Several kilometres into Suchi's Slums, the noon sky shining a bright, cloudless blue.
A donkey-drawn wagon with its driver and a customer on the back was bumping along through an empty section of The Slums. The run-down shacks grew around them dense and chaotic like the foliage of a jungle untouched by mankind's orderly fingers.
This area was inhabited by the Ibanmothe or Sandpeople, Suchi's lowest caste, who didn't bother with urban planning. What would have been the point? Once a month, during a ritual known as The Cleansing, they were forced to pack up and migrate into the savannah as the Ibangua or Claypeople, the region's native residents, emerged from their walled city and set fire to anything that remained. Thus, the Sandpeople, modelled themselves after the material for which they were named. Not burdened by too many possessions, they stayed light enough to be carried away on the wind and settled on whatever patch of dirt would entertain them for a while.
The customer on the donkey-driven wagon, like many players, had dressed strangely in West African-style silk garments with a zebra-head mask to disguise his face. The eyes through the slit of his mask, usually tired, were now creased into an ominous, foreboding frown. It was a type of frown out of place for a sunny day in a videogame, one more appropriate to that hard-to-place paranoia of a nighttime moments before a struggle over life and death.
What a miserable beginning, Henry thought, a string of sighs echoing through the hollow chambers of his soul.
Barely half an hour had passed since dealing with the weapon-smuggling merchant, and this zone had already pestered him with several more annoyances.
First, he'd visited one of his guild's outposts in order to pick up documents containing information on Suchi to bring up to date with recent developments regarding the gangs.
Barred as part of the wager from accessing the guild’s own database, Henry had anonymously commissioned new reports to be produced through one of the guild’s local area managers. These managers were regularly hired for such tasks by the general public. The information Henry would have access to would not be as detailed as the guild’s, but partially informed was better than completely ignorant.
That should have been a brief stopover. Instead, the Senior Director NPC managing the outpost broke protocol and held the documents hostage until Henry met with him. The guy, having figured out Henry was the same anonymous figure commissioning a private practise arena, attempted to blackmail him for more gold by threatening to delay the construction process. In the end, Henry pretended to be an agent of a covert necromancer prince and threatened the Senior Director back that he'd murder the dude's family and turn them into skeleton puppets.
That boast had just been nonsense to speedrun the encounter, but, obviously, the corrupt official would be apprehended soon by The Company's agents and executed, Henry snitching again. From a few observations at the dude's office, it also appeared that the Senior Director had been the one coordinating the weapons smuggling, which seemed to be a much larger operation than first presumed, involving multiple Merchants.
While Henry'd been finishing up that sidequest, he'd then received the untimely news that the trainer he'd hired to race through the tutorial was no longer available due to being stuck transformed as a monster. Prepared for this trash zone to throw such challenges at him, Henry had hired a backup trainer. This backup, however, he also learned, had been incapacitated by a curse while exploring an ancient ruin. A third, backup backup trainer had left the country in pursuit of an arsonist that'd torched her shack.
Three trainers taken out of commission, had that been a pure coincidence? Maybe. Suchi was a horrendous place.
One could see its abysmalness from a third strange incident unfolding right now.
To find a new trainer, Henry'd intended to go to Suchi's initial spawn area and hire one of the tutors offering public services to noobs. Alas, for some reason, the wagon-driver he'd paid to taxi his character over had taken him in the opposite direction, to a deserted part of The Slums.
Now, Henry's paranoia senses were tingling, warning him that he was about to get jumped by a gang of thugs.
Suchi...couldn't it at least wait for him to pick up an ability before trying to kill him?
A weird sound slipped from his mouth, a mix between a laugh, a sigh, and a groan.
"Discover something funny again, sir?" asked the driver, who'd been chatting idly with him.
"Something like that," Henry answered.
He took a moment to study the driver...just to be certain.
Red-haired and with the ambiguous race of the ethnically-mixed Sandpeople caste, the fellow looked too pale for someone who actually worked every day bussing customers around in Suchi's relentless sun. His tone earlier had been overly nervous. Back when Henry'd hired him, he'd noted no signs of a Martial Class, the game marking each with distinctive visual clues.
So, this pale, nervous driver was either a rookie in his first week who'd gotten lost or, pretending to be a driver, he'd planned to lead this customer somewhere to get killed and looted by his stronger buddies.
What a conundrum...
Henry couldn't tell which explanation sounded more plausible. His gut said the latter, but his intuition had become slightly unreliable as of late, frequent attempts by spies to kill him having made him somewhat distrustful.
Luckily, he had the perfect tool for solving these kinds of problems in a rational, detached manner. Closing his right eye, he entered his Mental Library, a special feature of his Scholar class.
In the iris of the closed eye, miniature glowing scrolls of vellum, splotches of ink, and quills began swimming about excitedly. The darkness of his eyelid deepened and expanded, a scene opening before him as if the eye belonged to a separate body floating in another physical dimension. Filling this space in every direction were rows of shelves towering a dozen storeys high and stretching beyond the horizon, shelves swollen with treatises, manuscripts, tractates, and reports. In the sky above this archive of incomprehensibly-vast knowledge, the stars had been rearranged to form the glittering words of the last page Henry'd been reading.
Every item here had been copied from a material-original in Saana, written by his guild's historians, linguists, and anthropologists, borrowed from national libraries, dug up in chests in ancient ruins. Henry, making a daily habit to copy the latest procurements brought to his kingdom's archives, had collected more than ten million items, ranging from trashy fiction written by players today to philosophical masterpieces by in-game civilisations that'd perished over six millennia earlier.
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Books - these were the sword and hammer of his Scholar Class. Aside from crafting Spelltomes, translation-work, and roleplaying as a teacher, the Scholar's main function was to use their absorbed archives for research, rediscovering lost crafting methods, tracking down obscure tidbits of information to solve quests. In addition to manually browsing it, their Mental Library could be queried like an advanced search engine. If, for example, Henry found a rare item he couldn't recognise, he could input its physical characteristics into a search for books containing mentions of them. In other words, the Scholar was a walking, human version of Google.
Even if it weren't the most exciting Class in a fantasy setting with volcanic dragons and cosmic apocalypse demons, one shouldn't underestimate its utility. The burden of knowledge in Saana was gargantuan and information really was a means to power. It was just as important as money, military might, cheats, and even luck. Many times, the success of Henry's schemes had hinged upon unearthing a rare fact buried in the archives.
Giving his Mental Library a command, he ordered it to sift through the documents he'd just picked up from the corrupt official's office, having the system search for cases of crimes committed against players by the Sandpeople within the past three months.
In an instant, a selection from the archive of thousands of books and paper reports appeared as one giant floating wall before him. The items numbered 17578 in total, the corrupt official having gone above and beyond in his procurements with the hopes to tie up Henry's time and pressure him further. After threatening the Senior Director, Henry'd copied the whole lot in a couple of minutes using a high-level technique, then set fire to the originals to cover his traces.
At his query, the wall began to fly past at a dizzying pace, occasionally pausing to throw a book or a report behind him.
Half a minute later, he was repositioned before a smaller wall.
Mental Library Inquiry complete.
Returned a list of 194 documents containing 40,934 relevant entries.
208 Universal Productivity consumed. 73676 out of 92160 remaining.
Universal Productivity was the shared resource for all the Civilian professions. Every non-combative ability drew from the same pool, from the Waterworker magic used to sail the ships Henry'd ridden this morning to the Scholar queries he was making now. The sharing of the resource corresponded to the fact that players could skill multiple Civilian professions with certain restrictions and draw from all of them for multi-Class, hybrid abilities. The UP-pool refreshed every 24 real-life hours.
Forty-one thousand entries, Henry thought, reflecting on the gargantuan output. So much crime...this was truly the game's worst zone. He should have known to be more specific.
His open eye scrutinised the driver more carefully, picking up additional information. The driver seemed about 16, his height stunted by malnourishment, and, from the state of his attire, on the poorer end of the Sandpeople. In contrast to this last fact, he carried the faint scent of an expensive-smelling, spearminty, cola-ish perfume.
Pursuing the incongruency, Henry refined his Mental Library inquiry, reducing the selection to any incidents mentioning distinctive smells or perfumes.
A single entry was returned from a report on the Italian Village of Valencia. Three days ago, one of their Merchants had been ambushed by a band of masked spearmen after arriving at a meeting point he'd arranged with a strange-smelling Ibanmothe claiming to be an investor.
Henry conducted another search for incidents with groups of masked spearmen in the past week, discovering 63 more cases. Skimming these, he noted that there were several distinct groups, one of whom, involved in at least 11 cases, were dousing their spears with poison and/or chanting in a strange language.
Henry's instincts told him the answer lay in this.
He searched his database for criminal organisations associated with Ibanmothe, spears, a distinctive scent, foreign connections, and poisons, checking for all potential combinations of those five. In one of the subsequent hits, he found the entry he was after, an organisation matching four of the variables, including scent.
The cult were called The Primordial Path of Nerin.
They targeted disenfranchised Sandpeople youth for recruitment by promising the 'true path' to salvation. All one had to do was adhere to the original teachings of the Goddess Nerin, whom they claimed gained her strength through cannibalism. Henry, having met the God herself while doing Suchi's main questline, The Trials of Nerin, could confirm that she was, indeed, a cannibal.
Among the group’s distinguishing features listed were the use of double-pointed spears, Nerin's supposed favourite weapon, spell incantations cast in a dialect of Old Rangbitan, Nerin's supposed original language, and a perfume made from the Borskola Nut, Nerin's supposed favourite scent. The spear preference, Henry knew to be true. The second feature was false, Nerin not being a Rangbitan but a pygmy originating from jungles to the far southeast of Suchi. The perfume part might have been true, but he remembered her smelling like a goat.
The cult's noted criminal activities were cannibalism, drug trafficking, and kidnapping. No mention was made of eating Offworlders, but, based on the language of their incantations and the ambushers chanting with 'poison'-doused spears, the group may have recently imported a demonic empowerment technique from Saana's Western continent, where the language they spoke had originated.
In conclusion, it seemed that Henry was on his way to be ambushed by a gang of cannibals.
That was something he'd prefer not to experience.
By his estimation, he still had a couple of minutes before they reached the ambush site. Using a sketch feature in his Mental Library, he quickly brainstormed his available options using the tools he had on hand, from running away to intentionally falling into the trap and decimating the cultists.
Eventually, he settled on a middle-ground solution. A scribbled note left in his Mental Library read, 'Shirt. Confirm. Check AP, response, and HP. Kill. Steal donkey.'
He would have to kill this dude.
The fundamental mistake of the driver's, aside from joining a cannibal cult, had been leading Henry so far away from the newbie training grounds. Henry was usually a very easy going person, who'd choose practicality over justice - even if his e-life was being threatened, if it were the more efficient option, he would have slipped away and forgotten about the issue, taking no offence at being threatened in a videogame. Alas, with them having travelled 8 kilometres from his desired destination, killing the driver and stealing his donkey would now be faster than jogging the distance.
As for the rest of the cannibal cult, Henry would simply ignore them, this wagon never reaching the ambush site. The Slums weren't his guild's jurisdiction and, even if it had been, what did any of these problems have to do with him, who'd retired?
Henry, in all his caution and charity, would make a final check of the driver's guilt. For this purpose, the distinguishing features listed in the cult's profile offered several possibilities. He could pretend to be a cult member too by speaking their language. He could create an elaborate excuse to swap clothing and look for the scars that should be on the driver’s torso from an initiation ritual in which members consumed bits of each other’s flesh. To save energy and time, he opted for a cruder, more direct method.
Sighing at this miserable zone, Henry waited for the wagon to near a shack with a second-floor balcony, onto which he could leap and escape if the situation turned south.
In incredibly poor timing, another hiccup appeared. As the shadow of the balcony was passing over the head of the donkey pulling the wagon, four players suddenly strolled out hand-in-hand from a side street. The group consisted of a Shaman mother, a Miracleworker father, a boy Qi Master of about 11, and a girl Arcanist of about 5. All were Tier-0. A family.
The family gave Henry and the driver the friendly but curt wave one gives strangers met in an isolated area.
Henry, judging them an instant not to be colluders with this cannibal, decided against altering his plans.
Fixing the zebra mask he'd been wearing more securely, he summoned a belt around his waist with a sheathed dagger, and a small fillet knife, the handle of which he bit between his teeth. In a very slight gesture, barely noticeable, he also twisted a cheap-looking, rusty ring worn on his left pinky finger.
The daughter of the greeting family raised her finger to point out his strange preparatory actions, but it was too late, Henry already springing forward and airborne.
Step 1: Shirt
"Hey!" shouted the wagon-driver, turning to follow the girl's gesture and finding himself blinded by his own shirt pulled over his head.
As the rest of Henry's plan played out, the family froze up, staring in shock and horror and delight.