A wave of irritation washed over Glitch as he realized he had to spend half of the game traveling.
This was worse, as he knew traveling to the meeting point with no strength would be a waste of time.
The only potential solution that came to his mind was to start a machinery group and move toward his destination with a mobile base.
This was the most wasteful way, but he did not want to miss that unknown opportunity. He sighed and shook his head. He stopped thinking about all this and looked out of the village gate.
He took out a second map. This was a detailed map of the Rown kingdom. Right now, he was in a big village on the eastern side of the kingdom.
There were two nearby places from this first village. First up north was a small village that was about a few hours of walking distance.
Then, to his right on the east side, there was a big town within one and a half days of traveling distance.
Now, if he went up, he would move close to the Rown Kingdom's capital, but this was on the opposite side of his final destination.
So he canceled that and focused on the town on the east side and looked ahead, trying to route to the south side.
The Rown Kingdom had a topography where massive mountains surrounded them from the north, east, and west, leaving only the south attached to grass plains.
This situation created an interesting development, as he could see on the map that the kingdom's capital was not in the middle but up at the top of the north side.
There was a massive straight corridor filled with multiple big cities that connected the capital in the north with the south border, while the east and west sides were comparatively remote, with only a few cities here and there.
The first city he was in was already in a little remote eastern area, and he could see that further east, except for that one town, there were no big cities, only multiple dots that represented small villages.
He took out a marker and circled a few remote areas. After marking the rough route, he closed the map and started moving around the gate.
He planned to reach this town, and depending on the situation, he would decide when to form this machinery group and other stuff.
To his luck, he found a merchant group that was about to move to the same destination.
He knew traveling alone for such a long distance would be hard and filled with a lot of danger. Not taking any risk, he walked to the main carriage and paid 30 bronze coins to join the group as a traveler.
A group of guards led him to the last carriage, where he found five more travelers already sitting inside. 3 on one side and 2 on the other.
He sat on the last empty spot and glanced at others in the coach. There was a young couple in front of him with a woman who looked like their maid next to them. The three of them looked tense as they looked out through the windows.
From their clothes and the fact they have a maid, this couple must belong to a decent family.
Next to him were a kid and an old man, both of them dressed in rags.
If he did not know that everyone here spent around 30 bronze, he would think of them as beggars. But it was clear they had their own story.
No one in the carriage looked simple in his eyes.
Not to get dragged into any mess, he decided to just close his eyes and enjoy the icy wind that seeped through the gaps of the window from time to time.
Soon, the merchant carriage started moving down on a rough route carved into the side of the mountains.
He could see a thin layer of ice all around the mountains, with multiple conical trees here and there.
The rough road was barely large enough so that only two carriages could move side by side. All the merchants' carriages were moving one behind the other in a straight line, while there were a bunch of adventures guarding the carriage from both sides on their horses.
He did not feel like he was playing a game, but more like he had transmigrated to this planet.
This was the most interesting thing about Universal Online; here the number of players was little to no compared to NPCs.
In most of the games, the role of NPCs was to give quests to the players, but there was no such thing here.
There was no mechanism for taking quests from the NPCs. The quest had an entirely different meaning in the game world that involved the events on the planet or the theme of the planet.
Like the magic base planet, Nex would have dimensional quests.
These were the dungeons that appeared all around the planet that rulers could conquer to get some reward from the system.
The event quest would be like the core quests for group rulers to compete for the kingdom seats and a few more.
Except for these few things, the system would not interface with anything. In the game world, killing a monster would not even give coins, only experience points.
However, there were multiple exceptional areas to this, like in dungeons where killing monsters drops loot or in a region like the trial village where the space portals of dead rulers were present.
Outside these areas, a player mostly needed to butcher the monster or carry the corpse to NPCs for trade.
He did not know much about other games, but he saw many videos of top players explaining these differences.
The toughest of all was the lack of a leveling system in the game world. A player could encounter a king that they could kill with a slap or a beggar that could kill them with a flick in the same place, and they would not even realize it.
This was one reason players considered it taboo to create trouble with NPCs.
Time continued to pass and hours into the journey when, for the first time, the carriage stopped. He opened his eyes to see what was going on when he heard a roar.
Roooow!