The Suchi River, its murky-red flow separating the developing West Bank and the declining Slums.
A donkey emerged from the reeds growing along the eastern bank,
Aside from Henry, one other player was using the spot, a Waterworker lounging in a chair with a fishing rod, a case of beers, and a naked belly. They gave him an odd glance.
"Seen some action, my boy?"
They'd spoken in Slovenian. It was late enough for the Europeans to awaken.
"A bit," Henry laughed. "I need to wash my hands, if you don't mind."
"Go right ahead."
Henry approached the water's edge. Squatting down, he dipped his gloves up to his wrists and rubbed. Purple worms tendrilled southwards, flowing towards the sea. After travelling a short distance, they diffused indistinguishably into the rest of the river.
In the end, the disciple who'd dropped Twenty Tools and dashed its fragile skull had been himself.
Following his rise to fame as The Cripple, someone seeking revenge against him wiped the sect out. At the foot of the temple where he'd studied, the perpetrator had mockingly written the Japanese characters for 'Unrivalled Under The Heavens', a phrase from Miyamoto Musashi that Henry'd often employed during his childish boasts about his duelling victories, in the blood of the foul-mouthed monk and the disciples he'd trained with. None of the sect members could have offered much resistance. Heavy-Fingers himself had been restricted by his flawed body from progressing beyond Tier-6, making him a pushover at that stage in Saana II.
Back then, identifying the culprit had been impossible given the sheer number of duellists he'd pissed off - adding their fans together, he had hundreds of thousands of haters.
The truth was eventually revealed to him, but not until quite recently, around half a real-life year ago.
"A Thousand Tools..." he mumbled.
Amongst the many things the supreme martial art had evolved into, could it also be a small apology?
But an apology to what, exactly? To NPCs in a game, to the spoiled aspirations of NPCs in a game...
How tacky...how delusional...
But was it actually delusional? Henry'd never been sure, even before The Overdream.
Did the real, the 'tangible' truly have a monopoly on sentiment? Art was often a blatant fabrication, yet that didn't devalue the ability of great works to touch people, to motivate them, to inform them, to instruct them, to reshape them. Much as the characters in books or movies could occupy a more significant emotional space in one's heart than the real but faceless strangers on the street, why couldn't the same be true of NPCs in a video game?
Delusion, by his estimation, had to be found somewhere in the degree, in the force of the sentiment invoked by the unreal, in how much one allowed these digital feelings to touch and contaminate the real. Grieving over a murdered NPC? Fine. Killing an NPC in revenge for an NPC? Sometimes fine. Killing a real person in revenge for an NPC? Not fine.
He wished the distinction was always as clear as that.
The Waterworker behind him coughed. "I think your hands are clean, my boy."
Henry, having zoned out for a few minutes, stared at his gloves mindlessly splashing around.
"I'm not sure about that either."
As he replied, red dust sprinkled the water below him like cheap fish food. The particles had rained down from his face, detached by the movement of his mouth muscles.
"Right," he said in understanding.
The Waterworker had been creeped out by his appearance.
Reaching for The Cap of a Thousand Dreams, he removed it from his head and inspected it. The shabby, mould-damaged straws from which the priceless artefact had been woven were caked with a brownish-red layer - sunbaked blood.
His arms, his chest, his pants, his boots, his skin...drenched from head to toe.
214 cultists, a bit over a thousand litres of the stuff, it was hard to stay spotless in that situation.
Laughing, he stood erect and marched forward, wading out into river like a sinner at their baptism. When the murky water rose above his eyes, he continued walking along the riverbed using the weight of his armour. Then, in the centre, he planted his feet and steeled himself against the cleansing flow.
The oxygen ran out; his Healthpool stopped him from drowning.
-Silver Wolf (Chayoka City, Chayoka): What the hell is this...
Silver wasn't usually up this late. From that and her annoyed tone, she must have been reading his ultimate pleb-bait.
-Henry Flower: get rekt lol
As he'd told Donkey Bro, 'twas the perfect time for jokes.
-Silver Wolf: You can't publish...
With her enraged follow-up spam as sweet background music, he concentrated on the heaviness of the river flowing through his soiled equipment, purifying it and him of Suchi's filth.
-Silver Wolf: What kind of deranged showboating a-hole writes an entire book just to mock somebody?!
-Henry Flower: it's a tetralogy. there's going to be four books lol gg ez
This was kind of pleasant.
But Suchi, sensing him slipping into comfort and taking this as an intolerable affront, gnashed at him with its rotting teeth. Before he could react, the water began to spin around him, a death roll being initiated by an alligator that'd bitten down on his thigh after being attracted by the blood.
-Silver Wolf: HENRY, TELL ME WHERE YOU ARE ALREADY!
He couldn't even take solace in his favourite respite because his lungs were choked with water. Sigh, he thought, unsheathing his sword. Sigh.
-Silver Wolf: HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY!
Sigh.
-Silver Wolf: HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY!
Where else could he be?
-Henry Flower: The trashest zone in this trashest of games...where else would this shit keep happening?
The Overdream.
After digging a burrow in the bank to hide his body in, he returned to The Overdream where his farm was smothered in winter.
His mind was too disturbed to tackle the next martial art he'd lined up so soon. Therefore, he decided a break was in order - a fishing trip, for no other reason than the last human he'd encountered had been doing that.
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Boarding up his buildings, packing supplies, and donning his fur-clothing, he trekked through the snow to the north-western coast of his island. There, on a black-stone beach, he constructed a small camp and spent the days and nights casting a line into the ocean or sea. The size of the body of water was a mystery.
In Saana, too, fishing was excruciatingly dull, but, through Floating Leaf, he endured.
On the second week, a storm far out in the ocean or sea churned up 30-foot waves that battered the coast and continuously splashed him, their salty droplets freezing on his skin. He could have
When he grew frustrated with fishing and angry with the waves, he hiked in-land to a stand of balsa-like trees with light, buoyant wood and began chopping them down. Following an instructional video uploaded by a player, he then shaped them using Woodworking tools, wasting eleven of the trees before crafting a satisfying surfboard.
Armed with his creation and more instructional videos, he returned to the ocean/sea and fought the 30-foot waves and was smashed by them relentlessly, dunked again and again into the freezing waters.
It was still more fun than fishing.
Not a single wave did he conquer in the first week, nor in the second. In the third, however, after the storm had passed and the surf had shrunken to a normal size, he rode his first. The feeling was exhilarating, his stomach rising as he dropped down from the crest, the fins of his board slicing through the blue-wall before he, not knowing how to manoeuvre yet, hit the base and was swallowed in an avalanche of whitewash.
One random morning of his fishing-turned-surfing trip, he glimpsed a breath-taking sight while floating on the ocean-sea on his hand-made board. Reading the wave crests marching towards him from the horizon, sizing them up for which would be the next to ride, he spotted a tower-sized serpent swimming in the distance. The creature, perhaps excited by the coming spring, leapt into the sky, bounding the height of a mountain. Its sinuous segments shed thick sheets of saltwater, which froze during the descent and sparkled like a glass waterfall in the fading winter sun.
A digital training space for the next martial art, the site replicated from the fertile north of Abhaya with plump rainclouds scooting overhead.
In a patch of rainforest, a 180- by 180-metre clearing had been made with regular grid lines denoting every 6 metres. Distributed around this formation were boulders, pits, mounds, and other obstacles, all of a standardised height and width.
“Kem. Bang. Keun..."
Henry, in the centre of this grid, with a set of Tier-0 Bloodmancer Spelltomes strapped to his chest, was casting the basic ability
He would now be studying The War-Priest's Duty, a defunct martial art practised by the War-Priests of Old Rangbit a millennia earlier. These were the Bloodmancers who'd acted as commanders in the Rangbitan undead armies.
What interested him, however, wasn't the style itself, Bloodmancer skills being useless from his perspective. Rather, he was drawn to a peculiar method for teaching the art called The All-Mother's Death Training. This was a program used by the Rangbitans for mass-producing War-Priests from their slave colonies.
The grid formation around him was The Death Training's standardised proving grounds
"...An. Jeun. RIT!"
With the spell's completion, the dead mouse exploded. A skeleton wielding a longsword burst out from the gore and joined a row of four others summoned earlier, awaiting his command.
The next instant, the Spelltome in Henry's hand was replaced by a dusty manual entitled 'Examiner's Guide'. Its pages contained a series of map illustrations depicting the proving ground with various configurations of monsters distributed around it.
Experiential learning was The Death Training's core principle, learning through doing. Trainees were instructed in The War-Priest's Duty through hands-on participation in a gauntlet of incrementally harder exercises. A dual function of the gauntlet was also scouting talent, the rounds structured so that only a handful in every ten thousand participants could finish them all. Those who failed died. Hence, 'Death Training'.
It'd been an extravagant waste of life. For that reason, it'd fallen into disuse after 'The All-Mother', i.e. Rangbit's patron hermaphrodite Goddess, was assassinated by Karnon and his buddies. When her domains had started to fragment, the slave population became too small to supply adequate numbers for the program.
Lately, though, The Death Training had undergone a minor revival in the game's Bloodmancer-friendly zones following the arrival of players, who could attempt the gauntlet without fear.
Henry selected the most challenging stage-one arrangement, which had apparently weeded out 96% of the slave trainees. With The Cap's replication feature, he summoned dozens of Psychic Shadow Monkeys from thin air. He spread these hairless, translucent creatures around the grid formation according to a map in the examiner's guide, creating a sort of PVE, death puzzle.
For him, the primary value of The Death Training was that it represented the pinnacle of training exercises. He hoped to use his experience in it for designing new exercises for other martial arts. Thereby, he would accelerate the speed with which he mastered them, much as had occurred by learning Floating Leaf.
Moreover, once A Thousand Tools was formulated, the drill design skills could prove valuable for teaching the art to others. After all, future protégés wouldn't own hyperbolic time chambers with which they could mess around for centuries, learning 84 different styles separately then combining them into one.
Before beginning the gauntlet, he gave the puzzle a final survey. Most trainee's instinct would be to have the skeletons attack the group nearest him, a collection of bulbous-headed females, before they could complete their spells. This choice, however, would leave them unguarded against a pair of clawed males further away, half a metre within aggro range. Dead.
His jaw clenched with slight hesitation.
There was a secondary value for him of The Death Training...
A core feature of the original program was that the slave participants had been highly motivated by the risk of dying. Obviously, players lacked this special incentive. However, some crazy Bloodmancer roleplayers, in search of an authentic gaming experience, had devised a moronic alternative.
System Alert: You are attempting to set pain reception to 100%.
Saanatek accepts no liability for trauma incurred due to this decision. Are you sure?
A player might be unable to die, but they could certainly feel the agony before death.
In his pursuit of martial perfection, Henry had already explored the learning benefits of extreme boredom, extreme emotion, extreme roleplaying, so why not extreme pain?
System Alert: pain reception has been set to 100%.
As he thought about starting, the Psychic Shadow Monkeys, in creepy unison, unleashed their demonic screech.
A few real-life minutes earlier. Chayoka, a private marina, inspectors in ash-grey uniforms examining the arriving and departing vessels for contraband.
Amongst the boats being prepared for the high seas was a 90-foot schooner staffed by a 12-woman crew. The first mate recounted the supplies for repairing the vessel after monster attacks, and the second mate ensured that their route maps were up to date, Saana's ocean currents and hazards in constant flux.
The owner of the vessel was on deck, too, disguised in a baseball cap and surgical mask. She was presently directing a long, exasperated stare at a book in her hands.
-Henry Flower: get rekt lol
-Silver Wolf: You can't publish...
As he proceeded to ignore her messages, Silver fantasised about the book sprouting a neck so she could feel the satisfaction of gripping it between her fingers and choking the life out of it...out of him.
Her weird writing buddy had sure pulled a number with this one.
The abomination he'd asked her to edit was insultingly unoriginal, crammed to the eyeballs with pop-lit clichés.
The narrator was a shameless composite of the Mary Sues from history's most low-brow novels, an Alpha Mary Sue, her personality quirky yet bland enough for any reader to self-insert into - the most plebian protagonist.
For anti-social tendencies like listening to old and new music simultaneously, the Mary Sue was bullied at school, so she escaped into the totally unique retreat of virtual video gaming. LitRPGs, the most plebeian genre.
The quests in Saana she faced were thrilling and character-building despite not even being Legendary quests. Skill, celebrity, adoration, all of these were her destiny to obtain, the Mary Sue skyrocketing to the apex of 200 million players without the narrative portraying a hint of how absurdly difficult and improbable that would be in reality - the most plebian character 'development'.
And, naturally, even though she lacked any discernible qualities that would attract a top-tier mate, she was swept up in a whirlwind love triangle between her school's wealthy bandleader jock genius secret-twelve-millennia-old alien-vampire and a passionate muscular stallion-riding barbarian NPC. Human x alien-vampire x NPC - the most plebeian of romantic sub-plots.
The sarcasm wasn't anywhere in the book itself. Silver Wolf, however, had been able to hear it whispered as footnotes for each line, through traumatic memories of the nagging, pretentious critiques he'd always thrown at her about the nonsensicalness of her own stories, the trashness, the plebness, the accessibility.
More insultingly, the story was written in first-person - the most plebian of POVs. And not just any first-person - hers.
He'd literally copied her writing style. Not even as a parody; the narrator sounded exactly like her. Stealing her voice, he'd forced her to speak hundreds of pages of sappy, inane, teenage drivel!
-Silver Wolf: What kind of deranged showboating a-hole writes an entire book just to mock somebody?!
-Henry Flower: it's a tetralogy. there's going to be four books lol gg ez
!!!!!!!!!!
And most insultingly of all, the story was—
A whistling Aionian woman climbed on deck, the ship's captain. "Silver, have we got a destination yet?"
"One second."
-Silver Wolf: HENRY, TELL ME WHERE YOU ARE ALREADY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY! HENRY!
-Henry Flower: The trashest zone in this trashest of games...where else would this shit keep happening?
Silver frowned for a moment, then turned decisively to the captain. "Suchi."
End of Volume 3, Part I - Slumcripple Sextillionaire
Next up: Volume 3, Part II – Steppencripple