Isaac woke up face down in the muck, and spluttered out some of it before pushing himself back onto his feet.
I'd been kind enough to let him keep his clothes and personal effects, and even topped off the charge on his iPhone.
This, plus the rather mundane environment, had the unfortunate side effect of letting him delude himself for a few more minutes that he was back on Earth. At base reality, I grumbled as my Neurology Inspector tool was spazzing out when I tried to run it on him. Nobody had managed to get it working on anything in COS since the last patch, which was quite a feat because it advertised near perfect universality. I'd tried it on real penguins and Cellular Automata, and while the results were as expected, the damn tool did work.
At least it didn't require omniscience or mind reading to figure out what Isaac was thinking. He was whispering under his breath, patting his clothes for his phone and wallet, and likely confused by the combination of what seemed like amnesia but no hangover to explain it.
"What did Leo and I do? Hold up, I need to check the GPS, I don't recognize this trail." He explained, waving his phone about in case that would help pick up a nonexistent cell signal or that of GPS satellites that hadn't existed for who knows how long.
He decided the most likely cause for the issue was the tall trees obstructing his view, so he wandered into a clearing and then began the same ritual, so intent on staring at the phone that it took him an entire minute and change to notice the two moons overhead.
"Oh fuck." This was punctuated by the phone falling out of his hands, though a nice case kept it intact.
He massaged his eyes, as if any degree of double vision could explain one reasonably Terran moon and another that had been split apart and turned into a bowl surrounded by massive clouds of astral debris.
To make matter worse, the otherwise normal moon was bedecked with lights, clear evidence of technological civilization if you ask me. Huh. Apparently they didn't have that yet in 2023.
He collapsed onto a fallen tree trunk, but recovered soon enough. I'd picked him up for the high resiliency to shock after all.
Isaac had taken my passing comment about his cancer to heart, because the next thing he did was strip and begin examining himself. I watched with disinterest as he palpated his own balls, felt his armpits, and flicked his nipples, to no avail. The melanoma easily evaded him, but he did discover the first and most concrete change in his physique, the small lump corresponding to his Dantian organ, which he likely mistook for either bladder or prostate cancer.
I fast forwarded my perceptual time for about half an hour before he stopped feeling sorry for himself, recovered his phone, and began trekking out. I checked my map, as expected, he'd ended up in a carefully picked location for starter characters, surrounded by points of interests in all directions, even down.
Shit. It can't be that outdated can it?
Who am I kidding? The original Noob Village was now buried a quarter of a kilometer beneath the soil, and still glowed with residual radioactivity.
Starter Town had apparently grown into a metropolis, built towers that had touched the stars (literally in this case, this was before they'd extended Z-heights), all until they'd drawn the ire of some Higher Level Cultivator reincarnated into a toddler, who accidentally splattered them.
I was almost about to hit a panic button to teleport Isaac to a backup location when I noticed with some relief that he was in fact walking in the direction of a small village, albeit further than either of us would like. I kept an eye on engagement metrics, but most of the Ancestor Worshippers had still stuck around despite the slow start.
He was stopping along the way to experiment with his Qi sense, treating the equivalent of a hastily coded shader effect with far more reverence than it was worth. Colorful though, I'll give it that. He stared at a passing six-limbed lizard, Old Sage mushrooms, one of which he picked out of habit, and a bunch of other miscellaneous critters nobody cared about enough to document as they ran about in the undergrowth.
Smaller creatures, the not-particularly magical ones, had tiny auras, comparable to the brightness of a firefly in the dark. When Isaac looked at himself, his was akin to a flickering candle, blown about by invisible Qi currents. Faint lines flickered beneath his skin, tracing out meridians, which lead back to the currently tiny organs that stored Qi. He seemed a little happier when this suggested that the lumps weren't actually cancer.
He spotted a branch that glowed unusually brightly, and decided to craft that into a spear. Not a bad choice, though he didn't realize that another plant species here conveniently made a lethal neurotoxin he could rub onto it.
Another hour of walking brought him to the edge of a cliff, beyond which lay endless vistas, but closer to hand, clouds of smoke that indicated a village.
He took out his phone and made use of the telephoto zoom to peer closer, though he seemed a little confused by the interface.
Due to Historical Licensing fees, I'd had to make some minor edits to the design of the device. Nothing major, I'd carried over the basic specs as appropriate for 2023, like the 20 petabytes of storage, the 200x zoom and electron microscopy features, IP68 waterproofing etc. Bit of a rush job, given that I was more focused on his biology, but it had all the usual features he was used to.
He dialed in some knobs, and managed to get a much clearer image, showing a lively village of about a couple hundred inhabitants with rather typical baseline human features. A better anthropologist would have realized that they possessed tools and clothing incongruent with their numbers and tech level, suggestive of trade, or in this case, Xianxia bullshit. Still, he seemed happy that this world had humans quite similar to him.
More confusing were the figures clearly flying in the sky, some above the village. There was regular traffic, headed both up into the sky and down into the trees. Human again, but riding some kind of giant bird he couldn't identify.
Instead of trying to find a way down the cliff, which was actually a small portion of the edge of a crater left by that reincarnated toddler, he decided to examine his phone with more care.
As expected, he found the Notes app, Inventory management, the Wiki (WIP), and Multitools. He quickly opened the last option, and whooped as he found sections such as Cutting Laser, Sex-toy mode, LIDAR Neural Radiance Field creator and other standard iOS features.
He wisely avoided pointing the laser at the village itself, instead aiming for a nearby tree, which promptly caught fire. Not like the whole thing going up in flames, just a few leaves. He quickly dialed it down, and decided to try using it to signal one of the flyers.
At this point, he quickly learned why the app came with an FAQ explaining why it wasn't FCC or FAA approved, because even reduced in intensity as it was, the beam blinded the rider, and in his pain and panic, he fell off his mount and plummeted several hundred feet into the ground.
The chat instantly erupted with cheers, money changed hands as those who had put their joules into "omnicidal MC" made bank, some Ancestor Worshippers began tallying up confirmed kills, while others petitioned me to enable the old Achievements system.
Goddamn, I was tempted, but Achievements had been busted for several millennia and I had far more important problems to fix.
Management even gave me a small bonus as we hit one of first metrics, an organic edit to Omnipedia both announcing the upcoming update as well as one dedicated to the fork of Isaac we were running.
Isaac wasn't as happy about it as he ought to have been, he dropped his phone again, cracking the screen for real this time, and began weeping. He was lucky that the old Beginner's area still had hard-coded power caps in place, because an assault of this nature in a more advanced region would have likely lead to him being immediately decapitated with a flying sword or blown to bits with a lightning bolt.
The village went into absolute turmoil, with the remaining flyers darting for the clouds or hiding in the trees. Isaac hid himself behind a bush for quite a while, until he assessed that things had calmed down a notch.
He climbed a tree and spent a rather uncomfortable night fending off an amorous lizard, but woke up at dawn and decided to find a way down.
It was clear why the most obvious means of transport out of the village was aerial- the crater had been weathered over eons, but it still took him half of the day to find a path down, the remnants of a long gone waterfall, which he managed to follow without breaking anything important.
The villagers discovered his approach well before he came out into the open, alerted by the baying of their hounds. He yelled out in English and terrible Chinese for a bit before they told him to shut up and wait for someone to get him.
Isaac was confused again, or rather more confused than he already was. If he'd bothered to read the manual, he'd have learned that we'd prepped him and future arrivals with standard translation routines, the kind omnipresent in civilized space. In this case, we were using it both as a marketing point, and also because it entailed us the ability to claim a couple grants for Disability Aware and Accessible Simulations. It didn't work for everything of course, especially when it was narratively convenient for something new to be incomprehensible, but it would absolutely slow down our hype if he had to spend a few months picking up the local language.
It was a design choice that to him, it largely came across as English and poorly translated Chinese, which is a staple of the genre from what I'm told.
He stood about nervously until the gates opened, and the most disposable denizen of the village, a little girl, came out and carefully teased out a path to him. I checked, and as part of their defensive preparations, the villagers had activated an ancient formation embedded in the soil, which as far as my debugging tools could tell, acted like a minefield.
Isaac hovered uncertainly as the girl came up to him, just about reaching the level of his belly button as she peered up at him earnestly. "Are you an Otherworldly Demon?"
"Uh.. Do you mean a transmigrator? I'm from Earth, have you heard of it?" He asked hopefully.
"Otherworldly Demon then. Hang on, let me check my notes." She pulled out a scroll of remarkable age, if the amount of dust on it was any indication. The act of unraveling it made them both break out into coughing, but she quickly recovered her poise and began reading aloud.
"Do you have retrograde amnesia in the absence of cranial trauma (or equivalent)?"
"I remember talking to some god in the shape of my buddy, but I don't think I hit my head!" He explained.
She took out a ballpoint pen and ticked a box.
"Do you see floating letters, numbers, ASCII characters including emoji in your visual field, or any other unusual qualia?"
"What? No! I asked for a System, but he said this wasn't a lit RPG."
She crunched up her face in deep thought, something so abominably cute that Isaac had a nigh uncontrollable urge to pat her on the head, but due to decades of upbringing at the height of the American Social Conservatism movement and associated fear of pedophilia, he refrained. Ok, that meant the memetic suggestion field was working as intended, as well as the Trope Manager.
"Have you met a god, angel, demon, Ayy-I, or anything of that nature who claimed to have brought you here?" She asked again. Before Isaac could answer, she interrupted him. "Uncle told me that Cultivators or Dao Agents don't count. It has to be in another world."
They ran through the rest of the list, but since the little girl didn't know how to add up more than single digit numbers, after a bit of yelling and discussion, the villagers agreed to defuse their formation and let the two of them back in to tally it all properly.
Isaac was forced to discard his improvised spear, and then escorted through the village by a couple of the stronger men, even though their physiques were nowhere near a beef-fed American like him. They kept their spears and bows at the ready, till was brought to a rather sturdy and decorated building, only a little smaller than the Chief's or the Medical Elders'. A sign, which he was surprised at being able to read, informed him that this was the abode of the Imperial Envoy, 5th class, Lord Wang.
He was escorted in, and found himself in what was clearly some kind of office, with a chubby official in ornate robes sitting across a desk, while he was told to sit down in the middle of the room. Even the relatively spacious interior was crowded, everyone from the Chief to the men not on guard duty wanted to lay their eyes on an Otherworldly Demon.
"State your name for the Imperial record." The envoy ordered.
"Isaac Kai"
"Kai, of the Isaac clan?"
"Oh, no, it's the Anglicized form, not the Chinese way."
"What's a Chinese?" The envoy asked suspiciously.
"Umm, you're Chinese. I'm like a quarter Chinese myself." Isaac explained.
At this point, the scroll filled out by the little girl was brought over and ceremoniously placed before the envoy.
He ran the numbers and tried to ignore his runny nose, and eventually proclaimed, "Isaac Kai indeed meets the criteria for an Otherworldly Demon".
He turned to the Village Chief and other elders. "So, if he is one, what's the standard procedure for handling him?"
The elders all looked at each other sheepishly, before someone poked the Chief, who was startled into stepping forward. Finding himself under the expectant gaze of the envoy, he scratched at his head for a moment. "Uh, Lord, truth be told, nobody quite knows. The last time was certainly two Epochs ago, well before the battle of the Three Divines destroyed the second moon."
"Give me your best guess then. I'll be honest, when the Court sent me to this little backwater famous only for somehow avoiding every extinction event that came its way, I thought that my standing orders to ask about Otherworldly Demons was made up by a bored eunuch to waste my time." He stroked his beard, appraising Isaac again.
"My lord, we've been a bastion for humanity, the only settlement that has survived multiple epochs while surrounded by the perfidious xenos and the mutants!" An elder cried out, his honor affronted.
"I remind you not to use slurs to refer to fellow Imperial citizens, even those of different skin colors and bodily configurations. You think the Emperor and Empress give a shit? All they care about is that the taxes keep flowing." He declared with a degree of contempt only safe to express because he was a week's travel from any contemporaries.
"You, Demon. Did you see any Akeni, wielding weapons that emit beams of coherent radiation? Not just pulsed lasers, it could be a continuous beam." The Magistrate asked, squinting at Isaac.
"No! I mean, er, no my lord! Assuming I understood you correctly." Isaac lied, doing a reasonably good job of it.
"Good, it seems it won't be too hard to educate and tame this one. In the meantime, you have my word that if you can produce evidence of the Akeni being responsible for the attack, you get a waiver to take a few scalps. Otherwise, my edict overriding Air Traffic Control stands, no flyers till we find out what's going on." The Elders nodded angrily, clearly having their own misconceptions about what was going on.
Isaac was clearly unwilling to leave without a few answers but after a quick poke with a walking stick, he agreed to follow the villagers to a place prepared for him.
They returned his phone, only expressing mild curiosity about it. He wisely refrained from elaborating on its abilities, including the blinding laser, but found out that similar devices were occasionally seen in the hands of passing traders, even if they were more clearly magical.
He certainly didn't find a Lightning charger, but since his phone had a kilowatt hour battery, he still had plenty of juice left. He frowned again, confused by the numbers, but quickly went off to sleep, stomach full with a rather delicious stew.
The next morning, he was brought to the Chief, who had felt unfairly sidelined as the Imperial Envoy had done all the interrogation. Isaac quickly learned that this village was composed of the descendants of an ancient and noble folk, the people of the Tu'to Real. Instructed by inscrutable deities, they took care of transmigrators or newly spawned PCs, who almost invariably left after a while to explore the wider world.
Even to this day, some rare bloodline abilities occasionally cropped up, such as those unusually skilled with a bow or the ability to steal with supernatural finesse. Unfortunately, these abilities did not mesh with the known routes of greater Cultivation, so were little more than a curiosity.
Isaac learned that while humans were by far the dominant race, in this particular region, they were a minority, coexisting with a motley collection of sapients, some considered as variant races, while others were "Xenos" as the translation software conveyed it. The Chief proudly proclaimed that regardless of what happened, be it the aftershock of a battle between high level Cultivators, nuclear warfare, a Storm of Qi or anything else that might lay waste to the region, this tiny village and its people inevitably survived and carried on the knowledge of their duty.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
Unfortunately, they were rather unsure of what that duty actually was, since there hadn't been a fresh spawn for two epochs. Some suggested they train Isaac as a warrior, others hoped that he would teach them his ways. Some suggested blowjobs or bed warming, which he considered with care until he realized that they expected him to be giving the blowjobs.
In the end, it was academic, since for the past hundred years or so, the polity referred to as the Empire had taken over these lands, and had a standing order that the affairs of new Otherworldly Demons should be left in their hands.
Still, it would be a while before the Envoy, Lord Wang, heard back, so he might as well get comfortable.
Isaac realized that the people here were perfectly happy to answer the stupidest questions (genetically engineered in fact), so he set about learning as much as they could be bothered to teach him.
This village was a distant descendant of the original Starter Village, now referred to by the locals as the Village of Tears. They were largely self sufficient, only lacking in even the lowest of Cultivators, since as part of the Imperial Tithe, promising candidates were taken to the regional capital.
In terms of export goods, they made a decent living mining blast glass and other detritus that could be found in the crater walls while harvesting some uncommon medicinal herbs, and largely lead a comfortable existence, were it not for the evil Akeni.
The Akeni were apparently not of this world, tall blue digitigrade beings ostracized by both normal humans and other variant races. They had no aptitude for Cultivation, but apparently had a stockpile of artifacts left behind from whatever cataclysm had brought them here. This included unusually powerful yet seemingly mundane weaponry, which is why they were the immediate suspects for the laser accident.
Isaac listened carefully as a litany of crimes were pinned on the Akeni. Leaving aside the blinding and murder, they were apparently responsible for the infertility of cattle and woman alike, the failure of the harvest last year, and causing a decrease in game animals because even wild creatures found their odor offensive.
His conscience, while atrophied, wasn't entirely extinct, so he did have a few thoughts about coming clean, but wisely didn't. It didn't seem like it would make a difference, he told himself, the locals were already sufficiently riled up and eager to take heads.
He finally got to see the creatures the flyers rode on, large birds not quite the same as any he'd seen before, but somewhat close to a very large albatross. He had some doubts about their wingspan to weight ratio and half-remembered something something square-cube law, but he already felt resigned to magical bullshit, another wise choice.
The village didn't own these birds, they'd once been entirely isolated from the wider world, until they were discovered by said Empire, who provided these creatures on loan as mounts. They were very useful for travel to the floating trading outpost that overlooked the crater, though they couldn't fly significant distances.
While the village had no Cultivators, barring the Envoy, who was supposedly one, not that he ever showed it; as part of remittances from its diaspora, it occasionally received Cultivator-made weapons and equipment, or traded for them with passing caravans that stopped at the Imperial outpost.
Magical machetes that could hack through the thickest vine, spears you could effortlessly poke through a cow, arrows that sought out anything with warm blood, all were present. If not in large numbers, they were at least there.
Isaac asked about general geography and culture, and received half a dozen mutually contradictory answers. Everyone agreed that this little village was in Footfall Crater, at the edge of the Simadril Province, in Jiangshu Continent of the Lowest Realm.
Unfortunately, that was where the dissent began. One elder claimed that the world itself was round, another called it the shape of a saddle, another a torus, with the Chief drawing groans and laughs when he claimed it was actually flat. Isaac asked them what the shadow cast on the Moons looked like, and was told it was crescent shaped, which he took as evidence that the world was in fact spherical.
He was indeed right, but so were the others, because going through the commit history, I saw no end of weird configurations for the World, including some rather non-Euclidean ones. Right now, it was spherical, but colossally so, having approximately the same size as Jupiter orbiting Sol.
Isaac now asked about the history of the world, which caused even more acrimony. Depending on the metrics used, this was either the 263rd or 264th Epoch, a rather unclear period of time marked at the beginning and end by tumultuous changes. As I expected, this roughly corresponded to the 26.3 million years the Sim had been run, but I was rather curious about the local timekeeping myself.
They told him that each Epoch was about a 100k years, and the last one had been heralded by the shattering of the Second Moon, just after the Heavenly Toddler had crushed the region. It had been around 7000 years since the beginning of this one.
I checked the patch notes again, and yup, that's about when the total sapient population of the Sim reached numbers that became rate limiting in terms of ticks per second, and as usual, the answer was a rather indiscriminate cull. Sometimes they didn't have to bother, the mechanics of the Sim were broken enough that events that killed 99.99% of the population occurred on a distressingly frequent basis.
Isaac picked up some more flavor about the Akeni. One on one, they were strong warriors, capable of facing down a beginner Cultivator of the Lowest Realm, at least in terms of physical strength. But their numbers had been dwindling for ages, and even the Envoy agreed that they were likely extinct in the rest of the Empire. What kept them relevant were their stockpiles of weapons and armor, but these were irreplaceable relics, often used to pay off Imperial tithes, or saved for a rainy day.
The Empire was broadly tolerant, and accepted the existence of non-humans, but since the Akeni couldn't tithe in Cultivator seeds, and their stockpiles had been constantly dwindling, they had sotto voce informed the other tribes that they wouldn't investigate too hard if the Akeni were wiped out and replaced with a more productive people, and wouldn't bother at all if there was sufficient pretext.
Isaac then attended the funeral for the villager he'd killed, an unusually large affair, as half a dozen of the other tribes in Footfall Crater had been invited, in a naked bid to form an alliance to take down the Akeni at minimal cost.
Lord Wang observed quietly, as the shamans roused the latent anger in human and variant alike until all were ready to slay and slaughter in the name of justice.
Isaac was struck by the diversity of the Variant Humans. Since the starter area had initially been a testbed for more Western High Fantasy, there was a race derived from something close to classical Elves, albeit they'd interbred for so many aeons that other than the pointiness of their teeth and unusual height, they weren't all that much to look at. There were Leopard Men (and women, and children), with their tails and spotted skin, standing proud. In the corner were the Mirrored, almost indistinguishable from normal humans, except for the fact that their internals were exactly mirrored, including organs and the like. While this didn't extend down to the genetic and protein level, their meridians were also incompatible with normal people, hence they were unable to interbreed and normally classified as Variants.
All were united in their hate for the Xenos, and soon, blood oaths were sworn, and plans for a pogrom were made.
In the meantime, Lord Wang received a preliminary response, that Isaac should receive some degree of training while a caravan was re-routed to pick him up. He tugged at his beard fretfully, since there were no Cultivators in such a backwater, and he himself had been crippled in his youth, leaving him only suitable for a dead-end posting such as the one in Footfall Crater.
Out of better options, he resolved to teach Isaac that historical technique the locals knew, while it didn't scale anywhere near a proper means of Cultivation, it was better than nothing. Isaac was summoned, and queried about his existing combat prowess. Of course, that was close to nil, but he was told it was no barrier at all.
Eventually, the locals brought him to a temple near the center of the crater that had been painstakingly excavated from deep below the soil. Isaac walked in eagerly, almost certain that whatever this place contained would be his Edge or System, a way to get ahead of the curve.
He was about 23 million years too late for that.
At a hidden altar, activated with the blood of an Elder, he found himself in what seemed like a summoning circle. The moment he stepped into it, a bright light flared up, scaring the shit out of the locals. It looked like the trigger used to identify new spawns was still working, if only I could say the same for the rest of the code.
Hello Adventurer Null Null
Welcome to the Realms of Magic
Please choose a class:
1) Knight
2) Wizard
3) Mage
4) Nuclear Physicist
5) Chiropractor
6) Alchemist
7) F1 driver
8) Chimpanzee
9) Thief
10) Archer (50 lb draw weight and below)
11) Lord of Destruction (1/1 available, player only)
12) Knight (left-handed)
Isaac was smarter than me, because while I was checking the skill tree for Chimpanzee, my eyes boggling at frankly OP banana peeling skill, he decisively chose "Lord of Destruction".
This crashed the entire Simulation. For a few nanoseconds. I quickly managed to fix the issue, something to do with a collection of lootboxes that had been banned for corrupting the youth.
Congratulations on your first Legendary Class!
Lord of Destruction comes with a complimentary assortment of premium cosmetics, but we're sure you're most interested in the unique skill tree and summonable items!
You'll have to put your skills to the test, as your class is marked as PvPvE. But you'll certainly look sick doing it!
Isaac grinned from ear to ear as a sense of unchecked power rushed through his system, he felt himself float a few millimeters off the ground, which while not particularly impressive, still felt pretty good.
The Village Chief fell onto his knees, sobbing with pride, "Ah, if I had known this day would come, I wouldn't have felt so depressed about picking F1 driver."
Isaac walked back out of the temple, followed by a gaggle of villagers. He closed his eyes and willed, and with a shower of light, a pink cloak surrounded him. He was a little nonplussed at the color, but once again wrote it off as Xianxia bullshit.
I scratched my head, it certainly shouldn't have been pink, but we'd lost the licensing rights to that armor set a while back so it had probably picked default textures.
Closing his eyes, Isaac went over the rest of his loot, before opening them with a roar, and then reaching out with his arm, summoned a massive sword into existence.
The Obsidian Blade of Ragnarok, or Obbie as the original playerbase called it, coruscated with purple light and shimmered in a manner more indicative of a bug in the antialiasing code rather than anything intentional.
He swung it about effortlessly, exultant in the intoxicating sense of power. Meanwhile, I looked over at the chat, with had broken out in acrimony at what some claimed was OP loot breaking character progression, others arguing that it fit entirely into the lore, and other miscellaneous stupidity.
Eh, they'd all see why I wasn't fussed in the least about Obbie.
Tired of whirling it about, Isaac paused, surreptitiously and checked that the audience was paying attention, and then took up a pose ready to swing Obbie at a particularly thick tree. He'd seen the documentation, it came with +35% parry chance, +135 armor piercing and a +200% drop rate for Realm Coins. Oh, and it had a colossal 76000 base damage stat, almost a hundred times higher than any other starter weapon.
None of us expected the tree to parry, but the armor piercing and massive damage seemed promising.
He squared up, warmed up his shoulders, and then swung the Obsidian Blade with all his might. Time seemed to slow, the squawking birds and chirping insects shut up for once, and the villagers gasped in anticipation. I checked my inbox.
There was a massive boom, a blast of wind shook the forests, leaves rained down, and a cloud of dust obscured the scene. Cheers broke out, Cultivation OS lacked a grassroots environmentalist movement and didn't suffer from Anthropogenic Climate Change, so nobody was sad about a poor harmless tree getting it.
But as the dust cleared, all except me were shocked to see the tree standing unscathed, while a terrified Isaac stumbled back, gripping onto Obbie.
Just his luck eh? He thought he was taking on a random shrub, but he'd accidentally provoked the hibernating form of the Great Druid Amos the Mad, a sworn enemy of the Dark, and his fated rival.
Well, that's probably what he was thinking, but even after a few minutes passed, the tree showed no indication of being anything but a tree. A few of the braver birds even returned and went back to their nests.
Isaac shook his head, and swung his sword at another tree. Cue another impressive explosion and associated particle effects, but once again, the tree was unscathed. Unwilling to give up, he tried slashing, stabbing, poking and even unscrewed the pommel and threw it at the plant.
Nothing worked. He gave up, and moved to a bush. No luck. Maybe a blade of grass? Damn, them grass got hands.
He gritted his teeth and tried shaving off a fine hair from his arm. Might as well have dipped the blade in Teflon.
While Isaac speedran through the stages of grief, I examined the documentation. Things had worked out as I expected, which either meant I was getting better at grokking the code or going insane, whatever the difference was in Cultivation OS.
Realms of Magic had never been particularly popular, hence the transition to COS. This coincided with a shift away from a hitpoint system to a more subtle physics-based damage model, which had been endlessly extended over the years. Since nobody but a handful of NPCs had bothered with such an outdated and underpowered system for millions of years, most of the legacy code was utterly useless. Sure, there were probably a few things that were absolutely busted OP, but to the best of my knowledge, none of them were in the original starter region.
Obbie's insane stats meant absolutely jackshit today, and its broken physics model meant that it wasn't even any good at being an ordinary sword. Still looked damn cool though, so points for that.
Isaac had yet to give up, he joined the villagers in spirited discussion, exploring options such as the blade only harming the righteous/evil, a particular spell or incantation being missing, the need to finish a quest before its abilities unlocked and so on.
To test the first option, a poor Akeni captive was dragged out from the village prison, and severely tickled as Isaac and the other braves tried their best to murder it.
Isaac wanted to try it on the "righteous", but his suggestion was vetoed straightaway. Not before a long philosophical debate about what that meant of course. Surprisingly, everyone was in agreement that the Akeni were indisputably evil.
A day passed, and eventually Isaac gave up on Obbie, unsummoning it for the moment. He tried out the other free kit he'd been given, but was dismayed to discover that the bright pink cloak and armor did nothing of note, not even protect from mosquitoes. Yup, collision broken, and the stat boosts didn't work anymore.
Still, Isaac didn't come out of this empty-handed, he'd received some basic muscle memory regarding swordsmanship from the character selection, which took him to the level of a passable beginner.