I can’t believe I’m doing this again.
When I hastily quit the game back then—liquidating my currency and dumping all my gear—the friction that broke out with my guildmates is something I’d rather not revisit.
Unable to reveal the pathetic family mess behind it, I became a full-fledged traitor who’d turned his back on the entire guild.
Everyone I’d played with then… by now they must all be in their late twenties or thirties.
They’re probably too busy with job hunting and real life to care about games. The players who’d shared Eraha Online’s early days with me have either moved on to other titles or are living their own lives, unable even to recall some long-ago “named” player.
“…”
Thinking of that era made Yeonjun’s chest tighten.
The time when he shone brightest, the spring of his youth that would never come again, was frozen in 2012.
Memories may remain in the past, but people must live the present and press toward the future.
Thirty-one-year-old Seong Yeonjun is a man living a different life from the Seong Yeonjun of his early twenties.
The fans who’d trailed Ignis everywhere, those who’d flooded server chat and the forums with bulletins of Ignis’s victories, have all taken different forks in life.
Hoo…
Arriving home on autopilot, Yeonjun slumped into the chair of his rented studio that obtained with the nest egg he’d only just scraped together and powered on the tower.
He opened OpenGames’ main site and clicked Eraha Online, realizing it was truly his first approach as a user in ten years.
As a GM he’d run test data until two years ago in QA, so in truth the post-reboot UI was oppressively familiar.
They haven’t tweaked the UI one bit in two years.
With a snort he typed in his user ID and password, and sure enough a notice popped up saying the account had been placed in dormancy.
Mimicking the expression of the ugly male default avatar shown under the notice, he grimaced when his own face flashed in the blacked-out screen that appeared for the security prompt.
After slogging through a host of annoying steps, he finally logged in, only to be greeted by that accursed ID.
(Nacht) Ignis Lv 80 (Flamer)
Considering the current cap was 140, that was a quaint little level. The game had opened with a cap of 70 and raised it by ten every major patch, seven times in all.
Just thinking of grinding that again felt daunting, but…
Still better than starting from level one.
Starting fresh from one seemed hopelessly far off. And part of the reason he chose to log in on Ignis instead of rolling a new character was a faint hope that maybe one or two acquaintances from the past might still be around.
Probably no one, but if even one remained… Half fearful, half nostalgic, he stepped into Eraha Online and was immediately shunted to the login-queue screen.
[System: Welcome back to Eraha Online, where your story becomes legend!]
[System: “Returnee” benefits have been applied due to long absence.]
Well… a returnee tag was obvious. Logging in on my own account as a user—not QA—was truly the first time since I cashed out and bolted. Heart thumping, he opened his friends list first.
[Registered Friends] [41/250]
As expected, not a single green light. Every name was gray.
Eraha’s friend system worked like most SNSs: one-sided adding was allowed, but if the other party blocked you, you could no longer see their status or profile.
When a relationship soured, one side would block and then unblock to erase the name from both lists.
There were only two reasons a name vanished:
- The person deleted the character.
- The person blocked you.
A list that had once been stuffed to the 150-friend limit now held only 41…
How many people blocked me, exactly?
He’d disappeared one day without explanation. He sold all his gear, converted all his gold to cash, and ran so becoming a betrayer was inevitable.
Still, he’d had his reasons. Now he could brush it off as ancient history, but back then it felt like the world was ending.
The comfortable life he’d believed would support him for at least another decade collapsed.
His sister, who’d never worked part-time, became head of the family and he had to graduate fast and earn money.
If he’d kept thinking about gaming, he would have been garbage. Circumstances were unavoidable, but seeing the outcome spelled out like this wasn’t pleasant. He’d rather believe all hundred-plus friends had simply deleted their characters.
Given the cramped 250-friend cap, etiquette dictated that if you freed space you blocked then unblocked to wipe your name from the other list, so maybe they hadn’t all blocked him maliciously.
Still… he hadn’t expected only this many to remain. He’d thought he was pretty famous, pretty well liked. Was that just delusion? A bitter taste filled his mouth.
Perhaps leaving forty names from ten years ago in a mere 250-slot list was amazing, yet seeing every one gray meant they’d abandoned the game, lingering as dormant ghost accounts. They’d moved to newer titles or were just too busy living.
He shrugged, chasing away the regret.
He hadn’t planned on asking anyone for help anyway. If he saw a familiar name, he might have said sorry. That was all. He gave a wry smile at the one guildmate still in his friend list.
[Offline]
- [Emu]
Holding a grudge over the siege wager, Emu had grumbled every time he saw him and sworn to carry that resentment until Bishop’s performance was nailed into a coffin.
Leaving Yeonjun on his list alone proved he hadn’t been joking. Back then, the first director had appeared at a community event on a Bishop character, a class Emu despised, vowing to hold the grudge till server shutdown.
Now that they were on the third director, the joke was meaningless…
Reflexively picturing the current director, Chief Joo, Yeonjun clenched his fist.
If contract killing were legal in Korea, I’d spend a year’s salary just to have that bastard’s head.
Grinding his teeth, he shook his head.
Unfortunately, murder was illegal, so to “take off Chief Joo’s head” metaphorically he needed another method.
If he melted naturally among the player base and dug around, controversies might pop up like buried sweet potatoes. First priority: adjust to the revamped game.
Closing the friend window, he opened his status and instantly cringed at the pitiful condition.
Class: [Flamer] Lv 80
Race: Male Kiran [Change Appearance]
Title: [Returnee]
Item Level: Lv 160
What’s the average item level these days… He meant to inspect some random nearby player, only to remember where he’d logged out last and burst out laughing.
Right… I parked myself in some deserted place to meet a buyer for RMT.
This was a field players around level 50 passed through briefly while clearing main quests. No powerful mobs, no zone boss, no special quests. It was so deserted you’d be lucky to see an ant crawling.
Even back then it had been a forgotten map. It was the same now.
He was about to click “Return to Town” when a dot, someone riding a sky-pet, grew larger, heading straight toward him.
“What the…?”
Maybe a newbie lost his way?
Eraha’s community endlessly debated whether veteran over-care for newbies was good or bad, so Yeonjun’s reflex was to think How do I signal I’m not a lost newbie? His mind raced.
Pretend to be doing something. He slammed the fuzzy-remembered hotkey to switch into Gathering/Crafting mode—Tab.
Fwoosh—
With a wardrobe-change effect, his twenty-something male avatar appeared completely naked save for a basic sickle in his right hand.
“Argh!”
Because he’d sold all his gathering gear, enchanted and protected. to RMT buyers, his gathering load-out was now just the starting sickle. The sudden Kiran-male full-nudity show made the white dragon flying at him screech to a halt midair.
“Damn it, this is crazy. I’m gonna get reported.”
He fumbled open his inventory, trying to throw on any clothing, but all remaining outfits were combat-only, trade-locked enchants he couldn’t equip in gathering mode. Nothing else? A robe? Starter clothes?
Panicking, he finally found a rag-tier junk garment, threw it on, and tried to run. There was no real need, but nerves make your hands clumsy. His right hand fat-fingered the torso slot in the status window once more.
“Aaack!”
The rag he’d just donned came off, and as he hastily went to re-equip it, sweat slicked his fingertips. At that moment, the same finger mis-clicked again, dropping the robe to the ground, his other hand flailing the mouse and bumping the spacebar so that his underwear-clad avatar leapt grandly into the sky.
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