“Eighty-eight and a half thousand,” he whispered. That was a lot of cash.
He stepped away from the pedestal and poked his head outside. Nothing remained of the town of Nathak, now called Kingscastle. Roads and paving cut through a massive sea of mud, all enclosed by the familiar walls. Now that it wasn’t filled with a winding maze of buildings, the town seemed a lot smaller.
He returned to the pedestal and sold the rest of the walls and roads, bringing him up to just over a hundred thousand System Coins. He wouldn’t need all of the space, and he’d seen a cool option when scrolling through the buildings list.
He selected the building, mind wandering. Why hadn’t the Undead done this, and why had there been so few of them? The town could fit a few thousand of the Undead, yet there’d only been about three hundred in total. What’s more, they had no need of the buildings—they had rested in the town center. Why had they kept them?
It was just another mystery, and Chris doubted he’d find answers. He shrugged and walked outside the building, as instructed to by a screen.
The walls were gone, and he stood next to the small thatched house, an island in a square kilometer sea of churned dirt.
The house disappeared, leaving the pedestal standing alone in the field, then piles of stone rose from the earth, stacking themselves on top of each other until they formed a small keep with battlements and a steeply pitched tile roof topping it off. A section of the wall in front of him disappeared, and a thick wooden door sprang up in its center.
Chris entered the much reduced town of Kingscastle, looking around. The area was relatively spacious, with enough space for a bed, table, and a few other amenities. A roaring, woodless fireplace sat at the far end of the room, and a small spiral staircase hugged the corner of the room, reaching the next floor. Not seeing the pedestal, he ascended.
The next floor was bare and surfaced with wood, except for a small stone stage set around another fireplace, so he continued up. The staircase ended in a small ladder with a bolted wooden hatch in the ceiling, he pushed it aside and climbed up to the roof of the keep.
A steep, tiled roof to protect against the worst of the elements covered the tower, supported by thick wooden beams beside the crenellations that ringed the top of the keep.
There were small murder holes, for archers to shoot down from above and drop boiling hot chocolate, or whatever it was medieval defenders did; and at each of the four cardinal directions, inset into the crenellations like computer terminals were the pedestals he was looking for.
The F-1 keep upgrade for the tutorial town had been expensive at 20,000 System Coins, but it gave him better defensive options and was pre-requisite to some of the higher leveled, complex defensive fortifications.
Then he began buying other buildings and vendors. A wall began to form around the keep—the tower a bullseye in the center—far smaller than the one that had surrounded the former town. Inside buildings began to take shape, roof tiles clicking together like fish scales on top of the buildings, punctured by the occasional chimney.
He saw one of the Slime buildings, but blanched at its price tag of 30,000 System Coins. Then he remembered the Building Token he’d received as a reward, he quickly applied it and watched what looked like a massive iron cauldron take shape.
Finally, he bought some of the free tutorial buildings and closed down the building menu—88,000 System Coins poorer, including the initial keep upgrade.
He moved on to a menu called ‘Spawning’ and opened it. There were two sliders on the screen next to the words ‘Slime’ and ‘Human’, both were set to zero. There wasn’t any explanation, but he guessed this was how people got transported over to the tutorial zone. He hesitated over allowing spawning for Humans, then thought better of it. His settlement, Kingscastle, was still in a formative stage—adding people would complicate the affair.
He closed out the window, then descended the stairs to peruse through his new buldings.
The first building he visited was the System offered Defender’s Barracks. It would spawn System generated warriors who would guard the settlement. It had been one of the buildings that required the keep upgrade. The building was simple and squat, containing eight empty beds, lined up in neat rows. When he pressed his hand against the frames, he saw a countdown timer for each of them. Three days. It was a bit of a wait, but hopefully it would be worth it.
He moved onto the next buildings: an Infirmary, which accelerated healing inside it; four Vendors for General Supplies, Skills, Armor, and Weapons; and finally a Slime provided building called a Spawning Vat—the cauldron-like building he had seen earlier.
Chris was particularly interested in the last of these. Since Slimes were monsters, their options for settlements were different. Monster settlements were geared toward empowering monsters or creating more of them, helping to pump out enemies that were more powerful or more numerous—although he didn’t know how they managed to pay for the buildings. Maybe they got them for free, or through quests.
The Spawning Vat was an iron tank full of goo that would pump out Slimes from a spigot-like vent at regular intervals; but rather than sending them out to rampage among the Enlightened, Chris had the System build a pit trap in front of the spigot instead—with slippery surfaces to prevent climbing of course. He could already see the first Slime dripping from the spigot; it was a small thing, maybe the size of a basketball, with a stone in the middle—the size of a golf ball. It fell with a splattering squelch into the pit, where it began to blob lazily around the bottom, trying and failing to scale the sides.
Another Slime began to drip from the Spawning Vat, taking another minute to emerge. He smiled as he saw it fall, the Spawning Vat would make a good farm, if nothing else—and the building token meant he got it for free.
Content, he went over to the Skill Vendor. It was a building packed with luminous crystals in baskets. There was a desk near the entrance and a short, bald human man with blue eyes and a black beard that choked the lower half of his face in a thicket of scraggly black wires.
“May I help you, m’lord?” The bush around the man’s head shifted hypnotically and it took Chris a moment to realize that it was the man speaking.
“I need to buy some skills. I have Skill Tokens.”
“Very good, m’lord.” The man’s eyes lit up at the mention of Skill Tokens, so much so that it his beard looked in danger of catching fire.
“And call me Chris.”
“Very good, m’lo—Chris,” the man rumbled. “What skills are you looking for?”
He thought to himself. What was the stuff people always got in books and anime. Harems, attention from gods—with a fifty-fifty chance of them joining the harem—more harems, and identification skills. “Do you have any hare—I mean, skills that will let me know how powerful something is? And what’s your name?”
“Brim, Lord Chris, and I have just the thing.” Brim hurried over to one of the unmarked baskets, shoved his hand inside and pulled out a specific crystal. He clutched it in his hand and whispered something to it. Light seeped from between his fingers, then he held out a crystal that looked exactly the same as it had before. “This crystal holds [Insightful Gaze], rank F-1, which should give you information on the level of all enemies, rank F-3 and below.”
Brim’s free hand flicked outward. A screen appeared in front of Chris, showing that the skill was able to be exchanged for 4,000 System Coins, or one F-1 Skill Token. “Would you recommend anything else?”
“I am unable to offer advice on how to advance your build, Lord Chris. I am an artificial construct created by the System, non-System affiliated shops would be able to help you more.” Brim’s beard drooped apologetically.
“No worry.” Chris’ hand hesitated over the accept button, then fell away. “Uh, do you have a skill that lets me detect danger?” Danger detection was more vague, but, unlike identify, it might work even if he didn’t know where the threat was, or where it came from. It might even work against unidentifiable threats, like poison gas, or traps.
“I will retrieve it,” Brim said. He replaced the crystal, drawing a faint wisp out of it as he did so; then he moved to another basket and retrieved an identical looking crystal.
“[Sense Danger], rank F-1.” Brim held out the skill crystal.
Perfect. Now for the rest.
I think F-1 with sense danger means it would affect range and how much time before the attack it would warn and if the attack has stealth level it would be rolled against sense danger's F-1 first.
Maybe F-1 would warn when mage has made a fireball in air.
E-1 would warn when mage has begun chanting.
D-1 would warn when mage has entered the area.
That's partly it
I assume he will use his skill tokens on whatever skills cost the most of the ones he wants rather than those two? Also, I would have expected internal dialogue around considering if he could get the money back from the buildings when he left.
Amazing stuff though. Truly cream of the crop! Even better really, it's one of the best plants grown in the whole crop, forget about the lousy cream!
He will use the tokens for the more expensive skills. I don't like getting dragged into internal dialogue too much, it slows down the story sometimes and that's the death of fast-paced stories like these.
@AwakenedKingdoms You are wise sir. I've been trying to write for a while and each time it amazes me how hard it is to put all the info I want while maintaining action. Well, even making sense is hard for me
. How are you so skilled at writing? What's your background? If you don't mind me asking.
@dosithee Sure. Not what you would expect, a Scientist. I quit that because it's basically an abusive relationship disguised as a job. For the past couple months I've been freelance editing for people. But I've always loved fantasy and reading even before that.
The thing about writing is that the more you do it, the better you become at it. It's one of the true skills.
A prodigy who's written only 1,000 words will write worse than someone who's written 1,000,000 words. The only way to get better at writing is to write. And to look back at what you did years ago and realize that you have indeed improved.
There's a few tricks to writing as well. You shouldn't write complex sentences before you write simple ones. If you can't convey your meaning briefly, you have no hope of conveying it when you're packing lots of information into a sentence. Write simple well, so you can write complex when you need to. Simple sentences are the foundations over which everything else is built.
Then there's word use. Read great writing. There's a rhythm and a flow to each sentence, they lead on and on. Internalize that, get used to writing with a rhythm. Then speak the sentence out loud. Sentences that speak well often read well.
Use the right words. Sometimes a sentence has many correct words, sometimes it has only one, sometimes it has none at all. Sometimes the word is right, but the structure is wrong and the rhythm ends up skewing the sentence, adding stress and intonation to the wrong places.
If you can't write the right thing, then write lots of wrong things to see what's wrong about each of those sentences. Sometimes it's not what you might expect and you learn a lot.
The most important thing is to go into it willing to write, and willing to learn. No one became a great writer in a day. And no one becomes a writer at all if they spend too much time on theory and too little on practice. Believe in yourself. Everyone's got a great book in them.
@AwakenedKingdoms orz. Thank you. I like what you said about simplicity. I notice you stick pretty consistently to putting the subject at the front of your sentences, followed by the verb. I've read about this, but always found it awkward when I read my own writing. When i read yours, even though it's similar, I think that since i'm not writing it, it feels different. I guess when I read my own writing, the way I read it is different from how I read normally and it distorts my perception of it.
I'm not at all surprised your a scientist. I can hear it in your writing. Also, building complex, but cohesive worlds takes strong logical thinking and not just pure creativity. And I see that in your story.
Though, sometimes it takes not trying to make it cohesive to make it cohesive. I personal find it hard to create worlds because as I build them and they become more complex, the more problems and inconsistencies form.
Thanks for taking the time to share your great work and your wisdom.
@dosithee Yep, I generally go with Subject and Verb first because it's like a handshake. It engages you with who's doing what immediately, introduces itself, grabs ahold with a verb and delays the reveal of what is done. It helps the English is conducive to that. Languages like Latin are a real pain since the verb often comes later. S+V first is great for fast paced books, mainly because it doesn't necessitate that you read the entire sentence before you understand its drive, it leads to good flow that holds up well even in the face of complexity. I used to try and avoid it like the plague, but editing people's books really helped out. That's just my style and voice of writing though; if you go with how you feel most comfortable writing, without trying to avoid "bad writing", and then go over what you've already written (maybe out loud) soon (but not too soon) after writing it, you can begin fixing the actual parts that are problematic - that will follow you through into your proper writing over time.