Chapter 10 Chapter 10: SSS-Rank Gift Pack, Incredible Rewards
"Beep~ Shadow Realm Zone 12, River City Server, starting up..."
"Ding~ Welcome to the world of the Shadow Realm! Your current location is: Shadow Realm First Domain, Beginner Village No. 112: Dawn Camp! Enjoy your adventure!"
A beam of white light descended.
Ethan appeared in a somewhat run-down urban village.
Standing on the street and looking around, what came into view were rows of low, dilapidated houses, one or two stories tall at most, lining both sides of the road in either direction.
This was one of the mysteries that humanity had been unable to solve in over a hundred years of dealing with the Shadow Realm.
When humans entered this world, everything became digitized. They felt exactly as though they had become players inside a game. They needed to complete quests and kill monsters to grow stronger. The world was populated by intelligent AI that looked and spoke exactly like real people, what everyone called NPCs. Nobody knew where this world had come from or who had built it.
Gradually, over the decades, people had stopped trying to figure it out.
As far as everyone was concerned, humans entered the Shadow Realm with one shared purpose: to become stronger. Strong enough to fight back against the monsters pouring through into the real world. Strong enough to protect what was left of civilization on Earth.
Nobody understood the layout and rules of the Shadow Realm better than Ethan.
The Shadow Realm was structured like a country divided into regions, and each region was divided into ten domains. New players started in the first domain and had to level up, grow stronger, and complete each domain's ultimate challenge before they could advance to the next. The difficulty scaled upward with every domain.
Some players reached the tenth domain in ten years.
Others spent their entire lives in the fifth or sixth.
The higher the domain, the stronger the monsters, the rarer the resources, and the greater the rewards for those strong enough to claim them.
In the tenth domain, players from every server and every country would finally share the same space, able to interact, trade, and fight each other freely.
That was also where Ethan intended to find Ryan Carter. To kill him. To clear his own name.
One thing at a time.
His current location was the beginner village of the first domain: Dawn Camp.
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
From every direction, beams of white light continued to rain down as more and more players logged into the camp. According to the game's design, a single starting village could accommodate a maximum of ten thousand players before overflow routing kicked in and directed newcomers to adjacent villages.
While the other new players were still spinning around and marveling at the scenery, Ethan was already moving.
He crossed the street with practiced ease and made his way to the fountain at the center of the main intersection.
Beside the fountain stood an elderly NPC, white robes, a carved wooden staff, a serene expression that had presumably remained unchanged for as long as this server had existed. The blue name tag floating above his head read: Rewards Ambassador Norton.
It was common knowledge among veteran players that beginner dungeon completion rewards were claimed from this NPC. A small cluster of players had already gathered around him, collecting their packages and comparing results with the particular excitement of people who had just received their first real in-game rewards.
Two of them, a young martial artist and a ranger, were talking as they opened their packs.
"D-rank clear gift pack, 100 copper coins and a white skill book! Not bad for my first time!"
"Mine gave 200 copper coins and a book."
"Wait, what?! Why did you get more than me?!"
"Because I cleared at C-rank, obviously."
"Oh... that's fair I guess."
Ethan stepped up to Norton and triggered the dialogue prompt.
"Hello. I'm here to collect my reward."
The NPC's expression shifted into something that managed to convey both warmth and gravity simultaneously, the way only a well-programmed NPC could.
"Brave adventurer, I have been waiting for you."
Norton raised his staff.
"Ding~ Congratulations! You have received: [SSS-Rank Beginner Dungeon Completion Gift Pack] x1!"
Ethan opened his spatial inventory and retrieved the package.
In the hundred-and-ten-year history of the Shadow Realm, only fifteen beginner dungeon gift packs of this tier had ever been distributed. The one sitting in his hands was the sixteenth.
He opened it.
"Ding~ Congratulations! You have received the following:"
"100 Gold Coins!"
"Level-5 SSS-rank [Flame Ring] x1!"
"Orange Skill Book [Limitless Ice Blade] x1!"
"SSS-rank Hidden Class Scroll x1!"
Ethan read through the list twice.
The first item alone was staggering.
One hundred gold coins. In the Shadow Realm's currency system, gold coins sat above silver and copper and based on the pre-purchase exchange rates that wealthy players had posted on the forums, one gold coin was worth approximately one million dollars in real-world currency. Selling all one hundred gold coins outright would yield the equivalent of one hundred million dollars.
Enough to eliminate any financial concern for multiple lifetimes.
Ethan had no intention of selling them.
In the Shadow Realm, gold coins were worth more as in-game capital than as cash. With one hundred gold coins as a starting fund, he could achieve a level of early-game development that no other player in Zone 12 could come close to matching. Money in the real world was easy enough to accumulate once you had real strength in the Shadow Realm.
Besides, a hundred million dollars was roughly what he had earned in a single month during his previous life.
He moved on.
The orange skill book, Limitless Ice Blade.
High-quality skills were extraordinarily rare in the Shadow Realm. Under normal circumstances, only players who had been in the game for ten years or more had a realistic chance of obtaining orange-quality skills. Even veteran players who had spent decades clearing content in the old servers still carried mostly orange skills in their lists, with red-quality skills being a rarity even among the elite.
And here was Ethan, receiving one before he had killed his first monster in the main game world.
He pulled up the skill data.
[LIMITLESS ICE BLADE]
Quality: Orange
Description: Infuse the magic sword with the power of ice, releasing a blade of frozen energy that travels up to 50 yards and deals 275% spell damage to the first target it contacts.
Special Effect: 100% chance to freeze the target for 3 seconds. Subsequent attacks against frozen targets deal 30% bonus damage.
Cast Time: 0.9 seconds
Cooldown: 12 seconds
Cost: 30 Mana + 1 Orange-quality Rune (level no higher than user's current level)
Class: Battle Mage
An absolute monster of a skill for the early game. The single-target burst damage ceiling on it was higher than anything most players would see for years. The freeze mechanic compounded with the 30% follow-up damage bonus made it a skill that could end fights before the enemy had time to respond.
However, Ethan couldn't learn it yet.
In the Shadow Realm, players began with a single skill slot and gained one additional slot for every three levels reached, plus bonus slots awarded for completing advancement challenges. Skill quality determined how many slots a skill required to equip, white skills took one slot, green took two, blue three, and so on up the chain. Orange skills like Limitless Ice Blade required five skill slots.
That meant Ethan needed to reach at least the 10-Star Warrior tier, complete the advancement challenge, and accumulate enough slots before he could equip it.
He set the skill book aside in his inventory and turned his attention to the remaining two items.
[FLAME RING]
Quality: SSS
Level Requirement: 5-Star Warrior
Spell Attack: +30
Class: All magic-type classes
Special Effect: The wearer's attacks ignite the target, inflicting a burning state for 3 seconds, deals 20 HP damage per second.
Description: A ring forged in fire, containing powerful flame energy…
Ethan looked at it for a moment, then curled his lip slightly.
SSS quality. Which meant his Infinite Fusion ability, the power that let him synthesize identical items into higher-quality versions, was completely useless on it. You couldn't fuse something that was already at the ceiling.
A minor frustration, but a real one.
The ring required a 5-Star Warrior level to equip. Into the bag it went for now.
He moved to the final item.
[SSS-RANK HIDDEN CLASS SCROLL]
Quality: SSS-rank Treasure
Effect: Activates the exclusive advancement quest for the SSS-rank Battle Mage hidden class, the Infernal Fire Mage. Completing the quest grants the SSS-rank hidden class: Infernal Fire Mage.
Usage Requirement: 40-Star War Master level
Class Description: A hundred years ago, on the eve of the annihilation of the Hellfire Clan, the most powerful race to have ever existed on the Shadow Realm continent, a supreme flame was preserved. Sealed within it is the Hellfire Clan's ancient bloodline. Those who obtain the Hellfire Clan's bloodline inheritance and rise to become an Infernal Fire Mage will stand at the apex of all Battle Mage evolution, the strongest of their kind the Shadow Realm has ever seen...
Ethan read it carefully. Then he read it again.
In the Shadow Realm, hidden classes occupied an entirely different tier from the nine standard classes. They were divided into the same seven quality grades, D through SSS, but even the lowest D-rank hidden class outperformed any of the standard classes in raw potential. Players could obtain hidden class scrolls through rare hidden quest rewards or by defeating high-level BOSS-type monsters, but the probability was so low that hidden class players of any rank were considered one-in-ten-thousand anomalies.
SSS-rank hidden class players were rarer still. Across the entire world, in the entire history of the Shadow Realm, only twenty people had ever held an SSS-rank hidden class. Their rarity was comparable to that of SSS-rank ability users.
And without exception, every single one of them had gone on to become a top-tier powerhouse.
Of the twelve Titled War God-level players who had emerged across the world to date, eight were SSS-rank ability users. The other four were SSS-rank hidden class professionals. And those original eight SSS-rank ability users had all subsequently obtained SSS-rank hidden classes as well, the combination of both making them categorically beyond what any single-enhancement player could threaten.
There were a handful of players in the world who held SSS-rank hidden classes without SSS-rank abilities and even they stood at the very edge of Titled War God territory, only one threshold away.
Ethan already had the SSS-rank ability.
Now he had the hidden class scroll to match it.
The only obstacle was the level requirement, 40-Star War Master, which was still a long climb from where he currently stood. Like the Flame Ring, the scroll went into his inventory for safekeeping.
He closed his bag and stood for a moment in the quiet of the starting village, processing everything laid out in front of him.
Now he fully understood why every single one of the fifteen previous SSS-rank beginner dungeon clearers had developed so explosively in the early stages of the game. Why they had all shot to the top of their servers within their first year and never looked back.
One hundred gold coins. An orange-quality skill. An SSS-rank ring. An SSS-rank hidden class scroll.
It was like being handed a fully loaded account on the first day of a new server.
Every other player in Zone 12 was starting from zero.
Ethan was starting from somewhere else entirely.
He closed his inventory, straightened up, and looked out at the streets of Dawn Camp, at the new players still
spinning in circles, still marveling at the world around them, still figuring out which direction to walk in.
Time to get to work.
Zone 12's first domain wasn't going to conquer itself.
