New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

The dragon looked at Astaroth like he was an idiot.

“I said tell me which way. Which way is that kingdom of Sunpeak? I’ll go get it back myself.”

Astaroth’s stomach dropped.

‘Did I just start another dragon-on-dragon fight?’

“Sir Dragon. I–”

“Stop calling me sir dragon. My name is Rocunyrth. I am the oldest brown dragon left, and I deserve to be called by my name.”

“I’m sorry, Sir Rocunyrth. I was going to say that you going into Sunpeak to get your tail spike might cause a fuss. Aurexiar did not look like the welcoming kind…”

‘That is not your concern, mortal. Just tell me the way.”

Astaroth knew he wouldn’t change the brown dragon’s mind, so he opened up his map and pointed the way to Sunpeak.

The dragon nodded before changing back to its original form. As it turned around in the right direction, its massive front legs started rending the earth, digging a tunnel under itself.

They exchanged no more words as the dragon burrowed away. Astaroth looked to where the dragon had been, and the hole was closed up, only brown rock covering the ground, with wet mud and pieces of green.

Bending down, Astaroth picked one of those lumps of green up, thinking it was grass. As it squelched in his hands, he rapidly dropped it.

He scanned it, understanding it wasn’t grass, but a living organism.

*Green Slime*

Level: 1

Grade: Common

HP: 10

When he backed away from it, he quickly noticed that the ‘grass’ all around him was moving toward the spot of freshly unearthed rock.

He rapidly understood why this was happening. The green smiles were eating at the fresh stone and wet mud that Rocunyrth had thrown back, and out of them came grass. ．

The thought that this entire field was filled with slimes that pooped out grass kinda grossed him out, and Astaroth decided he had wasted enough time here.

Melding with Luna, he dashed away, restarting his journey. He had just lost a little over five minutes, holding a discussion he didn’t want to have, as well as inspecting some green slimes.

He had to make haste.

With his map still open, Astaroth calculated the distance he had travelled, and the distance he had left. He estimated he had already traversed around two-hundred miles.

This was quite the distance, but considering the distance he had left to travel, he wasn’t that impressed. He also had to factor in that his root travel skill had increased his speed at least tenfold.

Since there wouldn’t always be a forest, or even a forest this long, to travel through, he knew it wouldn’t go that fast all the time. If he could, he would reach home in a couple of hours.

‘Wouldn’t that be amazing?’

He estimated he still had a little less than three-thousand miles to traverse.

At his normal speed, if he couldn’t use Luna’s skill at all, he would never make it. So he was thinking of doing something extreme.

He had never been fond of science as a kid, so he didn’t remember the exact number. But if his memory wasn’t too hazy, the speed of light was about three-hundred thousand meters per second.

Doing math in his head, he calculated that this translated to roughly one hundred and eighty-five thousand miles. That was around sixty times what he need to traverse.

But he did not know how his arrival would work, and how he would even stop going forward at the right place. Astaroth was thinking of using Lightstep.

But his Royal Protection skill wasn’t off cooldown yet, and wouldn’t be until late the next day. By the time it would be off cooldown, he would have thirty minutes left before being logged out.

But since he wasn’t sure he could reach it without using it, he was willing to give it a try. But was travelling all day that day worth it, if he was going to cover the rest of the distance in less than a second the next day?

He instead did something else. He messaged in the guild chat, requesting all his guild members to share their map data with him.

This was something he seldom wanted to use, since it made all the exploring the other players had done moot to them, as it completed his map with their info.

It made him feel dirty to steal their progress in New Eden, and sad that he wouldn’t have to explore all those places himself. But right now, that wasn’t his first concern.

Not every member was willing to share their map data, since some of them revelled in exploring unknown places, and stealing their map data was like stealing all their hard work.

He held no hard feelings for these members, as he wouldn’t have done so, either. But for those that shared their map progression, he thanked them profusely.

He sent a message to Phoenix, with a screenshot of all the names of those who sent him map data, asking her to reward those players a bit more lavishly.

She didn’t question his decision, having seen the message, and even sent him her own map data.

Receiving all these pieces of the map, Astaroth’s map looked a lot more complete. I’die and Athena’s map data also covered so much of the forest around the Elven kingdoms and the Bastion, that a huge chunk of his map lit up around there.

He was grateful to all of them, because he had already spotted what he wanted.

On his map, around fifty miles from him, there was a level thirty dungeon. A guild already claimed it, as Athena had tagged it. But seeing the guild tag on it, he grinned.

‘Oh, I’m going to enjoy this very much.’

Grinning from ear to ear, Astaroth darted in the dungeon’s direction. The tag under the dungeon was the guild emblem of Aces High.

Astaroth revelled in the idea of stealing resources from them. Of course, he wasn’t stealing anything, since dungeons weren’t locked in their amount of parties allowed inside at the same time.

But if he could complete a hidden quest, or something similar, inside the dungeon, those resources were non-renewable.

He secretly wished they hadn’t completed it yet.