Chapter 067: The Great Lands Within the Game

The Mage’s Legend—no pop-ups. As Lone Wind muttered, he clicked the confirmation button for the two million gold coin trade. The leader didn’t pay it much mind and clicked his button as well. But as soon as the transaction ended, a glaring red message jumped out in the chat box: “Transaction failed!”

“Huh?” Everyone was stunned. The leader said, “Why can’t we trade?”

Lone Wind was puzzled too. They tried trading the gold coins again, but still, the coins wouldn’t go through. The leader was dumbfounded. “What’s going on?” The two of them fumbled through the process several more times, but it was no use.

Lin Jia, baffled, said, “Let me try trading!” Naked, Lone Wind ran over and initiated a trade with Lin Jia—this time, it worked on the first try!

“Damn!” the leader grumbled, bewildered. “Is my luck just that bad? Number Two, trade with me!” Lin Jia tried to trade the two million coins to the leader, but again, it failed.

“Damn it! What the hell?” The leader, still not giving up, had Number Four try to trade with her. Number Four transferred 100,000 gold coins, and it succeeded immediately. The four of them were completely stumped. After more experimentation, they finally figured it out: there was no glitch after all, but rather a limit. A player’s inventory could hold a maximum of five million gold coins. The leader already had over three million coins in her bag from selling equipment, so when Lone Wind tried to trade two million at once, it exceeded her carrying limit, making the transaction impossible.

“There’s a rule like that?” The leader was exasperated. “Where are we supposed to put our money now? We can’t even store it in the warehouse!” In the end, the leader had to distribute the extra two million coins, a million each to Lin Jia and Number Four. Usually, all the money was centralized with the leader, who served as the “treasurer,” while Lin Jia and Number Four only kept enough on hand to buy potions and repair equipment. Now that the leader couldn’t hold it all, it was finally their turn to manage the funds.

Once everything was settled, Lone Wind, still naked, ran a few laps through the corridor on the second floor of the warehouse before announcing, “Alright, I’m logging off. I’m dead tired and can’t keep my eyes open! I’ll come back in the morning to pick up the gear you guys loot!”

Lin Jia replied, “Okay! Aren’t you coming to level up with us?”

“Another day! I really can’t stay awake tonight! Later!” As soon as Lone Wind finished speaking, he logged off in a flash—it looked like he really was exhausted.

“So, where should we go now?” the leader asked. Number Four, itching to try out their new gear, chimed in, “Of course, we’re going to the Fragrant Stone Catacombs to grind! I want to hit level 23 as soon as possible and wear that Blue Jade Necklace!”

The three brothers repaired their equipment, stocked up on potions, and headed straight for Sabak. The city was rather empty at that hour. Unlike the main city, which had the Pig Cave—the nearest leveling spot—Sabak didn’t offer a convenient training area, or at least, no one had discovered the secrets beneath it yet. Rumor had it that just to the right of Sabak’s marker on the world map, there was a leveling area similar to the Pig Cave in the main city. Players called it the “Rat Hole.”

Just as the Stone Tomb in the main city was dubbed the “Pig Cave,” this place—formally named the “Zuma Temple”—earned the nickname “Rat Hole” because of a unique, region-specific monster: the Giant Rat.

Lin Jia and his brothers had never been to the “Rat Hole.” In fact, in all their days playing Legend, the only place they’d really explored was the Fragrant Stone Catacombs. The leader and Number Four had at least spent some time in the so-called “Skeleton Cave”—the Orc Tomb and the Natural Cavern in Bicheng. But apart from the newbie village, Lin Jia had spent nearly all his time in the Catacombs.

Legend actually contained many other leveling maps for various levels, but ever since they’d found the “Fragrant Stone Catacombs,” the brothers had holed up there. Places like Bicheng’s Orc Tomb (“Skeleton Cave”), the abandoned mines (“Zombie Cave”), Snake Valley and its mines (“Snake Zombie Cave”), Woma Forest and Woma Temple, the Stone Tomb (“Pig Cave”) and Zuma Temple (“Rat Hole”) in MZ Province—all these were mid- to high-level grinding grounds. Among them, the Pig Cave, Rat Hole, and Woma Temple were notorious for spawning the highest-level monsters and had the highest player mortality rates.

It seemed players liked to name maps after the monsters that appeared there. Besides these dangerous caves, at the very top of the MZ world map was a cave called the “Dungeon,” which spawned a monster resembling a giant centipede. Players called it the “Centipede Cave”—an apt and memorable name.

Most of the cave maps were fairly easy to find, but the Centipede Cave, like the Fragrant Stone Catacombs, was hidden in a tangle of rocky hills on the map’s edge. Its entrance lay shrouded in shadow—unless you happened to stumble upon it while passing through the coordinates, you’d never guess that behind a row of toppled stalactites was the gateway to a sprawling labyrinth.

During these few days playing Legend, Lin Jia and his brothers would sometimes overhear other players in the internet café’s public area bragging or chatting about the game, and they’d picked up a lot of information that way. Much of what they knew about these maps came from such idle talk or from trading with other players in-game.

If not for this, the three of them would never have had such luck in discovering all those hidden maps on their own. Take the Woma Temple, hidden deep in Woma Forest near Bicheng, for example. The three brothers, who’d never even visited Woma Forest, would never have guessed that a gate to Woma lay on a sheer cliff in the forest if they hadn’t heard it discussed as a high-level monster map.

Lin Jia mused that he wasn’t the only lucky player around. He wondered if there were others, who, having discovered hidden maps, kept quiet and enjoyed them in secret.

Assuming that the more well-known maps had already been flooded by the masses, the brothers decided to level up as quickly as possible in the Fragrant Stone Catacombs before most players caught wind of it. Once the place was exposed, it would surely be overrun by the levelling horde, and finding another spot so secluded, with such high drop rates, good terrain, and abundant experience would be no easy task.

The three were united in their plan: raise their levels, then move on to the dangerous, sparsely populated high-level maps that most players couldn’t yet access, hunting for gear in those perilous places.

In just a few short days, the number of Legend players had doubled and doubled again. Soon, the online population had reached a level that would have taken other games months—or even half a year with heavy advertising—to attract. And that didn’t even count those who registered but couldn’t log in because the servers were packed beyond capacity.

*************

[Trouble: Quiet down! No one can burn their little universe every night like a seven-times-a-night stallion. I have to work, sleep, chase girls, and have fun! When you all get as wild as that, I’ll go take some Viagra! Sigh, you lustful, insatiable lot!]