VR: Ascended Assassin

Klein was his team leader in Azure Corporation that took care of him when he first joined the game.

He was a smart guy with a big heart, always paying attention to other peoples' feelings.

During his time working under him, the two of them had faced many challenges together and all the stuff he had learnt were patiently taught to him by Klein without any reserves.

When Rena needed money for her treatment, he was the only one in the team that forked out a large sum of money to help with the medical bills without Venn even asking for his help.

Venn knew about his family's poor circumstances, but Klein never once prodded him about repaying him back. Up until the end of his life, Venn wasn't able to pay him back for his kindness.

They were practically like real brothers at that point, and Venn was grateful that he had such a great mentor and friend.

However, Klein had no idea who he was right now as he didn't go for the job interview with Azure Corporation unlike before. His trajectory in life had changed drastically.

It was a unique experience to see Klein showing the others the ropes about the job at a distance away. Venn recalled that he was part of the newbies in the group as well, listening to Klein explaining about the job scopes of a library rat during his time as one of the members.

It wasn't a glorified career, but at least it's honest work.

One of the job responsibilities was to learn the written language of the major races such as the Elves and the Orc as in-game translation is not provided to players in any sort of way.
If a player wants to understand the language of other races for their quests, they either have to look for certain NPCs and bribe them with gifts to establish a friendly relationship so that they could ask them for translations or look up their meanings in the library.

That was how hardcore the gameplay was for Heaven Descent, and it was also the main attractive factor for some masochists as well.

However, to companies that pursue profits, such methods are time-consuming and have a low rate of success.

And, as a result, it was natural for big companies to collect and consolidate in-game data and organize a group of contracted employees to decipher and crack these languages for easy referencing, resulting in a more efficient solution to such problems.

Venn simply stood at a distance away without disturbing Klein's lesson. He was glad to see him again but he had made up his mind.

Although he wanted to work with him again, and live a better life together, he decided not to recruit him for the time being as he had more important matters to attend to.

Besides, why would a promising team leader of the Azure Corporation quit his job and work with a level 7 player in Heaven Descent? If Klein did that, he would seriously doubt his motive in doing so.

Furthermore, he would just appear like a madman that had lost his mind if he ever did approach Klein like that. He had nothing to offer him in return.

Pausing for a brief moment to reminisce their time together, Venn moved away from Klein's group, and blended into the crowd made up of similar groups that worked for other corporations.

All the groups are scattered around the place, hard at work, competing against one another with regards to information gathering.

Although the groups here hated each other to the core, they had to coexist peacefully in the library. If anyone tries to start a fight, the NPC guards would arrive within a minute and the player that started the fight would be arrested, and dragged away to a prison to rot.

The penalty for starting a fight in safe zones is harsh and merciless. Arrested players would have to spend a week's worth of time staring at a stone wall, being bored to death.

Logging out of the game wouldn't help as the timer would stop counting down until the player logs back into the game again.

Funnily enough, the punishment and lack of method to bypass it had driven many players to insanity that if one survived the sentence, it became some sort of bragging rights to them.


Initially, when the game was just launched, a lot of players ended up getting arrested for doing stupid things like sexually harassing NPCs and being a public nuisance in general. However, after news on the harshness of the penalty erupted in the forum, these things quickly stopped.

Thus, it was quite a hilarious sight to see how these groups behaved in the library. Most of the time, they are like petty little school kids doing their schoolwork while at the same time, disturbing the others to slow down their progress, all the while avoiding the gaze of the elf caretaker.

After stopping his feet for a while to look around the place, Venn nonchalantly slipped into a relatively remote section of the library without drawing much attention to himself, and away from public eyes.

There, he began to search for a certain book in the gigantic wooden bookshelves as normally as he could, trying his best to maintain his composure.

Similar to real life, the library books in the game were sorted according to chronological order, so Venn had no problems finding the book that he wanted to look for.

Tracing his index finger horizontally from right to left on the books that belonged to the DOOLB section, his finger stopped at the forty-ninth book in the forty-ninth row of the bookshelf .

"Jackpot!" Venn muttered under his breath as he took out a mysterious black leathered book with no words on the cover or at the back. It was a small and thick hard-bound book, weighing approximately half a kilogram.

Shifting to a much isolated corner of the library with the book in his hand, he sat down on a wooden table and opened the pages nervously. His entire plan was hinging on this book.

Like what he had expected, a black envelope was hidden inside the book. With the letter in place, he thought that he should be able to activate the repeated errand quests. But much to his surprise, he couldn't find the note that would indicate who the letter should be delivered to.

With no other way to continue, he decided to open the black envelope after some tinkering.