Chapter 22 - Serendipity

The power of serendipity can't be neglected. Is it not serendipity that Saachi got such wonder bonus multiplier? Serendipity is him landing in a village with loads of paper tigers. Serendipity is few fellow alchemists having good impression of him. Serendipity is worsening of village conditions while he was busy running away from salaried offer in real life.

After getting bombarded with calls and messages from alchemist friends, Saachi understood the situation.

There will be few situations in life where a leap of faith would land one in heaven. Of course, the corollary is - in other times, one will fall in pit or s**t. So one has to decide if this is heaven worthy moment or pit worthy moment.

Thanks to Saachi being our beloved MC, this turned on to be heaven altering moment.(A/N - Even I don't know if this ends up in good way or becomes failure from which he will learn the secret of success.)

He promised to help all of them. For thirsty, even a drop of water is life saver, let alone a cup of water. Now Saachi had to decide whether to give drops of water to all or cups of water to few. After all, his was not never drying well.

And just like that, an alchemist union was getting ready to take shape. He asked them to just spend time within village limits or log in sporadically. As soon as situation turned around, they would start in earnest.

Saachi still had things to do though. He turned extravagant, booked alchemy trial room for two days and left all the potions there. Potions he made previously, the ones he made now and the ones sold by fellow alchemists.

He took just 2 HP and MP potions, checked the durability of wands(He had many, so if durability was low in 1 or 2, it did not matter.) Now he was ready to face monsters and players.

This sort of attire with level 1 tunic, pant and shoes with a wand held in open turned him invisible to fighting groups. Even those who loved PK, turned blind eye. 'Beggar player' was the term used.

It was now a frequent sight in the village. Within a day , due to in-fighting, and fighting without a thought of gains and loses had turned a normal, averagely progressing village into a backward village.

Out of some many factions and groups, only 10 or so remained. 2 were player killers. 3 of them of small businesses who fought in real life too. And the last 5 were rich 'spare' brats, who always competed, even to the length of counting the time they took to piss. The 3 business groups were 1st to fold up. They did not have money to pay as penalty multiple times.

There was a feature in the game. Post revival, one could fight with 30-80% of the strength the character had based on coin Penalty one paid. Higher the penalty, better the strength. If no penalty was paid, one would have 30% strength for atleast 4 hours, which would increase slowly over time and within a day, person would be back with 100% strength. This was entirely different than EXP loss. So if an average mage had magical attack power of 30 at level 3, after death , even if stayed at level 3, his attack power would be around 10. The situation would be worse if he dropped to level 2. Then his attack power would be around 6.

Imagine you and your friends just fought and died. Thankfully, level advantage is still there. But you are weak. Yet, you can't hide in village, you have to grind the levels, keep a lookout, hold the fort. Will your enemies let you to stay in peace? Would you let your enemies stay if you saw them in weak state? To prevent early death, paying a bit extra in no biggie.

It turns biggie when you do it repeatedly and in large bunch. The levels were not recovering but death became an intimate friend. Sometimes, others would kill you, just because...

The business faction folded. They did not have extra money to spare. They came here to spread their name and might. So they may as well go to another village to spread it. Farther away from these bunch of ruthless ruffians.

The PK group had level advantage, good player advantage. The brat faction had money, money and more money and of course, people to spend it.

In normal situation, they would not have interacted at all. But this is serendipity, thus ruthless interactions took place.

PK players were slowly inching towards peak of level 4. They are the type who would kill players in seconds but needs few long minutes to kill a single monster. And one of them, got bored with less players for PK( as many had started resetting) and killed a couple from other faction.

Won't you know, that girl was very much sought after in real life by these brats. So the massacre started. The brat group had people ready to die. Anyway each death would get them extra money from group leaders. A chance hit to kill PK player - that's enough for bragging. Then the boys would turn...no, the boys would show that they were still boys by show and tell - see ...my group had killed those horrible PK players so and so times.

Other than so called core members of group in brat faction, every other person had levels reduced. The PK players turned ruthless, they started assassination of these leaders. The level lost did not matter. The skill to kill was still present.