Rise Online: Return of the Legendary Player

“So the Magic Scroll will allow me to evolve a skill I choose? That’s much better than I could have imagined.” Kaizen concluded, looking at the screen of this item.

Having an item with the function of evolving a skill was an impressive thing for someone who had not yet gotten a skill that could be evolved by distributing Class points. However, this item was nowhere near the best that Kaizen had received the previous day.

The second item he needed to check out was the ‘Grimoire of Curses’. In the description of this item, it was stated that this could be used to enchant a weapon to apply the eternal bleeding debuff. In other words, should Kaizen enchant a weapon with this item, every creature or player he attacked with this weapon would be cursed with a guaranteed bleeding condition that could only be healed with the use of healing or blessing magic. This was another great item, but the scroll was even better in Kaizen’s view.

“Let’s go to the next item… Summoning of Hellround.”

Just reading the name of this item was enough to instigate Kaizen’s imagination, and he immediately began to imagine what this item might be able to do.

[Item: Summoning of Hellround.

Being able to tame a creature and summon it from another world is an ability that usually only Summoners can boast, but the first and last King Summoner created special stones with the ability to replicate the Summoners’ talent and store their summoned creatures. This item is one of those stones and can summon a Hellround.

(Note: if its total strength is less than the required Fitness Level, the summoner will not be intimidated and will become a creature hostile to you).

Class: Mutant.

Item Level: 1 of ?

Attack: 15

Defense: 9

Physical Fitness Level Required: 10]

After mentally doing the math on his current Fitness Level, Kaizen clicked on the item.

“My Fitness Level is above fifty. I’ll be fine.”

Suddenly, a red crystal with bits of black rock surrounding its prismatic-shaped base appeared in his right hand. He then uttered aloud:

“Summoning Hellround.”

[Summoning Hellround…]

The stone that Kaizen was holding suddenly began to levitate and spin at high speed. At the same time, the stone also began to emit a blinding glow, which Kaizen unconsciously averted his eyes from.

[Hellround was invoked].

“Ow!”

Kaizen heard a thin bark near his feet. When he looked down, he saw a black-haired puppy dog that had a thin face, pointed ears, two small horns still being born on its skull, extremely black eyes, and slender legs.

Psyker looked at this puppy with disappointment, because he had in mind something similar to the dogs that appeared alongside The Guardian of the Gates of Niflheim.

“Ow!” The dog barked again.

Sighing in disappointment, Kaizen crouched down, petted the puppy a little, and said sympathetically:

“The last creature I had was sold for a lot of money, but I promise I won’t sell you, all right?” He had an affable smile as he said this and stroked the dog’s head. ‘I just won’t sell because no one is crazy enough to pay more than 1000$ for a virtual pet.’

After Kaizen had returned the dog to its summoning stone state, Kaizen opened the inventory once again.

‘The key to the Gates of Niflheim is a self explanatory item. Icy Ore is for making weapons that carry the element of ice and blah, blah, blah… Let’s see what else interesting I have here. Blessing of Bastet? That’s the reward I got for staying on top of the highlight videos.”

𝒪𝗏𝐥xt.𝓬𝗈𝓂

[Item: Blessing of Bastet.

The feline goddess of the hunt, Bastet, grants her blessing to those who have made her proud. As a reward, the goddess offers her sacred blessing, which will grant the bearer the gift of a wise cat’s cleverness. You will obtain the talent for learning languages.

Class: Mythic

Item Level: 1 of ?

Attack: 0

Defense: 0

Required Fitness Level: 0]

Instantly, Kaizen knew that this was an item that was probably worth a lot of money. His eye was always very sharp and analyzing this item intrinsically with his experience from real life and online gaming, he knew that there would be people who would pay fortunes for an item like this, perhaps even more than they paid for the Mythical Beast Mount that he sold less than a week ago.

However, this time Kaizen didn’t want to rush into anything. He knew that if there was an item that allowed one to learn different languages within Rise Online, then that meant that there were languages that not all players had the ability to read.

In such a competitive game world, the difference between knowing a language or not could be crucial enough to determine who would be at the top and who would not.

Kaizen knew that instead of immediately selling or using this item, he should first inform himself of the rarity level of the ‘Blessing of Bastet’ and the existing ways to learn an in-game language and then make a decision. So he logged out and searched the Webnet first for the item in question.

At the same moment that he pressed ENTER on his keyboard, a dozen videos appeared that talked about the rewards Kaizen had received the previous day.

Kaizen decided to spend some time on these videos and discovered absolutely nothing. They were all videos of reporters or streamers trying to gain engagement with speculation about what the item ‘Blessing of Bastet’ was capable of doing. However, since Hónghé Holdings did not reveal anything about what this item did, it was only left for them to speculate about it. Still, Kaizen did not give up on finding something useful.

‘The subject is on the rise. If someone knows about it, they will definitely bring it up to gain attention.’ He thought.

On the forums, some people were saying for sure that this item was capable of increasing attributes or able to grant powers, but following the basic rules of Rise Online, that was impossible. No item should be able to grant an ability or permanently increase a player’s attributes.

Soon Kaizen realized that probably no one but himself, and the game developers, knew what the ‘Blessing of Bastet’ was capable of. This encouraged him, but he continued his research and then tried to find out about the different languages present in Rise Online.

If the ‘Blessing of Bastet’ gave its user the talent to read strange languages, this meant that there were languages that could not be understood by normal players. At this point Kaizen decided to search the Webnet to see if there were already mentions of other languages.

After less than five minutes of searching, he found a post from two weeks ago in a question and answer sub-forum about Rise Online.

The title of the post read: I found these strange symbols in a lost elven dungeon in the Vrikhodour Kingdom region, has anyone seen anything like this and knows what it means?

Below the title was a video showing twisted symbols full of strange dots. Some of these symbols had several dots and commas accenting it.

To Kaizen, this did not even sound like a language that exists in real life, but although he is not an avid user of languages other than English, the handwriting of these mysterious lined symbols had a distinct inspiration in cursive Arabic. Moreover, after watching the video more closely, Kaizen realized that the symbols were not exactly twisted, but rather were trying to form meaning.

In the comments tab of the post, there were not many comments, but there were some.

[Carl1510: This is obviously fake.

Memo0o: Man, I’m not very smart, but isn’t it obvious to deduce that it’s an elven language? After all, you are in an elven dungeon, aren’t you?

Master12Dog: I saw the comment above, so I decided to research more and I really think it might be elven, but not like the elven that already exists. In real life, the writer Tolkien created an elven language that looks similar to that, except that the patterns of that language that appears in the video are quite different from what Tolkien created. Hope I helped!]

Kaizen was intrigued by the last comment and decided to research more about the elven language mentioned.

When he researched, he realized that the comment in the post was right. That in the video was indeed a language inspired by the elven created by Tolkien. However, the patterns were so different that it was practically a new language. Although they had the same origin and were probably similar grammatically and phonetically, these two elven languages could be as different as Latin is from English or even as different as English is from Spanish and Portuguese.

Engaged in his research, Kaizen decided to look into whether it was possible to learn a new language within Rise Online, but found nothing about this.

This did not mean that it was impossible to learn, but rather that it probably took months to learn, and that even the high-level and evolved players who had access to this kind of information had not yet revealed it to the mainstream media.

So Kaizen decided to add the owner of the dungeon video post and ask if he had found out anything more about the language.

The author of the post was a player named Luno2001, and fortunately Kaizen was able to find him online. In order not to be identified as Kaizen, he used a fake nickname.

[Klaus93: Hi, Luno2001. I saw your post about the elven language and I was curious. Do you know how to learn this language?

Luno2001: Hi, you know that this information is never free, right?

Luno2001: Just kidding! Actually, I didn’t find out anything. I talked to some mage NPCs and they said that the elven language is a lost language.

Klaus93: Got it…

Klaus93: What about the players who chose the elven race? Can they not read?

Luno2001: I don’t know if you know, but depending on the race you choose, you can be born on three different worlds, which are: Midgard, Alfheim and Jotunheim.

Luno2001: I have never met elves on Midgard and only Evolutions can travel between worlds, so I never had the opportunity to talk to one.

Luno2001: I kept the post online just in case some elf player finds one, he or she can tell me what it means.

Luno2001: The game is very new, so it should take a few months for the community to come together.

Klaus93: I see…

Klaus93: Thanks anyway :).]

After he finished talking to the owner of the post in the sub-forum, Klaus stood up from his computer chair, stretching his spine.

“If the only person I could find talking about other languages hasn’t learned anything about it yet, or doesn’t want to talk about it, I think the most viable option is for me to use the Blessing of Bastet to gain an advantage over others… And I just wish I could know how much an item like that is worth.”

Klaus knew that he now had the option of asking about it to a player much more experienced than him, and that player was literally only a few steps away, but Klaus still didn’t trust Bleeding Lily enough for that.

In the end, Klaus decided not to say anything about the Blessing of Bastet to Bleeding Lily and instead returned to Rise Online.

…

Edited by: DrHitsuji

If you want to see original illustrations of Rise Online characters, consider helping me on pa treon: Pa treon.com/NandoFalske

More character images in:

https:///bpqq9u4gS8

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