"Ugh! World of Warcraft just keeps getting less and less fun... Tch!"
Li Wei sighed heavily. He was a hardcore World of Warcraft player who had been playing since the closed beta. Because he had started early, had plenty of friends, and, most importantly, had patience and persistence, his main rogue on Region 1 had been among the first to get almost all the best gear. By now, there was basically nothing left for him to pursue in any dungeon. He was bored stiff, only occasionally helping friends out by filling in as a powerful DPS... Luckily, he could still play a few arena matches afterward.
After all, his years of experience had given him ** positioning, solid skills, and a deep understanding of his abilities, while his gear was almost good enough to crush his opponents outright. Although he had gone through several groups of teammates, he had always managed to maintain a high win rate. As for other things, like running dungeons, they were as tiring as going to work. The game had also undergone several major changes, none of them what he had hoped for. He always felt it was becoming more of a fast-food game... He hated it!
Take the old talent system, for example. It gave players a great deal of freedom, and every different way of allocating points could produce a god. Now it was a bit mindless...
Or those days when hunters didn't even know what kiting was, and still dutifully lined up to camp Humар and Lupos in Darkshire...
He missed the days when he farmed humanoid monsters exclusively, staying up all night just to get linen and wool, then bringing his own materials and buying thread to make eight-slot bags...
And those days when level 45 was the cap, and you could dominate with a Scarlet set and individual pieces of blue gear from Zul...
But as wave after wave of his comrades left the game, even someone as patient and persistent as him had begun to grow tired of it... Yet what could he do if he left World of Warcraft?
Although he had a respectable job in real life and had long since married and had children, his love of games always kept him from letting go. Almost all his spare time, aside from what he spent with his wife and children, went to playing Warcraft...
His wife had once said that games were his first wife, while she could only be the second...
Fortunately, as a longtime homebody, he had his own principles and sense of responsibility, so he did quite a lot for his family too. It was just that, outside his family, games had become his only hobby.
After playing World of Warcraft, everything else was trash, especially those domestic cash-grab games, which he wouldn't give a second glance. At a loss, he suddenly remembered that a friend had recently mentioned that a new server, Vol'jin, was opening in Region 3 that year and had asked him to join in starting fresh. The friend was from the game, of course. What real-life friends could a shut-in like him have when he never went out? He hadn't paid attention at the time, but now that he thought about it, why not just make a character on the new server for a change of pace? Maybe he could even give someone a "surprise"?
So he eagerly pulled up the Region 3 list and found the full server... Vol'jin!
All right! He had been a rogue for so long; why not try a completely different class this time? A mage?
A mage sounded good! That was the one... So he carefully picked a face and hairstyle. Actually, human males all had Western-looking features, which he really didn't care for... Then he... had to queue?
Damn! As expected of a new server, there was actually a queue? It felt like it had been ages since he'd had to queue for his Region 1 character. What the hell was with being more than 700th in line?
Fine, he'd look at something else! He'd leave it in the queue for now... The estimated wait was two hours. Another round of curses!
Still, Master Li was in a pretty good mood. He hadn't queued in so long that it actually gave him a familiar feeling from when the servers had first opened. It was kind of nice, wasn't it?
In high spirits, he clicked open Blizzard's news page...
Hearthstone?
The webpage was full of promotional posts for Hearthstone. Blizzard had made a card game too, and it seemed to be very popular lately. But Master Li never played card games and had no interest in them. Even so, he had downloaded this one early on. Given his boundless passion for World of Warcraft, anything related to Warcraft could catch his interest...
He had even completed the quest that rewarded the Steed mount for playing Hearthstone!
Since they were both made by Blizzard, the Hearthstone development team had surely wanted to take advantage of World of Warcraft's success. They had made it so that logging into Hearthstone would reward players with the special Hearthstone Steed mount in World of Warcraft... You couldn't buy it!
That was quite appealing to Young Master Li, wasn't it? Besides, even that crappy Heart of the Dragon Aspects mount cost 120! So he had downloaded Hearthstone overnight, then... logged in, played a few casual matches, and gone back to World of Warcraft to try out the horse...
Since he had nothing to do while waiting in the queue anyway, why not give Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft another try?
He remembered it being pretty fun. The minions he summoned were all familiar faces from World of Warcraft. Sir Li just thought that, as a card game, it was a little too simple, and he couldn't show off his exceptional mechanics and ** positioning...
Logging into Hearthstone, he remembered that he had just unlocked the Priest class back then. The class was nothing like the shining paragon he had imagined; many of its skills involved stealing cards. When he had faced a Priest on hard difficulty, the bastard had stolen so many of his cards that it was pure torture... Fine, this time he'd figure out how to play Priest...
Come to think of it, Blizzard's launcher was shared by several games!
There was World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Hearthstone. Over there, his brand-new little mage was still queuing for Vol'jin in World of Warcraft's Region 3. Over here, Sir Li couldn't resist clicking open Hearthstone... His old, beat-up computer began to roar like it was dying, and then... that was it!
Nothing happened. The world had simply lost one bored homebody!
His head hurt!
Sir Li felt like he was dying. His head hurt as if a herd of rampaging kodos had trampled through it, and the pain was unbearable! He forced his eyes open, but only managed to glance at his surroundings before passing out again... Fortunately, it looked like he was still on Earth. The moon in the sky looked pretty familiar, didn't it?
He had no idea how much time passed. When he woke up again, he realized he seemed to have had a very, very long dream...
In the dream, his name was Aigel Stoke, a child from a poor family, but people always called him... "Aige the Coward"!
His family was poor and his parents were honest folk. They had only a small plot of land in a remote part of Northshire in Elwynn Forest, and barely managed to live off what they produced. He also had an older brother and a younger sister, and the family of five scraped by on the grain their fields yielded.
For as long as he could remember, he had rarely eaten his fill. The taxes collected by the noble officials were far too high, and the various other levies had also been more than the impoverished family could bear... His younger sister had died young!
His older brother?
When Aige was in his early teens, a noble had come to collect taxes. His brother, exhausted from spending the whole night irrigating the fields, had failed to hold back a startled, scrawny horse, which had charged into a noble's child. The nobleman had broken one of his brother's legs on the spot... From then on, the Stoke family had half a laborer less and one more burden, making their hardship even worse.
He had grown up accustomed to a life of hardship. At twelve, he had been sent to the Carl family as part of their taxes, forced to become a noble child's attendant... Incidentally, Carl Frank's father was the very noble who had ordered his brother's leg broken back then.
Did he hate them?
Of course he did! He could only bury his grudge over his brother deep in his heart. The Stoke family, utterly unable to resist the nobility, could only endure in silence, endure... until death!
In the more than ten years Aige could remember, he had suffered every kind of torment at the hands of the Frank family. Carl was about his age, but extremely cruel and petty, always beating and scolding little Aige. If Aige hadn't more or less been considered her property, he would probably have been killed long ago...
He never had enough to eat or warm clothes to wear, only a single layer of clothing to ward off the cold. On ordinary days, he was lucky to have black bread. Yet because he often had to go out with his young mistress, he had to wear a somewhat more presentable linen outfit whenever they went out... Carl also never hit him in the face, because she had to preserve the Frank family's image!
This time, simply because he, Aige, had refused to carry out her order to strip a little girl, Carl had beaten him with her own hands for a long time... Perhaps because the girl had gotten away, Carl had been extremely dissatisfied and hit a little too hard...
It should be noted that Aige had been given the "fine name" of "Aige the Coward" by others precisely because he had never dared fight back when Carl beat or scolded him, and because she had forced him to do quite a few bad things...
Everyone knew Aige was a dog kept by Carl, one who didn't dare utter so much as a word no matter how he was beaten or scolded... When he was young, what had happened to his brother, the nobility's power, and his parents' cowardice had stripped him of nearly all his fighting spirit!
This time, Carl's intended victim had been a pretty, innocent little girl. The bastard had wanted Aige to help her rape the girl! With the girl's honor and innocence at stake, Aige had finally stood up for himself for once. Of course, all he had done was cover the girl's escape... As for directly resisting, he'd only do that if he wanted his whole family to suffer!
This sort of thing was all too common in Northshire: an improper action by one family member could lead to an entire commoner family being killed by a noble... Resist? The noble lords had whole squads of fully armed infantry as accomplices. How could anyone resist?
If he didn't resist, only one person would die! Once he resisted, his whole family would be slaughtered! That was the cruel reality!
Before, they had all been young, and Carl hadn't been very strong. Even when she beat him viciously, she wouldn't beat him to death. But now the two of them had grown up together and were both about seventeen or eighteen. Carl had really struck hard several times, and little Aige's body had already been weak, so he had died just like that...
Dead was dead. A noble who beat one or two commoners to death didn't need to offer any explanation at all. At most, they only had to pay the local government a small fine, perhaps ten copper coins, or perhaps even less...
Aige the Coward was dead! Without anything new or any stir at all... He had died just like that!
He was a noble's property, and his family had no right to even ask about his body. Like a ragged sack, it was carried around at the whim of several vicious servants. Finally, it was casually tossed into a pit out in the wild...