Admin: Main Quest (2) (Patreon)

As an excuse for the lack of activatable abilities, I had shoved whatever scraps I created into the Systems tab, the most useful tab in the world! I clearly had a stroke of genius when I came up with it.

It was the tab that stored everything in general, and most importantly, without any problems!

No one can tell me that ‘activated skills do not belong in the Systems tab’ because no one really knew what, in fact, should be in a normal ‘Systems’ tab. So no one would be complaining when I dump everything in there!

Of course, I should have started developing a magic system, especially since mana had only one use so far, that is in creating potions in the Alchemy system, used only by Jim and a couple of his students. But for now, at least I could fend put it off, until the Players found anything magical or fulfilled some ‘secret’ conditions that I had thought of.

And as long as nothing happens, I could continue putting that off!

However, such an excuse wouldn't work with combat abilities anymore.

In addition, so far the Players may enjoy smashing the skulls of imps with their own hands, but too simple gameplay will quickly become boring, and therefore it needs to be diversified, yet remain simple. Even very simple things like a ‘Quick Kick’, ‘Strong Kick’, and ‘Block’, and a few variations of that would probably suffice.

And it was easy to create too; this one's makes the attack faster, this one has higher damage, and this one will reduce damage received for a couple of seconds, simple, easy modifications like that. Tie it all down to basic damage to Strength, speed to Dexterity, protection time to Stamina, and other stuff, and there you have it, Players, you got some new skills!

You now can run around and enjoy the fact that you could suddenly become stronger or faster at the touch of a magic button…

True, such joy for players was not given for nothing, of course. After waiting for a moment when a dozen Players had time to try out the new skills, I rubbed my hands and launched a message to the whole game world.

At the same time as the entry of new players into the world.

***

[Attention! In the holy of holiest, the Infinite Heaven, the sprouts of evil have bloomed. The Enemy, who once thought the Infinite Heaven conquered, once again turns its gaze towards the Heavens, and terrible is its gaze!]

Jabberwocky, having just returned from his latest rebirth after being betrayed by his closest associate, Double Down, there must have been some subtle religious allusion lurking here that Jabberwocky had missed, stared carefully at the pop-up message. Looking at it so closely that he almost missed the fact that his level had dropped from almost the tenth to the eighth! His Charm stat had also dropped by one point, causing Jabberwocky to exhale irritably.

While it didn’t take him too long to reach ninth level and almost make it to tenth, Jabberwocky couldn't get much further without a support group. Having invested all his points in Charm and gained skills of the right category, he functioned only as well as he did when part of a group. As an individual fighting unit, Jabberwocky was actually really unimpressive…

And his support group would need a long time to be rebuilt. They had killed Double Down, of course, but he had severely battered their group, sending many to be reborn, causing immense level losses…

And, of course, back to the elephant in the room, the system message! Jabberwocky didn't know the game's lore very well, just like all the other players at the moment actually, even the forums are having a heyday in making theories, so he couldn't say for sure what had just happened in the game. But judging by the red font and the very clear title of ‘Enemy’, it's unlikely that anything good happened…

Jabberwocky had only once encountered such a message, caused by his actions on the call of the angel, even. So this time, he could only hope that he was not the cause of such an event again… He really didn’t want to become even more of a target.

Jabberwocky didn't think any further, an ear-piercing, sharp scream made him jerk to the side, which hadn’t saved him completely. The pain was barely transmitted through his capsule and neural link, but the sharp jab, along with the roar of the ferocious beast and the shadow darting sharply beside him, made him scream in pain and panic.

The huge, lump-like body, seemingly covered in muscles that are hardened to a point of becoming armor, towering a good three heads above Jabberwocky, turned sideways, revealing its grotesque humanoid body. Its disproportionately huge, fleshy, black-and-burgundy arms, ending in sharp-looking straight claws, that looked more like meat cleavers than fingers, and a face that consisted only of a huge mouth full of many sharp teeth.

Jabberwocky tried not to stare at the gaping hole inside the creature’s throat, looking more like an entrance to an abyss than anything mundane.

‘Junior Demon Minion, level 8’, his Perception skill told Jabberwocky, but rather than celebrating the fact that he had found some kind of new monster, his gaze instead drifted down to the creature's claws again. The claws that continued to hold his severed arm.

A moment later, Jabberwocky's field of vision darkened, replaced by a simple sign.

You are dead. Time until revival: 1:59:59… One that is counting down the seconds.

"For crying out loud!" Jabberwocky shouted mentally to the dark void before sighing. "Okay, I might not have lost all that much since I literally just respawned, but… What were the chances of that thing sprouting up next to me?! Fuck my luck!"

***

What was the chance that Jabberwocky would respawn next to a demon? Honestly, I didn't even look where he was supposed to revive, Jabberwocky may have behaved badly, he after all still made me think about new quests. I've already fucked him up once, okay twice, even if he was still a player personally noted by me in a somewhat negative way, there’s no way that I actually want to harass him until he quits.

It was an honest-to-god accident.

Well, I'll just have to remember to give him something for his stupid death… But there are more important things to think about.

Yes, here are the new opponents to the players! And they are strong enough, that it is clear that an eighth-level player is no match for them. And seeing that the current strongest fighter, Sturm was just a level six, along with Double even if he was less spec’ed for combat, no Player would be a match to the Demons. Alone at least.

The junior Demon should push the player into starting to learn how to fight in groups, rather than the strange system that Jabberwocky’s group had created. The Demon, with some luck and the right tactics, could be defeated even by five first-level players…

Of course, I had only created a very limited amount of the Elite mob, fifteen in total, along with a bevy of other low-level mobs. I even added a flight-capable ‘flying imp’, all because of the portals on the hovering islands that opened up oh so unexpectedly.

Have fun, players, my generosity knows no bounds!

In fact, I did tweak another system a bit, and lo and behold, now you can carve up the carcass of a defeated enemy for their parts! Now you can craft your own weapons, well you can already do that seeing just how many people sporting chair leg clubs, but now you can make; armor from demon bodies!

I even added a normal System… I already told you what's the most useful tab in the world, didn't I?

Add that to the brewing proto-guild fights and a second statue on the other islands, and you've got yourself another week of fun. And in the meantime, we can start working on… Well, of course, first we'll add a couple of starting zones for new players, and we'll start working on magic properly!

Truth be told, I had no idea how magic was supposed to work, or how to design one in the first place, other than it had to be mana-based abilities. Maybe I should add some kind of magical language whose words had to be spoken to activate it – something like Enochian?

Hmm, that’s a serviceable idea, let's go with that for now. Maybe I should create a system where the Player needed to draw symbols? Well, excluding the simplest shapes, like geometric ones, most players just won't be able to use them in combat. For now, but let's leave the idea of some runes or rituals.

What else, maybe some kind gestures? No, in that case, because they'll have to do something with their arms and body, it needs Dexterity, and it'll look like some kind of martial arts. Not bad at all, but better to leave it for some special mage classes, not for standard ones.

Okay, I can't think of any more ideas, so I suppose I should create the magical language now? Considering the angelic motif we got at the moment, cribbing some kind of Enochian language isn't so bad and might work.

So a magician would say these words to cast magic… And these words are magical because they are the language by which… We created the world, yeah! Okay, let's immediately lay down the approximate standards that we have big, varied magic and no ceiling of power to be seen…

Although I will have to balance it, so that not only mages can destroy millions of people with their abilities, but warriors could also do something like that… And archers… And anyone else I come across… I suppose Alchemists too.

Great, so we have a kind of ‘first’ language that created the world… And Mages could use the language to use magic, literal small-scale reality manipulation. Okay, that's the lore explanation I could come up with for now, it needs some more details, but oh well, that’s a problem for the future. I could even foresee some twist that can be pulled in the future! Something like the creation language only created this world, and that it was maybe not actually the first language!

Well, the system as it is, is good enough, the rest can be left for the future.

Hmm, I’m calling it Enochian, or well a copy of the thing, but how would it sound like? Using English seems a bit like a cop out for a magical language. As much as I'm tempted by the possibility of demanding some inexpressible sounds, only I'm capable of doing such a thing with my trusty army of AI and voice modulators. Can’t exactly expect the Players to be able to do a rendition of the Black Tongue each time they want to use Magic.

So, we'll take just a language, just sounds and put them together in a random order so that it sounds relatively similar to words, but unusual enough for the human ear that it wouldn’t actually be legible.

Okay, now the second question is how do we let the players learn this magic? Where can they read the so-called miracle words, that would make them capable of doing all sorts of nastiness over the physical laws? A full-fledged NPC-teachers… Not on the table, creating an AI script and a lore background sounds like a lot of work, even just Signia is already too much work, and I’m fibbing with her most of the time, and even taking personal control.

And that’s when only interacting with one Player! How about tens? Hundreds? Thousands?

Each with a personal relationship score to the NPC? Probably needing unique interactions and whatnot?

No, a trainer NPC is still a bit too complex, at least until the Captain Signia experiment concluded, and some general NPC AI could be compiled. So, for a while we'll do without them.

Maybe just a random loot like a Grimoire? The Players seem to have a knack of just doing the most random of things, so that might work… but, no. The Players, for the most part, had already checked most of the islands up and down, and looted anything that is not nailed down, and to some, even those that are indeed nailed down. So, scattering any magical grimoires now was not only useless, since no one is going to look someplace they’ve already visited, but also suspicious…

Perhaps just throw the grimoires out of the Demon portals? Make them a reward from clearing them, creating a random pool of item as a reward, seem feasible. No… Magical grimoires with angelic language are a poor fit for demons.

Unless I want to go straight into a storyline like ‘it was actually the demons who created the world, and the angels took the credit’…! But in that case, the shown aggression of the newly summoned demons did not look particularly good.

Unless I want to move the plot towards cementing that demons were generally normal guys, and went crazy over something? But then what about when I literally called someone, apparently, the oldest of the demons, an Enemy? Not ‘the enemy of something’, but THE, all caps, Enemy?

Hmm, let's keep that in my back pocket.

On the other hand, Jabberwocky has a ritual for summoning an angel, because someone read something similar to the ritual, right? Well, yeah, that's how it's gonna be.

Hmm, really, I shouldn't just give magic to everyone at once, a couple of players as a try first, to cover the most obvious loopholes…

Hmm, but how to justify the fact that this couple of Players will have magic and the rest won't?

That’s a good question… I blinked a few times before clapping my hands as a figurative lightbulb appeared over my head.

The Pirates, of course!

***

Yersinia, a girl of short stature and unremarkable build, made the short way to the docked pirate ship before lounging behind a small line of people, slowly getting answers to their questions and shifting away from the small bridge thrown between the ship and the hovering island.

The pirates, or, as they, grinning as if from some private joke, called themselves the ‘Wanderers of the Endless Sea’, had appeared in the game yesterday afternoon. Yersinia had heard of at least two groups, excluding the one she was lining behind, armed with quite working equipment and relatively high level, and thus probably not bad skills.

The Pirates didn't respond to the players' appearance and interest, instead handing out quests first for supplies and equipment that the Players had worked together to scrape, before allowing the players to start joining their factions. At least three of the pirate groups were, in their own words, seriously battered during the journey, so they were ready to seek help from the Players, giving out quests to find other teams and information about them.

And of course, a couple of Players even tried attacking the pirates, either for the loot or just for the heck of it. Keyword there being ‘tried’. Even if the Pirates were ‘weakened’ of ‘lacking supplies’ they ran roughshod on the idiots and send them away to be reborn by means of gratuitous violence.

Yersinia was quite surprised by how the NPC seemed fully alive, full of emotions and even reacted and communicated quite realistically to the sudden attack. Especially at their bafflement of why a bunch of people using only salvaged weapons, that being broken-off chair legs and literal sticks, tried to attack them. Trash that were quickly discarded by the Pirates, showing off just how above the Players the NPCs were in terms of equipment.

No Players tried to attack the Pirates after that. And with nothing interesting happening around her, all she could do was shuffle along as the line in front of her was becoming shorter even as the one behind her lengthens.

The pirates were giving out a rather vague but simple quest; but seeing as it was easy to accomplish, and one of the more reliable and safe way to level up, the work went quickly completed, newcomers and repeaters alike. Unfortunately, Yersinia herself was going to take the quest solely because she saw no other way to level up. Having invested her ten starting points in wisdom, she found herself in a bad position, that is, being incapable of hunting monsters.

She had somehow finished off a few imps to reach the second level, but at this point she was no better than a civilian in a fight, so the only hope for her leveling was in completing quests.

Initially, Yersinia hoped to gain experience by completing the quest to clear the island, but a high-level player, relatively speaking, and his entourage of subordinates came and literally squeezed Yersinia and the other original inhabitants out. The group then took the experience they were entitled to and leaving the other newbie Players like Yersinia with nothing.

Experience for information, that is completing the Pirate’s quest multiple times, was the only opportunity the girl saw at the moment.

Maybe when she actually puts points in the stats that would help her kill some monsters, she would find something else. But now? The Pirates would be a familiar sight for her.

Fortunately, despite the fact that there’s no skip voice lines option like in many other MMORPG, the line quickly decreased in size as many in the line are repeaters, and the NPCs are well-designed enough to remember. No need to repeat the information that the Players already knows after all, and Yersinia was lucky enough that there weren’t any newbies in front of her, as that would actually prompt the NPCs to start explaining the quest. And that could take a while.

Sure enough, Yersinia, in a couple of minutes, stood before a short, bearded, middle-aged man, wrapped in a cloak that had once clearly been blue but had since managed to be discolored into some kind of brown with wear and dust. The Pirate quest giver lazily reclined on a barrel filled with supplies, which not so long ago was dragged to him by other Players completing their own quests.

Yersinia once again quietly marveled at just how life-like the NPCs could be, being so dynamic in their actions. There would be no idle poses for the NPCs here, in this game… She wonders if anyone would start posing as NPCs in the future.

"Another one?" The man sighed as he looked at the long line behind Yersinia, before rubbing his eyes and repeating a line he had given many times before to just as many Players. Though this time, something different happened.

 "Anyway, we need information on the other…"

After a moment, the man seems to blink, before concentrating his gaze on Yersinia, to which she immediately took a half step back, unaccustomed to what was happening. It was literally an off-script moment.

"Wait, you…!" The man glared at Yersinia, scrutinizing her, as if he had never seen her before. "Are you… an angel-voiced?!"

Yersinia wondered for a moment, what?! She was a what now?! Did she tick some kind of option when creating her avatar…? No, she couldn't remember anything like that, and no one had mentioned anything like that in the forums either. But she needed the experience, and new unknown quests were always a good thing, so instead of giving an unequivocal answer, either way, she only shook her head.

"Perhaps…?"

"Oh, in the Eight Holy Names!" After a moment, the old, sullen pirate suddenly put on his face a grimace, which with some stretch could even be considered a friendly smile. "I did not think that I would find one such as you here… Though, yes, of course…"

Then, acting completely out of character to the gruff way he acted before, this time the pirate looked like he was one second away from wringing his hands in worry.

"Um, my lady," The pirate coughed into his fist a few times and then put it away as if trying to hide his un-aristocratic appearance and action. "You, um, can you go to the ship, to the Captain… He's the only one who knows about… Uh, that kind of thing. Please?"

The small crowd behind Yersinia's back began to whisper and gossip like children at the unexpected action of the pirate, and they were right to do so. Like a strangely colored wall in an old RPG, NPCs suddenly acting different is almost definitely a hook to something special.

And in this game, something special could get yourself killed in short order.

She could only swallow the thick saliva gathering in her throat, clearly realizing that she, or rather, the pirate, had just drawn a huge target on her back. But if she was already a target anyway, at least she wanted to get something out of this!

So, under the stares of the people behind her, that is beginning to feel like a lion eyeing a choice cut of meat, Yersinia walked onto the ship, passing the gangway swaying dangerously under her feet. Whereupon the pirate, who had followed her with a glance, took a step to the side, blocking the passage that she had just taken. At least she didn’t need to worry about any of the Players behind her in line pushing her off into the abyss below.

The pirate, glancing around at the dozen people before him, crossed his arms and propped his chest, leaning back on his barrel. "What are you standing up for?! Do you want the job or not?!"

***

Yersinia Pestis, the player I found earlier as a test subject, unlocked the secret of magic a few moments after learning the basic lore, that is the magic words. Learning a word that sounded like ‘Ulle,’ she learned to summon light on her palm. Useless in the current sunlit world, barring some dark catacombs, but also completely harmless!

Such magic had yet to be turned into battle magic, but I had no doubt that, in a short time, that even such a harmless spell would not only find a use in battle but make me clutch my head at something about it, I hadn't even thought about. It was inevitable, really.

After a few more moments, the girl learned a second spell, becoming so far the first full Player with ranged capabilities, the famous, and infamous, magic arrow. Or, as I called it, a ‘magic charge’.

It was another test, a test bed to see its power, and if it doesn’t allow the girl to kill half of the demons on the islands in a fortnight, we'll start slowly introducing more magic into the game.

We'll have to figure it out, of course, and balance it along as Players' further their magical research, and to see if Yersinia will go to teach other Players magic. And if she does, how to make it so that not every Player would just class into being a mage.

So far, requirements in the form of base of intelligence and wisdom seemed to me the most suitable of options. If it requires 10 wisdom, say, for magic charge, then from all players, as the database had shown me, only a couple dozen can learn that… Put the next spell requirement at 15, and no one can learn the next spell.

But, on the other hand, I gave the players a theoretical system with the ability to do magic research on their own. At the moment, of course, it didn't work that way, but the connected AIs were supposed to collect all sorts of Player actions, compile those, and forward them to me. I, in turn, would look at what the Players had done and set a new vector for the development of the magic system.

Perhaps in the future, archmages, those who dedicated their time conducting research in their tower, where they would research all kinds of changes in tone and letters. It would not break his magic system, because it was not recorded in the list of available abilities, but would affect its effects… Like a magical arms race.

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves there. For now, let's start by designing two spells, and just watch the fireworks fly… Hopefully not literally.

Oh, I almost forgot! As the Hound system had shown me, new Players have begun arriving at the islands!

***

Beze inspected her form, then jumped a few times to try it out, checking to see if gravity would really bring her back to the ground, and if the seemingly treaded earth underneath her would turn to jelly, disturbing her immersion. But the world, after her body suffered a slight jolt from the landing, seemed solid and responsive.

Knowing that the ground would not suddenly crumble under her feet, a company making games more known for their bugs than their games remaining unnamed, allowed Beze to look around without worry. Getting her PC getting swallowed by the ground is a funny thing to see when it was just all behind a screen, having that happen in person? Not so much.

Surprisingly, no matter how many times she immersed herself in such games, she still could not believe that everything happening around her was real… Well, of course, not real—it was all lines of code and other tricks of game designers, but playing this? It all felt… so real.

It was as if she was really inside the game, she could feel the cool breeze on her face, the firm ground under her feet, and the clothing over her body.

But Beze's admiration was interrupted after a moment by an annoyed voice, "What the? They didn't say anything like this in the forums…?"

Thanks to this interruption, Beze was able to pull herself from being lost in the sensations, returning her attention to observing her surroundings. Indeed, many of the previous batch of Players had said on the forum that when they had first logged in, they had found themselves on top of a flying island.

Well, nothing she could see had disabused her of that option, but the people on the forum had told of finding ruins, abandoned homes, plains, and hills. None mentioned the hanging fields of dust and small rocks that made it impossible to see anything outside of the islands themselves.

"But look! Those are definitely imps, right?" Following where the other person was pointing, Beze found a small figure that from a distance could even be confused with a person—a child, even. That is, were it not for the fact that there was a strict ban on anyone under the age of eighteen playing the game.

The little figures scurried around, but they also looked around aimlessly at their surroundings.

"The forum said to look for tables, chairs, anything that might be used to assemble primitive equipment," The man's voice sounded as he walked next to Beze.

"I see a hovel?" Beze frowned, as she spotted the small house, But the one she could make out was definitely too small when compared to the Players' description in the forum. "I can't say it's the one spoken in the forum, but it's worth checking…"

"Yeah, sure, let’s get on with that, only we'll have to break through the imps to do it," The man replied. "Did you do a good job of spreading out your stats? To be usable in a fight at least? I can't say that I'm well-prepared for a fight."

"Oh yeah," Beze snorted and then pumped up her fists and punched in a very practical motion as her fists cut through the air in a graphic display, "I just wanted to see if seven years of boxing on the outside would do me any good…"

***

I'd wait a few hours before harassing them, so I didn't unleash any new monsters on them right away. I had the idea of just throwing the newcomers their own pirates but decided not to.

The huge pirate fleets, each of which was a separate ship, caused one to question who they were and how they appeared here now. It was a great tool to break up any potential large fights between Player. But it was not so urgent for me at the moment to distract the players from each other. Let them run around, beat the demonic little things, and scratch their heads when they find a ruined statue.

Meanwhile, I'll watch the game unfold slowly without showing my involvement.

Although, of course, I should begin to prepare a third starting area for the Players. The simple soaring islands and soaring mines, if they can be called that, have already been… Well, it’s going to get stale soon without anything new to explore.

Hm, I would offer a city on the third option, but a city requires buildings, information, books… There wouldn’t be people though, since that would ruin the aesthetic I’m going for.

On the other hand, it’s a nice bit of added lore to add a city that the pirates were supposedly looking originally. That is of course, before their ships were blown of course and damaged, leading to them needing the Players’ help in the first place… Hemm, speaking about the Pirates, looking at the current geography of the sky islands, does it look like they could have such storms?

What am I talking about, I’m the game designer here, if I say that there would be storms, there would be one. It might even be good to force the Players to hunker down to save themselves from the raging storms, allowing me to fix some of the earlier fuck-ups when the Player couldn’t see them.

Of course, that would also mean building the so-called shelters, and to conjure up some lore reasons why the shelters worked in the first place. Plus, I couldn’t just add the shelters out of nowhere, well, I could, but I would still need to conjure up a reason for their sudden existence. Otherwise, the Players would eviscerate the game, and in doing so me, perhaps even literally, in the forums.

And seeing as the forums is the first place many first-time new Players would check about the game, any bad news there would be catastrophic. Which means there would be a lot of work to implement the feature…

Okay, let's put a pin on the idea for the future. For now, let's go back to the topic of the third starting location. If not a city, and also not the empty, garden like sky islands, plus the mines, what else could I add? Hmm, post-apocalyptic… What kind of setting or location would fit that aesthetic? A Desert, probably, nothing could be more desolate than that…

But a sandy wasteland would just pour beyond the borders of the soaring islands unless, of course, we introduce a new entity in the form of some portals or borders… Maybe a forest?

I thought about the idea for a moment. No, a forest of trees wouldn't look good next to a desert, but a jungle… Yes, that's right, a jungle! A cursed jungle at that!

Let's take a past idea from the cursed places lore that I’ve already created, but just change the approach to the concept a bit!

The filth has poisoned the trees; remove that, and the trees will return to relative normality, grow vines or roots, and there's your passage! Why, it looks beautiful and fantastical, and all within the fuzzy logic of a fantasy narrative!

At the same time, I can immediately stuff some new enemy types there. Imps, of course, proved themselves as a good bystander Mob for every occasion, but I can't feed players the same Mob forever, especially since it’s likely that the first batch of players will get to the jungle.

Maybe I can justify the fact that the enemy would consist of Imps as the desert would be another starting location, but for Players for whom it might be their third set of locations? They would most definitely complaints about the lack of variety in the monsters.

Making excuses like ‘it’s just the starting zone’ would only result in the ‘veteran’ baying for newer, more difficult locales.

And I'm currently out of endless, perfectly flat glades, covered with the same to-the-millimeter carpet of grass. The Players would riot if I created another zone like that. Not that it's absolutely nothing, but it's not like a location with a lot of quests!

Great, it's decided. We'll do the sky jungle… Before a ping, indicating a message from the AI, alerting me to something happening, made me frown.

I just left those Players for a few seconds. What had they come up with now?!

***

The main problem with organizing the new economy in the game was that no one had any money. No Money, no Economy. Practically no one, some of the luckier players had managed to get themselves some coins, but there was no point in them at the moment. As standardizing their worth before any exchange of goods could happen would need it to be more widespread.

An Economy could not run on only the backs of a dozen of spread out Players, if that.

No one had yet had the heart to see how the pirates would react to the little scraps found in the ruined buildings, and no one saw much value in the bits of silver and copper besides the pirates. In a sense, Jim could tell that there had been a regression of humanity from progressive capitalism with all kinds of currencies back to primitive barter – food for tools.

True, consuming food was not necessary in the game for Players, so there wasn’t much of a market there even if he were to push it.

But there was something else that players valued above all else.

"Yeah, so two explosives and three small healing potions," Jim said, using an improvised plate made of wood and a dressed skin of an imp.

Thanks to the discovery of some hunter, the skin could now be separated from the imp itself. And with the skins, there are now some standardized means of exchange, as the skin is worth something inherently. As crafting materials, it felt like going back to the fixed value market of the past, rather than the fiat system used now. And as literal experience points?

Well, you could put a definite value on that.

Money… As disturbed as it is using living beings as currency, mankind has made use of many things in the past as currency, so what if it is the experience points one could get from killing an imp? If it works, it works.

Besides, what difference is it from trading cattle or chickens?

"That would be five imps."

"Yeah," The taciturn player, Sturm Stross, merely nodded at the assessment and the price before pulling forward the stubborn creature, which remained spinning with only a couple of health points left.

"I already have one right here… Do you need me to take it some place?"

"No, we'll take care of that now," Jim nodded, then waved a hand, beckoning another player hanging around the makeshift market to him.

"Sad, this one's yours."

Moments later, Sad appeared from around the corner of the borrowed building, picking up a small makeshift baton while looking at the imp. A moment later, the baton was slammed into the imp's head, crushing its skull, but the blood splatter didn't even reach Stross, who was holding the creature.

The imp dissolved in his hands, leaving the players with no way to take the creature's body apart. Well, the next one could be used as materials.

"It's always a pleasure doing business," Jim smiled at this picture, getting into the role he used to wear outside the game as a trade representative.

"You owe four more imps, come back when you have them, or if you need more things to be traded."

It might be a more barbaric form than the outside, but Jim just thinks of it as being more honest instead. After all, the same thing is happening outside anyway, if more slowly and a lot more indirectly.

***

Capitalism was built on Experience, a definite value already set by the System, by the game itself. Experience was the currency.

Everything ingenious is simple; everything simple is ingenious. Jim came up with a unique trading system – trading for experience.

Players could buy a simple healing potion or an explosive one, the price was the same: one imp. Imps had to be brought half-dead before the trade would be accepted. Alchemists, Players that would unlikely meet monsters and therefore get experience from killing them focused as they are in the manufacture of potions, dealt with the half-killed creatures, leveling up in the process.

The imps themselves could also be thrown into the cauldron and boiled into an explosive potion, simultaneously hiding the source of creation of those very explosive potions, guaranteeing trade secrets from being leaked. One simply has to balance the imps acquisitions among collecting resources and experience.

The Alchemist would benefit from this, getting more materials for their experiments, and also levelling up, so that they could experiment more. While the Adventurers would get potions in return. A win-win solution.

It was a barter system, you provide us with imps, and in return, we give you the works of our labor. Simple, elegant, efficient, and…

"You're good, Jim," I could only sigh as I watched the market booming with people trading, Imps changing hands all the time… With this kind of economy in place, maybe I could actually make the third starting location infested with imps as well.

No, that’s a slippery slope, I should create more, new enemies, the Players would figure out themselves how that would fit in, in their new barter economy.

"I thought you'd just stop at alchemy, but you took the first step and decided to monopolize it."

This way, it allowed Jim's alchemists to level up with no problem. All of Jim's alchemists would quickly become the strongest of the potential alchemists and presumably get their hands on the first opportunities to sell the strongest potions and control all supply channels.

Outside alchemists not part of this consortium, this monopoly, would clearly naturally be drawn to Jim’s side, even if they were to discover the secrets of alchemy by themselves. Simply because Jim provided ample resources and offered excellent terms should they join.

I already saw this happening many times as I watched the backlogs.

Plus, now that I had begun to pit players slowly against each other and unleashed new monsters into the world, the potions Jim was trading at the moment would be in an even greater demand in the future. This would cement Jim’s place as the strongest Alchemist Guild in the future.

Talking about guild…

"And here I thought I was doing something ahead of myself by deciding to create a proto-guild, that I’m finally ahead of the curve. Anticipating rather than just reacting." I sighed.

"And it turns out that I was beaten on my own field by a player and without a hundred-thousandth of my powers and processing capability."

Okay, Jim, I underestimated you. Good for you for doing this, it at least improves the gameplay and serves as another brick in the foundation of its future growth, but…

"Okay," I looked around at Jim again, and finally deciding to make things official.

"Let’s put the sky jungle aside for a second, let's get on with the guild system, management, and trade."

I could already feel the headache coming from just how much work it would be.