Ascendance: The Rebirth Of The Unknown Gamer

Laura and Fiona were tasked with the hunting of runaway nobles while Aura was busy dismantling traps.

Meanwhile, for obvious reasons, the world was panicking.

The five countries had been around for a long time, and for good reason.

They were completely self-sufficient and they had no need for each others' land, the only wars occurring between them due to growing hostilities due to ideological differences.

In other words, the five countries weren't interested in destroying one another.

Everyone had been informed of the Firen Kingdom's offensive, but nobody had expected a one sided slaughter of the entire Toffler Republic's population.

Even ruthlessness had its limits, especially since each country helped fend off the monsters that would occasionally invade from the Outlands.

Destroying one another simply wasn't beneficial to anyone.

Once the Firen Kingdom realized what was going on, they sent missives to the other countries stating that they had had nothing to do with the plan.

Which was a fairly obvious lie, since one of the functions of a kingdom core was to keep track of those with a high crime value, and had the Firen Kingdom not been involved, they would have been notified of such a criminal.

Even if the criminal was outside the range of their core, crime value wasn't some intangible, arbitrary marker that said 'this guy is bad', it was actually a measure of how much an individual has been cursed.

As it builds up, a person's soul will begin to degrade, turning them into a monster on the inside.

Which is actually why vampires aren't considered a very important threat, since they still have the heart of a human.

Only valid curses will affect a person's soul, as the person actually has to be aware that what they did was evil and still do it for the curse to affect them.

The force of the curses built up within a body can be sensed from a distance.

But only 'valid' curses will affect a person's soul, and that has to do partially with a person's acceptance of evil as well as with who backed them up.

The reason why people wouldn't gain any crime value during a time of war so long as they fought for one side or the other is that they weren't doing something 'evil' they were fighting a war, where death is entirely necessary for peace to return.

As it is a war, so long as one is a soldier or a hired mercenary, no curses will affect you, because according to the rules of wartime, they are in the right.

And if you are doing the right thing, then you can't also be doing evil.

This was the nuance that the game's system and developers never bothered explaining, since the players actually had a better understanding than the NPCs for once.

NPCs believed that the system was created by the gods for their benefit, so naturally they believed in the system's benevolence, but what was true?

In actual fact, the system was cold and unforgiving, and stuck to strict rules to ensure that people couldn't take advantage.

It just didn't have enough rules.

One of the most major holes in the myths of Ascendance is that the gods created the system.

But if the gods created the system, how did they become gods?

Aura had already gotten several clues that made it rather clear that the gods had not created the system, but most people simply believed the lore the NPCs spouted.

But without the system, both NPCs and players would lack the ability to grow in strength.

There would be no level ups, no skills, and abilities would require actual training to learn.

Without the system, the realms of Ascendance would have long since been ruled by monsters.

The sad part was that, because it was a game, many scholarly players never bothered to look into things like this.

It was such an interesting idea too, that the whole game was so detailed, and yet the developers hadn't bothered to flesh out the lore to any reasonable point.