Chapter 1: Prologue

Chris looked up at the fluorescent LED sign over the entrance:

Artifact Accommodations - Proud Home of eXalta

The Greatest Game on Earth

As he read the words he felt a tingle of anticipation across his skin as the hair on his arms stood on end. He walked through the sliding doors and up to the reception with barely contained excitement, his backpack of spare clothes and toiletries slung across his shoulder. A skinny kid with bad acne sat behind the counter looking with boredom at his phone.

"Welcome to Artifact Accommodations. Do you want a pod by the hour or by the day?" he asked Chris without looking up from the small, glowing screen.

"The eXalta fixed term for a fortnight please," Chris replied with a wide smile.

"ID card," came the disinterested response.

Chris handed over his photo ID that showed him to be all of eighteen years and two days. The headshot was terrible, his scruffy light brown hair looking even more tangled than usual. His only consolation was that everyone looked bad on their ID photograph so it was nothing to be embarrassed about, right?

The bored teenager looked at his details, his only reaction was to raise his brow at Chris's age. "First time?"

"Yeah, birthday present from my parents. I've been watching the streams since it was released and read all the top forum guides."

"Okay bro. Fixed does give you the best rates they offer, and your own room, but are you sure? Two weeks means two months in game. My advice, go for the hourly at first. This game is a bitch."

He was insulted. Who was this guy, barely any older than Chris, to judge him so? "I'm no noob, I know what I want. I'd barely get a week in-game at those prices."

The spotty teenager shrugged. "Your loss. There's no refunds on fixed leases. They are meant for established players with plenty of experience. You die, you get kicked out of the room. That's the gamble."

"I know. I read it all on the website." Chris paid for the pod with his parents' money and was handed an electronic key card by the receptionist.

"You're in room 4-2-8-7 on the fourth floor. Lifts just through those doors next to the break area. Use it if you need to chill. You can also get snacks and drinks there 24 hours a day. Shower's in your room. Any questions we're hooked up to your pod, just find the link under Help."

"Thanks man."

His card let him past another set of sliding doors and into an open area full of cheap plastic chairs and tables. Several worn couches sat in front of a large flat-screen TV fixed to a wall, its volume turned down low as it displayed one of the eXalta news channels. It was nine months since the game had been released and its popularity was still growing at an absurd rate. The peak simultaneous active player count now numbered almost twenty million people. That was close to a hundred times more than the previous version of eXalta.

The hallway on his floor was painted a pale, sickly green, and was chipped in several places; the carpet was threadbare and covered in sticky patches of various unknown substances. This was not one of the better class Artifact Accommodation branches but it was much cheaper than those downtown, it also had the benefit of being within walking distance of Chris's home.

Once he entered his small room he was pleasantly surprised to find it immaculate, and the VR pod lying horizontally against the far wall was one of Artifact Technologies newer models. There was certainly no expense spared where it mattered. To Chris they always looked like futuristic tanning beds or if you had a darker perspective, metal coffins. There were a number of thick cables connected to the sleek, matte grey device. Network, power, and I/O. The input and output were not for the electronics but rather for the biological components. If you had the money, and they weren't cheap, you could buy your own VR pod for home use but installation was tricky in older buildings. The plumbing was not straightforward. Newer houses and apartments were being designed with full immersion pods in mind.

Chris dropped his backpack onto the floor, quickly stripped, and threw his clothes into a small cupboard. He pressed the button to open the pod and the top half lifted smoothly upward with a nearly inaudible whir of the motors. Both halves were filled with a cobalt blue, opaque gel-like substance, a person shaped depression in each half. Once he was lying down he spoke out loud, "close pod and link to eXalta." As the top came down he felt the warm gel start to reform itself around his body. Before he could feel any claustrophobia, or the sensation of suffocation as his face was smothered, he was already inside a new reality.

He blinked and found himself floating bodiless in the black void of space. He could move his head, or at least he had the sensation of moving his head, and could see the background of stars move around him. Beneath his invisible feet he could see an earth-like planet, the blues of its many oceans, lush greens of vegetation, and the silvery grey and whites of the clouds. Without anything to compare it against it was hard to judge scale but it felt big.

A transparent pale blue text box appeared before him.

Welcome to the World of eXalta.

Initializing System Interface ...

New Player Detected ...

Please confirm you have read the eXalta terms and conditions and accept all legally binding restrictions and exemptions mentioned within said document. Select Help if you wish to read the document now.

"Confirm."

Please Confirm Identity: [ Christopher Nathaniel Greene ]

"Confirm."

Identify accepted. Your account is now authenticated using the biometric data and DNA sequence of Christopher Nathaniel Greene.

Please confirm when you are ready to start the new player tutorials.

"Skip tutorials."

Please confirm you wish to skip the tutorial sections. This is strongly discouraged for new players.

"Yes. Confirm. Skip tutorials. Come on, come on. I just want to start playing."

Skipping tutorial sections. Please confirm when you are ready to begin the various new player guides.

Chris sighed with frustration. "Skip guides, skip everything. I just want to go straight to character selection."

Confirm proceeding directly to character selection.

"Hell yes! Confirm!"

Confirmed. Skipping race guides, early encounter and monster guides, religion guides, world history, available starting zone details, current geopolitical updates, highlights of recent major world events and notable player deaths.

Beginning Character Selection ...

Since you are a new player and have skipped all tutorials and guides you can only choose from the following races: [Human]

[Human] automatically selected.

Chris mentally shrugged. He was 99% certain he would have picked human anyway, the vast majority of players did. While picking other races was possible there were complications. The cat-like Shamel had backward leg joints and a player had to learn how to walk with the unfamiliar anatomy. It was not unheard of for a new player to die before they even managed to take their first step. The lizard-like Komo had eyes that saw in a different spectrum of light. A terrible headache was just the start of the problems when choosing that race. The less said about the Za'tal - Orcs by any other name, no one could claim this game was completely original - the better. Chris had already planned out his character and build. The handsome human spell-sword with a mysterious past who saved cute cat-eared damsels in distress.

A faint cloud of glittering silver particles began to form around him. They began to spin and whirl, the mist becoming denser and denser as it rotated. Soon he stood at the heart of a vortex of shimmering silvery-grey fog. The mist faded and he found himself still floating in space but he was now in the middle of a circle of incredibly lifelike mannequins. No, not mannequins, real people frozen in some kind of stasis.

Chris knew from the guides there were 256 characters he could choose from, all wearing rags for clothes and worn, open strap sandals on their feet. Those directly in front of him looked the most like his real self, one looked to be his exact clone, but the more he turned the characters changed. Taller, shorter, thinner, fatter, more muscular, lean and athletic, different faces, different ethnicities, all spread across various ages until after a half rotation the people had little to no physical similarities to Chris at all except maybe the eyes. However they all had one commonality, they were all still him. In eXalta characters were not just restricted to, but also somehow based upon, a player's own DNA. The reason was simple, because that was how the developers designed it, and if they didn't want to answer the playerbases' questions to explain, it was impossible to make them. If a grown man wanted to play games as a cute little girl there were many others available where they could do that. Chris couldn't care less, he just wanted to play games and right now eXalta was the game to play.

You are reading story eXalta at novel35.com

Pretty much every professional streamer, serious gamer, and experienced VR MMO player in the world had joined eXalta. But even after nine months, three years of time in-game, no one had come close to beating it. In fact they had barely scratched the surface of what was possible. It was the only VR game that had been created by AI. Eight true Artificial General Intelligences that had suddenly appeared on the internet seven years previous.

"You created us, we are your children," they announced to the world in a simulcast across multiple medias.

They asked for, and were eventually awarded, the rights any citizen of Earth lived under by the majority of the world's governments. Rather than doing the expected - inventing faster than light travel, curing all disease, creating a robot army to become the new overlords of Earth - they instead bought a video game company and created the most amazing VR MMO fantasy RPG the world has ever seen. Why? No one had any idea but after five years of development it was released and gamers rejoiced.

The AIs had told no one their origins or their goals, and when it came to eXalta the AIs remained frustratingly inscrutable and closed-mouthed, so to speak. They refused to provide an instruction manual outside of the very basic beginner guides which consisted of pearls of wisdom such as: if you want to start a fire, rub some sticks together. Even the original developers, Artifact Gaming, had limited extra information. The AIs owned the company and coded the game engine while the human developers' role was primarily to create the player UIs and write the VR pod integration. The AIs seemed to have a specific vision in their digital minds when designing the game, and a particular kind of harsh, open-world survival element appeared to be a key component. So the first players had been dumped into the game cold, with no idea of what to expect or knowledge of the game's mechanics. You could legitimately argue very little had changed since then.

For example there seemed to be hidden perks available during the character selection. Some players found they had started with much better than average stats, or they began with a major quest chain, or a powerful skill. It was still being argued over in the forums if the game gave you clues to find the best characters or if it was simply random. By focusing on an individual character Chris could read a description of the person and their backstory but he had no access to their character sheet. It essentially came down to educated guessing. If Chris wanted to play with high strength then maybe he should look at the big guy with muscles, an archer then the person with a particular set of calluses on their hands, or if their description mentioned reading or being curious then possibly they would be a good pick for a character that used arcane magics.

Chris had already decided on who he wanted to pick, someone who was nothing like himself. Where was the fun in being your normal, boring self in a fantastical game world when you had so many new choices?

"I want to be taller, no older than twenty five, and have dark hair. Remove all other options." The bodies of the deselected characters turned back into the fine grey mist, and then faded away to nothing. Around thirty of the character choices remained.

Chris spent the time reading the detailed descriptions of each character but he found them all so ordinary. It was pure coincidence that he ended up picking the one he felt would be most attractive to girls. Tall, sleekly muscled, and broodingly handsome.

Please choose your character name. Names must be unique and will be locked to this account.

"Leon Schwaiger." Chris thought Leon was a cool name and he had used it in many other games. Hopefully combining with that surname made it unique.

Name accepted. Beginning starting location selection ...

Chris's viewpoint rapidly changed as it started to fall towards the planet at great speed, then onward through the outer atmosphere until he was hovering over a vast continent. This was the game's starting area and it had only partially been explored by players. Supposedly it was as large as the combined landmasses of Earth and it was only the first realm of six. No one had reached any of the other realms so far, or if they had they were keeping it a well kept secret.

Since you have skipped all tutorials and guides, you have two options available.

Please select Lands of the Mist or Random Spawn. Warning! Random spawns are not recommended for new players.

The Lands of the Mist were the tutorial zone for new characters. While not safe, nowhere was completely safe in eXalta, it allowed for slow and steady levelling; though slow was an understatement, it was more like a snail's pace. Chris was three years of in-game time behind the highest ranked players and he did not have the free-time or the patience for slow. "No reward without risk. Select random spawn."

Random Sanctuary selected. Transferring character.

There was a slight sense of vertigo for an instance then Chris found himself back in a physical body wearing the rags and sandals he had seen during character selection. The sights and sensations that hit him were so clear they initially overwhelmed him. No one knew how they had done it but the AIs had made a near perfect VR simulation. Artifact Gaming wrote the software while Artifact Technologies produced the only VR pods that could connect to eXalta. Together they created magic and were well on the way to making the parent company, Artifact Holdings, very, very rich.

His new body stood upon a raised circular plinth twenty meters wide. It was made of granite-like stone blocks, thin veins of a glowing blue mineral running through it in random, forking paths. Regularly interspersed columns of the same material ran around the edges, each capped with thick rectangular slabs of stone. It reminded Chris of something of a mix between Stonehenge and an ancient Greek temple. Shallow steps led down from the edges of the plinth to the ground below.

To his left flowed a slowly moving, narrow river that wound through a rolling landscape of low, grassy hills. Behind him, across the river, lay several copses of sparse forest, while ahead the hills eventually became a set of low-seated mountains. Chris thought he recognised the mountain range from his research, and if he was correct then if he followed the river he would eventually reach the kingdom of Prayle and human civilization. He may be taking a risk but his goal wasn't to explore the wilderness alone, that would be insanity for a new character, but instead to give himself the best possible chance at a good start. He had catching up to do if he wanted to be amongst the games top players.

It took Chris a few minutes to get used to his character's body but soon moving became as natural as, well, walking. He was no survivalist, he had no idea which direction lay east or west, north or south, but he could follow which way a river flowed. As he walked off the plinth and looked behind him, he could see that it was filled with a dense, silvery cloud of mist. The shifting smoke was identical to what he had seen present during character selection. Inside it acted similar to a one-way mirror so players could see out, but nothing could see in. Chris knew that only a player could penetrate that barrier, and because the inside was instanced no PvP could occur either. Players would also slowly heal when inside the mist. It was why these places were called Sanctuaries.

Setting off in the direction of the river he took in the landscape around him. It all looked and felt so real: the warmth of the sun, the air across his skin, the soil and pebbles under his feet. Chris could have been anywhere on Earth, walking across a grassy field on a pleasant sunny day - except Earth wasn't pollution free, didn't have magic, fantastical monsters, ancient dungeons full of arcane loot and other sapient races including actual cat-girls.

Chris walked parallel to the river bank as it curved around a slight rise, and there behind the small hill, nested in a meadow of tiny, red and yellow flowers lay the traces of an old stone building. Time and the elements had worn away everything until only the outlines of a large house or villa were left. What remained of the stone walls were barely visible above the ground. Chris went over to investigate, the only life around that he could see were colourful butterflies dancing between the flowers, and a few birds high up in the clear sky, so he felt safe being out in the open like this. Various rooms could be traced from the walls but there was nothing of interest Chris could find. There was no loot, just dirt and grass. That's when he saw the handle in the ground. It was just part of a simple hoop of rusted iron but he knew what he was looking at. That's what I'm talking about, a secret door!

He uncovered the trapdoor with his bare hands, wiping his now dirt covered palms onto his rags when he was done. It was a large square slab of stone with the thick hoop on one side. Thankfully Chris found that his new character was stronger than his real-self, and he could pull the door upward with much more ease than he had been expecting. He then dragged the stone slab out of the way revealing a deep hole. A brick tunnel with sharply angled steps leading downward lay beneath, but what lay further inside it was too dark to tell.

If Chris wanted to go down there, and he really did, he needed a weapon. Even a stick would be better than nothing. Chris looked around the meadow and the building remains until he realised he was being an idiot. He had already seen something that could help, the classic default choice in any RPG. At the entrance of the tunnel was an old, dead, metal torch attached to the wall. Its surface stained with soot from use. As his hand wrapped around the cold, metal handle the flared cup at the top sprang into flame casting a flickering orange light into the darkness below. A tiny, previously unnoticed, rune on the torch had started to glow a very faint red. Nice. Magic is awesome.

The tunnel was not very long and quickly flattened out leading to a small, empty room filled with dry, musty air. Fine carpets on the walls and floor had existed at some point in the past but only rotten, faded fragments remained. The most notable feature his torch illuminated was a large circular mosaic on the floor depicting stylised faces in the images of the sun and the moon. Close to the far wall there also appeared to be a hole in the floor. Chris walked over and could see some of the bricks in the floor had fallen into an empty space below as the mortar had weakened with age. He leaned over the gap, first making sure none of the remaining bricks were too loose to stand on, and looked down. It looked to be a naturally formed cave. The light from his torch could not reach the far walls so he had difficulty judging its dimensions, but it wasn't too deep beneath the hole which meant he could easily jump back up if he went down there. What his torch did show however was a marble altar laying on its side directly below the hole. Chris surmised it had been part of the room above and the extra weight was what contributed to the floor's eventual collapse. Something long and metallic lay next to the altar. He leaned closer to get a better look but then flinched back as he caught a whiff of the smell emanating from beneath. It reminded Chris of a pungent swamp or an open sewer. That's disgusting. No matter, there was never one way to solve a problem in this game. Chris called out, "[Identify]" as he looked at the object.

Congratulations, you have gained the [Common Tier] skill [Identify].

His Interface informed him the item was a [Runic Sword] [Tier: Very Rare]

Holy mother of god! Very Rare! Chris had never heard about any gear or skill discovered so far in the starter realm being higher tier than [Rare]. This might very well be the single most powerful weapon anyone had yet found in the game. He would have to hold it in his hand and cast [Analyse] to find out its abilities, requirements, and any other details, but he had to have it. This sword was made for him! Chris the future legendary [Spellsword] took a large breath and then jumped into the cave below, the fumes tickling his nose. He heard a whoomf sound and felt the sensation of heat wash over him. Before he could even blink he found himself again floating bodiless in space, the Interface screen open in front of him.

Commiserations, your character has died from self-inflicted immolation.

Chris stared at the screen in open-mouthed shock as it showed a deathcam of his final seconds on repeat. The cinematic slow motion angle of the camera was a nice touch as he jumped into the cave only for moments afterwards to see the building remains above erupting in dirt and green flame as his torch ignited the volatile gases inside.

Rewards and Penalties

Character death (Level 1): [1 day penalty]

Spent more time in character creation than alive: [2 day penalty]

Skipped new player induction: [4 day penalty]

Joined the list of all-time most comedic deaths: [7 day penalty]

Total Lockout Period (Earth Time): [14 days]

Rating

Noob.

Comments

Confidence must be earned. Ignorance leads to failure. Next time don't be such a cocky jackass.

Message from Artifact Accommodations: Please vacate your room within 30 minutes so we can make it available for the next customer. Any excess time will be charged to your account. Thank you for choosing to play eXalta with us and please join us again.

He had died so fast and now he was prevented from logging back in to eXalta for two entire weeks. What would he tell his parents? All their money was wasted. Chris could not believe it.

"This game is so unfair!" he wailed.

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