Restarting From Genesis

"Arthur!" One of the developers noticed him enter and called out to him. "No wonder Gaia is interested in you. I can’t believe you’re so far west already."

"Gaia estimated that it should be at least two months before players made it to Parrhasia." Another developer grumbled. "I guess that’s why she separated you into your own list."

Fortunately it seemed the developers were rationalising Gaia’s behaviour by themselves, without any input from the culprit standing a few meters in front of them.

The developers spoke with Arthur about his stream, and he received several questions in regards to the sudden growth of his combat abilities.

Eventually he was saved by the barrage of questions as more players began filling the room, and the developers had to scramble their notes together for the briefing.

The briefing didn’t take too long as there wasn’t much information to be shared. And when it came time to list of the top five, much to nobody’s surprise, the top three hadn’t changed, while it seemed as though Liam, better known as Zankoku, was barely holding on to his fourth spot.

The briefing had ended, and Arthur made his way out of the building while talking with his friends. Eventually they all split and went their separate ways, and Arthur walked over to where Donovan was waiting for him. The two exchanged pleasantries as they drove home.

He went through the usual routine of watering his plants, working out and having dinner with the family. And once he logged onto his computer he found himself flooded with private messages in regards to New Genesis.

He played a few games with his friends, who both came loaded with questions of their own, before going to bed. Once the next day arrived, at some point Donovan came around to drop him back off at the facility. And at this point, it didn’t take long for the first group to be ushered into the capsule room and sent back into the game.

Merlin found himself standing in the middle of the town, next to the stables where he logged out the day before.

He stared up at the sky, taking note that it seemed to be rather late at night, or early in the morning depending on your perspective. Now the question was if this was several hours later than when he left off, or had at least a day gone by?

While remaining hopeful, Merlin checked his quests, and fortunately it seemed as though the orc attack quest hadn’t been marked off as failed, meaning he was either in the clear or had to start running fast.

He quickly received his answer as he stepped into the stables and caught sight of an older looking ranger brushing his horses.

After a sigh of relief, Merlin made his way out of the stables and began chanting the system command to start his stream. "System stream, start."

What appeared moments after was a notification to inform him that his stream would be live in ten seconds, and after those ten seconds were up, forty more seconds had passed before Merlin received his first notification for the day.

「"Cyeven" has gifted 2000 tokens with the message: "Hyped for the stream!"」

"Jeez, that was fast." Merlin retorted, "Thanks for the gift!"

A few rangers had started making their way over to Merlin’s position, some of them appeared to be somewhat hungover. Clearly they hadn’t taken Callisto’s warning to heart, either that or the sight of an empty Acacesium had caused them great pain that only drinking could dull.

The entire group formed up within the span of twenty minutes, and not long after the sky had started to brighten as the sun barely rose into view. Callisto had eventually appeared, and after reprimanding a few alcoholics, ordered the group to enter the wagons once more to continue their journey.

The group set off westbound once more, following along a road that was maintained much better than the one that connected Acacesium to Megalopolis.

It seemed as though the two frontier towns had their fair share of travel between them, otherwise they wouldn’t put the effort into maintaining such a large road, especially under the threat of high level monster attacks.

Fortunately for the group, there wasn’t a single monster that dared to attack the train of wagons as they travelled the road. Although they saw the occasional monster watching them from a treeline or standing alone in a field. It seemed the monsters within this zone were intelligent enough to rationalise that attacking such a large convoy would undoubtedly lead to a painful death.

The sun slowly began rising behind them as the convoy travelled for almost an hour, the scenery experienced very few changes until the last half of the journey, where they noticed that the lush green forested landscape they had been familiar with for quite some time was slowly obtaining more interesting rock formations.

The rock formations became more frequent the further west they went, and while looking ahead quite a distance away, they could see that eventually the scenery became almost exclusively rocks and gravel. And a little further than the rocky landscape was a massive mountain range that marked off the furthest west one could go in Arcadia, as it was nothing but ocean past that point.

However, that was a journey for another day, as their target was much closer than the mountain range. Standing in the slightly rocky yet still very lush landscape, and sat next to a wide river that was flowing down from the previously mentioned mountain range, was the largest thriving frontier town, Farncombe.

Surprisingly, for a town so far west in a dangerous region, it wasn’t entirely walled off unlike most of the settlements in Arcadia, most of which remained in relatively safe locations. But it did have a unique layered style of fortification that was born from the bad habits of a certain eccentric crafting-obsessed race.

It seemed that the town had tried several times to wall itself off from the outside world, only to require more space and expand out, which they then also tried to wall off. This process repeated itself until the chaotic mess of a fortified town was born.

The wagons drew closer to the town, riding past large plots of farmland. There was a lot of farmers out working the farms, and it seemed as though all of the farmers that Merlin could see were armed with at least a dagger or their farming tools, where most seemed to have bigger or more specialised weapons, such as swords, bows and wands.

A large majority of the farmers were human, but he saw plenty of elves in the bunch. All of which had quite the healthy tan and a happy expression on their faces, the mood was rather light for a town in such a dangerous area. Especially one that was at risk of being invaded by orcs any day now.

Several people greeted the wagon drivers and some of the other rangers as the wagons drove past, and it didn’t take long for the wagons to officially enter the town.

Merlin took in the scenery, the city was rather loud compared to all the other settlements he had visited during the beta. It wasn’t just that it was just full of traffic, but that the town was full of life.

More noises became audible and others slowly dimmed out as the wagons moved, there was the sound of hammers pounding against metal as they drove by a blacksmith, and then the sound of hammering and sawing from the nearby construction sites.

Merlin glanced at the closest construction site from the wagon, and he watched as a short yet stout man found himself hanging from a harness, attached to the most rickety looking crane that he had ever seen.

The stout man was swinging over what Merlin could only estimate was roughly a ten meter drop, and he was hammering in nails without a care in the world. While equally short and stout individuals were swinging the man around on the other end of the crane.

’Dwarves.’ Merlin thought to himself with a sigh, ’They’d all go out of business if this world ever adopted the occupational health and safety act.’

While most of the individuals working at the construction sites were tanned dwarves, some of which had very impressive beards, there was a single individual on the construction site that stood out from the rest.

One of the reasons he stood out to Merlin was because he wasn’t a dwarf, rather he was quite tall even for a human, and while standing next to two other dwarves he was at least four heads higher.

Him being human wasn’t that big of a deal however, as there were other humans and even elves working on the construction site too.

But the main reason that Merlin found him interesting was because this man, whose large blond beard even rivalled some of the dwarves. Although he was out working in the sun like everyone else, his skin was extremely pale, almost to the point it could be compared to a sheet of paper without any form of exaggeration.