. Level 25 represented having passed three bottlenecks already. Now consider the fact that there are only eight recognized bottlenecks. With that in mind, the party is almost halfway through the bottlenecks needed to reach level cap.