About Meeting a Dad in a Game

"To be honest, after playing games for so long, this was the first time I'd ever felt like I'd been scammed."

The Minotaur grumbled to the Tyrannosaurus Warrior as he mined with a pickaxe slung over his shoulder.

"What kind of NPC charges money to give out a quest?"

"That is a little odd," the Tyrannosaurus Warrior agreed before offering his own opinion. "But in my view, that isn't the problem."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"Look at the quest panel."

The Minotaur opened the quest panel in confusion.

Other than the quest issued by ???, there was nothing else on the panel.

"Look at the quest description. Didn't it leave out the reward?"

The Minotaur froze.

Having played countless games over the years, he immediately caught on. "It really did. Could this quest be more than just mining?"

"That's right. This is definitely only a prerequisite quest."

The Tyrannosaurus Warrior said with great certainty, "When we played big single-player titles before, the characters we played were protagonists who already had roles in the game's story. But Kingdom of Heavenly Principles is different. The official promotion said it's an exploration game. To the NPCs here, we're travelers—we're strangers. They can't possibly trust us right away. So what we're doing now is earning the NPCs' trust."

After listening to the Tyrannosaurus Warrior's lengthy explanation, the Minotaur finally understood.

"So that's how it is. Brother, how can you analyze it so clearly? What do you do in real life?"

"I'm just an ordinary gamer."

The Tyrannosaurus Warrior replied without the slightest flourish.

"All right, let's hurry up and mine more ore. Maybe we can even raise the NPC's Favorability."

You have chosen to submit ore (100/10)

Confirm?

"Confirm."

"."

Linton stared at the two huge bags of ore before him and fell into thought.

Were players these days all this enthusiastic?

He hadn't hinted at anything. He had even forgotten to list the quest reward because he was unfamiliar with issuing quests for the first time, yet they had actually overfulfilled the quest.

"Thank you for your help. This is a small reward. Please accept it."

Quest completed

Rewards obtained: Gold x1000, Character EXP x100

The Minotaur stared silently at the reward for a moment, then forced down his voice. "That really is a fucking small reward!"

The Tyrannosaurus Warrior hadn't expected the reward to be so stingy either. He could only stare eagerly at Linton, waiting for the follow-up quest to trigger.

In truth, they had misunderstood Linton.

In his previous life, when most players played Kingdom of Heavenly Principles, what they complained about most was how painfully slow character leveling was.

A normal monster only gave a few dozen experience points, while an elite monster gave just a hundred or so. Even higher-level bosses only gave five hundred.

Linton was currently level eighteen, still considered to be in the beginner stage, yet the experience needed to level up had already reached twelve thousand. In other words, he needed to kill at least twenty-five boss monsters to level up.

That alone would have been fine, but the problem was that monsters needed time to respawn!

And that was only the early game. At levels eighty or ninety, when a single level required hundreds of thousands or even millions of experience points, just thinking about it was enough to make one despair.

Whenever Kingdom of Heavenly Principles released a survey, players asked for this to be changed, but the developers never offered an explanation.

Fortunately, character level was not especially crucial. As long as one's controls were good enough, some bosses could be soloed without taking damage even at level one. Since it did not greatly harm the game experience, the players eventually let the matter go.

The Minotaur and Tyrannosaurus Warrior had only just switched over from other games. Compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands of experience points characters could gain elsewhere, Linton's quest reward did indeed seem rather shabby.

But Linton felt wronged too.

He had already set the quest experience to the maximum amount he could give.

Mining quests were among the simplest quests in the game, essentially daily quests.

And daily quests only gave one hundred experience points, no matter where one went.

If he could, Linton would have loved to give more, because he could receive one-fifth of the experience reward he gave out himself. The more he rewarded them, the more he gained too. It was a win-win situation—who wouldn't love that?

Unfortunately, the system had ganked him and would not let him give more.

He could give more gold, but gold was not very important to players in the early stages. Besides, this was a beta that would have its data wiped, so giving more would be useless and would only let the system swallow it for nothing.

So, to keep his money from going down the drain, Linton had to make another move.

Meeting their expectant gazes, he said, "You two travelers from afar, your journey will not end here, will it?"

"Here it comes!"

The Tyrannosaurus Warrior and the Minotaur's eyes lit up at the same time—though the sight of a red-skinned pompadoured man and a blue-skinned Minotaur both glowing green-eyed was rather bizarre.

The Tyrannosaurus Warrior's mind raced. "If I'm not mistaken, this should be the turning point of the quest. We should have two choices: one is to continue traveling, and the other is to stay here."

"Which one do we pick?"

The Minotaur had long since given up thinking.

Why use his brain when a master was leading him?

"Pick the first one!" After thinking for a moment, the Tyrannosaurus Warrior answered, "Since our identities are travelers, we naturally can't make a choice that goes against our character settings. If we choose the second option, he might suspect our identities, lowering his trust in us and preventing the second quest from triggering."

The Minotaur admired the expert's analysis so much he was practically prostrate. "Right, right, right! So how should we answer him?"

The Tyrannosaurus Warrior smiled faintly. "This is only the first stop on our journey. Of course we will not stop chasing the wind."

Exactly right, brother!

The corners of Linton's mouth beneath his hood were nearly twisting into a grin. "In that case, your journey will inevitably encounter all kinds of danger. As it happens, I have many items here that can increase your strength. Would you like to take a look?"

"Look at this skill book. You're a mage, right? How can a mage not know the essential Fireball Spell for lighting cigarettes? Get one. Not 114514, not 8848, only 998. Take the skill book home today."

"And for this, uh, guest—look at the weapons I have here. They're all top-quality goods, also only 998 each. All made by master craftsmen, quality guaranteed!"

[???] has opened a personal shop for you

"Huh?"

The two players were both dumbfounded.

This was a little different from what they had imagined.

Why did it feel so familiar, like they had arrived at a souvenir shop in a tourist attraction?

Yet when they saw the goods in the shop—

The Tyrannosaurus Warrior deleted the title of the game review he had drafted in his mind without hesitation.

"How Scummy Can a Hidden NPC Really Be?" (X)

"About Meeting a Dad in a Game" (√)