Expanding Your Horizons

In the two months since you've last died, your Intelligence has risen enough to the point where you have a healthy appreciation for what your strengths, and, more importantly, your weaknesses are. Both your physical and magical attack power are relatively high - or so you are **** to assume based on the damage you deal - and your speed and dexterity are up there as well, which is good considering how paltry your defenses are. Your magical defense at least has a decent growth rate, however that's offset by the fact that you take extra damage from both fire and holy magics - the two most used kinds. Your physical defense is your worst stat by far. If it weren't for the fact that you could become intangible, you'd have been hacked to pieces long ago. As a result, you've had to learn how to fight smarter, not harder.

Incorporeal and Shadow Dash are instrumental to your survival, and you can go from casting one to the other almost instantaneously at this point. Dark Pulse, and the range it grants you is also invaluable, however only being able to cast one ability at a time means that you have nearly been killed by arrows more times than you're comfortable with, and had to quickly learn to take out or avoid ranged-classes whenever they were present in the raiding parties.

The most crucial aspect to your ongoing survival and growth, however, are your traps. As you had told Madi, players' intelligence was not proportional to the stat of the same name. From what you could tell, in their case, Intelligence granted them specific boons and abilities such as being able to decipher other languages or (much to your chagrin) detect traps. It did not have any real bearing on how smart the player was. You had seen more than one wizard forget to scan for your traps or allow you to outsmart them in a fight, and you had seen the opposite as well, in one barbarian who had come alone several times and spent more time running around your chambers, falling into each of your traps than actually fighting you.

"He's a scout," Madi had explained one evening while sparring with you. Training her situational awareness and strategic thinking was crucial, but it was also important that she have training with when her stats were so drastically increased from your Aura of the Dark One. "He's got enough health to survive a few hits from you while gathering information that he'll then write down and sell to the other players."

You were actually impressed by how a player had managed to twist this endless cycle of **** and rebirth to their advantage even if it meant that you were now wasting resources constantly adding and removing traps around your chambers so as to avoid becoming predictable. Madi would also use some of the gold the two of you earned from your crafting to buy what she called a Boss Guide, which she explained was a manual full of information gathered by players who had fought you with tips on how to beat you. All of this, however, led to you coming across yet another obstacle.

Even with Call of the Dark and the five wisps you could now control at the same time gathering materials as fast as they could, much of your crafting efforts were bottlenecked by one thing: wood. Presently, the only method you had of gathering wood was to destroy your door and wait for it to respawn as well as the loot you stole from players. You had managed to increase your yield on the former somewhat, by harvesting your door multiple times in order to build a more stable, durable entrance to your chambers, and discovering that when players once again destroyed it, it respawned in its upgraded state, garnering a larger amount of wood whenever it was harvested. Unfortunately, between your door's significantly longer respawn time compared to the cobwebs your wisps gathered or even the metal you mined, and the inconsistency of being able to rob a player before you killed them and simply hoping that loot contained more than a few planks' worth, you were left wrestling with the only remaining option:

Going above ground.

You've only seen glimpses of the world above from your time as a wisp whenever your aimless drifting would bring you close to the dungeon's entrance. You instinctively know that your dungeon is accessed through a cave about a half a day's ride South-East of Livenvale, but other than the foggy memory of countless trees and green grass, you don't know much about it.

"You're cave is in the middle of a part of the Everwood called the Greenling," Madi explains when you ask her. "It's well-known for its abundance of trees, wild game and natural resources. That's why the Church of Anari issues that quest to gather Shadow Essence for its initiates. They're worried that the darkness here will infect the surrounding forest."

"If that's the case, then why would Vienna bless this area in the first place?" You ask.

Madi shrugs, that familiar expression of bitterness that appears whenever she thinks of whatever circumstance it is that keeps her from improving. "Probably to give the players plenty of opportunity to farm Woodcutting and other Skills before going off into the wide world," she grumbles. At the confused tilt of your head, she snorts, the ghost of a smile on her face. "Not all of us can just magically gather and craft whatever we want. There are about thirty different skills that players use, and they all begin at level one."

You file that information away as you spend the next week trying to convince yourself to go outside. There isn't much you fear nowadays. According to Madi's investigations, there has yet to be a quest issued involving killing you, in particular, so you're not being overrun with players, and when one of them seems to strong you aren't ashamed to fake your **** and melt away into the shadows, leaving behind a piece of loot. None of the other monsters in your area of the Hollow Roots pose even the slightest threat to you either, so, as long as you are careful in your explorations, you aren't terribly afraid of venturing outside your abode to explore.

Leaving the Hollow Roots and exploring the surface, though, is another thing altogether. It's probably thanks to that strange talking crystal that put you on this path in the first place, but, for some reason, you're completely confident the gods have no idea about your existence so long as you remain within the safety of the Hollow Roots. If you step foot outside the cave entrance, however, you will instantly lose that protection. Even if you go at the dead of night under a new moon to avoid both Anari and Helia's sight, Vienna will instantly be able to find you within her domain should you attract her attention. The crystal had mentioned that the gods would no longer be able to simply wipe you from existence, but that didn't stop them from just smiting you themselves, or siccing an army on you.

But as the players slowly start to adapt to the traps within your chambers, you know that staying hidden forever will only hamstring your potential for growth. And so you wait until nighttime during one of those periods Madi says is safe to explore, and as she leads you to the surface, you can't help but think that she is leading you back along the path she leads players towards you.