Ascendance: The Rebirth Of The Unknown Gamer

Chapter 8 - 6

Aura's goal this time was an area nicknamed the 'Deepest and Darkest of Woods', which is not at all a joke. The place is crawling with all sorts of spider-type monsters and is about as well lit as the inside of a shoe.

This place is a dream come true for all crafting professions in the early game, containing rare trees, herbs and ores, the most notable being a series of blackwood trees, spiderweed plants, and a small mine where players can find venom iron and occasionally mithril.

Aura, having LV 10 in all his gathering skills as well as having an Item Box, was going to take all these resources for himself, before the place was even discovered by players.

Resources in Ascendance are just like the monsters, they don't respawn, and herbs and trees take a great deal of time to regrow.

An excellent way to make money is to take saplings and seeds and plant them in a private area, selling them when they grow up. This is actually the way most druids make money, since they can use their nature energy to accelerate plant growth to some extent, although this takes quite a bit of skill, as too much nature energy could cause the tree to become a dryad, which would ruin any and all chances to cut it down peacefully.

Aura wanted to clear out the depths of the forest before players could figure out how much money they had missed out on, but this would take quite a while, during which time he would have to wipe out a bunch of spider monsters, which would hopefully take him to LV 9, chop down 23 trees and gather all the herbs growing beneath them, and mine out several small ore veins.

Even with his gathering skill, it would take up an entire week, and be extraordinarily boring. Fortunately, if he could reach LV 10 before starting, he could gain access to the rest of the system's locked functions, with the most important one in this case being the music player.

In most games, there would be music playing in the background while you are hunting or whatever, but in Ascendance, which focuses on realism, the music player function is switched off until players hit LV 10, allowing players access to the library of all songs ever uploaded to the internet, available to play straight into your ears.

The function wasn't locked by some sort of music hate from the devs, but was locked instead to help players learn how to play the game before adding in additional distractions from the system.

While doing mundane tasks, Aura always used to play classical music, or perhaps a mix of the game's unlockable tracks (when large scale events happen, they will unlock soundtracks and movies that the developers made to give players some backstory).

This helped him focus and also didn't impede his senses too much.

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The spiders in the Deepest and Darkest of Woods were giant, not very venomous spiders which would use their incredible strength to crush their opponents, but they, like most insect monsters, were weak to fire.

All Aura had to do to kill a spider was gather some magic energy and fire off a flame arrow into a spider's face, which would kill it instantly. These spiders didn't have any useful parts, so he just turned their corpses into foresty goodness with nature magic, all the while gathering his materials.

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A week later, Aura had gathered everything.

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Blackwood

A type of rare, poison attributed wood.

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Spiderweed

A medicinal herb used in the concoction of intermediate level antidotes.

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Venom Iron

A type of rare, poison attributed iron. The poison dissipates under heat.

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