The first ti Ethan t him—when creating his character, he was carrying a wine bottle.
Later, on many occasions, he would speak to Ethan while completely drunk.
And more than once, his drinking had caused serious problems, nearly getting Ethan killed.
Now, with the enhancent properties of the Wishbound Relic successfully preserved, Ethan was in high spirits.
He looked at the dazed Second Avatar before him, unable to hide his fascination. Carefully, he examined the Divine Forging attributes once more.
That's when he discovered a new ability: [Reforge].
Regular forgers didn't have Reforge. Not even the NPCs in Ethereal had it.
Literally, it ant recreating an item from scratch.
Ethan decided to give it a try. After testing several pieces of equipnt, he realized that only Gold-tier gear could be reforged.
Reforge allowed him to redistribute stats like agility and strength across the item. For example, he could cut the agility stat in half and move the difference to strength. That was the core function—but each piece of equipnt could only be reforged once, and once done, the change was permanent.
Still, it was exactly what players with attribute caps needed. If a piece of equipnt had four attributes, you could halve the ones you didn't need and funnel the rest into your main stat.
But there was a risk: if reforging failed, the equipnt would vanish entirely.
Then again, such gear was rare. Most dropped items were tailored to class-specific armor types, so they typically didn't co with unwanted stats. The exception was Druid equipnt, which always had evenly distributed attributes across four stats.
That was why, even now—despite Druids having attribute growth on par with other classes—no one wanted to take them into dungeons.
Ethan closed the skill window for his Second Avatar and shrugged. It wasn't like he needed Reforge anyway. As a Quad-Form Druid, any stat beca useful after transformation.
With the Wishbound Relic issue resolved and narrowly avoiding disaster, things were looking up.
Celia was handling logistics for Renegade Alliance, while Skyblade and the others were busy clearing dungeons. Everything was moving steadily forward.
In the Northern Frontier Region—especially in Harmony City, not even Zachary's Steele Consortium posed a threat anymore.
The shops managed by Mad Engineer were doing well enough. Though he'd been a bit distracted lately, Ethan still found him reliable.
Now, it was ti to stir up so chaos in Carnage Faction territory. But first, he needed to visit City Lord Gregor.
What kind of entity was this 'NPC' who sotis behaved like a person and other tis like a machine?
Today was Wednesday, not yet three in the morning—not the designated ti to find him. Still, NoPaperOnTheBigOne had ntioned that Gregor had co by the shop looking for Ethan several tis recently.
That suggested he didn't strictly appear only at that odd hour Ethan had originally been told about. Maybe that ti just marked his most consistent appearance. He might still show up occasionally at other hours.
If that were the case, Ethan figured he might as well look around. He was planning to upgrade his shops before leaving anyway.
Town Hall and Comrce Hall were only separated by a single wall.
By now, many stores had already been upgraded to level two. The All-You-Need stores no longer held an advantage in terms of level.
Once upgraded, a shop could handle more custor traffic, and the crafting workstations offered to hired players would provide better bonuses. Production would also increase.
Ethan knew this round of upgrades would burn through a lot of gold, but the investnt was inevitable. Besides, City Lord Gregor was subsidizing part of the cost—not upgrading would be a waste.
Leaving the cetery, Ethan made his way into the city. He added his Second Avatar to Renegade Alliance and directed him to the guild headquarters.
At the sa ti, he ssaged Celia, telling her that his "brother" was on the way to et her. He asked her to set him up with a solid mining tunnel and to put him to work.
Controlling two bodies at once felt strange. Multitasking wasn't easy—even just directing both to walk around took effort. Clearly, he needed more practice coordinating his Second Avatar with his main character.
In this state, forget fighting other players—just fighting monsters with dual control would be a nightmare. He'd probably have to rely on the AI-Control Mode system while playing his main.
Sure enough, after a while, his main character walked straight into a wall. He sighed and gave up, switching the Second Avatar to AI-Control Mode. He set it to report to the guild and follow Celia's instructions.
Looking back, his earlier ambitions had been too optimistic. He'd even imagined using two stealth classes to ambush people.
Wishful thinking.
Still, Morzan had ntioned the Second Avatar's AI was as capable as a professional player, with learning abilities and independent judgnt. That sounded promising.
If that was the case, maybe he'd let Morzan ss around with it when things were slow. With AI-Control Mode active, it could even practice crafting skills on its own.
It had already proven useful solving the Wishbound Relic issue.
Now, Ethan headed for the Comrce Hall.
Building a shop had cost him 50 gold coins. Upgrading to level two was 500. And now, upgrading from level two to level three? A staggering 5,000 per shop.
Even with the City Lord's ten percent discount, he still had to pay 4,500 each.
He grit his teeth and paid 9,000 gold coins to upgrade both his Harmony City shops to level three.
What he didn't know was that his upgrade fees were much higher than average.
That was because his shops sat on pri real estate—the biggest plots with the most traffic. So really, the cost was on him.
High traffic ant higher profits. If they weren't going to squeeze soone like him, who would they squeeze?
Then he glanced at the Auction House and cursed under his breath.
'Twenty thousand gold coins? Are you kidding ?'
Total robbery.
But level three Auction Houses ca with perks. While the current level two building had two floors, the second was just dead space.
Once upgraded, the Auction House would beco a three-story structure. The top floor would serve as an actual auction venue.
This allowed players to host live auctions. Without reaching level three, auctions couldn't be system-backed, which ant security risks for both items and paynts.
So yes, hosting a few auctions to build reputation might be profitable. But Ethan didn't feel any urgency.
After all, he already owned all three Auction Houses in the major cities of the Northern Frontier Region.
With no competition, why bother with reputation?
Once the Fortress Wars concluded, traffic would shift from the cities to the front lines. Shops inside the main cities would beco far less relevant.
Players training and treasure-hunting would resupply at fortresses instead.
Still, upgrading the Auction Houses was inevitable—just not a priority.
After all, Auction Houses couldn't be built inside fortresses anyway. Only shops could.
And the most important facilities in a fortress weren't Auction Houses to begin with.
User Comments
0 comments from readers