There was an old saying - God looks after innocent, naive and fools. The meaning is no one else would take that thankless job. Atharva always believed to the list should include clueless too.
Take the point, his game life. Inspite of him being intelligent, intelligent enough to enter famous academy of excellence, and preparing extensively before entering the game, he was still clueless and needed guidance time to time. The lowest of the low was when a tank gave up his position and stood next to him, a mage and guided step to step and he still didn't learn completely. The hotheads of 'Stone heads galore ' group was crackling up watching this.
Artha could have even sworn some passerby player even took the video to turn it into trending short video or a meme. To be remembered forever by an AI as noobiest noob ever, if ever there was such term.
When the short lesson ended because his coach had to leave the map to handover the fulfilled task, Artha rested down near edge of the map, far away from the agro zone of monsters and slowly restored stamina. He drank water and ate apple. Then running around to completely conquer the map by collecting whatever he could, he actually rested.
He was pondering what his 'coach' had told before. This game was nothing like the ones before. They are slowly but surely shifting the way to play the game. It was not just resource restriction (they assumed that it was present in all villages), death debuff but also how monsters fought. As the map level raised, even the normal monsters showed a bit of intelligence and didn't fight mechanically.
Now Artha was thinking farther. Unlike others who had played games before this having preconceived notions, he was a clean slate. Only thing limiting him was his imagination. Maybe he should stretch his imagination a bit. He had earned more money in these 2 days that even damaging the game avatar could not be considered extreme.
He started reading and learning about all the things, big and small, using the talent of Nitpicking.
He paid in XP and upgraded his status bar. Zoop. Now he could claim to have most upgraded status bar.
When they said that the game was player driven they meant it. He said he wanted to store all excess XP and items he got from multipler bonus seperated from actual initial amount. And voilá. His inventory space and separated to 2 different coloured grids and he could add his trader bag into which ever side he wanted. The gold trimmed side was continuation of previous colour code , so it would continue to do it's usual job. The monochrome grey bordered one was what had asked to be seperated. Apart from inventory grid, there was only XP progress bar. This side didn't have anything extra like attributes, skills etc.
Artha was electrified. Is this the reason why not one told how the status bar would change later on? It's effing customisation. So how can they explain how it may end up like?
This game, he decided to play, by removing all preconceived ideas. He wanted to be a legal bandit, also known as middleman, service provider etc. The commonality among these were that they swallowed money without letting others know how much would go to their pockets and how much in original product maker's.
He checked the count down timer he had set. Though he had walked to and from from village few times, other than the time he spent to get the missions imposible from NPCs, he had not wasted much time. Though he wished to denude this map, he had to check other maps too, especially considering he had to collect various items for various quests.
After selling few more potions and getting some pre-orders for sleeping bags, he went to do the task with high returns but no takers. The place was alley behind the hotel. The smell was horrible even with senses muted to the maximum and the garbage were spilling over from various bins. The whole thing was end result of merriment and mini food street yesterday evening. It would be cleaned up by NPCs themselves or players who recieved tasks of cleaning up. So why did Artha take this horrendous job? Vinzo had permitted him to use a nook near his office to read and write. There was a time gap between few of his orders and he considered customers to be supreme, especially when they were paying in credits. He had already harrassed NPCs and unless it was to handout finished tasks, he would rather not go infront of them. He didn't forget that he had to copy a big book but he had changed his room into temporary storage space. So where to do copying and remembering?
Vinzo to the rescue. The nook though small was a good place for reading and writing. He also provided protection gear, thoughtfully.
The Nitpicker in him tsked when he saw all the waste. He slowly cleaned up the areas till most of the areas were clear and most garbage were in single place. He paused the work, went to earn some credits and came back soon after.
He started sorting out the things and putting waste into correct bins. The talent which brought him trouble 😵💫, the talent which set the bar so high to even touch the threshold of being apprentice in lifestyle way, unexpectedly showed it's peculiar way again. Just like when he was collecting items in the wild, in the maps, it started giving hints on the items he picked.
Initially, it was not a big thing. The explanation was simple and unless he was interested in village life, not worth much. Slowly, the content in the explanation changed.
Roasted boar meat piece changed to overseared boar meat, then to level 2 boat meat with too much Helzin dressing. Towards the end, the explanations were like Level 2 boat meat , roasted properly but with excess Helzin dressing, made by Wulrum 1 day back. Can be cleaned and used again. Strength +0.5 for half an hour if cleaned properly.
Artha blinked. What sort of explanation was this?