Greater Teleportation

Seeing this post, Zhao Xu knew this player's trouble was enormous.

In the players' eyes, he had merely killed an NPC. What was the big deal?

But the NPCs in Arthur were actually living, breathing people. The players simply did not know it.

Quite a few Earthlings who crossed over to Arthur had directly married Arthur's natives.

These NPCs were flesh and blood. Every "NPC" could be traced back to their roots; they had parents and were not people who had casually sprung out of a stone.

That player thought he had only killed a piece of data that would revive. He could only pray that had been his original mindset—that he had assumed the NPC would revive and had merely acted out of thoughtless impulse.

If so, abandoning his current account could still restore his alignment. Otherwise, no matter how he changed accounts, the label of an evil alignment would surface sooner or later.

And once he crossed over, when changing accounts was no longer an option, the Evil Aura on him would follow him like a shadow.

Zhao Xu knew the player's best course of action was to repent, offer compensation, and then be imprisoned for a while. It was not a big deal, really; he could log off, so he would not actually have to stay locked up.

Otherwise, the apparent conflict would only be temporarily suppressed. When the crossing came a year later, the player who thought he had merely chopped down an NPC would finally suffer the consequences.

Alignment-detecting spells only required Level 1, barely more demanding than a zero-level cantrip.

More importantly, Detect Evil was a Paladin class ability. At times, it even became the opening gesture whenever a Paladin encountered a group of players.

Low-level evil players had nowhere to hide in Arthur.

Basically, every human settlement rejected people of the Chaotic Evil alignment.

Ambitious Lawful Evil types were at least willing to play disgusting games within the rules. With Chaotic Evil thugs, no one could tell who their next strike would fall upon.

Avoiding Evil was also a lesson players had learned through blood and tears after widespread education.

At this point, Zhao Xu had no saintly mindset, nor did he think about how to educate that player.

On the first night after logging out of the game, driven by some absurd stroke-of-luck mentality, he had still written a brief post titled "Ten Commandments for Novices in Arthur."

Unfortunately, that person had not seen it.

The entire post contained no game secrets. It was more like a piece of chicken-soup advice telling players what mistakes they should avoid.

Zhao Xu knew that more than half the players entering the game now would use up all their Resurrection Stones and restart.

Not within a year, but within a month.

Still, he hoped that, as the luckiest person, he could toss down a rope. How many players could grab it was up to them.

The first commandment was to avoid Evil.

Yet on the night he posted it, many replies had scoffed at Zhao Xu's suggestions, which ran contrary to conventional games.

They even looked through Zhao Xu's posting history and lectured him to go play a few more games and gain some experience first.

Zhao Xu did not pay any more attention after posting it.

Every point in it would, in any case, be repeatedly verified by players through painful mistakes.

After browsing for a while and finding nothing new, Zhao Xu's formidable self-control kicked in. Without another word, he returned to the game.

The players were desperately fighting for themselves without realizing it.

He, on the other hand, was clearly saving himself.

To log off, players only needed to go five minutes without any combat before they could activate the logout command.

Ten rounds—one minute—later, their bodies would turn into motes of light and vanish from Arthur's Prime Material Plane.

If they were in a hurry, they did not need to wait through those ten rounds. They only had to find somewhere safe and log off.

If they were unlucky enough to be attacked during those ten rounds, they could only hand over a Resurrection Stone and call it a day.

In the early stages, most players ignored the system's warning.

Only after their levels rose did they begin to cherish their accounts. By then, even in safe town zones, they would obediently wait until their bodies vanished.

But sometimes sudden circumstances required them to log off, such as being shaken awake in the real world or receiving a system notification of an incoming call.

Forced logout was also possible, but the downside was that their bodies would not disappear. They would remain in Arthur indefinitely in an unconscious state.

Yet regardless of the method, returning to Arthur required a twenty-minute cooldown.

Countless players would complain about this in the future, saying that the game had sacrificed everyone's convenience just to replicate its internal communication methods.

But Arthur retained this rule until the day of humanity's mass crossing, and those twenty minutes were precisely the time Zhao Xu set aside for eating and reading posts.

Even so, it remained common in the later stages for people to exploit the loophole by frequently logging in and out: A received a message in-game, logged out to contact B online, and B logged in again to relay it to their organization, acting as a part-time courier.

Even Arthur's natives occasionally hired players for emergency communications this way. Of course, after this relay method was used too often, some organizations were naturally punished.

There were cases of players being bribed to pass along false information, and half a year later, everyone had resorted to codebooks.

After a flash of white light, Zhao Xu appeared directly in his bedroom within the Floating City above Mystra.

Wherever one disappeared was where one reappeared, no matter what happened. There had once been a player who logged off beside a volcano crater, only to return and discover that the volcano had erupted; his body was crushed to death by cooled lava.

After he appeared, Antinoa's body also emerged in a sudden flash of white light. She was still wearing the same mage robe she had worn several days ago.

After three days of dealing with her, Zhao Xu had learned that the Floating City was quite vast.

Antinoa had set up a Magic Alarm in his room. The moment he appeared, she would receive the alert.

That was right. Although the Floating City was huge, and even though Antinoa was not far from his quarters, she was still willing to use a level 7 spell, Greater Teleportation, to come over.

As for why she did not use the ordinary Level 5 Teleportation Spell, it was because that spell had a margin of error.

Zhao Xu had also tried asking why she did not simply use the Level 9 Gate of Another World.

The answer was that although Mystra and the Floating City used Mythal-like Legendary Spells to block teleportation and similar methods, only people with marks like her could receive an exemption.

But even with that exemption, a spell like Gate of Another World, which could travel directly from another plane, was still highly sensitive and would be placed on a monitoring list.

Antinoa did not want people asking her every day why she had traveled from one place to another, so she gave up on it.

Back then, Zhao Xu had foolishly asked why Greater Teleportation would not be detected.

The answer he received was that anything placed on the monitoring list had to be investigated. Greater Teleportation could not travel across planes, and its prerequisite was familiarity with the destination. Since it shared an origin with the Teleportation Spell and was used by too many people, it was not subject to review.

In other words, if they kept at it, they might as well stop allowing teleportation altogether.

Only then did Zhao Xu realize why, after his Wizard classmate had mastered the Third-level Spell Phantom Steed at Level 5, his feet had never touched the ground again.

It turned out Wizards had inherited their laziness from the same lineage.