Epilogue

Mysterious Man

It was night in the game when Hannah logged in.

Exerting her body, she stretched and instantly transformed into her Bestial form. Her body elongated, arms, legs, torso all stretched out and she became thinner. Her feet especially grew longer and slimmer, making her stand on her cat's paws; it felt like she was standing on the tip of her toes, yet her balance and bodily coordination increased several times with her transformation, her passive Skill Fluid Movement activating, helping her feel at ease even when balancing on the steeply slanting roof's slick ceramic tiles. It wouldn't do if she fell from the roof of one of the highest towers in the Magician's Guild.

As her body elongated and grew thinner, her clothes started baring most of her body, and she could only sigh. Sure, now her skin was completely covered with a fine fluffy black fur, so she couldn't really call herself naked without clothes, but it still felt wrong. The fur on her body was only about a centimeter long and covered nothing so far as she was concerned. Only on her arms, legs and neck were her fur thicker and longer, though still very fluffy and soft. She liked stroking her arm's fur and imagine how it would be like to own a pet, but knew it was an impossibility, so she could only imagine.

There were lots of good things about being of the Bestial race. She got lots of extra Stats when she transformed into her Beast-form which was a great advantage in the earlier parts of the game. Not to mention having two Professions from the start; even if one had to be a Crafting Profession and one had to be a Fighting Profession, it was still a large advantage over those with only one Profession.

One of the few bad things about being of the Bestial race was that there was such a large discrepancy between her Human form and her Beast form; it had taken her more than a week to get used moving around in her Beast form. But the worst thing was that there wasn't any good clothes she could use with first her Human form and then with her Beast form after she transformed. She untied the buttons on her self-made clothes and flung down the cloth that usually covered her in multiple layers of furs and was now wearing a jacket and pants that suited her Beast form's elongated limbs. It had surprised her the first time she changed her form and some of her clothes had ripped to shreds because her Beast form's body was almost a meter taller and had a very different bone-structure.

Activating her Mana Manipulation she exhausted her Mana to put up a translucent cloud of darkness around her, shrouding her in the shadows of the night, keeping the cloud alive with her meager Mana Regeneration. The cloud of darkness made her body hard to distinguish from any other shadow in the night. It was a useful tool, because she really didn't want to be discovered going around on the Magician's Guild roofs. Someone might think she was a thief or something.

She looked up, watching the bright star-filled night sky with her incredibly enhanced night-vision, a few clouds slowly moved along, blotting out the weaker starlight. It was a beautiful night. Lying down on the slanted roof, she waited for the sunset. This—one of the highest towers inside the Magician's Guild—was the best place to watch the sun rise or fall in this town. She had spent many a night here just marveling at the wondrous sight that was a sunset. She had never experienced its kind before she entered this virtual reality. She had not even set foot on a planet before. Everything in this reality was still new and exciting.

She heard some distant muffled screaming, but ignored it. Some random beast crying out its death-cry couldn't distract her from appreciating her relaxation.

At first she had thought this game was not worth the Creds she had spent to get the complete package for entering the full immersion virtual reality, but now, after almost a month of regular visits inside this too realistic virtual reality, she understood the game company's slogan “Take a break from reality.” Spending time inside God's Dream had become her refuge from the monotony of her working life. She could even forgo sleeping, now only needing a few hours a day, because she entered an almost sleep-like state when inside the game. And because the perception of time inside the game gave her two hours of time inside the game for every hour that went by in real life, she could spend more than half her waking hours in this paradise. It had given her an incredible increase in life-quality.

For her, every day began with waking up, taking her prescribed stimulants, emotional dampeners, nootropics and eating two food-bars before leaving her apartment, taking the stairs to the floor above hers, to her workplace. Then followed 10 hours of reading through the reports from researchers in the other parts of the satellite. Her only break was after six hours of work where she had 10 minutes to take her prescribed stimulants, emotional dampeners, nootropics and eat a food-bar.

Her job was to sift through all reports and find what would be important for the head research manager to read and what wouldn't be. It wasn't a boring job, nor a fun or interesting one; it was just her job, and she did it well, nothing more. It was her life. After work she got her prescribed antitoxins, removing the medicines she had taken to do her job most efficiently, reducing her focus and intelligence to a more normal state. She didn't mind that; it was rather comfortable to get a respite from how she felt during work.

While working she was always on the edge, feeling entirely stressed out and maniacally focused while not actually having those feelings influence how she performed her work, because somehow her mind was detached from what she felt. It was a most bizarre state of mind, and she really didn't feel like herself at work, but what could she do? She had to take what the company gave her to improve her work, or she would no longer have her job. Not having her job wasn't something she could even remotely contemplate. Hannah had been born to do the job she had, replacing her mother when she came of age. And the most important point, if she didn't do her job satisfactorily she might be scrapped; ending her life in misery as a test-subject wasn't something she would ever want.

Despite all this, she didn't mind her job. She knew she had it better than most, the only trouble had been her free time. The recent few years, she had had nothing truly enjoyable to do after work. All she did was sit inside the holo-room watching movies or other things on the view-walls. Sometimes, it felt like she was bleeding away her precious youth, but there wasn't really anything to do in her District; there were only living compartments and working space in this part of the satellite, and she didn't have the permission to leave the District except on Market-day once every thirty days when everyone could leave their District for the day without breaking any laws.

When she was in school she had interacted with lots of children her age, and even made a few close friends, but after school they had all been split up and taken to their preassigned jobs. She talked to some of them sometimes, but because she had not met her classmates the last few years the contacts were growing fewer and fewer; she sometimes wished she actually minded that. Maybe she was weird?

So, her only real problem in life had been her fairly lonesome and monotone free time. She lived and worked in the same place, and her life had repeated every day for almost five years now, deeply ingraining the monotony as something normal. She had not even realized how miserable her life was before she got the Full Immersion Virtual Reality module for God's Dream. But this new contrast made her actually look forward to waking up and doing her job for the day, only so that she could dive inside the game and run around exploring this extremely beautiful reality. And now for the last month she had spent all her free time except eating and sleeping inside the virtual reality, because it was without a doubt more real and wonderful than the mundane reality she lived in.

She looked out over the town of Garam's Gorge, her extremely light-sensitive eyes easily picking out the buildings and streets. There was a distinct segregation of the city's buildings; half of the town had orderly straight streets and square, blocky buildings with three to four stories, each house abutting each other with a small alley every fourth to fifth house; the other half of the town contained the Magician's Guild compound.

From this height she could almost look out over the entirety of Garam's Gorge Town, but only the Magician's Guild compound was interesting to look at. She leisurely looked out across the Magician's Guild; the buildings all around her were as if ten thousand mad architects had put together all of their ideas and then stacked them on top of each other, making a bizarrely beautiful scene. She plotted out a new training course to run from this tower. The Magician's Guild compound was a great place for her to train her Fluid Movement Skill, it was the only Skill she had that gave her Experience toward her Level as she improved in the Skill, so she had spent the last few days here using the buildings as a make-shift obstacle course during nights.

She yawned, looking out at the sliver of light coming from the horizon. The sunrise would soon be here. She lay back, closed her eyes to wait. Suddenly, a loud bang and a crash sounded out below her. It piqued her interest, making her turn over her body and sliding across the tiles on her belly, then she peaked out from the rim of the roof, only showing the top of her head and glowing green cat's eyes. Below she saw an open window with lights coming out of it. It was from there the noise had come.

“Big Brother!” someone said in a shrill voice. She immediately called him Squeaky in her mind.

“Yes, little brother, what have you come barging in here for?” a smooth unpleasant voice slipped out of someone else's mouth. He became Slimy in her mind. Now it was easier for her to visualize the conversation.

“You are responsible for this, are you not!?!” Squeaky almost yelled. “There is poison coming up from the sewers. It has already killed many of our novices and even some staff. I warned you about proceeding with whatever it is that you've been hiding in the lower parts of the ancient structure. I knew it couldn't be anything good when you blocked entrance to that floor for everyone from the Magician's Guild with the Compound's Sealing Barrier, and I was right. Look at what you've done!”

“What I've done?” Slimy said in a slow calm voice. “I have done nothing. This is all your fault. You have ruined years of my work!!!” Slimy's intensity flashed brightly, but just as sudden his voice returned to its normal slithering smoothness. “If I don't miss my guess, you have sent down people that haven't joined the Magician's Guild to investigate my experiments on the lowest floor. Only people from outside the Guild would be able to slip through the Sealing Barrier's flaw. I can never understand why it was made to only hinder our members from going into restricted sections. One of those you sent down must have killed my Black Slime.” Slimy's voice flashed in burning anger again “You filthy Destroyer! You have doomed me. I'm a dead man now!”

“What are you talking about brother? I confess that I was curious about what you were doing down there. You have been so secretive these last few years,” Squeaky said hesitantly. “And yes, I sent down a few people to look around, but everyone came back soon after, telling me that they wouldn't do my Quest because of the awful smell in the sewers. Only one person has not returned to me to cancel the Quest. I think his name was Jay.”

“Who?” Slimy said. “Give me a Mind-Picture of his face and write down anything you know about him. He has destroyed our Guild's property and need to pay for his crimes.”

“Yes, yes,” Squeaky said. “Here you go.” A rustling of paper could be heard from down below and a bright multi-colored light flashed from the window.

“Good,” Slimy said. “Now there's only a few things left to do to clean up this mess.”

“What do you mean, brother?” Squeaky asked. “What were you doing down there? Your experiment has killed a lot of people. You need to explain yourself. It's not only me you need to give an explanation to, the third Elder has also shown an interest in knowing what you've been doing down there.”

“Oh?” Slimy said. “Thank you for telling me that. I will go and have a talk with the third Elder after this then.”

“Come on,” Squeaky said, growing a bit less hesitant. “Tell me what you've been doing down there. There must be some excuse for this, right? The experiment went wrong or something? You couldn't have been creating deadly toxic gas down there, right? The Guild clearly forbids the creation of weapons of mass destruction. And this could almost count as one.”

“What I've been doing down there?” Slimy asked, pausing for a moment as if for dramatic effect. “I have only created something from an old book. A most powerful Magician gave me this book and told me that a corrosive gas could be harvested from a created Black Slime; a corrosive gas that would be able to melt through the Sealing Stone that blocks the entrance to the lower floors in the Ancient Ruins below the Guild's compound.”

“What!?!” Squeaky squeaked. “The Ancestor sealed that place for a good reason. The lower floors in the Ancient Ruin are extremely dangerous. From the stories told, even the Ancestor had trouble coming back after he went down to explore the lower floors when he found the Ruins. How could you even think of breaking the seal?”

“For the treasures, of course,” Slimy said. “I need something of truly great value as a gift and sacrifice if I want to join my new Master's Organization.”

“New Master? What about grandpa Jonel? Our real Master is him, and no other,” Squeaky said. “You're confusing me big brother. We've lived here our entire lives. You are even on the Counsel in this branch of the Guild. You might even become the Head Magician here in time.”

A silence descended in the room down below. Hannah was quite intrigued by the conversation these NPCs were having. She didn't know they could behave so life-like. Suddenly, Ping!

Quest The Sealed Ancient Ruins Below Garam's Gorge Town Difficulty: ? There is a seal down below the Magician's Guild in Garam's Gorge Town. Find out what is beyond the seal. Investigate the Ruin's origin. Open the Ruins and explore its secrets. Reward: ?

Do you wish to accept this spontaneous Quest? YES / NO

Hannah was startled; it was possible to get Quests like this too? She immediately pressed YES. It wouldn't hurt to have something to explore. It seemed like it could be fun too since she got the Quest from a random encounter. The conversation down below had continued while she was distracted.

“...tell the entire Guild!” Squeaky screamed. “You have betrayed us. How could you? My own brother...” his dejected tone stopped.

“For power, of course,” Slimy smoothly said in an almost whisper. “You don't know what is coming, little brother. If you did, you wouldn't blame me so. But now, it is too late.”

A scrambling, rustling noise intensified in the room below. A loud crash sounded out as if a table or large chair had been turned over. A buzzing, sizzling sound blasted out of the window, and a few streaks of lightning followed.

A second later Hannah looked down into the eyes of a man with unruly brown hair, half his body was hanging out from the open window. The man looked up at her, his face filled with dread. Suddenly, a startled expression flashed across his face, but moments later it turned into dread once more as his entire body was tossed out through the window.

The man looked up, waving his arms and legs in the air, his futile attempts to cling onto something entirely in vain. Moments later his body fell down onto the ground, seeming to sink into the ground, ripples in the darkness flowing out from where he landed. The man screamed an ear-piercing shriek, but was muffled a moment later, his entire body was quickly enveloped in a dense black smoke. Only now had Hannah seen that there was some weird black smoke roiling on the ground below, it behaved a bit like a stormy sea, violent peaks tried to rush into the sky before falling down to the ground again. It was truly difficult to differentiate between the smoke and the darkness of night. The sight was very strange. She had never seen anything like it; the night seemed to have come alive and spewed out a small stormy sea of smoke.

From inside the black smoke Hannah could see the man's withered, bloodied hand stretch out, its flesh melting away before her very eyes. She felt sick. From below she heard the voice of Slimy whisper as if to himself.

“I'm sorry, Rolan. You shouldn't have poked your nose into something beyond your understanding. You can only blame yourself for dying. You have, after all, spread a poisonous gas all around our Guild.” Slimy's voice hardened. “Now there is only that Jay left to kill. I will make the entire guild hunt him for destroying my property and disgracing the Guild's grounds with all these dead bodies.”

A minute or two passed as Hannah looked down on the seething ground of black gas, it was entrancing to watch the sea of smoke billow and seethe. Then she saw a peculiar thing; off in the distance—some three hundred meters away—there was increasing movement in the black smoke. And as she watched the blackness on the ground closely, the black smoke rippled outward, clearing up an area of grass.

A little time later the top of a head stuck out of the ground, or so it seemed. The head swiveled around, looking like some cautious rodent coming out of its hole. It looked like the head didn't see anything wrong and soon a body followed it up from the ground. In the darkness Hannah could still clearly see the silhouette of a man looking around furtively.

The man started running, the smoke flowed away from him, keeping its distance. The man stopped, looked around and reached out with his hand as if sweeping something from the air. A few small dots of light flashed into the man's hand, and he put them away in an inner pocket of his cloak.

Looking around even more the man proceeded to run around, always having the smoke keep its distance from him. He was running around as if searching, covering a large area of ground outside one of the training pavilions; every once in a while he would sweep out with his hand and collect a few more of those peculiar dots of light. This went on for a minute or two, but suddenly a beam of light flew out from the window below, instantly crossing the distance between the window below and the man down on the ground. The beam of light struck his body, doing nothing to the man from what Hannah could see.

“It's YOU!” Slimy screamed from the window, and a few seconds later an incredibly bright beam of light with crackling lightning coiling around its surface shot out from the window, barely missing the man below.

The man looked up, seeing the lit window, then turned around with all haste and ran back to where he had first come up from the ground. Another beam of bright crackling light flew out, barely missing the man below, making the man run even faster, and in a zig-zag pattern to avoid being targeted. Again, another beam of light missed the man only because the man turned at the last moment from where he was running to. Soon, the man was back where he had come up from the ground. But against Hannah's assumption that he would once more flee down into whatever hole he had come from, the man did something she hadn't seen before.

A silvery white rope flew out from the man's arm, coiling itself around a parapet on the Magician's Guild Compound's wall. Then the rope went taught, flinging the man over the four meter tall wall in one fell swoop. His body arcing over the wall gracefully. Tonight, it seemed she had been blessed with two interesting things. The Quest, and that man. She had to know how they related to each other. She also had to learn how to do that trick. Rope-jumping seemed like so much fun.

Hannah sneaked away from the lofty tower, going down the fastest route she could find until she was a leap away from the ground. She looked around; there was no smoke on the ground below. Jumping down, coming to a crouch, she ran toward where the man had jumped over the wall. She had to get his scent before it disappeared if she wanted to track him down.

Before long she had arrived at the wall. She looked around, finding the place she searched for and activated the Skill she liked the least of all her Skills. It not only felt weird, it was also the one that was given to her randomly at the beginning of the game, so it was quite quirky. She thought, Scent Synesthesia. All around her blossomed an overwhelming myriad of sparkling dots of light, billowing in clouds, a chaotic mess she had trouble even slightly processing. Seeing scents was truly not a pleasurable thing, it overwhelmed her to the point of causing nausea.

She looked at where the man had gone over the wall. In a faint streaking arc over the wall she saw the special trail left by the man. The scent-trail looked like a streamer of a wispy cloud made mostly out of pale yellow dots with silvery dots mixing together in a unique pattern. She would be able to recognize this scent if she saw it again. She deactivated her Scent Synesthesia Skill and felt her stomach settle down.

Then she immediately left the scene, not wanting to be associated with anything that happened within the Magician's Guild this night. She just had to stock up on some essentials and then she could be off to find that strange man. She had to find out what he had done to create the black smoke, and if he knew anything about the ruins beneath the Magician's Guild. She felt more alive than she had in ages, excitement overflowing in every part of her being. She had found a mystery to solve.

The End of Volume 1