Ascension: Online

In a flash, I was brought back up to the starting point at the top of the cliff. Thankfully, I was out of that pit of eternal darkness. Staying down there couldn't have been good for my mental heath.

"Whew...okay. Now, let's do this the normal way."

I crept closer to the town before me. The sign read 'Xi Yang, Village of Memories'.

So, it was a village, not a town. From the noise this place was making, I assumed it would be a bustling town, but...it could also just be a big village, I suppose. I walked inside and began exploring. Shops and food stalls were set up all around, with children running through the packed streets, happily. It was sure a lively place.

And these people too...or rather, NPCs; they seemed so realistic, as if they were real humans. Of course, that was impossible. This was just a video game, after all. A very...realistic one, but a video game nonetheless. It was virtual. Nothing in here was part of reality, I knew that. I knew that, and yet...that AI's words repeated themselves in the back of my head like some sort of parasite.

[What you may think of as just a virtual game...could very well be another's reality.]

Looking at all these lively NPCs walking around, I almost felt convinced.

Almost.

And then, a person called out to me.

"Hey there!"

"Hm?" I turned around to face the direction the voice had come from. It had been a man in his forties who appeared to be a blacksmith of sorts. He had a shop set up, with dangerous weapons of all sorts hanging behind him. But that wasn't what surprised me the most. Instead, what was truly shocking was that I could understand what he was saying - Chinese. However... I didn't know Chinese - I was Japanese, yet somehow I could understand what he was saying? It was complicated to explain.

"You're another newcomer, right?" he asked.

"'Another'...? Yeah, I guess I'm new here," I replied truthfully, walking closer to him. "But when you say 'another'...you mean there's more like me?"

"Oh yeah," he said. So he could understand my Japanese as well. "A bunch of newcomers wearing the same exact clothes as you have been flooding through this village. It started around last week."

My clothes...I looked down. I was wearing some kind of simple brown shirt with fur on it, and rough black pants. I looked almost like a prisoner, from the outside.

"Around last week...that's when Ascension: Online was released," I muttered to myself.

"Hm?"

"Oh, nothing," I quickly replied, deciding that all this was just part of the 'backstory' of this game. We are summoned here to save the world, or something like that. "So, what did you want from me?"

"Well, I was wondering if you were, perhaps, in need of some weapons," he said. "The others before you have all bought something off me, so."

"Uh, sure," I agreed relatively easily. "But...what do I pay with?"

"Well, the other newcomers that came in here before you all did some sort of gesture with their hands and opened up a screen or something in front of them. I was pretty surprised when I first saw it," the blacksmith explained. "The gesture was something like this..."

He swiped his hand across in front of him, from left to right, with his palm facing outwards. Of course, nothing happened, since he was a NPC, after all. At least, that's what I believed.

I copied his gesture, and widened my eyes as a hologram appeared in front of me.

"Woah..."

"There you go," he chuckled. "I don't know how you guys can, but I can't seem to do it, even though we're doing the exact same gesture."

Well, of course you can't. You're a NPC, and I'm a player.

The hologram I had just brought up was an interface of sorts. I could access my character profile, inventory, settings, and log out of the game from here too. Right now, my character was completely empty with the exception of the brown prisoner-like clothes, nearly-torn black pants, and poor-quality sandals. As for my body itself, it seemed to be an exact replica of what I looked like in real life - messy and unkempt black hair plus deep blue eyes, like the sea. With no other good explanation in mind, I just assumed that all ARMMORPGs created an avatar based on your real life appearance.

Above the full-body portrait of myself was a few strings of text: name, gender, level, and race. It looked like this:

[Name: Igarashi Kaze]

[Gender: Male]

[Race: Ḩ̛͜͠u͏̛m̢͏̸á͠͠n̸̴̕ ]

[Level: 1]

Why...was the race glitched out like that? I could still tell it said 'human', but...that's weird.

Putting that aside for now, I moved on. In the next tab, my inventory, was 100 gold coins. At least, that's what it looked like.

"Well...this is quite the roundabout tutorial to teach us how to play this game. I can't say I dislike it though, Ascentech," I murmured.

"What?" the blacksmith questioned, furrowing his brows.

"Ah, never mind," I replied. NPCs would never know what Ascentech was, after all. Then, I took a look at the time. Apparently, time in-game matched that on the outside. I had taken a look at the clock when I started up my AR set, and it had read 5 PM. Now it says 5:30 PM in the game. Roughly half an hour had passed.

Hina-nee would probably be done dinner by now, so I decided this was about a good time to quit. I switched to the log out tab of the hologram, and-

"Hm?"

It didn't switch the tab. Frowning, I tapped on the log out tab's icon again, a door with an arrow pointing inside it to show an exiting motion.

"What..."

It still didn't work. I frantically spammed click the tab a couple of times.

Nope.

"What the hell...?!" I couldn't hold back my surprise anymore. "Why can't I log out?!"

My screams echoed across the sky as the sun began to set.

"Hey, kid, what's going on?" the blacksmith asked in worry. "What's all this about 'logging out' and stuff?"

"A-Ah, it's nothing..." I muttered, switching to the other tabs.

Every other tab worked fine. Only the log out one was blocked off - greyed out.

Was this some kind of bug, or just server problems...? Since the game only came out a week ago, I wouldn't be surprised if there were still some major issues and loopholes in the game, but...not letting players exit the game? That should've been an issue fixed on launch.

I quickly turned to the blacksmith to ascertain my questions. "Hey, sir, do you have any idea where any of the other 'newcomers' are? I need to talk to them."

"Uh...yeah. One passed by a couple of minutes before you came. You should still be able to catch up to her, if you go now. They that way," the man said helpfully, pointing deeper inside the village.

"Got it, thanks!"

I hurriedly began my attempt to catch up to another player.

"H-Hey! Aren't you going to buy anything?"

I ignored the blacksmith's cries, and picked up my pace.