Maxwell

I despaired as I stared at the hole in my command building. Unlike when I constructed something, repairing buildings enforced a timer on the structure. It would be ten hours before the building was in one piece again. Sighing at the sight, I shook my head and continued on my way.

Near a tower towards the center of the town, everyone that was heading to the city was waiting for my arrival. I paused to examine the tower. There were a few of them in the town now. The black metal encased a glowing purple stone at the tower. It looked more like a piece of art than a defense weapon.

Spotting Rowena, I waved. “Good morning!”

She looked me over. “I would say the same, but it doesn’t look like you slept much.”

I shrugged. “What can I say, worry is the best coffee.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” she said patting me on the shoulder. “We can put this off until tomorrow if you’d like.”

“I appreciate your worry, but I doubt I’ll be able to sleep for the next couple days.”

“Seriously, what’s got you so wound up?”

“Lapis and the newcomers. One thing goes wrong and we lose everything we’ve worked for these last few months.” I ran my hand through my hair. “This might sound wrong, but I actually enjoy my life here. I only had my dad back on Earth and we weren’t exactly on speaking terms. My work aspects weren’t the best and as you know I wasn’t doing my best in school either.”

“Yes, I recall the late-night study sessions,” Rowena chuckled.

I straightened up and steeled myself. “I’m going to do everything I can to protect my place in this world.”

She gave me a small smile. “Sounds like a plan.”

Giving her a nod, I walked past her to the rest of the group. “Alright everyone! We’re about to make the jump to Black Tail. I’ve confirmed with Glistening Dawn that the area is peaceful for the moment, but hostilities might erupt any minute, so be on guard. I would like to make Black Tail an ally in the future, so act as if you are ambassadors.”

“I just hope they’ll act us in the training sector,” Razz commented with a grimace. “Some times this racial divide thing can get annoying.”

“Tell me about it,” I replied with my own scowl. Dark elves were already prosecuted on a regular basis. As a void elf, it was even worse. I smacked my cheeks to get rid of the thoughts. I had chosen my bed, I would lie in it. “Don’t worry. I plan on increasing my NPC trainers as soon as I can. The requirements are just a bit difficult to achieve.”

“Take your time boss. We all know you’re already working hard for our little community.”

I nodded my thanks. “Well then, let’s get under way.” The party joined hands as I moved next to the tower. It was a nice little addition to my town. One of seven in fact. Now that I had a decently steady supply of mana stones, I was able to expand many features of the town. One of these features were mana collectors. In times of peace, they passively gathered mana from the air to be used during sieges or offenses. Given that even my walls were mana based, the system would be drained quickly if we came under concentrated attack, but it was better than having no fallback.

What was really cool about the system was that I could use it for personal spells. Placing my hand on the tower, I accessed the considerable pool of mana. Combined with my mana pool, I had nearly fifty thousand mana at my fingertips. With a look over the group, I activated my teleport spell landing us in the clearing right outside of the Black Tail.

“We’ll have to hopscotch our way back, but it should only take a few minutes with Ulic with us and his amazing Mana Share skill,” I said gesturing to the man. “Other than that, I guess we’ll met back here in… five hours?”

“Sounds good to us,” Sasha remarked after getting nods from her people.

Razz gave me a thumbs up. “I like it, though if they kick us out, we’ll be waiting here for you.”

“I sent Glistening Dawn a message. I think she should be meeting us at the entrance,” I said, rechecking my friend’s message.

With everything in order, we headed for the city. There were quite a few patrols on the roads and the surrounding areas of the city. It looked like Glistening Dawn wasn’t taking any chances. ReilArch might have been dealt with, but he was a player. There was no telling what he had available at his disposal, including friends.

Our mixed race group got a few looks from the beastkins working the fields as well as the patrols, but no one stopped us. Even before the change the game, players had a unique place in the world. It was good to see that there was still a fraction of that in effect. Otherwise, a band of goblins would normally be attacked on sight.

“So far so good,” Razz mumbled next to me.

“Positive thoughts, my friend, positive thoughts,” I said patting his back. Rather than Razz and his lot, I was actually worried about myself. Players might be one thing, but I planned to speak with the vendors and some NPC trainers myself. As a void elf, it was up in the air whether anything might come of it. I just hoped I wasn’t attacked by a hostile mob.

We finally reached the gates to the city. I waved when I spotted Glistening Dawn. The Deer beastkin waved back. “Welcome, friends of Maxwell.” Glistening Dawn used a noble tone, as if roleplaying. I couldn’t blame her; I did the same a lot of times when I was conversing with the NPCs in my own town.

“Glistening Dawn. Glad to see you!” I grinned.

Glistening Dawn gave a deep bow. “I would like to thank you for your help at that time. Ah, just call me Dawn.”

“Its wasn’t exactly difficult for me.” It really wasn’t since all I had to do was teleport a few times. Something I did on a daily basis.

Dawn laughed then shook her head. “That’s almost scary.”

She gave us all passes that would assure our safety while in the city as long as we upheld the rules and laws of her territory. After that, everyone dispersed and went their own way. I soon found myself on my own, even Rowena taking off to handle her affairs. I had a list of things I wanted to do, so I went to my first stop. Black Tail Adventuring Union.

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Much like Galim, there weren’t that many players working the quests. At least, there weren’t as many drunk in the corner. I walked over to the counter. The receptionist gave me her best customer serve smile. “Welcome to the Black Tail Adventuring Union. How may I help you today?”

“Excuse me, I signed up at Galim. I wanted to know if my membership was still valid here.”

Her smile never wavered. “I believe they should have told you, but your application expires after a week. Besides, it would have only been valid in the area that you signed up.”

Oka wasn’t exactly the prime receptionist back in Galim, but I did remember her saying it was only valid for a week. “Ah! You’re right. I remember now. Thanks. I’m going to take a look at the quests before I decide whether to sign up here.”

“Sure thing, please see the bulletin board.” I nodded my appreciation then headed over to the board. Since I hadn’t filled out the paperwork, I had to use this terminal to access the list. Once I was near the board, the quest icon appeared. I clicked it to get a feel of what was going on in the area. I noted that there were a lot of bandit slaying quests. There were also quite a few resource quests. It looked like lethargy was present here in the players as well.

“Nothing that I want to devote a lot of time too right now,” I said after I went through the list to the bottom. Dawn was doing a good job keeping her territory in order. Just a few charismatic players were enough to motivate the others.

I went back to the receptionist and thanked her for her help then left. The next location on my list was just a few streets down. A sparkling white tower that seemed to gleam in the morning light. There had to be some sort of spell on it to make it look that radiantly clean. There were more people here than at the Union, but after studying them for a minute, I found that most of them were NPCs.

Inside, I felt like I had entered a bank and a library that had been fused together. There was a large lobby that led to a group of receptionists. Behind them there were shelves upon shelves of books. There were armored guards wherever I looked along with hawked eyes magic users. One wrong move in here and you might not make it out to talk about it.

I joined the line for one of the receptionists. When it was finally my turn, I had the misfortune of being attended to by a surface elf. He glared at me with such hatred that I nearly took a step back.

“How may I be of serve today?” he asked, clearly using every ounce of his artificial willpower to control himself.

“I just wanted to take a look at your catalogue of spells,” I said with my own smile.

“I don’t think you’d be able to understand them. You are a subsurface substitute made by a lesser god, after all.”

My eye twitched but I managed to keep my smile. “That might be true, but thankfully for me, that’s not up to you to decide. Please let me see the list,” I retorted. I wasn’t about to back down.

The receptionist’s smile vanished. He looked like he was about to commit violence at any moment. He glanced over to the guards. I pulled out the pass from Glistening Dawn and placed it on the counter. “I would think before you act. As a mage, I’m sure you understand that,” I said quietly.

He narrowed his eyes at me but finally pulled out a massive book and slammed it down in front of me. The boom was loud enough to cause the people around us to flinch. “Please. Take your time,” he said twitching even more.

“Thank you very much.” I opened the book and began to completely ignore the receptionist. Unlike the mage tower I had constructed in my town, the list of spells available here was much longer. I was even able to see spells that had actual level requirements. As I browsed the list, I was becoming even more impressed with Glistening Dawn’s mage tower. She had clearly invested a lot of gold into the structure.

After nearly five minutes, I found a few spells that I wouldn’t mind having at my disposal. Sadly, I didn’t have nearly enough gold for them currently. There was one spell that I had enough gold for though, that I couldn’t resist. “I’d like this Lightning Strike spell.”

Ten seconds went by without a reply. I looked up from the book and returned the receptionist’s glare with one of my own. Finally, the man gave in. “Right away.”

He handed me a scroll and I found myself a thousand gold poorer. I sighed as I left the Mages’ Tower. I would have to avoid surface elves for the time being. At least until I found a way to deal with the overwhelming loathing that they had for my race.

With my personal business done for my trip into the city, I headed to a more official destination. Heading away from the busy city center, I found myself surrounded by warehouses, lumberyards, blacksmiths, and more. The noise was hard on the ears. I never noticed until now that my elven body had extremely acute hearing.

Every hammer blow was like a blow right to my head. It was almost worse since I wasn’t actually feeling pain. The sensation was odd to say the least. Struggling through the headache, I arrived at the Construction guild.

Thankfully, there was some soundproofing as I entered the main lobby. Men and women that were more jacked them most of the guards that I had seen so far were moving around with construction materials slung over their shoulders. It was made even more impressive since most of them were beastkin. Seeing an Oxen man carry what had to be hundreds of kilograms of lumber was truly a sight to behold.

I glanced around to make sure I wasn’t going to be dealing with another elf, then sighed in relief when I didn’t see one. I walked up to the counter where a cute beastkin fox was serving as receptionist. “Welcome to the Worker’s Union!” After the disrespectful elf from the mage’s tower, this treatment was amazing.

“Hi. I am a Lord for a little settlement in the Great Forest. I was hoping to get a look at the building schematics that you might have on record.”

“Of course! Of course! Browse all you want,” she purred, I think, as she pulled out a book much like the one from the Mage’s Tower. It was wider, and as I opened it, I realized why. It was a book of blueprints after all. The buildings schematics were similar to those that you might see in the real world. Then again, the ones that I had seen in the real world were only in movies. I had no idea just how accurate they were.

I flipped through the offerings. I already had access to most of the beginning structures. There were a few unique options as well as upgrades that I could add onto my structures that I had already constructed. I only went through a few dozen and found that I would love to buy most of them.

One blueprint I did find was for this game’s version of an apartment complex. Unlike the ones I was able to build at the moment that only housed five max. These would be able to house over a hundred people with ease. They were expensive to build, but when I did the math, they came out cheaper than constructing enough houses for my current immigration rate.

“How much for this blueprint?” I asked pointing it out to the receptionist.

She glanced at the book then back at me with a grin that really drove home that she was part fox. “Five thousand gold.”

“Can you… can you lower it some?”

“Fine. Four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine gold,”

“Umm…”

“Oh, and ninety-nine silver.” She didn’t blink a single time.

I dropped my head with a sigh. “Fine. I’ll be back when I have enough.” I really had to get some trade deals going. A broke Lord simply couldn’t operate in this game for long. I returned my gaze back to the book and went ahead and looked at a few of the more advanced structures. There was plenty to look forward to. There was a spell matrix structure that was able to cast spells over my entire territory, gardens that grew enough food for thousands of people, orchards that were able to produce hundreds of units of wood a week or more.

Seeing all this made me realize that the Lords really had a lot of benefits. It also marked just how hard it might be to fight another lord in the future. I was actually glad the Razz had decided to be my Vassal. Dealing with just a few of these things would have been a headache so close to home.

I handed the book back then left the Construction Union. That really completed my goals for today. The mage’s Tower hadn’t had Void magic, so that was a bust. I would have to find somewhere else to gain knowledge on that. Since I was done, I decided to head back to the meeting point. I could have teleported, but I wanted to enjoy the city for a bit longer. Plus, you never know what you might encounter during your walk.

I really should learn not to expect good things. I had barely started walking when the air rippled from outside the city.

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A new Demon Lord has been born. Aurora, Demon Lord of Death has risen from the night. Mortals! Prepare your armies! Choose your side!

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