Chapter Eighteen: Advanced Teleportation

Upon seeing this post, Zhao Xu knew that this player was in serious trouble. In the eyes of players, killing an NPC was nothing more than a trivial matter. Yet, the NPCs in Arthur were all living, breathing people—though the players had no idea. Quite a few Earthlings, after traveling to Arthur, had even married local residents. These NPCs were flesh and blood; every "NPC" could be traced to their origin, each with parents and a family, not just randomly sprung from a stone.

That player thought he had only slain a chunk of data that would respawn. He could only hope his actions stemmed from this misunderstanding—that he believed the NPC would come back, and that it was simply a thoughtless impulse. If so, abandoning his current account might still allow him to redeem his faction; otherwise, no matter how often he switched accounts, the mark of the Evil faction would always resurface. Worse yet, when he finally crossed over for real and could no longer change his account, the aura of evil would cling to him relentlessly.

Zhao Xu understood that the best course for that player was to confess, compensate, and then serve a short sentence—it was nothing serious, really; he could just log off and needn’t actually be imprisoned. Otherwise, the conflict would only be superficially suppressed, and when the year was up and it was time to cross over, the player who thought he’d merely cut down an NPC would suffer dearly.

Spells for detecting alignment required only the first level—barely more advanced than a cantrip. More importantly, “Detect Evil” was a class ability for Paladins, and often became their reflexive move when encountering groups of players. Low-level evil players simply had nowhere to hide in Arthur.

Virtually all human settlements rejected those of the Chaotic Evil alignment. The Lawful Evil schemers at least played their vile tricks within the rules, but no one could predict who a Chaotic Evil thug would attack next. Avoiding evil was a hard lesson seared into the players through bitter experience.

Zhao Xu didn’t have a saintly attitude about it; he wasn’t thinking about how to lecture the player on what to do. On the first night of the game, when he logged off, he was struck by an odd sense of responsibility and wrote out a “Ten Commandments for Arthur Newcomers.” Unfortunately, the player in question never saw it. The post contained no secrets about the game, and was more like an earnest essay advising players on what not to do.

Zhao Xu knew that most players entering the game would use up all their resurrection stones and start over.

Not in a year, but within a month.

Still, as the luckiest person, he hoped to toss down a rope—if players could grasp even a little of it, so much the better. The first commandment was to avoid evil. Yet that night, most replies to his post scoffed at his advice, so contrary to traditional gaming wisdom. Some even checked his post history and told him to go play a few more games before presuming to advise others.

Zhao Xu left it at that after posting. After all, every rule he’d written would be proven true by the players themselves, one painful stumble at a time.

After browsing and finding nothing new, Zhao Xu’s formidable self-control kicked in, and without further hesitation, he returned to the game.

Players were unknowingly fighting for their own survival.

He, on the other hand, was fully aware that he was saving himself.

To log off, players needed only to ensure that no combat had occurred in the previous five minutes, then they could issue the logoff command. Their bodies would fade into motes of light after ten rounds (one minute), vanishing from the main world of Arthur. If they were in a hurry, they could log off right away in a safe place. Should misfortune strike and they be attacked during those ten rounds, they’d just have to pay the price of a resurrection stone.

Early on, most players ignored the system warnings. Only at higher levels did they begin to cherish their accounts, and then—even in the safest towns—they would wait patiently for their bodies to disappear.

Sometimes, emergencies required logging off—being woken in the real world, or a system alert for an incoming call. Forced logoff was possible, but the downside was that the character’s body would remain in Arthur in an unconscious state.

No matter the method, returning to Arthur required a twenty-minute cooldown. This was a constant complaint among players in the future, as the game’s communication system took precedence over convenience. Yet Arthur held to this rule until the day mass crossing over began, and for Zhao Xu, those twenty minutes were his mealtime and forum-browsing break.

Even so, frequent logins and logoffs, with Player A receiving a message in-game, logging off to relay it online to Player B, and B logging in to pass it to their group—acting as a part-time courier exploiting the system—became commonplace later on. Sometimes, Arthur’s natives even hired players to use this method for urgent messages. But overuse led to organized penalties, and soon false relays and bribery became rampant, forcing everyone to resort to codebooks within half a year.

With a flash of white light, Zhao Xu appeared directly in his bedroom in the floating city above Mystra. Wherever you disappeared, that’s where you reappeared, no matter what happened in the meantime. There was once a player who logged off beside a volcano, only to log back in and find that it had erupted, his body instantly crushed by cooling lava.

As soon as he appeared, Antinoya’s figure also flashed into being in a burst of white light, still clad in the same mage’s robe as the past few days.

After three days of interaction, Zhao Xu had learned that the floating city was vast. Antinoya had installed a magical alarm in his room; the moment he arrived, she would be notified.

Despite the city’s size and her own chambers being relatively close by, she still preferred to use a seventh-level spell—Greater Teleport—to come over. Regular fifth-level Teleport was too imprecise. Zhao Xu once asked her why not simply use the ninth-level spell, Gate. Her reply was that while both Mystra and the floating city used legendary wards to block teleportation, only those with certain marks could bypass them.

Yet even with such clearance, Gate—a spell that could open a direct portal from another plane—was highly sensitive and would land her on surveillance lists. Antinoya had no interest in being interrogated about her daily comings and goings, so she avoided it.

Zhao Xu once naively asked why Greater Teleport wasn’t monitored. The answer: everything on the surveillance list was subject to investigation; Greater Teleport couldn’t cross planes and required familiarity with the destination. Since it shared roots with the regular Teleport and was used by so many, it was not scrutinized.

Otherwise, they might as well ban teleportation entirely.

Only then did Zhao Xu realize why his wizard friend, upon mastering the third-level spell Phantom Steed at level five, never again set foot on the ground. It turned out that the laziness of wizards ran deep.