Inside the reclaid stronghold of the Blackwind Brotherhood, the air buzzed with excited chatter. A crowd of girls from the Crimson Bloom guild was gathered, comparing their rewards from the massive event.
“Whoa, I got the [Guardian of the Blackwind Brotherhood] title! It’s 20 to all stats!”
“ too, too!”
“Hey, Hazel, Lunara, Rena, Starbloom… you guys were in the sa party as the guild master. Is your title different?”
Hazel proudly displayed her new title for everyone to see. “Yup. Mine is [Star Defender of the Blackwind Brotherhood]. It’s 50 to all stats.”
Lunara and the others chid in. “Sa here, we all got that one.”
A wave of gasps and exclamations swept through the group.
“Whoa, that’s insane!”
“Plus fifty to all stats?”
“OMG, I’m so jealous!”
Just then, Kael finished his farewells with the three chieftains and stepped out of the main hall, right into the middle of the excited crowd.
“Well, hello there, Ullr,” Rena purred, sauntering over to him with a playful glint in her eye. “Or should I be calling you… Dawnbreaker?”
Before Kael could answer, Hazel’s head snapped around. “What did you say? Is he Mr. Dawnbreaker?”
Kael just gave a wry, helpless smile. After that battle, it was clear his secret identity wasn’t going to stay secret for long. With a ntal command, he switched his displayed ID. The white “Ullr” vanished, replaced by a na that shimred in a vivid, blood-red hue.
The mont Hazel saw it, she let out a squeal and launched herself at him, wrapping her arms and legs around him in an ecstatic tackle-hug. “Wow, you really are Mr. Dawnbreaker! I’m so dumb, I should have guessed it ages ago!”
Kael awkwardly unwrapped her from his torso and set her back on her feet.
“So, Dawnbreaker,” Rena asked, her curiosity piqued, “what kind of title did you get?”
Kael simply displayed it for them: [The Blackwind Champions].
The other girls crowded around, their eyes wide. “Huh? That’s a weird title.”
“What kind of stats does it give?”
“Plus 130 to all five core stats,” Kael said casually.
“A hundred… and thirty?!”
A stunned silence fell over the group. The girls just stared, their minds completely blown.
Leaving the dumbfounded crowd behind, Kael switched his ID back to Ullr and made his way to Stonehaven.
.....
The safe zone was still buzzing with players dissecting the recent event. A mage was sighing dramatically. “Man, so close! We were just a hair away from winning!”
An archer standing next to him shot him a furious look. “You’ve got so nerve. If you and the rest of Magnus’s goons hadn’t been throwing the defense to go gank Ullr, we would’ve taken the main hall for sure.”
“Hey, if you knew who he really was, you would’ve been right there with !” the mage retorted.
“Who is he? The guy who triggered the quest, so what?”
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The mage paused for dramatic effect. “Ullr is Dawnbreaker. Dawnbreaker is Ullr.”
The statent dropped like a bomb. Instantly, every player within earshot sward them.
“What? Are you sure?”
The mage nodded confidently. “It was just a theory at first, but I confird it at the end of the event.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“I have a skill called [Inspect]…”
“You can’t inspect through a hidden ID.”
“Of course not. But a successful [Inspect] lets you view their equipped gear. It took over a dozen tries, but I finally got one to go through. And I saw the bow in his hands was the [Galeharrow].”
“What?! The Ascendant weapon?!”
A collective wave of understanding washed over the crowd. There was only one Ascendant weapon on the entire server. Who else could it be but Dawnbreaker?
The archer’s face went pale, then red. “Damn it! Including the event just now, Dawnbreaker has killed five tis!”
“See?” the mage said smugly. “I ask you again: if you knew who he was, would you have let him go?”
“Hell no!” the archer snarled through gritted teeth. At that mont, his resentnt for Kael overshadowed the entire event’s failure. “The next ti I see him, it’s kill on sight!”
“Yeah, kill on sight!” A murmur of agreent rippled through the angry mob.
“Next ti I see him, I’ll…”
“Ullr’s here!”
The mob went silent. Everyone just looked at each other.
The archer who had just been vowing bloody revenge suddenly cleared his throat. “Uh, well, you see… my… dog is on fire. Gotta go.”
“Oh, right, right,” the mage added quickly. “ too. Sa dog.”
A cascade of equally terrible excuses followed.
“Wow, look at the ti, I gotta… fold my laundry.”
“Catch you guys later!”
Whoosh.
The crowd scattered as if fleeing a plague.
Kael had just zoned into Stonehaven to find a perfect circle of empty space had ford around him. The other players watched him from a distance, their expressions a complex mixture of fear, anger, and awe. It was admittedly awkward to be standing in a safe zone with people you’d been slaughtering minutes earlier.
Ignoring them, Kael scanned the area, his eyes finally landing on a familiar face in the market stalls—BuysPlanets4Fun.
As Kael approached, Elon spotted him. The rchant’s eyes went wide. He shot to his feet, pointing a trembling finger at the ID above Kael’s head. “You… you really are Dawnbreaker.”
Kael just smiled and sent him a friend ssage. It’s .
Elon glanced at the ssage, then back at Kael, muttering to himself. “So the rumors were true… there really is an item in the ga that can change your ID.” His expression quickly shifted to one of pure excitent. He grabbed Kael’s arm. “Boss, you got any more of those? I bet they’d be a massive hit on the market!”
Kael chuckled. “I’m afraid it’s not that easy to replicate. The hidden quest I did was extrely high-level. Probably a one-ti thing.” He had a growing suspicion that the Blackwind Brotherhood quest line was a major deviation, one that would alter the main story and push the ga in a direction completely different from the last tiline.
Hearing this, Elon’s face fell.
Kael didn’t waste any more ti. He opened a trade window and began placing a series of items into it: a level 1 Legendary-tier bow, a level 5 Legendary-tier quiver, the full level 10 Epic-quality set, and several assorted Epic-quality gear pieces from the level 15 Hidden Realm.
Elon practically drooled as he inspected the items. The level 1 bow and level 5 quiver, despite their low-level requirents, had stats comparable to level 15 Epics.
While the Rotstalker set wasn’t unheard of, most of what was circulating on the market was rare-quality; a full epic set was still incredibly rare. And as for the level 15 Epics, they were the current endga gear—supply couldn’t possibly et demand.
Elon accepted the dozen or so items. “Boss, I guarantee I’ll have all of this sold in half a day!”
Kael nodded. He could have sold the gear to the Crimson Bloom girls, but for his long-term plans, he needed a professional distribution channel. He was essentially acting as Elon’s angel investor, providing the seed capital for the comrcial empire he knew the man would one day build.
With his business concluded, Kael headed for the teleport nexus. For the cost of one gold coin, he warped to Crescent City.
Crescent was a true galopolis, the central hub for hundreds of smaller towns like Stonehaven. It should have been bustling with an endless sea of players.
Instead, the sight that greeted Kael was one of vast, empty streets, with only a few scattered players here and there.
The quiet was due to a simple restriction: you had to be level 20 to teleport into the main city from the outside world.
On the fifth day after the server launch, reaching level 20 through normal grinding was impossible. Only soone like Kael, who had completed a series of special, high-yield quests, could have managed it. The few other players present hadn’t teleported; they had made the grueling multi-day journey on foot.
Crescent City was the hub for a player base in the tens of millions, one of twenty such main cities on the Earth server alone. In real-world terms, each capital was as sprawling as Los Angeles.
Forcing players to traverse that on foot would have been a nightmare. To solve this, the city was designed with four main teleport nexuses for travel to and from the outside world, each of which connected to a hundred smaller regional nexuses for instant travel within the city’s districts.
Kael found himself at the main western teleport nexus. He raised his head, scanning the sparsely populated plaza, until his eyes finally locked onto his target.
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