End Online: Volume 1

by D Wolfin

  “Hmmm, I have no idea even where to get these materials,” I mumble to myself as I finish cleaning, “I had better look up the location of them on the internet.”

  On the wiki I am surprised to find that both the materials that I need can be found in the city, although in order to be able to correctly identify and harvest them you require the skill ‘Herbalism’ which not many people choose considering in order to make use of the herbs you harvest you need even more skills such as ‘Alchemy’, ‘Potion Creation’ or ‘Distilling’.

  Even if I cannot harvest them properly at least I will make an attempt as long as I can bring the old lady twenty of each.

  Logging in I returned to the wolf hunting ground, in the midst of a considerable amount of players hunting here. When I was here while I was the only one in the hunting area, there were other players who passed by, but seeing me hunting in such an embarrassing way caused them to hunt elsewhere.

  My pouch contains a little over ten gold coins at the moment, I had made some money selling an enormous quantity of cheap wolf pelts and spent a little on weapon and armour maintenance but I never ended up spending much so most of it was left over.

  I am quite close to the den of the great white wolf so I decide to go collect some apples before I return back to Iceridge in order to complete my quest. The cave’s location is still familiar to me so it doesn’t take long to find it. Wolves attack me in the narrow corridors as soon as I enter, but I am a lot stronger than I once was and with a quick dash through the wolves, well places slashes reduced their numbers one by one.

  The whole process of the wolf attacks and my speed overwhelming them continued until I reached the cavern in the deepest parts of the cave, I still had full stamina and my health was at 87%, no reason to wait.

  Just inside the cavern a familiar howl reaches my ears, followed by an even more familiar wolf looking down on me from about twenty meters away. It emanates a low growl for a moment before sniffing the air, catching my scent. The hood I am wearing does nothing for preventing it from recognizing me by smell.

  All of a sudden the wolf becomes a little more wary, a snarl creeps onto its face that could either be from anger or happiness of seeing me again, either way I have the feeling revenge is the only thing on the wolf’s mind right now.

  Being fully aware of its speed and given that I was only able to win last time due to being able to land two incredibly effective critical hits at the start, hindering its movements speed. I doubt even with my current speed I could beat it now that it’s more cautious of me and treating me quite seriously.

  If I removed my hood my speed that is already tremendously fast would double, and I should easily be at least as fast as the wolf. But I have already decided to keep the hood on and nothing will be changing that.

  The wolf took off in a flurry of white, directly towards me in front of the entrance. I had already anticipated this, and the moment the wolf began to move so did I, sprinting off to the left towards the closest bunch of apple trees.

  The wolf with a single powerful bound changes its trajectory to intercept me right before I reach the trees. A race against time, it is a test to see if I can reach the trees first, or if the wolf can reach me.

  My adrenaline is pumping. The wolf trying going to intercept me right before the trees, its jaws opened to deliver the greeting of our reunion. It made a low lunge at me to grip me in between its teeth. Deciding that this was all or nothing, I ignored the distance and jump as hard as I can.

  Narrowly escaping the wolf’s jaws, I feel its hot breath passing across my feet. The trajectory of my jump followed a parabola, fortunately I manage to get my hand on a lower branch just after the height began to drop, this kind of jump would have shamed most basketball players. Swinging myself around the branch I climb up slightly higher in the tree, out of the reach of the great white wolf and into safety.

  For the next two hours I travelled through the trees and collected apples, the amount I can carry has exploded enormously since my strength is now a total of fifty three points, along with the fact that my armour is rather light I can carry an enormous amount of small items such as wolf pelts and apples.

  The wolf followed underneath me the entire time carefully, waiting for the moment I would drop down. And I did, after slowly collecting a total of 160 apples, I could not find any more so there was no more reason for me to be up here. Falling down to the ground the wolf jumps back a few meters to put a little distance between us, clearly remembering what happened last time.

  Fortunately for me, the exit was behind me. Turning and running I hear a pounding noise following me, I don’t even need to turn around to know that the wolf was gaining ground on me. Ten meters away from the exit the wolf proved its dominance as a sharp pain overcame my back as a solid blow from behind caused me to catapult into the ground in front on me, luckily bouncing and sliding through the exit and out of range of the great white wolf.

  Truly scary, that is my thought when I look at my health that has dropped by a quarter. To think that I beat a wolf that can do this to a me in one clean hit, despite how much stronger I am now, terrifying.

  The sun started to sink over the horizon, the game entering the night stage. At night monsters became about 1.5 times more powerful, the experience you got also increased a little, but not really enough to make up for the increased difficulty of monsters.

  Back in town all the merchant shops are closed during the night, so I log out.

  ***************************************************

  The trip to buy groceries and come back was incredibly dull. It took me half an hour to get there, and once I was there I was too embarrassed to ask other customers to get things for me from the upper shelves. The the trip back took twice as long due to being held down by the extra weight of the shopping. A two hour round trip to a nearby supermarket just to buy food had completely worn me out, especially my arms.

  After my lunch it is time to go back to End Online. With the morning sun it was time to search the city for the herbs I needed, but the bazaar was calling me first.

  “Good morning, Peachstar.” I approach the small girl at her usual spot

  “Mooorning! how can I help youuu today?!” Still as irritating as ever I see.

  “I’m fine. Also I have more apples for you to sell,” A couple of heads turned at my voice and Peachstar seemed to light up.

  “Oh reaalyyy? That’s great! The last ones sold the saaame day!”

  “Haah, well that’s really good to hear.” These apples were surprisingly popular!

  “Nowww, this time you don’t get any money until their sold though, kayyy?”

  I was aware the normal situation of when it comes to real money transactions, you generally leave the goods with the merchant and don’t get any money until they are sold. But seeing her shaking a finger back and forth across her nose, I can feel unimaginably violent urges rising from my stomach.

  “It’s okay, the money will automatically be deposited into my wallet when you do finally sell them.”

  I always try keeping my conversations with Peachstar as short and on topic as possible, she is without a doubt an incredibly nice person. But, talking to her always leaves me feeling angry for no particular reason.

  With our conversation over I walk to another vendor that specializes in animal pelts, I had been to this man a few times in the past.

  “Hey, Mr Hood, how can I help you today?” He was a very down to earth person, as a matter of fact he was so normal that he could stand in the middle of a crowd and nobody would notice he was there, not even the crowd themselves.

  “Morning James, I have a few animal pelts to sell today, 2 silver each as usual.” Pulling out a stack of 74 wolf pelts, James was no longer surprised at the amounts I’ve been giving him.

  “No worries, I’m glad to be able to buy it off you,” James had the ‘Sewing’ skill, and in End Online you use that skill to create clothing and some light armours out of various animal and monst
er hides.

  I also learned from him that I can sell just about anything directly to other players too. What Mouse told me about only being able to trade with merchants who paid the higher subscription fee only applied to real money transactions.

  Two silver for a wolf pelt is quite a cheap sale, I could potentially get three if I haggled or five if I sold them directly to customers, but I wanted to sell them quick and James always bought them all then and there.

  Next on my to do list was to gather the herbs that the old lady from the apothecary requested. Travelling around Iceridge I searched for parks and relaxation areas, to be completely honest the guide I found with information on the herbs was from Grenton, the starter city and capital of the Kingdom of Foster, which wasn’t covered in snow.

  It wasn’t exactly recent news, but each starter city was the capital of its own kingdom. My territory is the Kingdom of Glace, while Swordbreak is the capital of the Dalbe Kingdom. Each kingdom has a specific symbol, which can be seen as your inventory icon at the bottom-right of your vision and once you hit level fifty it will appear as a tattoo on the back of your right hand, until then you are not allowed to leave your kingdom.

  The symbol for Glace is a wolf, Dalbe is two swords crossing each other, and Forster is a tree. All these symbols are a simple solid shape in a ring, creating three perfectly round symbols representing the kingdoms.

  Bringing my mind back to topic, I enter a small park area which has a few benches and trees around but probably the most important issue would be all the snow, it is about half a foot deep and covering everything.

  If my instincts are not wrong then this city should be the same as the others and have novice level herbs in its parks as well, one only need brush the snow out of the way that is hiding the herbs. I try in between the trees and use my hand to brush some of the snow aside, only to find soft dirt underneath.

  My second location I try however revealed two green medicine herbs, jackpot! A quick sweep of the area revealed eleven more green medicinal herbs and nine antidote herbs. The next issue that came to me was the harvesting of them. While I identified them by memory off the picture that they look like on the internet, I do not have “Herbalism” to harvest them.

  Pulling them out of the ground breaks them at the stem, which was especially difficult with the antidote herbs considering I need the roots of them. Some diligent work and practice allowed me to be able to quickly dig the dirt around them and remove them. Only I still kept breaking them.

  In half an hour I had thirty six green medicinal herbs and twenty antidote herbs with the roots still attached. Despite them all being withered and damaged, I had them.

  Walking into the apothecary the old lady behind the counter gave me a somewhat angry look and spoke.

  “About time young’un! Where are those herbs you were s’posed to bring me!?”

  “I’m terribly sorry for the delay! No matter how many times I tried to harvest the herbs I just couldn’t do it right and kept damaging them, these were the best I could manage!” A complete lie I know, but I will need to be good at fooling people if I’m going to make a lot of money!

  “They are absolutely terrible!” She gawks at the herbs I placed in front of her, “You are also incredibly lucky that my first grade skills with herbs ‘ill still allow me t’ use these however if you had any less dexterity these herbs would have been completely ruined.”

  Oh, so dexterity is related to harvesting herbs huh, that is a useful piece of information that may prove useful later. It was possibly also required to clear this quest without the herbalism skill.

  Your quest has been successfully completed

  “Allow me to show you the correct method for harvesting herbs such as these while you are here too, t’ do something like this t’ nature tis a heinous crime.”

  She made some hand motions as if digging around a herb and began forcing me to copy her movements. Five minutes of this old lady grabbing my hands and forcing me to dig out the air before a notification appeared in front of me.

  You have successfully learnt 'Herbalism'!

  You have empty skill slots so this skill will be automatically equipped.

  Herbalism (SLvl 1, 0%) -Active

  You have a strong affinity with herbs and you are capable

  of identifying and harvesting them, however you will not be

  able to identify a herb that is higher than you skill level.

  SLvl 1:

  - Capable of identifying novice herbs and their effects.

  - Capable of utilizing a herbs effects, can be used on others if

  you do the application of the herb.

  - +3 Dexterity.

  Incredible, I may have been short changed when I started this game but I have now gained two free skills, even if ‘Herbalism’ probably won’t be very useful to me.

  “Good, now you’ve got the hang o’ it,” The old lady nods her head to herself a few times and continues while squinting at me, “But someone like you ‘ill only forget if you don’t practice it prop’ly. Go get me fifty more o’ each herb! An’ each one has t’ be in perfect condition!”

  Quest: Practice 'Herbalism'

  The owner of the Apothecary has requested you to get another

  50 Green medicinal herbs and 50 Antidote roots,

  + all have to

  be in perfect condition when harvested

  Failure or refusal will cause you to lose the 'Herbalism'

  skill.

  Grade: White

  What a horrible quest.

  “It would be my pleasure,” I put on the best business smile I can imagine, “I will be back with the herbs as soon as possible.”

  Excusing myself I left the apothecary, I didn’t even get the potions I was supposed to for the first quest. It was still early afternoon in the game so I may as well do this quest now and finish it before it gets dark.

  Picking herbs with ‘Herbalism’ was incredibly easy, to the point where I was abusing my high dexterity by kicking the ground around the herbs with my feet, and flicking them out with the toe of my boots, even though that ruined two in three herbs. Carefully picking herbs will raise dexterity, but that was useless while I was busy digging up chunks of earth with my feet.

  I spent a full hour on the task and ended up with about a hundred of each, only due to losing count of how many I had collected and ended up with double the amount required

  The old lady is giving me a stern face as I hand over the herbs.

  “Hmm, I assumed you woul’ do a better job than this. Well, tis still a pass nonetheless. You ‘ill get better the more you do it.”

  “Thank you, I really did my best!” Not even faint remorse that I hardly put any effort in at all, “Although I don’t really have much use for these herbs right now, I can’t do anything productive with them.”

  If I was to directly consume one of the green medicinal herbs I would only recover a single health point a second for ten seconds, and the antidote roots have a ten percent chance of curing minor poisons.

  “He he he. ‘Herbalism’ has many great benefits t’ it that you jus’ need t’ explore. You ca’ use them in cooking t’ give your food productive bonuses, or negative depending on what you use.”

  “Also, in regards t’ these herbs you’ve brought me. If you don’t know what you ca’ do with them, instead of providing you wit’ some potions allow me t’ teach you how t’ create them instead.”

  I would have preferred the potions!

  Your quest has been successfully completed

  You have successfully learnt 'Potion Creation'!

  You have empty skill slots so this skill will be automatically

  equipped.

  Potion Creation (SLvl 1, 0%) -Active

  The art of using all materials to create potions, you can

  use everything from herbs to monster parts. In order to use

  this skill you require the right equipment, plus empty vials

  to place the concoction
s within.

  SLvl 1:

  - Capable of using a Mortar & Pestle.

  - Created potions will have 0.5X potency

  I can’t exactly complain about the turnabout, I did get another skill for free, however I still have somewhat of a sour taste in my mouth.

  “So where can I buy these empty vials?” If I have the skill I may as well use it.

  “He he, why you can buy them here o’ course! Five silver each.”

  “Come again? That’s a bit too expensive don’t you think!”

  “Cheapes’ you will get ‘em,” The old lady’s grin deepened, the aura of a predator exuding from her frail body, “You could always go find someone who knows how t’ blow glass otherwise, but you can’t buy ‘em anywhere else.”

  I give some serious consideration to scavenging through the bazaar, there should be without a doubt some player selling empty vials.

  “Fine, I will buy twenty.”

  “That ‘ill be one gold coin, than’ you for your business! he he”

  “Considering I’m buying in bulk, can I get some kind of discount or extra vials.”

  “Twenty isn’t considered as bulk, maybe two hundr’d if you’re interested.”

  This old lady probably couldn’t fight a troll, yet she knew how to truly murder a person’s finances. Handing over one of my precious gold pieces, my inner self is conflicting over whether or not to just simply grab the vials and run.

  “Now tha’ you have the vials, you still can’t make anything, you ‘ill need a ‘ood mortar and pestle!”

  “Oh no! I had completely forgotten! Please one of those two!”

  The aura of her killer instinct got stronger in the room, thickening the atmosphere and making me feel incredibly pressured.

  “That ‘ill be six gold” She even managed to speak that as if she was daunted by the price. Me on the other hand could feel her hand around my heart draining me of my life.