Second Life: Welcome to Gaia

After the four players decided to join Immortals, they treated Ye Yan even more amicably, which is not always a good thing. My Girl, seeing how serious Ye Yan is, started to flirt with him to see his reaction, winking and throwing kisses at him.

Ye Yan can't understand such a person. He is married with children but is playing as a woman and flirting with men in front of his wife, no less. My Girl says it's funny while his wife's mouth keeps twitching seeing her husband's antics.

Ashardalon and Ye Yan talked about the guild, their future plans in the game, and the composition of the twenty-man team they need to form for future dungeons.

Spell Bound had inquired in the Adventures' Guild and discovered that at level 10, besides the 10-man dungeon, there are a 5-man mini-dungeon and the first 20-man dungeon in the game. In the City of Ji, the 20-man dungeon is a haunted mansion that belongs to a Duke, which will reward those that help him to get rid of the ghosts inside it.

There is a mini-dungeon of levels 5 to10 in the City of Ji and the other cities, but they are easy and mainly made for those that hadn't yet change classes. Their difficulty consists only of Easy, Normal, and Hard mode. And that's why Ye Yan and his friends went directly to the 10-man dungeon and didn't mind about the 5-man mini-dungeon. Areas away from the cities can be more challenge than this mini-dungeons, so they went there directly after they had enough of the 10-man dungeon.

Tientsin has one 5-man dungeon and starfishes can be found inside it.

Ashardalon and his team had entered the mini-dungeon before and they told Ye Yan about the starfish after they knew that he needs this item. But starfish is a rare monster that appears around once every twenty dungeons. It can be used to make water property equipment through a quest, so it's very difficult to find it in the Auction House, and when it appears, the price is very high and players buy it instantly.

Ashardalon and the others decided to enter the mini-dungeon with Ye Yan, to increase the farm speed. Ye Yan wants, at least, three starfishes to prepare the potion, and this means he would need to do around 50 to 60 runs to get the quantity he needs if he is lucky.

The dungeon doesn't have a daily entry limit, then they can challenge it as many times as they wanted in one day. Ashardalon's team took around 40 minutes to clear the dungeon before, but now they have Ye Yan. With him, they should improve their clear time because not only Ye Yan is an elite player that was in the first clear party, but they don't have Elegant Sword to hinder them.

Ashardalon's party thought that helping Ye Yan now should improve their relationship and he would help them later. But, before they take Ye Yan to do the mini-dungeon, they led him to an NPC on the beach. Zhang Wei is an NPC instructor that teaches players how to swim for only 5 silver coins.

The mini-dungeon as well as many other quests in the coastal region requires the player to know how to swim because many of those quests are underwater. Players that tried to enter the water without learning the skill first, drowned or were killed by the cold.

Zhang Wei gave a waterbreathing pill to Ye Yan and cast a protective spell on him, making him immune to cold for a small amount of time, then led him to the water. As Ye Yan already knew how to swim in real life, it was easy for him to learn the skill. He followed the instructions of the NPC and completed everything on the first try.

Players that did not know how to swim could use the NPC to learn this skill that they could use in real life. And no matter the time the player required to learn, they will not have to pay any extra coins for it.

After he followed the last instruction of the NPC, she led him out of the water.

"Congratulations! You are a fast learner and can swim freely now." Zhang Wei said smiling at him.

System: Congratulations, you learned the passive skill [Swim] at level 3 - advanced.

"Thanks, instructor." Ye Yan said politely.

With the skill Swim, Ye Yan can do quests underwater, if he eats a Waterbreathing Pill, and will not sink into the water like a potato sack, making glub glub until he dies.

When the players started entering the water in the beginning, they didn't know they would need to learn how to swim and thought they would float in the water like magic as the characters in many other games do. But soon, they discovered that they do need to know how to swim and happened in the worse way possible. Many players entered the water and sank immediately, making glub glub sounds that were so loud that players and NPCs could hear them from the beach.

Every ability the players need to performed certain acts in the game, like swimming, riding, and flying, required the player to learn a specific skill. If a player wants to ride in the future, they need to learn how to do it. They can't just mount on an animal in any way they want and have their asses glued to it, enabling them to ride it at any speed.

The ability skills have proficiency like most of the skills, needing the player to master it and the level of proficiency that the player will begin depending on the level of the skill that he shows to the instructor to the limit of level 3, advanced.

After Ye Yan learned the skill, they took him to speak with an NPC in a shop near the beach. The shop is made of naval wood with wooden flor that ends in a pier 10 meters further in the water.

The shop works harvesting oysters and freshwater pearls in a place not far from the city [1], but lately many monsters appeared in the region disrupting its business. That's why the shopkeeper is recruiting adventurers' teams to clear the place of monsters.

They accepted the quest and got on a small wooden rowing boat that only fit the NPC responsible for rowing the boat, plus five more people. The NPC took them to a region around 1km (0.62 miles) away from the shop and told them to enter the water because that was to mini-dungeon "entrance".

They ate the Waterbreath Pill that tasted like roasted fish seasoned only with salt and entered the water.

When Ye Yan swam underwater before while learning the skill, it was very near the beach and didn't show many examples of marine life. But now, Ye Yan could see many little fishes swimming, forming shoals in various shapes and colors. The scenery was so beautiful that Ye Yan was dazzle for almost one entire minute.

After he comes back to himself, he filled Ashardalon and the others that were standing waiting for him not very far. They could understand Ye Yan's reaction because the first time they entered the dungeon, their reaction was the same as him. The crystal clear water together with the marine life gives birth to the scenery that any photographer would like to capture with their cameras.

The only problem is that they didn't have a skill that enables them to speak underwater, but with the difficulty level being very low, it is not really a problem for them.

They started to swim, looking for monsters, and found some red crabs not far from them. They were about 4 feet high and 6 feet wide, 8 legs and 2 pincers, with the right one being double the size of the left pincer.

There are many Red Crabs in the region and to increase efficiency, they started to mob the monsters to kill them together. Ye Yan and Ashardalon went to kite them and reunited next to the rest of the party.

Different from dry land, the speed underwater is very slow because they have to swim to the locations and there is the water's tensile strength that hinders the movement underwater, making the attack speed reduce to half of the original value.

Ashardalon and Ye Yan got the monster together and started to attack. Both of them hitting the monster while using physical skills. Harpy was shooting arrows at them as if the bow was a machine gun and sometimes using the skill [Arrow in the Knee], killing the monster on the spot. Hello Kitty was throwing her ice and water property spells, [Ice Bolt] and [Water Ball], to kill the monsters. She only used these two spells because she can't use the lightning spells while she is underwater or it would damage them as well and the others spells that she knows are utility spells.

They started to mob monsters and kill them until they cleared the area of every Red Crab. Then the Giant Red Crab that was sleeping under the underwater ground got out of it, shaking his pincers from one side to the other as if he was dancing, spreading the sand everywhere.

....

[1] China is the largest producer of cultured pearls in the world. The country has a long of harvesting pearls from saltwater oysters. The region of Hepu and Behai had active marine pearl fisheries as early as the Han dynasty (3rd century AD). Information was taken from:

Zhu C., Southgate P.C., Li T. (2019) Production of Pearls. In: Smaal A., Ferreira J., Grant J., Petersen J., Strand (eds) Goods and Services of Marine Bivalves. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96776-9_53