“What does it mean to have a lightning affinity?” he asked.

“Ohhh. It just means you can gather lightning mana or what you would call electricity faster and easier than those who don’t. Basically, should you choose to be a lightning mage it will make things easier,” Wazsh said.

“Mage, like magic mage? You want to tell me you have magic here?” Duncan asked in surprise.

“Well, magic is just another word for science you don’t understand,” Wazsh said with a smirk.

“What do you mean?” Duncan asked, looking expectantly.

“Hmmm. How to explain. Let’s take the Healing potion I gave you for example. This one works by infusing nanobots into your body that fixes the damage to your matrix on an elemental level.

They are basically as powerful as medium potions you can sometimes get in a good alchemist shop. Those work by gathering life mana from plants and other ingredients into a form that is beneficial to the body.

The nanobots were directly infused with the mana to skip the arduous process of making the potion. I guess I didn’t quite explain. You know of string theory?” Wazsh asked exasperated.

“Yes. I heard something about that,” Duncan remembered when he was working in the library and browsing the net he came upon that specific topic.

“Imagine mana as a mixture of lots of specific strings. Some like to carry one type of energy the others another. Some attract each other; some repulse. Using magic is just filtering and concentrating the strings that you want that are all around you and inside yourself by making a magnet of some sort within yourself and then expelling them.

Your lightning affinity just means there is now a tiny permanent magnet within you that will gather lightning-carrying strings faster or make them move faster. I think that’s the best explanation I can offer you,” Wazsh said as he waved his hands vehemently.

“Is Identify also a kind of magic?” Duncan suddenly asked after a pause.

“Nah. That is just nanobots in our heads communicating and asking for our stat sheets. The higher the skill the more they return back. I probably already said too much,” Wazsh said.

“What do you mean?” said Duncan.

“This is not exactly public knowledge I gave you. Try talking to the natives about nanobots or string theory and you will see what happens. Maybe you get another passive skill.

I see your class synergized terribly well with their punishment protocols. Instead of punishment, you got resistances and an affinity. In normal circumstances, you would have to endure ten times as much pain or electricity and by then the level of punishment would be raised numerous times.

I checked your log after I saw your resistance being so high after just two hours. You made your punishment into a weapon. Someone really screwed up there setting the parameters,” Wazsh said with a laugh.

“I can turn my punishment into a weapon?” Duncan asked.

“That’s how you killed the rats. The AI punished you for cursing by flooding your body with electricity while the rats were biting you and the electricity killed them. It’s kind of funny you found a bug in their foolproof system,” Wazsh said laughing hysterically and striking his knee.

“You don’t seem to be satisfied here. Why do you work this job? I mean it is a job or are you forced?” Duncan asked after he got a strange vibe that Wazsh was not exactly thrilled to be here.

“It shows, doesn’t it? Ahhh, I used to like it. There was variety. Adventurers as we call you guys were plenty coming and going, telling their stories, and watching them grow was fun. But then they moved on and no new ones came. I am stuck here day after day opening this bar to serve the local drunks.

It has been 13 years of your Earth's time which translates to just under 200 years due to the time dilation since the last adventurer came before you. Imagine being stuck in the same routine for 200 years.

I can’t even kill myself like you can to end it since my body is in stasis on a space ship and I will just get a breach of contract and more years added to my contract,” Wazsh said with sadness in his eyes.

“Stasis? Space ship?” Duncan asked.

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“My physical body is, hmmm, you could say frozen while my mind is projected into a copy you see before you. I don’t age while I am like that,” Wazsh explained.

“You said contract? So, was it by choice? Why did you accept?” Duncan asked.

“Well, my home planet was about to be swallowed by the merger of our binary stars, and the employers offered to relocate us. Of course, nothing is free in this Universe and we were offered a variety of jobs to pay for this service. This seemed like a good deal on paper.

Playing the host in a reality show for the duration of the trip. They just didn’t mention the trip to last almost a millennium of your Earth's time. Bastards used the slowest ships they had to relocate us.

Well, they were still faster by a factor of a hundred compared to ours but still, it was a dick move. At first, it was fun as we prepared for this. I had a chance to visit Earth and learn about your culture but then I got stuck here behind this bar in this little town. I am not allowed to leave the town premises for the duration of the contract,” Wazsh grunted out with displeasure.

Duncan made big eyes at the new information as Wazsh dismissed his grunt with a wave of his hand.

“Enough about me we all have our crosses to bear as they say in your world. That reminds me of that wild story,” Wazsh said with a laugh.

“So how about those rats?” he said after a while.

“OK, I will do it,” Duncan replied.

“There should be five torches and a lighter in the backpack. Also, pick up the corpses please or they will just stink up the cellar as they decompose. Just dump them in your inventory," Wazsh said.

A blue window popped up again.

[ Rat killer Quest – Level 1-5 ]

ACCEPT

[YES] - [NO]

Duncan mentally clicked on YES and the window vanished.

Wazsh soon had the rope tied around Duncan and opened the hatch again meanwhile Duncan fished out a torch from the backpack and set it alight.

“This is insane. What the hell am I doing?” Duncan thought as he got lowered into the darkness.

Once down he untied himself. The shimmering torch made the darkness a lot less scary. It was just a 3-meter-long corridor where once upon a time a stairwell used to be and brickwork walls shimmered in orange color from the torch.

He looked ahead and saw a pile of rat corpses on the ground. He took a big breath and started walking towards the corpses when a shimmer from the ground caught his eye. Bending down he picked up a couple of round coins.

He used Identify on them and got [Bronze coin]. He stared at them under the torchlight and turned them around in his hand. There was a bearded fellow on one side wearing a crown and on the other side had a shield with a sword on top.

“Hmmm. How do I put this into the inventory?” he asked himself.

As he tried to work it out, suddenly the coins disappeared.

“I guess it’s mind-controlled,” Duncan muttered.

He used his bare feet to scrape up the loose soil on the floor and felt more coins beneath his toes and when he pointed the torch closer, he saw them. He started picking them up while scraping away the dirt. Soon the dirt was no longer loose so he used his dagger from the backpack and dug deeper.

Suddenly there was a yell from upstairs.

“Are you OK down there?”

It was Wazsh checking up on him.

“Yeah. I just found some coins on the ground,” he yelled back.

“Ohhh. Feel free to pick them up. You can keep them. They must have flown down with all the vomit over the years I usually just wash everything down there,” Wazsh yelled back.

“Oh god. I am digging through two hundred years of vomit,” Duncan just realized what this place was used for and why there were coins in the ground. He ignored the revelation since he was well aware of the circumstances of being penniless from his normal life and kept on digging until he found no more coins in the soil.

Altogether he found 247 bronze coins and 32 silver ones. They had different people on them bearded, shaven, kings, queens, some that looked like warriors, and even people on horseback.

There were also a couple of keys and a ring that looked like it was made of gold but he really could not tell under the orange glow of the torch. He used Identify on it and just got [Ring] from it.

The heavy metal stuff obviously stayed close to the hole in the ceiling and soon his treasure hunt was over. Moving over the corpses he was at first unwilling to touch the rats but considering he was rifling through two hundred years of swill and vomit, he forced his hands closer.

Just before he was about to touch a rat corpse it disappeared into his inventory.

He used this newfound magic act on all the other rat corpses too. There were now seven of them in his inventory. He moved on and came to the blue glowing poison mushroom and he avoided it like the plague. He got a sudden impulse and used Identify on it.

“Maybe I can sell it?” he thought.

[ Blue glowing Deathcap ]

[ It attracts insects and other pests with its blue glow and poisons them as they touch it. After they succumb to its poison it feeds off their decaying flesh. It burns your skin ten seconds after it is touched. Used for insecticide for up to level 5 insects. ]

He tried to pick it up by holding his hand near but nothing happened. Then he used his dagger and cut it off at the stem. The mushroom fell over and he willed it into his inventory.