FB: Chapter 8 – Monsters In The Murk

I went to the large general store. One could browse the shelves, but I just went to the counter with the clerk since I knew what I wanted to purchase. One could just ask for things directly and the clerk would put them on the counter magically drawing them from the store’s inventory. Another way QAI sped tedious things up.

“Hello, I would like pest repellant, town compass, regional and town map, stack of cloth bags, a waterproof neck pouch, and a stack of wood spears.”

“Pest repellant is 25 copper, basic town compass 25 copper, regional map 25 copper, town map 10 copper, stack of cloth bags at 1 copper each is 100 copper, a waterproof neck pouch is 25 copper, and a stack of wood spears at 5 copper each is 500 copper. Your total is 710 copper. Do you wish to deposit your items into your inventory?”

“Yes please,” I said and put my hand on the rune plate. I took my hand off once the plate flashed. “Command open inventory,” I then checked my inventory, and all the items were there. There were rumors that shopkeepers might cheat you if they disliked you, never confirmed of course, but that was why everyone with any common sense in the future always checked their purchases. “Command equip maps.” My heads up mini-map display was instantly filled out with labeled buildings as the maps disappeared from my inventory. “Command equip town compass,” I said as it disappeared from my inventory as well.

Now my mini-map would have an arrow pointing at the closest town if I was in range. It would help me from being lost. “Command remove neck pouch,” I said, and the pouch left my inventory and appeared in front of me. I grabbed it out of the air. “Command close inventory.”

I put it around my neck and left the store. No one else had showed up yet. If they had, they probably instantly left. One could go to the Trinity Church and get reset. They wouldn’t lose their character, but everything else about them would reset giving them a do over.

That was another reason why the Penitent Mine was so terrible. There was no Trinity Church to reset at. Some guilds charged extraction fees to get people out. They get you out, but then you have to do so much work for them, and it would be put into a contract. They would also cover your debt to society trapping people even more.

It was better choice than being stuck in the mine, but those contracts had very harsh penalties. You break them, you would be working the rest of your life. Many took contracts just to rush into a Trinity Church to reset, in order to escape their fate. That worked if you were at a low level, but the more levels you gained, the harder it was to make that kind of decision. I made my way out of Murk Town. The few NPCs glanced at me but left me alone. I exited the town through the wooden palisade halfway down the plateau.

“Command open regional map.” The mini-map expanded to take up a large portion of my vision. The town was to the Northeast of Murk Swamp. The outline of the coast could be seen far to the Southwest. Murk Tower was at the center of the swamp. I looked at general boundaries on the map for difficulty. “Command close regional map.”

Bzzzt. There was a bug. Where there was one, there would be more. “Command remove pest repellant.” I didn’t need to have my inventory open to remove stuff from it. Still saying command lines and having an object appear in front of you was a good way to not lose that item or mess up what you were saying. I pulled the cork off and drank the potion. The bugs stayed an arm’s length away from me while buzzing about.

That was the other big reason Murk Swamp was listed as a hell zone. The bugs were enough to drive a person to madness as they crawled over one’s body, eyes, ears, and everywhere else. The potion wasn’t a luxury, but an essential requirement. I took off my gray robe. “Command store gray robe.” It disappeared from my hands. “Command remove wooden spear.” A wooden spear appeared in front of me, and I grabbed it.

I gave it a twirl like I would a large baton. It was heavier than I would have liked. I would need to purchase a monocle or spectacles to track the durability. Or I could just leave it behind once it looked like it was about to break. I began moving forward towards Murk Swamp. There was more I could do in town like purchasing skill shards, but they were not needed right now with how skills worked.

The first thing I needed to do was confirm I could survive the Murk Swamp. If I couldn’t survive then I needed to pivot my plans as quickly as possible. My boots began to squish in the wet ground. Soon I was up to my knees in green slime water with chunks. The smell was overpowering. But there was no good way to counter it.

That was the unique ability of Murk Swamp, to just cut through all the other shit out there and would invade your sense of smell directly. People had tried, but any measure either wasn’t effective enough or too costly.

“Blarrrr!” A zombie, or a grabber as the locals called them, burst out of the water. I stabbed my wooden spear forward and aimed for its mouth. I impaled the monster, delivering a super critical strike. It instantly shardded. That meant the monster breaking into glowing white triangles and the corpse disappeared.

A super critical strike would shard any monster or player that took enough damage. That meant any strike that did an excess of 100% damage to its target. Decapitations and piercing head blows were the main ways to get a super critical strike with how critical hit boxes worked. “Command status screen,” I saw I had earned 146 general experience. “Command set all experience to skill experience.” That number was moved on my status screen to another box. One used up all general experience when leveling up so that experience couldn’t be saved, but skill experience was saved. Unlike other games, experience acted more as a currency to power than as a direct ladder to power.

One could spend experience on themselves to level up or on skill shards. You could only store experience for skills in large quantities, but all stored experience would disappear if you died. That made saving up a lot of experience for skill shards quite risky. My plan, which went against what the vast majority of people did, was to grind up a lot of experience at a low level. The higher the level, the more difficult it became to get experience. Only skill experience could be saved in large amounts, and it couldn’t be transferred back into the general experience pool.

To put it more simply, there were two pools of experience, general for leveling, and skill for skill shards. One could only save up experience in the general pool until they leveled up and they could move experience from this general pool into the skill pool. Experience in the skill pool couldn’t be moved back to the general pool and the skill pool could store unlimited experience.

Experience earned was based on the level of the monster compared to a player’s level and contribution if in a party. Since I was alone, I got all the experience from the grabber. This monster was level 5 based on the 146 experience I had earned. The amounts capped out at 250 at 10 levels higher and 14 experience at 19 levels lower. Any higher level would just give 250 experience, any lower would give 1 experience. Even boss monsters didn’t give bonus experience, but they tended to be higher level so a player would get the max 250 experience if they killed them by themselves. No one killed boss monsters for the experience. There was no other way to get experience except by killing monsters. Quests gave items or money, not experience.

Having the same level as a monster gave 100 experience. That meant it was 100 times faster to kill monsters at your level rather than hit down and get a single experience for monsters 20 levels and lower. However, the level difference added in another wrinkle. The absolute level difference as it was called. Each level of difference decreased damage and increased damage by one percentage point in both directions. I did four percent less damage to the grabber and it would have done four percent more damage to me based on the 4 level gap.

At a 100 levels difference, there was nothing a person could do. Their attacks would be ineffective and all attacks landing on them from something over 100 levels higher would deal double damage, often being super critical. The experience cap also prevented power leveling to a certain extent.

“Command gather all. Command repeat last command end of combat. Command gather all. Command repeat last command at experience gain.” That would automatically pick up dropped items every time combat ended or I earned experience. I wasn’t about to go digging into the chunky Murk Swamp for items. It was one of the quality of life things, like the automatic coinage consolidation that QAI allowed. Grinding monsters was brutal enough without having to manually pick up all the drops. This was one of the things players would quickly learn, but it would take time. I had the advantage of already knowing what to do.

The mist was really thick, thankfully I had my compass and mini-map. By the Trinity, this smell was awful. It was like a dying mutated animal mated with a toxic waste factory and this was the afterbirth from their horrific and unnatural union. I kept moving slowly killing one grabber after another. My exploration filled in detail on my mini-map. The maps I had purchased had given a general outline of the terrain, but by going here personally, the mini-map got a lot more detail to it automatically.

I was in the middle of the mini-map by default and only the surrounding terrain was shown. Monsters, players, and NPCs did not show up on the mini-map. Those kinds of features required more items similar to the basic town compass. Expensive items, which was why I had held off from purchasing them, even if they could have been a bit useful.

What I was really grateful for was that the blood bats and later on the giant leeches were considered pest monsters. The potion would last one game day, which was six hours. So, I wasn’t constantly harassed. Pest creatures were a nightmare, which was why the potion was so useful no matter what zone a person was in.

“Blarrg!” This zombie, or grabber, had ruined armor and a ruined sword. I had reached the higher level area of the Murk Swamp.

I stepped forward and stabbed out with the wooden spear. It pierced through the zombie’s mouth and out the back but it kept pushing forward and wasn’t shardded.

“BLARRG!” I let go of the spear and backed away as quickly as I could. That was the other lovely part of Murk Swamp. All the zombies had poison barf attacks, with the official name of the skill being Murk Barf. It was one of the most disgusting skills possible. Spewing vomit and chunks out of one’s mouth into a person’s face.

The zombie finally collapsed and dissolved along with my wood spear. “Command remove wood spear.” I picked up my new spear from mid-air that had come from my inventory and began moving back towards the town. This was the higher-level area with zombie soldiers ranging from level 10 to 20. The very small silver lining was that the water and terrain made it hard for the zombies to move quickly.

I sloshed my way back through the Murk Swamp as it began to get darker. While there were nocturnal monsters in some zones, Murk Swamp wasn’t any worse in the night than it was during the day. Just a bit darker, but the mist was still there, and it still smelled like human excrement if one was being charitable.

My exposure meter had only dipped by 5% while my hunger and water meter had dipped by 10%. Not a huge concern then. When I went on my multi-day trip, then I would be worried, but for now I wasn’t. I got back after an hour.

So, an hour to the edge and then an hour back. I had taken my time, but I could probably get that down to forty minutes. I emerged from the swamp as I made my way towards the only town entrance, which faced away from the swamp while I emerged from the Murk Swamp at the base of the plateau. That meant I had to circle around to get to the gate in the wall that protected the town.

“Command clean.” Since I was out of combat for over a minute, I could use the command. The water and clumps of swamp stuff dropped off my skin. I paused a short distance from the main gate. I removed a cloth bag from my inventory and put in all the grabber ears I had gotten into it. There was a very high chance to get a drop from a monster, about 80% for this kind of drop if my memory served me right.

I had killed 60 grabbers and had 47 ears, which was close enough to confirm what I remembered. Putting them in a sack and I then put the sack back into my inventory this was part of the process to turn them in for a monetary reward. Handing in monster goods not in a sack would annoy the NPC handling the transaction. One copper per ear. Which meant I earned 47 copper.

But the potion to scare away the pests had cost 25 copper. The wood spear that had been used up had cost me 5 copper. I had only made 17 copper, which was terrible in terms of time spent to my monetary return. I had earned 9,660 skill experience, but that was nothing in my mind.

The top levelers had a benchmark of 20,000 experience every real world day on average. The general population had about 10,000. These averages included off days as well as part of the average. Even when medical nanites were released the numbers didn’t change that much due to the difficulty in higher level zones and the sheer number of people in low level zones. That was why I considered the amount of experience I had earned poor. But I wasn’t upset. I had survived, and not died from the smell. I tossed on my gray robe, put away my current wood spear, and made my way to the gate of Murk Town.

Guards averaged about level 60 for towns like this. Then level 80 in large towns. Then level 100 in the cities and 120 in the Capital. But then they were classified as knights or elite guards after level 100. A decade from now, the strongest players were around level 127 while most people were around level 80. I had only been level 57 at the time.

I thought of it as most people, but it was just the level range where the numbers really shot up in terms of people, like a wave. The actual average was more like level 30. There was a small cluster of elite players at the very leading edge, a couple scattered below them, then the wave of people at the much lower level.

That was one of the sets of data I had to analyze for the super guild I was working for. As the game became more widespread, people took it a lot more seriously. Actually, hiring people like me to do math and figure out details like that. Real world jobs had become scarce, and I had been forced to compromise.

I was let through the gate without issue and saw the Eye of Vigilance icon show up again in my heads up display. The first stop was the General Store once more. I paid 100 coppers for a pair of basic inspection glasses. One did not wear inspection equipment while fighting. Since they were explosive. One poke, one wrong breath, and you would have shards of glass in your eyes.

Another reason why people didn’t wear them while moving about. It was just too risky. I preferred the glasses, but some people loved the monocle. While some people might turn in the bag of ears now, it could hold up to 1,000 ears and fit in my inventory allowing me to save space. Now whenever an ear was put into my inventory, it would be automatically put into my bag since there were ears already in it. Since a bag could only hold one type of item, but allowed for a larger stack in an inventory space. Instead of 100 of one item, I could store a 1,000.

It was better for reputation management to submit a large amount at once, rather than a few at a time. While not a huge difference, I had enough money in my inventory that I didn’t have to live day to day. While I wasn’t planning to buy any more items at the moment, I needed to make sure I focused on my reputation and made sure it wasn’t damaged in the slightest.

I made my way to an inn which was right next to the gate. It cost a copper for bread and clean water. All food did the same thing, which was fill one’s bars, but you paid more for better tasting food. Bread and water was as cheap as it could get.

I could get a three-course meal for a silver. But that was foolishness. A silver was worth 100 copper, and it was a lot in my mind. Real world, which was 2,000 dollars. Up until very recently I had been poor. Well not super poor, but poor enough to know the value of things.