Aethelgard: The Survival Game (Chloe) novel Chapter 14

Eureka: [Out of 100,000 players, half of us will be dead within 24 hours of the protection period ending.]

[Right now, all we’ve got is the starter six–by–six soil plot. A few of you with special talents have a little more, but everything outside that is pitch black. Nothing visible.

[Here’s the thing though. There IS stuff out there. If you stick something long enough past the edge of your plot, you’ll feel it brush up against shapes. Outlines. I can’t tell you what they are. Could be other settlements. Could be living creatures.

[What I’m saying is, we’re probably not floating in some empty void. The system has us walled off behind a kind of veil, and that veil IS the novice protection.

[Once the timer runs out, the system drops it, and we get scattered out into the real world for keeps.

[I can’t see everything, but what I can see isn’t pretty. This world is rough. Famine, war, monsters, and disasters on a scale most of us aren’t ready for.

[I can’t tell you exactly what kind of disasters. My visions only show me that once the veil drops, conditions are going to get brutal fast.

[We won’t just be dealing with creatures. We’ll be dealing with locals, factions, entire kingdoms in chaos. Yeah, this game, if we’re still calling it that, has natives. And the map is massive.

[My advice? Get your territory upgraded to at least Level One before the 15 days are up. Stockpile everything you can. Especially the cubic yard soil plots. Hoard them.

[Resources are pretty plentiful right now. Once we leave the novice zone, getting your hands on anything is going to be twice as hard.

[Selling info from special channels too. DM me if you’re interested.]

The second Eureka finished posting, the chat lit up with skeptics. Some accused her of faking the A–rank claim. Others called the whole thing a publicity stunt.

A few players asked her, politely, if she could share more details.

BeautyEmbracer: [Pathetic. What’s with the act?

[A–rank talent my ass. You think those grow on trees?]

SpringBreeze: [Yeah, no kidding. If you’ve actually got more intel, you should just spill it for the sake of the rest of us. What’s this “selling info” crap?]

SkyDragon: [Same.]

Annabel Kingsley: [Hey, can someone explain what territory upgrades are? You can level up your land?] Emerald: [Right? And what’s all this talk about resources being plentiful? I’m starving over here. Plus those cubic yard soil things, what good are they?

[Every time I picked one up and used it, more monsters showed up. The more soil you’ve got, the worse it gets. ]

]

Eureka: [Sorry, I’ve gotta survive too. I’m not going to dump everything for free. Take my advice or leave it.]

Eureka: [If you genuinely want more info, message me privately. Anyone who comes in swinging gets blocked.

BeautyEmbracer: [Bitch.]

Chloe read through the exchange and found herself believing most of what Eureka had said.

The truth was, she had already been wondering the same thing. Once the novice period ended, the world around them was bound to get a whole lot worse.

‘Otherwise, why would the system bother putting something like defense towers in the game at all?‘ she thought. Back then, the exact threat had h

Successfully unlocked!

there was a direction.

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Chapter 14 Trading Information

Extreme natural disasters, man–made catastrophes, and worst of all, famine.

The patch of soil right under her feet couldn’t even hold a seed, which said plenty about how rough things would be out beyond the safe zone.

Between casts, Chloe kept her eyes glued to the trading post. Plenty of other players had reeled up seeds too. The catch was, the second anyone tried planting them, the seeds just wouldn’t take in the soil.

Even players running The Cultivator talent, one of the strongest farming gifts in the game with built–in growth boosts, came right out and said farming that kind of dirt was a dead end.

Whatever was poisoning the ground had run way too deep.

Getting seeds wasn’t the issue. They came up on the line often enough. The real problem was that nothing they hooked ever had room to grow.

Out of every player pulling food up out of the water, hardly anybody ever hooked actual produce.

Every day, someone in the trading post was begging for fruit and vegetables, complaining their teeth ached from nothing but meat and crackers, with the unbalanced diet debuff to prove it. The corruption was just that bad.

Even with her Flora Whisperer’s Cap, Chloe wasn’t confident she could coax a carrot seed into anything edible. She glanced down at her seed packet and let out a quiet sigh.

Mulling it over, Chloe couldn’t help but feel a real respect for Eureka.

Putting that kind of warning out there against all the pushback hadn’t been easy, and in her book, that counted for something.

She easily could’ve kept the info to herself, stockpiled supplies on the side, and traded them off for anything she wanted.

Eureka had broken the ice, and now another familiar name was chiming in.

FrostTrace: [Eureka’s right, if you ask me. This world’s gonna be a whole lot more dangerous than people realize. Since someone already went first, I’ll throw in a few harmless things of my own.

[I’ve seen a ton of folks share their stat cards, and almost none of them list anything under Magic.

[Most people don’t have magic or any magical talent, so the Magic field just doesn’t show up on their stats. Mine doesn’t either, for what it’s worth.

[But magic absolutely exists in this world.

[I picked up a special book off a monster I killed, called Chronicles of the Aethelgard Realm.

[In it, the main character writes about creatures that have nothing to do with our world: mermaids, dwarves, elves, demons. There’s also a sizable population of human natives.

[Among those natives, a very rare few are born with magical talent. Those people got together and founded the Arcanum Spire.

[The Arcanum Spire developed all kinds of new tools and opened up serious possibilities. But after a starving mob eventually overran the place, the mages cursed a bunch of their scrolls and artifacts. Anyone without magical talent can’t use or craft magic gear anymore.

[Turns out players with magic talents are more likely to attract items with magical properties.

[I’ve pulled a ton of magic blueprints and tools. Already tested ‘em. Can’t craft or use any of it without a magic talent. If you’ve got one, hit me up. Happy to trade, or you can help me craft the finished products.]

FishSticks: [That explains it. I got a skill tome off a slime, Aqua Sphere. But the game won’t let me learn it. Are you kidding me right now? It’s MAGIC. You have no idea how bad I wanna learn that.]

MintyGrass: [Hold on, magic? Like the magic stat? I have that! Only two points, but still. Can we trade?]

FishSticks: [Sure, let’s do it. God, I’m so jealous. How do you even have a magic talent?]

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Chapter 15 Magic Talents