I woke up to a moderate headache due to all the information. The P107 knocks you out so you don’t experience the traumatizing experience of breathing in gelatinous air. At the same time you are injected with a paralytic and your heart and muscles are stimulated remotely. I’d always been curious so I looked around this new world. It was a small shack with a floating interface in front of me. Though it looked shabby, I couldn’t feel any wind blowing through cracks and the temperature was perfect. Maybe customization came later?

On the Prompt in front of me there was a simple yes/no question: “Would you like to proceed to character creator?”. How was I supposed to interact with it? Touch it? Will it? In my hesitation I tripped on a floorboard and my hand fell through the yes button. Immediately I was teleported to a grand white hall that looked to be ancient greek make. Well that answers that. Between the columns I could see rolling fields of wheat and barley, patches of melons and countless other agricultural products.Before me was a tall woman with a wheat crown on her head. The greek influences were off the charts.

“Hello, I’m Demeter, your helper for today. How may I address you?”

Before me was a prompt. Doug sounds boring and it’ll be weird to be referred to as a fake name. What about Dug? A perfect name in a game about cultivation. I hastily punch it in eager to learn what’s going to happen next.

“Welcome to the character creator, what would you like your race to be?”

A long list of different fantasy race names pops up in front of me. They seemed to be in no particular order so I scrolled to the bottom in the hopes there was a rare race there. Instead there were only elves at the bottom, it might’ve just been randomized. In the bottom left corner however there was a stylized gear symbol. So of course I clicked it. Inside were pages upon pages of settings.

One that stood out to me was a page for different senses. On it was pain, touch and volume. Pain was set to 20% as a base, how high does it go? I immediately tried setting it as high as possible but it capped out at 400%. Next I increased the touch sensation also to 400%. Nothing too bad can happen. They would get sued if they caused permanent damage to their players so there should be guards in place. Right? Right?!? Of course they would.

I return back to the race menu, but I’m definitely going to look at the settings again. Might as well just pick elf as they’re natury and graceful so I won’t step on crops. High elves are good at magic and that would be cool so let’s go with that. Immediately as the screen disappears I can feel a slight breeze on my skin that wasn’t there before. Did the wind pick up or am I just perceiving things better?

“I see you’ve picked high elves, now you can get to the bulk of the character creator.”

In front of me a high elf suddenly appears rotating on a pedestal. They’re fully naked for some reason. In front of me are pages upon pages og sliders. Some influence hair color, others finger size and everything in between. I try my best to make them very similar to me so it doesn’t feel too weird. Hair color doesn’t matter so instead of black I went with a light blonde because elves. High elves are tall so I increased my height by a couple inches from 5’11” to 6’2”. Although I’m in slightly good shape I still slimmed down my character a bit so less material was needed to make clothes and I become lighter for my strength. Maneuverability is important after all.

I can’t see my eyes but I don’t want to look too weird so I settle for my normal color, hazel. There’s probably going to be a bunch of edgelords with completely black or red eyes though. I make a bunch of other small adjustments for ease of use.

Finally after about 18 hours of switching around sliders I’m done. The majority of the time was spent making new characters on the side grotesque and just playing around. One of the benefits of the P107 is that it keeps your brain half on so you don’t have a need for sleep at normal speed.The biggest draw however is the time dilation. After the game properly launches it will be 3 times the time. There are drawbacks however and people will have to sleep in the game. It does add realism though.

“Remember, you can come back to the character creator any time before launch. Now, let’s move on to attributes.”

I was wondering what I would do besides parsing in the settings for the next 3 days. Maybe I can try to make various people in the game? A particularly good model might sell well. A proper block of stats appears in front of me.

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Attribute

Current Number

Use

Free

20

Can be assigned to any other stat.

Strength

5

Increases physical strength of the character. Allows for increased weights to be carried and equipment to be used with greater force

Agility

5

Increases physical speed of the character. Speed includes casting time, movement, professions and physical attacks

Constitution

5

Increases health of the character along with resistance to various status effects

Wisdom

5

Increases total Mana and the power of wisdom based magic. At higher levels can sometimes give guidance to the player.

Intelligence

5

Increases Mana regeneration and power of intelligence based magic. At higher levels can sometimes give hints of information

Charisma

5

Increases charisma based skills/magic and acts as a multiplier for charm with NPCs

Why they would need this many stats for a game about farming, I have no idea.

“Hey Demeter, why do they have this many stats when you’ll mostly be farming?”

“Farming isn’t the only thing you can do in Heavenly Cultivation. You can command a ship, create a city and much much more.”

Apparently Pepperidge Games used extremely targeted advertising to get more player base. It would be weird to spend 10 years developing a farming simulator after all.

“But then why did I get you as my character creating helper?”

“It is random to give everyone a feel for the different deities. You just got lucky.”

I go back to perusing the settings. Maybe there’s more interesting things? This will definitely take at least a couple days though. Most of it is different system config stuff but some applies to stuff I don’t know about yet. After 10 hours I get mind numbingly bored and go back to the character creator. The first thing I do is try to make my sister from memory. It’s much harder work than it looks.

First my memory isn’t the best coupled with the multiple months since I last saw her and the crazy amount of sliders make it virtually impossible. While I make her I ponder about what other possibilities there are. Being a mage would be cool and I would be pretty good at it since I chose an elf. There shouldn’t just be farming spells especially since there’s other stuff Demeter alluded to.

Since there’s constitution, shouldn't that mean that there’s combat? Is there going to be a tutorial or will I just be plopped into the world. Maybe I could be a healer, then I’ll be pretty sought out due to most wanting to experience combat firsthand and them being less about utility. Above all I should start as a farmer and sell my wares, adventuring can come later.

As I switch through different figures it gets extremely boring. I know I said I would stay in the game but there’s nothing to do anymore.

“It seems you’re getting bored, would you like to access the forums?”

“Yes!Yes!Yes! 1000 times yes!”

I hastily click the button which appeared. In front of me I have access to much more information than Demeter would ever give to me.On the forums everyone should be reccounting the information they’ve received. But one problem, the internet’s a weird place. It will take days to sort through any significant part of this. You really would have to parse through the fucking lewd creations made in the character creator of the differents dieties in game and celebrities outside of it. This is why I’m not on the internet much. You would think the moderating team could handle it but the shear wave of content would force anyone to drown.

But I’ve managed to come out with some useful information from the endeavor, though at the cost of 2 days of my life I could never get back.

1.Each person received semi unique targeted ads through some convoluted neural network.

2.Almost any activity imaginable is able to happen to great realism.

3.There would be a tutorial immediately once the game launches

Tutorial starts in 20 minutes so I’m going to mentally prepare myself.

19 minutes later

“See you later Demeter”

A screen pops up in front of me and I click take me to the tutorial.