Ascendance: The Rebirth Of The Unknown Gamer

Aura Thompson

Born 2000 died 2158

Aura loved fantasy, and books in general.

He owned so many books that he was forced to start buying digital copies instead of paper copies.

He read all of these things due to his greatest dream, to one day walk in one of those beautiful worlds.

He thought this dream was impossible and became extremely depressed, counting six failed suicide attempts before he turned 20. Failed not due to chance or interference, but rather due to his fear of death.

Even with the great advances of science and technology during the 21st century, even though mankind's dream for immortality was achievied before Aura celebrated his fiftieth birthday, only the ric.h.e.s.t could afford the treatments, and thus Aura grew old, but his fear of death never left him.

When Aura died, his last thoughts were: 'Please God, please let me have one more chance, just one more shot. I wish to have one more chance to accomplish my dreams of immortality, to one day stand atop the world I love!'

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When Aura was just 25 years old, he fell in love with a game, a game that was straight from his childhood dreams.

This game, released by Forgotten Industries, was a second world to mankind, featuring all the things that players could wish for.

Aura was one of the few players who chose to play classless, a path that has no limits, but every piece of power the player obtains must be earned. There are no bonus stat points, no skill points, no inherent attributes or innate abilities.

To play classless is to play on hard mode in a game where character death is mostly permanent.

But many players still chose it, at least at first.

The rules for classes were published by the developers long in advance of the game's release.

There are four forces, and each force has one main class and two border classes, with border classes being classes split between two forces. The forces are Life, Nature, Magic, and Void, with there being a total of eight classes available to starting players.

Main Classes

Life: Warrior

Nature: Druid

Magic: Wizard

Void: Rogue

Border Classes

Life and Nature: Cleric

Life and Magic: Paladin

Nature and Void: Ranger

Void and Magic: Necromancer

There are also countless auxiliary classes, advanced classes, hidden classes and more, each of which give bonus stat points every level, as well as giving bonuses to skill growth, inherent skills and innate abilities.

The downside to having a class is that the moment you choose one, you have a maximum level, each class can reach level 100, and once you reach level 100, you have to pick another class, but each time you choose a class you are forever forgoing numerous other classes, and theoretically, someone who has chosen a class can never surpass level 10,000, whereas classless has no level limit.

In Ascendance, upon each level up, a playef character recieves one point in each stat, Strength (STR), Agility (AGI), Constitution (CON), Intelligence (INT), and Wisdom (WIS), as well as one free stat point. A class grants an additional 3 stat points, with 2 in the class's main stat and 1 in its secondary stat. This means that a player with a class will recieve 300 additional stat points every 100 levels over classless players, at the disadvantage that players with a class would be unable to learn skills of opposing forces as well as losing out on some unimportant options in the future.

At an equal level, a player with a class has a significant advantage over a classless player, to the point that it can be considered unfair.

Aura stuck with classless because he hated being unable to do what he wanted, when he wanted. If he wanted to learn the skills of two opposing forces then he would be unable to if he chose a class, and due to his character's mediocrity, he would never stand out and get attacked or robbed. Classless was the best choice for him.

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And Ascendance was different than other games, how storng you were depended mostly on your knowledge and experience, as there were very few ways to forcefully learn a skill. Someone who knows how to swing a sword will have a higher level in the Swordplay skill than someone who doesn't. Upon entering the game, your mind is scanned, and all the skills and abilites you have learned will be brought with you into the game, with the system only providing rough assistance in their use.

Ascendance's unique skill system meant that caster-type classes had a severe disadvantage to make up for their raw power, in order to cast a spell, a caster needs to know how to manipulate their force, and each force requires a different technique to utilize.

Life is the power of the living and is innate in the humanoid species.

Nature is the power of order and is innate in beastkin.

Void is the power of the dead and is innate in monsters.

Magic is the power of chaos and is innate in demons.

These forces are each innate in their respective groups but are present in all living things, having too much of any force can lead to the death of the host.

Classes are a way to stablize the absorption of a force into the body, allowing the class's aligned force or forces to strengthen the body or mind, while not allowing the force to overwhelm a player. This is why classless players recieve no bonus abilities or stat points, because they have to absorb each force equally.

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Ascendance also has a rather strange structure, with there being fifty realms, or 'floors' with each realm being fuctionally limitless in size.

As you go farther out from the center of the realm, the monsters grow more and more powerful, meaning that while you theoretically COULD go forever in one direction, you would die long before you actually went any real distance.

This is mainly because monsters feed on void energy, and instinctually stay away from areas with high concentrations of life energy.

As one travels to higher realms, you would also encounter stronger and stronger monsters, due to the difficulties humanoids have traveling to higher realms, which also means that the populations of higher realms tends to decline at an exponential rate the higher you go.

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In the beginning, players can only choose the human race. This is due to Ascendance's reincarnation system, which means that when players die, if they are not resurrected or if they should so choose, they will reincarnate.

Upon reincarnation, all skills will be reset to level zero (but will be way easier to level up due to the player's knowledge of the skill and its effects), and the player's previous experience value will be converted into Reincarnation Points, which can be used to unlock races or classes that the player can then choose for their next character.

Death is thus, to many players, an unpleasant necessity, which allows them to further customize their characters to their heart's content.

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In Ascendance, NPCs are exactly the same as players, except that they do not have the reincarnation system. NPCs have lives, jobs and emotions, just like the players, they have access to the system, just like the players, they can do anything the players can do.

Likewise the players can do anything the NPCs can do, like giving out quests and even having children in the game.

Ascendance was made with virtually limitless possibilities, allowing players an infinite world that thy ey can explore or make a living in.

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Ascendance does not allow for the direct conversion of real life money to game currency, but it does allow one to spend real life money on currency and items sold by players.

Ascendance allows its players the freedom to create skills, items, and even classes, which they can then sell or give to others.

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Forgotten Industries published Ascendance with the intention of having every human in the world play it. They spent billions of dollars in order to make the equipment required free for any player to claim, and they didn't charge a connection fee. This was all to get as many players in the game as possible, because the more players who sell things on the onlline market, the more money FI makes from their 10% comission on everything sold.

FI has always operated in ways that most economically-minded people wouldn't understand, instead of trying to make as much money as possible with each transaction, they would offer their services at the lowest price possible. When companies began to sell smartphones and cell service in general, FI developed a smartphone that no other company could compete with, and sold it for $10, with free cell service for life. Most thought FI was insane, but they quickly learned why. FI charged a single penny on every transaction people made on their smartphone, an amount that few would mind and even fewer would complain about, however due to this single penny, FI raked in billions.

The vast majority of the people in the world owned an FI smartphone, and due to how widespread the cell service was, people could make purchases practically anywhere, so most people would buy things on their phones. And even if every person only ever purchased 100 things on their phone, FI would still make $7 billion.

Operating this way, FI achieved a practical monopoly on the entire technology market, making small amounts of money off of each person, to the point that people would barely notice it.

In just 25 years, FI had grown to the point that they could afford to give away billions of game consoles just to make that 10% off of every in-game transaction.

As time passed Forgotten Industries just kept on growing, their policy of making almost no profit on every item sold continued, with them branching into medicine, cars, energy, monopolizing each market over time, eventually becoming a beast of a company that no country dared to oppose.

When immortality was invented, FI was entirely responsiblr, but due to the ridiculous cost of the treatments, only the wealthiest could afford them. The decision to sell such medicine at such a high price was initially criticized, until later that same week, FI announced that it would be offering the cure for more than a hundred diseases that people had thought incurable, and they were offering it for free to anyone as an apology for being unable to make immortality affordable.

FI's longstanding policies of treating their customers well and always offering the best products for the lowest price were long since fixed in people's minds, so few doubted their claims.

It was an unshakable truth that FI had never lied to its customers, but even though people believed them, they still complained, and FI was more than happy to accept their complaints, because FI had a secondary goal in offering immortality: as of that moment, FI became the company responsible for keeping the ric.h.e.s.t and most powerful people on the planet alive, they became truly untouchable.

At this point, FI began suggesting changes to countries, changes aimed at improving the situation of all citizens. Taxes were lowered for the poor and raised for the rich, corruption was stamped out, minimum wages and working conditions were changed for the better, funds found their way to schools and utilites such as power stations, water purification plants, and farms, previously hidden agricultural sciences were published, hospitals grew exponentially, insurance was placed under government control, penalties for crimes that could endager others became more severe while crimes tbat could only harm oneself were made less severe.

FI's influence was so widespread that countries all over the world quickly accepted these changes, and soon made a startling discovery. Due to the citizens recieving higher wages and losing less to taxes, their countries rapidly developed, with their governments soon earning many times what they did before.

FI solved all of humanity's problems, from global warming to hunger to poverty, and as such, its CEO, who remained out of the public eye and only known by the name: Wanderer, became a figure of worship. The fact that nobody outside the company had ever seen the mysterious Wanderer, and that no company personnel would ever speak about their CEO made them even more godlike.