Other players, he could now finally see other players. The large ship slowly stopped at the docks, and the multiple players stepped onto the wooden beams.
"Ah, so someone found this place before us..."
The man at the forefront of the around hundred man and woman group sighed when he saw Leon. He was blonde and wore silver armor with blue crystal decorations, he walked towards Leon and reached out his hand.
"Name's Kaldo, nice to meet you."
Leon shook his hand, a bit confused by this development. Meanwhile, the rest of Kaldo's group had spread throughout the city. Leon smiled and shook the boys hand.
"Nice name. So who are you guys?"
"Straight to the point I see, well I was actually wondering the same. This area was supposed to be unexplored, also..."
Leon could tell the boy was glancing above his head, where his level was displayed. He did the same, and noticed the boy was level 50. With the current maximum level being around 70, that was a very large number. Not only that, but his gear seemed to be of a set and Leon could tell by a glance that he had no chance of defeating the boy in battle.
"I spawned here."
When he said this, a certain silence filled the air as Kaldo stared at him with a look of shock on his face.
"You serious?"
"One-hundred percent."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"..."
The boy stared at him a bit longer before he recovered from his initial shock.
"Now I'm interested, tell me the whole story."
The boy was a bit pushy, but he seemed mostly harmless so Leon decided to tell him the whole story of how he spawned on the island from start to finish. It didn't take him much more than a few minutes to tell the entire story, since it wasn't like much had happened.
He decided to keep some information like Soul Level to himself, as he didn't completely trust the blonde-haired boy, and might be able to somehow sell the information later.
"Is there any additional information you have on this island? I can pay you for the trouble, of course."
And there it was, Leon had received an offer. He didn't expect it this early, but this was better for him, if he could quickly sell the information that decreased the chance of someone else discovering it.
"One Pulse Stone."
Leon held up one finger in front of the boy.
"Ehhhh..."
Kaldo seemed hesitant, but Leon wasn't going back on his price. A Pulse Stone was an item that could heal 40% of your HP over 10 seconds which was extremely good. They also valued at roughly 20$ in the real world due to how difficult they could be to get. They weren't super rare, but they weren't common at all. Leon expected Kaldo would have some, judging by his level and gear.
He had read about these stones online and the fact that they were often used as currency between players. The currency was something like;
Pulse Stone < Pulse Crystal < Eternal Stone < Eternal Rune < Celestial Rune.
Which was roughly equal to;
20$ < 40$ < 50$ < 100$ < 200$.
These items also had a price in gold, but it was quite ridiculously high and not something an average player could afford easily.
While the amount of money may seem absurd for a virtual item, there was also the fact that Dreamland was almost a second home for humanity to support these prices. That and the fact that each item was incredibly hard to acquire while still being usedul were the reasons for the price. In fact, only around 100 Celestial Runes were in circulation with the community as far as Leon knew.
"Sure."
Kaldo nodded at Leon, he probably had come to the conclusion that the information was worth more than 20$ to whatever guild he was from.
He was given a Pulse Stone and then told Kaldo what he knew, about Soul Level, enemy types, the church and some of the other lore of this city.
"Wow, this place is interesting."
Kaldo said this while his fingers moved to type a message to one of his guildmates.
"Anyway, spawning here must've been a pain. If you want to leave this island, we'll give you a free ride."
"No, I'm good."
He had just understood that anything related to the island was worth a lot of money, so if he could acquire some more things before anyone else, he may be able to earn a lot of money.
Kaldo smiled at Leon.
"Alright, then I'm sure we can do more business later."
When Kaldo said this Leon recieved a friend request from him, and accepted it. This meant they could now message each other over long distances and trade easier.
"Then I'll be leaving."
Kaldo waved at Leon as he ran off into the town. Leon could actually see even more ships coming in the distance, and he decided to wait and see if anyone else would buy this information. Sadly, it didn't seem so.
"Let's see then..."
Leon mumbled to himself as he sat down on a bench in the main city square. He decided to continue what he was interrupted while doing and open his skill trees.
First, he decided to look at the Holy Knight skills. He currently had [Slash] and [Block], which were both useful. But he felt that they weren't enough to keep him alive in this place so he was looking at what he could upgrade further.
There were three different paths he could go down to begin with, and as he went down these they branched out into many different paths like a tree, thereby the name, skill tree.
Holy Guardian, a branch which uses both shield and sword to protect others.
Holy Swordsman, a branch which uses a two-handed sword to destroy the enemy.
Holy Slayer, a branch that can dual wield one-handed swords to quickly kill enemies.
Leon chose to go for the Holy Swordsman path of Holy Knight which gave him the skill [Holy Stab]. He also proceeded to unlock [Banishing Seal] and [Holy Spirit].
Each of these skills could prove useful to him in the future.
[Holy Stab] was a simple skill, at level one it added 20% of your current attack to your attack as holy damage.
[Banishing Seal] was a skill that allowed the user to create a seal which dealt quite a lot of damage to anything that used the unholy element. Otherwise, it only slowed the enemy.
[Holy Soul] was a skill with a mana cost per second while active which added 5% holy damage to his regular damage.
Next he decided to pick a skill from the engineer branch. He had a few to choose from, but there weren't really any clear paths. As far as he could see he could either go for creating machines and robots or more traps like he had already made.
He decided to pick the [Mechanical Engineering] skill which made it easier to work with moving parts as well as allowing him to create higher quality machines and robots.
He also picked [Smooth Talker] in the merchant skill tree which gave him +4 Charisma per skill level, he decided to increase it to level 5.
Now Leons stats looked like this;
Name: Leon
Level: 16 (72%)
HP: 8200/8200
MP: 1000/1000
Stats: (+0 Points) STR: 16 (+6) VIT: 14 INT: 1 DEX: 1 AGI: 5 (+1)
Special: Cha: 22
Skills: (+7 Points)
Holy Knight: [Lv.4 Slice <57%>] [Lv.1 Block <92%>] [Lv.1 Holy Stab <0%>] [Lv.1 Holy Soul <0%>] [Lv.1 Banishing Seal <0%>]
Engineer: [Lv.3 Basic Engineering <35%>] [Lv.1 Creator's Eye <0%>] [Lv.1 Mechanical Engineering <0%>]
Merchant: [Lv.1 Bartering <32%>] [Lv.Max Charisma] [Lv.5 Smooth Talker <Passive>]
Marshal: [Lv.1 Commander <0%>] [Lv.Max Charisma]
Soul:
Soul Level: Weakling (3)
Soul: 75/450
Soul Perks Unlocked: 3
Soul Perks Availible: 11
Soul points Availible: 0
Even after all this he still had 7 points to invest in skills, but nothing was that appealing to him at the moment so he let it be. He decided he should go hunting a bit, maybe even explore some new areas.
---
Meanwhile, on a longship following the design of Norwegian vikings there was a group of Russians partying by drinking inside the game. They were drinking all sorts of alcoholic beverages, since it was possible to get drunk in the game, and it was cheaper than getting drunk in real life.
These men were from the RGA, Russian Guild Alliance and they were currently headed toward the island Leon was on in order to explore the area of the new expansion.
The ship was between two others and the three of them gently split the waves as they pushed forward with nearly completely intoxicated crews. The sun stood high in the sky and the skies were completely cloudless. So if they hadn't been so intoxicated they may have just noticed the large black sails of the brig a hundred meters away from them.
But before the RGA even noticed, the ship with black sails had fired it's cannons onto them and broken through the hull of one of their ships. The cannon fire was followed by a literal rain of fire. The longships masts were set ablaze as the crew scrambled to do something about it. Many fell into the sea, and the water seemingly forced them to drown by dragging them down.
It wasn't long before the RGA had to surrender and the brig closed its distance to them before some of its black clad crew stepped aboard.
"Black Blood Pirates..."
The main captain of the three ship group spoke the name with what could only be taken as hatred when one of the men walked up to him.
"That's right, and what exactly is the RGA doing with their precious longships this far out at sea?"
The man in black that had walked up to him had long, purple hair and wore a lot of golden items on his black clothing as well as a red cape. The entire set of clothing looked like it would be horribly wrong to wear on a day like this, but no one dared question it in fear of the claymore on the man's back.
"I see no reason to tell you."
The captain kept his composure quite well, even under the threat of the large Black Blood Pirate.
"I will, we're here for the island. And there's a loff more where thish came from, the RGA will hunt you down! We had maneh ships..."
Another man leaned on the RGA captains shoulder and spoke in a slurred tone, clearly intoxicated.
"God Dammit!"
The RGA captain apparently wasn't good at controlling his anger as he lashed out at the man with a rather heavy punch.
"Good information. The boss will surely be pleased."
The purple-haired man and the rest of the Black Blood Pirates stepped of the ship quickly as they were starting to completely burn.
"See you."
He bowed at the RGA captain as he sailed off on his brig and contacted the leader of the Black Blood Pirates.
As the brig left, the players on the longships all either slowly died from fire or quickly died by jumping into the water and being dragged to the bottom by what could only be magic.