New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

Back in the kingdom of Stellar Woodlands, in Bastion City, whose name Leon had chosen while everyone was gone, Chronos was in a room above the dirty bar in the Singing Boar Inn.

He had rented a room there after his conversation with the Inn owner, Kitebera, who was much better outspoken than her sister in the adventurers’ guild. She had given him a lot of info on the city he was in, including who currently ruled it.

Chronos initially wanted to stay here for a short time, enough to get money from guild quests and bounce back to exploring the world. Even though he seemed to feel nothing anymore, he still remembered his original intentions for playing New Eden.

He had come back from his first day of questing and was tired. Most of the quests in Bastion City were for corruption patrol and elimination.

The patrol group he had first crossed when walking toward here had been one such group, and he rapidly learned that many of them came in and out of the city, be it day or night.

Groups of adventurers, sometimes composed of only NPCs, other times purely of players, and sometimes even mixed parties, constantly came to and from the city. Hawkers stood before the quest board, to gather party members in parties that were short of a set of arms.

That was how he had done for the day, as he didn’t know anyone here yet. But as he lay on his bed, contemplating the day’s events, he wondered how a city prospered, in a land surrounded by monsters of such power.

The monsters around the city ranged from level forty-five, all the way to level sixty. The grades were also never under special, making the hunts very dangerous for business.

Luckily for everyone involved, the stronger monsters were never in groups, making the challenge somewhat manageable.

From what Chronos heard when he lingered in the Inn’s bar, downstairs, Bastion City was the only city that actively hunted the corrupted monsters, which also seemed to be the reason they never clumped up in hordes.

The pay was apparently better for adventurers here, and that explained why there was such a large population of them present. Chronos wondered who had come up with such a business model.

Whoever they were, they were extremely smart, and their foresight in economics was out of this world. He also wondered what kind of starting capital a city needed to launch such a business model.

‘It can’t be anything too small. The salaries for hunting quests are easily twice as high as elsewhere, if I believe the gossip.’

Laying there on his back, Chronos decided he would train his new skills a bit before going to sleep.

He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath, before exhaling slowly. When he opened his eyes again, they were shining lightly, in an azure blue colour, and he could see the time smoothly flowing around him.

But almost immediately, something caught his eye. With practice, Chronos had started seeing time threads, although not all the time.

And right now, he was seeing countless of them floating all around him, passing through the walls and ceiling. The amount of them floating around was unnatural, even for a city. 𝐞𝐨𝘃𝐞𝐥.

He usually only saw time threads of people he was close to. His ability to see the time threads was currently limited to seeing the ones that intertwined with his own.

He looked down at his chest, where he could see his own thread, connected to his soul, or so Tyr had explained, leaving him and travelling in the same direction as the others.

Chronos’ curiosity kicked in, and he got up from his bed. Opening his window, he looked at the threads passing around him, all going in the same direction.

He couldn’t see where they were going from his window, so he climbed out of it, making his way to the roof of the Inn. Once there, he stared in one direction, slack-jawed.

All these golden threads that stemmed from all directions, some of them stretching further than his eyesight allowed, all travelled in one direction. And their destination was the massive tree that stood in the middle of Bastion City.

From the information he had gathered the previous day, that tree was a palace where the city was ruled from. He had yet to go inside the inner wall of Bastion City, but his thread still travelled towards it.

Looking around him from the rooftop, many threads passed right next to him. Tyr had once told him that with enough experience, he would someday learn to read the threads, like watching someone’s life through their eyes for a moment.

He was curious to see if he knew some people whose thread passed next to him, and was tempted to read them. But he had never done it before, and wasn’t sure he would even be capable of doing it.

He picked the closest thread and extended his hand toward it. But nothing happened.

His hand slipped right through the golden thread, like it was simply air. Closing his eyes, he focused as much as he could on his sense of time, cutting out all other sensory intakes.

He lost his sense of smell first, then his hearing went, soon followed by the sense of touch. All he could feel ?with his closed eyes was the vibrations emanating from the threads of time.

He felt them closely enough to not need to open his eyes and still knew where they were around him. Picking another thread that had flowed closer to him, he stretched out his hand again.

As his hand brushed against the thread, this time, he felt resistance. It was like blocking the flow of water with your hand when you stuck it under a flowing tap.

But instead of removing his hand, he flowed his hand in the same direction as the flow, suddenly feeling the resistance going away.

A sense of vertigo took him, and he almost lost balance. When he reopened his eyes, he was standing in a large open field, with grass up to his abdomen.

He heard something from his right rustle, and his body moved on its own. Seeing two daggers rise in front of his face, he finally understood.

‘I did it. This isn’t my body. I’m watching someone else’s life.’