I woke up in the morning with a massive yawn escaping my lips. Shrugging my shoulders to remove some of the stiffness in them, and stretching out my body, I got up and went off to have a bowl of cereal for breakfast. While I snacked on my small meal, I browsed the forums, but couldn’t find anything of interest. It wasn’t long after that I was heading back to my room to plug myself back into sanity online.

It was immediately after I logged in that I got to see something I hadn’t seen, or at least not noticed before. It was the spawning of another player. Light slowly pulled up from the bottom, where her feet were, and as the light went up, the player appeared. It honestly looked like the light was 3d printing the player. I watched for a while before shrugging my shoulders and heading off to the practice grounds for some more sigil practice.

Once I arrived, I got back to practicing imbuing my weapon with the sigils. They took a good deal of focus to create initially, but once they were created they were just a minor thing I had to pay attention to, feeding them mana while I sliced at the targets. Compared to writing my spell runes in live combat, the focus required for them was practically nothing.

After a few hours of practice, my body sweaty and sore, I headed off, I had what was going to be a few days before I could pick up my new spear, and I wasn’t feeling like hunting with my spear, which seemed to have more cracks in it every time I looked at it, the cut being the center of a spiderweb of small fractures in it. Deciding that I may as well gather some information, I checked my map, and headed off to the library.

Once I arrived, I was greeted by a cold stone building, with high arches ending in a point at the top, with statues of birds lining the arched top of the building. It looked to be around two stories high, so hopefully I could find something worth reading, though I wasn’t sure what I was going to be reading about.

Once I arrived inside, I was greeted by a warm interior that seemed the opposite of the exterior. Everywhere I could see, there was a bronze colored wood, and the library was lit with candles set into the walls every couple of feet. The shelves were monstrosities, at least twelve feet tall, ranging from the floor all the way to the high ceiling and ladders ranged here and there among them, unfortunately not the rolling kind you sometimes saw in real life. Throughout the forest of shelves ranged small tables with comfortable looking seats before them.

After looking around a bit, I noticed an old man at a desk, with a small ornament on the desk reading “Librarian”. Deciding that he would be my best bet to find something interesting, I wandered on over, looking around as I did so, enjoying the impressive sight.

I soon arrived and asked about the things I was currently interested in learning about.

“Hello, I was wondering if I could get some books on summoning and about the monsters.” My book on harvesting had some perfunctory information on the mobs, but it was woefully lacking in their habits, places they were found, and their weak spots. As for summoning, I was wondering how the summons were supposed to work, since we were supposedly summoned.

“Books on monsters you’ll find in section A4, books on the summoned are on the second floor section T7”

Thanking him, I went over to the section on monsters and started looking around. I soon found what I was looking for, a book titled “Basic Ecology of Monsters Illustrated.” I grabbed it from it’s place on the shelf among books titled more specific books on individual mobs, and headed up the stairs I found after a short search.

It wasn’t long before I found section T7, and I looked around, avoiding titles such as “Summoning For Beginners” and “Simple Inscriptions for Simple Summoning”. I soon found a book titled “A Study on Summoned” and grabbed it before heading to one of the tables that were placed here and there among the shelves.

Sitting down in one of the padded chairs, I took out my books and began my foray into information. I quickly opened my book on monster ecology, and flipped through the sections on different types of monsters, pausing over orbs to learn that they were cannibalistic, and through enough eating of each other or small animals, they could rank up to become king class.

Finding that interesting, I looked over a couple of mobs I had hunted already. In most cases, becoming king class was predicated on how much they were able to eat, especially in terms of humans. The book speculated that this was due to the higher than average mana density of humans, but stated that there were no confirmations, likely because nobody wanted to feed a king class mob random things to see the exact requirements for the evolution.

Treants were actually the exception here, as they became king class simply due to living for long enough, so if their numbers weren’t regularly culled, you would end up with massive amounts of king class treants. Thinking back to my fight with the lone king class treant, I shuddered, a bunch of those could likely wipe out a large number of people.

I was flipping through searching for the phol, the only three star mob I hadn’t encountered, when I ran across something that seemed interesting, call simply monster tides. It seems that on a regular basis, mobs will gather together and charge towards a town, thousands of them together attempting to crush any resistance.

The book went into different towns that had been lost to the monster tides, mentioning the fact that most of the losses were from not enough culling of the monster population to keep down the occurrences of king class mobs. I shrugged, I’d done my part in culling king class mobs, and was actually quite excited to see if I would be able to fight against a monster tide.

Deciding that I could do nothing to influence if a monster tide appeared or not, I went back to reading and soon found the section on phol. Phol were basically elephants, if elephants had three trunks, a prehensile tail the length of their body, and had some sort of gland on the top of them that looked like an open cut, leaking red fluid, which was odd, because their blood was purple. They tended to be found in large plains, of which I hadn’t seen any nearby.

The book mentioned the gland likely functioned as a replacement for sweat glands, keeping the monster from overheating. Shaking my head at the continued odd designs of the game designers, I checked the weak spots, finding a small illustration showing where their hearts were located, and the book mentioned that there was not much point attacking their skull due to how thick it was, and their skull and tusks were naturally imbued with toughness sigils, making it best to just attack their body.

I quickly flipped through the book some more, noting down the weak points of the different mobs I had faced, and learned that the standard way to deal with craw was similar to what I had been doing, attacking the joints in their arms to disable them before attacking their body, particularly a weak spot of their shell slightly ahead of the center of their belly.

I went over the weak spots of molts, their hearts located under the third joint of their body, and brags, which were basically just one large weak spot, but found out that ents had no particular weakness aside from blunt force trauma.

I took one last glance through the book, before closing it and opening the book I was truly curious about, the book on summoned beings. Flipping it open, the first page itself was interesting enough for me to start reading from there.

I quickly learned that the reason we didn’t die is because our true bodies weren’t actually here. The summoning ritual asked the goddess to create bodies for us out of pure mana, and borrowed our minds, dragging them into the bodies to control them.

Tilting my head at how similar that was to the reality, our brains basically hijacked by the VR gear, placed into virtual bodies that would never die, I shook my head before going over some more of the novel.

The book went on to explain that due to our bodies being made of mana, we had a more natural affinity for it, being much more able to wield spells than most of the population, most of whom could barely cast the basic force bolt.

I’d wondered why the population didn’t simply all go up and spam thousands of force bolts whenever a monster tide appeared, and it seemed I had my answer. The force bolts of a vast majority of the population would barely annoy even an orb.

The book then went over how before the invasion of the monsters, practically no one had the affinity for magic, only an elite few being able to harness the powerful force of mana. The book speculated that this was due to the mist that had appeared with the monsters, describing the mist as likely made from pure mana, and exposure to it enhanced the population. Due to this, more exposure to the mist was likely linked to your ability to cast magic, leading to almost all adventurers being able to cast magic or imbue their weapons, while the general population who stayed in their cities which the mist avoided weren’t enhanced in the same way.

After that there was a section on the monsters themselves. The book speculated that monster were invading in much the same way as the summoned were brought over, a form of a reverse summoning magic. It did mention that unlike us, the monsters were summoned in their true bodies, though where their numbers came from the book had no clue.

The book then speculated that it could be possible to trace back the magic to its point of origin, and send over adventurers to attempt to stop the invasion. I smiled, it seemed the developers had included hints of the end game in the lore of this world.

Deciding that I’d had enough of research for the day, I put the two books back, said goodbye to the old librarian, and headed off into the city, unsure of what to do now. I sighed, I wasn’t going to go hunting, all of my potion bottles were filled, so I guess I may as well go practice my spells.

Along the way back to the training ground, I attempted once more to meditate while I was walking. This time I thought I was seeing a bit more success, but I wasn’t totally sure, and it wasn’t long before I reached the training grounds.

Deciding to practice drawing up the spell patterns without my hand, I slowly focused the mana outside my body and started drawing the lines needed for the basic force bolt rune. It took a good deal longer than with my fingers, but eventually I was able to get it done, and I released it at a target, a small chunk being blasted off of it, a massive improvement over what my force bolt had initially been.

I spent the rest of the day doing the same thing, practicing drawing different spell patterns without my hands, and failing every now and then, it was far harder to draw the things without the use of my hand. .Whenever I ran out of mana, I’d go sit down and meditate to pass the time.

By the end of the day I was slightly faster than I had been at drawing up the spell patterns than before, but I still wasn’t feeling totally comfortable with it. Towards the end of the day, decided that I had better get myself some better armor, so I headed back to the merchant’s part of town.

It didn’t take too long for me to arrive, and I soon found a store with a needle and thread signboard in front of it. Taking a deep breath, and hoping that I didn’t run into another Merin, I stepped through the door, and was greeted by a much more professional store than the one Merin had run.

Rather than a riot of color, most of the goods inside here were of subdued tones of blues, greens, and browns. There were small sections for other colors, but they were still largely subdued rather than bright colors. While the store may not have been as cheerful as the colorful store that was Merin’s, it seemed far more practical, at least from an adventuring standpoint. It probably wasn’t the best idea to be attracting the attention of the monsters to you by wearing a bright pink shirt.

While I was looking around, I was soon greeted by a tall girl behind the counter, wearing a bored look on her face.

“Hello, and welcome to Aselya’s clothing store, I’m the namesake for the store Aselya, is there anything I can do for you today?”

“Hi, I have some molt plates, I was wondering if you could fashion them into some armor for me.” I then took out a couple of the plates of the chitinous material that I had harvested myself that I had left in my backpack for just this purpose.

“Yeah, though it’ll likely be three or four days before we can get to your order, is that ok?” she replied, the bored expression never leaving her face.

“Of course that will be fine” At least, it will be because I’m stuck in town until my spear is made anyway.

“That’ll be ten gold on pickup, could you come to the back and drop off all the molt plates at the back of the store for me?”

I agreed,l and she guided me through a door behind the counter, and I was greeted by a very busy scene. There were three tables, and at each one of them, there was a person busy sewing something together, likely her apprentices. She guided me over to a back corner, where I started to take out the plates one by one, watching them grow when I would take them out of my backpack and placing them on the floor.

Aselya and I then headed back out to the main area of the store, Aselya letting out a large yawn as we did to go along with her bored expression. I then thanked her, and headed out of the shop, glad I didn’t have to deal with excessive chattering for once.

The next few days passed and I spent them mostly on training, eventually getting to the point where I could draw a rune without using my fingers in only double the time it took me to draw it with them. MOst of the time was spent on the spells I’d already upgraded, as I didn’t want to see how much mana ice shatter would cost after upgrading.

Whenever I would get bored of drawing the rune patterns up without using my hands, I would head on over to the warri training area and practice with my spear, or at least I did until my spear finally broke. I looked down on it in sadness. It had served me well, but had lasted practically no time before it had been destroyed.

Sighing at my poor luck, I put the two parts of the spear in my backpack, deciding that I would hold onto it for a little bit before turning it into the blacksmith for what was likely to only be a couple of coppers.

I shook my head, then decided to log off. The first thing I noticed when I logged off was flickering lights. It seems there had been some sort of mild brownout while I had been logged in to the game. I smiled, at least it hadn’t kicked me out of game while I was in it. I was about to completely ignore it, when I heard my computer’s start up beeping noise. That was odd, my computer is what actually runs the game, it’s not the helmet that does the work. I shrugged, it had likely shut down right after I logged off, it was probably just lucky timing more than anything else.

Entertaining the thought that maybe this summoning stuff had some truth to it, I amused myself with the thought as I stretched out some more to relieve the soreness. I soon put the thought out of my head however, and walked over to the kitchen, cooking up some lettuce wraps before heading off to bed.