"Ten minutes left... Can't believe it took this long for the week to pass. *sigh* I feel like an impatient kid who's looking forward to open their presents, when it's Christmas Eve." Ashton commented with a smiling expression, as he was holding on the VR Helmet and watching the time tick away. Currently, it was 5:50 PM and the game would launch at 6 PM on his timezone and as he was looking at the helmet, all kinds of thoughts, emotions and memories were raging inside his mind, but he knew that whatever thought of what might happen in the future, it would not stop him from accomplishing his objectives.
As the seconds were ticking by, he decided to go through his plan in his head, one final time. Once he started the game, his first objective would be to obtain his starting spell, do one of the side-jobs in the starting town, obtain the essentials that he would need for the first week of grinding and finally, mentally prepare himself for the amount of shenanigans, party-wipes and shouting he was about to go through.
Once the alarm clock went off at 6 PM, Ashton took a deep breath and then put on the VR Helmet, as he laid down his body on his bed. As the VR Helmet was starting up, he felt his consciousness slowly disappearing, before it was quickly restored into a white room. This was a process he was extremely familiar with, since he had done this hundreds of times, but it was still an experience he would never be able to get used to. After his consciousness arrived in the white room, he felt a body was quickly being reconstructed for him and it wasn't before long he had a fully-functional virtual body. As he looked around, he found a golden square on the ground and the moment he touched it, the golden square shone brightly with a golden light, before the entire white room had turned into a platform made out of marble and golden clouds were surrounding the platform.
"This is a sight for sore eyes..." Ashton commented with a nostalgic look on his face, as he looked at the environment in front of him, since he had to experience a week without a major part of his life and to say he was bored, it would be a gross understatement. These seven days were some of the most miserable days of the past few years, since the only thing he could do was to remember whatever details he could from the game and wait for its launch. He attempted to go to his university to attend some of his classes, but he could only understand some stuff, since they had some pretty simple concepts, but everything else felt like alien gibberish. As for interacting with other people during this week, that was utterly impossible, since he was a pretty anti-social person and would rarely engage in conversations. Thankfully for him, he didn't get any calls from his uncle, ever since the events that happened in the morning of the first day, but he knew that he wouldn't be able to avoid the confrontation with him in the future, so he hoped that it would be delayed for as long as possible.
After spending a couple of minuted admiring the environment, he moved a few steps forward and a few marble pillars appeared in front of him, all while those pillars were holding the words "ENTER" and "QUIT". Ashton touched one of the pillars under the word "ENTER" and then he was met with a new pair of pillars that had the word "CREATE" on top of them. He knew that this was the interface for the character creation and upon pressing it, a holographic screen appeared in front of him with the message: "REGISTER YOUR ID: _". This required to input his account ID for any future characters he intended to create and he definitely use his previous ID he had used for the past three years: "Light_Of_Alcor_000"
After inputting it, a new holographic screen appeared in front of him that read: "INPUT YOUR CHARACTER NAME: _". For his name, he just went with Alcor, since that's the name he had used for all of his characters, both his main and the alternate characters he had used during the 3 years he played the game. After that, the holographic screen disappeared and the marble flooring started to crack and it wasn't before long it completely crumbled and he started falling, but he wasn't surprised since he was used to such a method of entering the game. After falling for a few seconds, his body started to slow down, before it started to levitate a few centimeters over the ground. As he landed, he could see lots of people who were either screaming the lungs out, had fallen on the ground unconscious, or looked like their souls had left their body.
'Man, this brings back memories of the new player influxes during the major patching updates.' Ashton thought to himself with a soft smile on his face, before he mentally called the word "Status and looked at the status screen in front of him:
[Name: Alcor
Race: Human
HP: 20/20 MP: 10/10
Level: 1 (0/100)
STR: 1 AGI: 1 ---: 0
INT: 1 WIS: 1
Remaining Status Points: 5
Skills (0/10): N/A]
"A blank canvas... What a beautiful and clean image. So much better than my main character." Ashton commented quietly to himself, as he couldn't help but compare it to his Glacial Swordmaster. As much as he would say that his main character was decent, even he knew that he had screwed up with his character, which led to the failure of a character, he would call his main character. Although the Swordmaster class and its variants were pretty fine for Tier 5 classes, his stat distribution was the undoing of his character and there was no way of undoing the stats you put in, aside from recreating the character from scratch. As for what it was, it was the heavy focus on the Intellect(INT) stat, which was the preferable stat for offensive spellcasters and the Glacial Swordmaster had quite a few skills that did fall under that category, but barely benefited from the stat itself, which led to his character underperforming, forcing him to master his motor skills with his horrible reflexes, just so his main character could be usable.
'Alright... Relax, you won't be making such a rookie mistake ever again. You know the game well, you know what each stat does and how it works and you know more or less which skills needs which stats to function well.' Ashton thought to himself, as he decided to stop reminiscing about the past and his first character. At this point, he need to think about the future and stop reminiscing about the past and decided to focus on the status screen in front of him. The 4 basic stats were Strength(STR), Agility(AGI), Intellect(INT) and Wisdom(WIS) and did about as expected from their names, Strength in creases, health, physical damage and defense, agility increases movement speed and the speed of the motions of the body, intellect increases magical power and mana and wisdom increases mana regeration, magical defense and ailment resistance. As for the last stat, that would be dependent on the first skill or spell he would get and he already planned which spell he would get first, as he was already making his way towards small temple, at the side of the town.