Chapter 2: The Worlds Problems

Alneria was a strange world. Usually, in games, the world starts to fall apart when the players first begin playing, and they have to fight to keep in from falling. Alneria was different; it had already begun to collapse and its people were universally suffering. Whether it was the elves who had lost the world tree due to a war with the daemon people of the north who wished to not be hunted for the magic stones that powered their hearts. Then there were the dwarves being driven to the brink of destruction by the hordes of goblins. The goblins themselves trying to run from the plague threatening to leave them but small clusters of villages scattered in the winding underground. Then of course the humans who seemed relatively fine except for the famine every other season. Needless to say, the world was crumbling and no one really knew why. Even in Ryan's past life in Alneria no one really knew why the world was falling apart. They just knew that they did not enough time to save the doomed world.

The players of Alneria hadn't had enough time to save the world. Well perhaps they did have enough time, but in the beginning, no one was digging deeper into the reasons behind the tragedies facing their races. Dwarf players hated the goblins threatening to drive them from the mountains; because well this was dwarven land and they were rewarded handsomely to keep it that way. This was a mistake that was only seen too late when in the second year the real tragedy hit Alneria the mana plague. Without the world-tree to purify the mana malice and hatred seeped into it corrupting the mana and making it tear anything that used it to shreds. This ended up killing the sapling of the new world tree which hadn't been planted till the plague started due to the war. This is where Ryan knew he had to start if he could plant the world tree before the plague reached the point of no return he could delay the complete destruction of the world. When he finished thinking he found himself in his starting area.

The starting area for the Kingdom of Lestria was the small village of Fairwater located on the other side of lake Astria from the capital of Lestria. Ryan looked around the small village. it was one of the luckier places in this broken world as it was located around the center of the country so it was rather safe from monsters and had access to the lake to help alleviate the problems the famine had caused. The town center that had previously been quiet and serine was now flooded with players. Because of the sudden explosion of people the villagers were rightly confused. Ryan thought for a moment recalling it players were a weird existence in the world of Alneria they weren't especially strong in the beginning but they also never died. They were called the immortals in some lands, or the cursed in others. People destined to throw their lives away in a vain attempt to get stronger. Every day running into fights they couldn't help but losing only to get back up and run back in. Scary not because they were strong, but because they would always come back stronger and more annoyed, able to slowly whittle down someone's stamina. They might not have been tough but they always won in the end. This was why the players were feared and unwelcome in the end times of a dying world.

Ryan could do little to fix the image of players nor did he necessarily wish to. players were nearly indistinguishable from the NPCs of the world. The "Immortals" were a large majority of players, but most players had actually adapted to being ordinary citizens of the world. Ryan wished to preserve the world he grew to love and to do that he had to become strong not just as a mage or a warrior but as he theorized every class. Joker was believed to be a joke class in the original run of the game. Despite the obvious reason of it having joke in the name; raising every class to level 10 before being able to raise any class higher was a terribly slow way of leveling up. However, having the insight he had from his old life Ryan knew the true powers of the joker class that being stats. When someone reached level 30 in any given class they were locked into only leveling with that class. That was why despite being a level 80 wizard Ryan had barely managed to level up blacksmith and warrior as they were classes he tried prior to picking mage, but the max level any class could reach was 100 at which point one's power would stagnate not to mention that level 100 in a class was exceptionally hard to reach due to a lack of base power from one's stats. This however was not the case with joker who could not only level every class to 100 but also snowball out of control in the later levels. It was theorized in the last year of Legends of Alneria that a joker could catch up to normal players when they started to reach the late 40's. This was what Ryan hoped to achieve because he knew if he managed to plant the next world tree he would need the power to both protect it and to quench the remaining calamities that threatened Alneria. As Ryan finished thinking about what he had to do to save Alneria a stocky old man with a slightly greying beard stood on a stage in the middle of the town center and began to address the crowd of rowdy players.