Teleportation was one of the few systems of Blue Sky that I still couldn't get used to completely. Although there were some small differences between each person's experience, what I experienced was minor dizziness, and they said that it was more or less a bug from Real Mode. Considering that, there were talks about the dangers of those who used the feature, but as there was no case of anyone dying or acquiring serious illness from it, the talk subsided.
In any case, I endured the minor dizziness and arrived at the sky castle. As the only possible methods to travel to the sky castle were either by having a mage cast a 'Fly' buff on you or by using the teleportation circle, there really was no other way for me to get there.
As I had no real reason to visit the place again other than the first time I logged in, this was technically my second time visiting the place.
[Warning! Approximately 30% of Sky Castle's durability had been exhausted. If the castle is not repaired quickly, the outer appearance will change and penalties will start applying.]
Seeing that the Sky Castle was demanding things the moment I stepped in like a baby crying for food, I facepalmed in annoyance. I mean, you had to pay a maintenance fee to repair even the smallest shack in some random corners of the territory, so just because it was a sky castle didn't mean that I could avoid paying such things.
[Open Map!]
As I know that there's no use complaining about such things to myself, I spoke out the shortcut command like I was trying to console a baby. As I did so, a 3D model map appeared in the air like a hologram. It had the model of the castle on a smaller scale, and it showed the cross-section of the building in clear detail. Not only that, it detailed where each room was located and what use they were for, so it acted as navigation as well.
Impressed by the details, I went 'Oho, I see…' as I looked over the huge scale of the castle as well as its numerous services and equipment that it had, then realized an important fact.
It wasn't exactly an amazing fact, but for now, empty spaces had occupied most of the space within the Sky Castle. Around 75% of the building was empty, while the rest of 25% was mostly used for purposes of storage, which made me realize just how uselessly large and spacious the castle was.
However, having this much empty space wasn't strictly a bad thing. Thinking of it in a slightly different way, it meant that there was enough space for roughly a medium-sized guild to move their whole operation inside here. The castle may be floating in the sky, but its scale was similar in size to those of average castles within the cities.
"Should I lend it out or something?"
I had a feeling that I was wasting away that space. But it wasn't like I was the same person as my past self, and it was obvious that if I were to do that, the place would start to get rowdy and noisy as well as having multiple problems occur every day. Since I didn't really like having more burden put on myself and I didn't particularly need a lot of money, I shook my head.
And so I looked for the castle maintenance room which was the original reason I had opened up the castle map for. The maintenance room was like a home office for the castle, and was where you could check on the status of the castle as well as upgrade or build new facilities inside the building. That was what I heard from the TV when it went through feature update information in the past.
As someone who considered every little thing related to Blue Sky very important, I couldn't forget even such a small detail.
Even if that wasn't the case, buildings of a certain size always have a similar system built into them so it wasn't that hard to come to that conclusion.
"Looks like it's here."
It was extremely easy to find the maintenance room as it was located right at the center of the building.
[Map Locked]
As I had found my goal and direction, I got rid of the map and followed the hallway down.
Rumble…
Hearing the sudden sound of rumble, I turned my gaze outside of the window. The sky that was clear and blue just moments ago was now filled with dark clouds all around.
Far out in the distance, an endless stretch of dark clouds marched forward. It always amazed me how the seasonal changes and weather forecasts are completely the same as the real-life counterpart. Sometimes it makes me think that the world in this game is better in some ways than the real one… The way some people say that your second life began once you played Blue Skys was no exaggeration.
Considering that it was still early morning and there were so many dark clouds, it seemed like it was going to rain all day long. Hearing the sounds of thunder that rang out occasionally and flashes of lightning confirmed my assumptions even more.
Tap, tap.
I was hearing sounds of occasional raindrops hitting the glass windowsill of the castle rooms. Soon the frequency of the sounds became more common until it finally became heavy rain outside.
Woosh…
With the sound of the rain being equivalent to that of waterfall sounds, the heavy rain obfuscated the vision all around like the whole sky was falling down.
Because of that, I stopped in my tracks to stare at the scenery.
Staring at the wide-open world where I couldn't even see beyond the horizon being doused with heavy rain was truly a sight to behold. It felt like a completely different dimension than seeing rain outside of the window while on a plane. On top of that, some of the dark clouds were close enough to the edges of the castle that it felt like I could almost reach it, making it look even more fantastical.
I was sure if I didn't have anything to do, I would have stayed here and kept staring outside.
"Ahh, I shouldn't just stand here like this."
Suddenly recalling that I had come here for a reason, I finally lifted up my foot and started moving down the hallway to the maintenance room again. Even during the walk I still often saw interesting things as I went down, but I reminded myself of the goal I had and kept it in my mind enough to finally reach the maintenance room.
Well, it was called a maintenance room, but you'd be wrong to think that the room was filled with all the latest technology and equipment. The only thing located in the maintenance room was a large magic circle with the mechanics that allowed the Castle to fly and move around, along with the corresponding artifacts as well as a giant mana stone that served as the power source.
Of course, since I had never seen a real maintenance room myself until now, my extremely high expectation was completely shot down.
"Eeek!"
Just as I was about to sigh in disappointment, I was so surprised by the sudden appearance of an unknown object that I screamed 'Argh!' out loud. I am definitely sure I yelled out 'Argh!' instead of 'Eeek.'
[Welcome, Miss Artoria! I'm Signus, the main system for the Sky Castle.]
Calming myself down, I looked carefully at the unknown object and saw that it was a 3-foot tall fairy AI that controlled the system. Though it had a similar appearance to the pet fairy, there was a clear difference as this particular one only exists within the residence.
"Nice to meet you."
However, the AI fairy also behaved like a human would just like the NPCs did in the game.
[Yes, nice to meet you, master!]
With an androgynous appearance which made it hard to figure out whether it was female or male and a neutral voice that didn't sound masculine or feminine, it was difficult to guess which gender the fairy was. Well, it doesn't matter, does it?
"Can I see the list of things that I can change?"
[Of course, master. As the official owner of the Sky Castle, you have the right to change every single setting.]
"All right, then give me a list please."
[First, you can change the location of the Castle. Second, you can change the armaments and equipment of the castle. Third, you can go through the maintenance of the castle. Fourth, you can adjust the type of the main system. Fifth, you can share the administrator rights, either all or partial, to whoever. Sixth, you can withdraw or deposit important items or gold. That is all.]
Seeing as how there were just six items in the list, it sounded small but as it had included the majority of the things you can change within the categories, so it didn't seem like a big problem.
"Third one first, please!"
I did need to withdraw some money, but since I needed to do some maintenance first, I asked for the third option.
[Command received. Master, currently the cost for repairs of the castle is estimated at 500,000 gold. You are able to pay it using the gold that's stored within the castle. Will you accept this transaction? Additionally you can adjust the usage of commodities for the castle, and if you set up an automatic payment, the cost for the repairs of the castle will be automatically deducted from the gold amount that is stored within the castle.]
I was suspicious of the fact that the cost for repairing the castle was only 500,000 gold, but then realized that the amount was definitely not a small amount of money compared to how much I usually had in the past, making me crack a bitter smile in the process.
"Accept payment and turn on auto-accept for future maintenance."
[Acknowledged. The payment will be automated starting from now. Is there anything else?]
Signus' businesslike way of talking got on my nerves a bit. I heard that by changing the settings of the system, you can change their way of speaking however you want. But I remembered that I had one more thing that I needed to do.
"Open up the sixth category please."
[Acknowledged. Master, the current amount of gold you have stored in the castle is 4.2 bil gold. You also have 326 items under special management. Would you like to see a more detailed list of the items?]
"Items under special management?"
I was about to withdraw the gold when I unexpectedly heard about items under special management, so I asked with a suspicious tone.
[Yes. They're items that are not part of the 3415 other types of normal items that can be freely deposited/withdrawn, but they are treated separately, stored within a secret safe. They consist of unique tier items at the lowest rarity level. Would you like to view it?]
"Ah, no need to right now."
326 different items. Even if I were to skim through them, it was still a huge list to go through. After thinking that I should try to look through them in details once I have some free time in the future, I considered the amount of money and thought that I wouldn't need to sell any of my items for real-life money to compensate for the cost of the blacksmith's order since I had plenty enough gold in storage. Considering the inflation that's happening in the real-life economy, it would actually be better to keep these items as valuable trade assets in the future instead.
"Can I withdraw 3 bil gold first?"
[3 bil gold. Although the amount can be withdrawn from your stored gold, the amount is too high. Would you like to transfer it to your gold card?]
A gold card is a type of 'Cashier's check', which was a system developed to hold huge quantities of gold. Even though each individual gold is small, it becomes physically impossible to carry above a certain threshold. Although there was a drawback that you needed to pay 5% tax to acquire one, it was definitely still a very useful and effective system.
"Yep."
[Understood. There will be a tax charge. I am currently connecting to the Central Bank DB, so please do not input any additional commands for a moment.]
The process didn't take too long to be completed.
[Gold card has been issued. Would you like to receive it? Yes / No.]
Of course, I chose yes.
"I'll be back next time."
[Yes, master…]
Finishing all I needed to do, I waved bye at Signus and left the maintenance room. It must be just my imagination that Signus sounded a little sad in their tone for a moment.
Arriving at the London city residence, I sent a whisper to a user named Jasmine.
[Warning! You currently have whispers blocked.]
"Ah, right!"
Thankfully if it wasn't for the warning that came out just in time, I would have been labeled as a senseless user who sends whispers even though I had set the whispers to be blocked on my end. With a simple setting change, I unblocked whispers.
[Are you there?]
I sent a whisper with a cautious tone of voice.
[Currently I am busy with my work and am unable to connect to the game, so if you have business with me please leave a message or call me on my phone.]
Rather than an answer, I received a user-set auto-reply instead.
"Ugh."
My mountain of anticipation that had built until now had completely collapsed. Of course there was no rule that the person must be connected to the game 24 hours a day, and it was my mistake to assume that was the case, but it was not enough to comfort my feelings of collapsed anticipation.
I've requested whispers two more times afterwards but their status was still set to offline. If they simply blocked all whispers, I would have sent a premium message that gets to them no matter what or commissioned a 'location trace' to find where they are, but since they are offline, what else could I do?
"No other choice then."
In the end, I decided to give up for now. Then I thought about teleporting again back to the Sky Castle. I was thinking that if there is nothing I can do, then I'll just spend time looking over my items.
[Ellie!]
But I couldn't even begin doing just that because of the whisper that came into my ear.
The number of people who would whisper to me was only two in the whole game. On top of that, there was only one who would call me by a nickname.
Yes, it was Katalina.
[Is it over already? That was much faster than I thought.]
It hadn't been that long since Katalina had left for the guild meeting. Considering how long most guild meetings last, it wasn't an exaggeration to say that she finished in record time.
[Fufu, nope. I'm still in the meeting but I'm just sneaking a whisper to you right now. It seems like the meeting will take longer than I thought.]
As opposed to my assumption, she said it will take longer than usual. I imagined that the agendas of the meeting were very aligned with each of the member's interests, so it will take a long time to solve everyone's wishes.
[How is it progressing? I hope it's not just spinning your tires in place as the talks keep going round and round in the same place.]
[Wow! You're really on the money. That's right!]
Tsk, I couldn't help but click my tongue. This is why I'm always annoyed at the thought of politics. When they have an enemy in front of them that needs to be taken out, it would be fine to argue about things after taking them down, but instead they just keep talking on and on about all the other things even before fighting them…
[So you're saying it's going to take a long time… Is that why you whispered to me?]
[No, I was just bored. Hehe.]
So she used me as a way to relieve boredom?
[I think you honestly just want me to be there with you. Am I right?]
[Fufufufu.]
She definitely does want that, doesn't she? Katalina only kept laughing in return, but I didn't feel annoyed at her for doing that.
[Should I go?]
[Yeah yeah!]
[Or not?]
[Aw…] This is fun. I wanted to continue a bit more but it looked like she's going to get angry, so I barely stopped myself from continuing.
[Where is the guild meeting location?]
[Woo! You're really coming, right? We're in Birmingham city!]
Birmingham was the same size as Busan in Korea, as the 2nd largest city and located 160 km to the northwest of London. In real life, it was an industrial city that thrived on the production of high-quality coal and iron-based metalworks. Interestingly, the game also reflected this geographical factor by having the in-game city earning most of its profits through the production and sales of iron and coal.
The likeness of big famous cities was reflected in the world of Blue Sky, and Birmingham was one of these cities that had its geographical location reflected in the game.
Currently, the guild that controls Birmingham was the 'Empire' guild. Appropriate to their name as they are the top 4 of the 8 great guilds in the game (Volcano, Shining, Chaos, Empire), with 'Terror' as their guild leader, who was 4th highest-ranking users in the whole server.
[But only the invited can get inside of the castle, right?]
I was sure that the ones most likely to be invited were generally guild leaders, vice-guild leaders, or users of that caliber. On top of that, they would be guilds with at least a small amount of land in their ownership. As a rare top-ranked user who had yet to join any guilds, I had a good enough reason to be invited, but it would be awkward for me to whisper Terror directly right now and ask for an invitation to the castle.
[Of course.]
But Katalina answered as if it wasn't a big deal. Before I could even reply, she continued.
[But we have the Rings of Promise after all. A useful function should be used if it exists, right?]
[Ahh…]
It seemed like Katalina had planned to bring me to the meeting location through this method the whole time. I was reminded that aside from the good stat improvements in the ring, there was a great function on top of that.
I'm sure I can only use it once a day or something.
There were no limitations on who could summon who. What that meant was that I could be transferred to where Katalina was and vice versa.
In other words, if there was any place where one of the two people was restricted from entering, using the ring could bypass that restriction, which made me understand just how useful the legendary rings were.
[First of all, it's a little awkward to summon you right here, so I'll summon you once I'm outside in the balcony when it's break time later. Be on standby and when the summoning message comes up, please press yes. You do know what happens if you accidentally press no, do you?]
She's threatening me with those last words, right?
[Do I?]
I dug into her words as a jest.
[Hehehe…]
Katalina covered up her threat with a laugh. I knew it, that was her intention.
Though it wasn't like I didn't want to join the guild meeting. In any case, I had accumulated a lot of debt towards the Shining and Chaos guild, so I had to pay it back. The only thing left was to choose whether I join in as a mercenary or in an official capacity.
First I needed to see how the meeting was going.
[Katalina has summoned you. Would you like to accept?]
"Yep."
Not long after, I heard the system message and accepted it without any thought right away. Soon, a blue magic circle spread out on the ground around my feet and covered my whole body in white light.
It was similar to teleport magic, but there was a subtle difference.
"Are you here now?"
As the pool of light dissipated, Lina greeted me with a smile. Even though we only parted with each other for a little bit, she seemed extremely happy to see me. Was the meeting really that boring and painful to her?
"Yeah. That's strange, there's not a single person on the balcony."
Looking around the huge balcony, I saw that not a single soul was standing around here.
"Hmm, well it's because they're all inside arguing about their profit and whatnot, so they probably don't even have time to get some fresh air."
Katalina's expression looked uninterested, but her tone of voice had thorns in it.
'Looks like the situation isn't going that well.'
I realized that coming to her without making a fuss was the best decision. It seemed like the situation was much worse than I thought.
"Now, let's go inside. Colin and many other officers were all excited once they knew that you were coming after all."
"Huh?"
I mean, they were not even related to me as a friend or anything, so why would they be happy I was coming?
"You, you didn't make contact with any of those guys after the meeting that day, right?"
"You know better than me, don't you?"
Honestly, considering that she was stuck right next to me every moment we played the game together, it was unbelievable that she would even ask that, which was why I snapped back at her and she responded by sticking her tongue out.
"Hehe, I guess so. In any case, they're just desperate to meet you since they want to have the chance to talk to you but could never find any. Well, even so, I will get in anyone's way if they try to be close to you."
For some reason, it was me who got scared instead.
"So why are you saying you'll introduce me to them?"
"They'll try to bother you anyway so I have to make sure I am next to you at all times so they don't do anything weird."
Hearing Katalina speak as if it was completely obvious, I was completely flabbergasted and couldn't think of anything to say.
And so we opened the glass door on the balcony, headed inside the hall and I was surprised by how completely occupied each table was.
Even guilds with almost no reputation were here. Although the number of people was relative to the size of each guild, there were still dozens of guilds altogether so the hall was completely filled with people.
I guess the only difference was that perhaps due to the fact that they were all in the upper echelon of Blue Sky users, it wasn't noisy like the flea markets.
"Now, come over here."
As I stood there completely lost in mind, Katalina pulled my hand and headed towards the table where it had the sign 'Volcano' on it.
"Who is that, and why is she coming together with the guild master of Volcano?""I've never seen her before."
"Yeah, I can't tell who she is because her ID is private."
As I was currently wearing ordinary clothes instead of a hunting outfit, there was no one that could recognize me even though my face was revealed. I guess I should be thankful, but I couldn't do anything about how everyone's gaze was fixed on us due to how famous Katalina was.
Finally, as we arrived at the table where officers of the Volcano guild were seated, a number of members that had met me before came to greet me.
"Ah! You're really here. It's nice to meet you, I'll introduce myself again. I'm Colin."
The young girl with impressionable cute eyes gave a fresh smile towards me, and I also greeted her back with a smile as well.
"Nice to meet you."
"Nice to meet you as well."
Using that as leverage, the user named Anubis and Joker who I had met before also came to greet me as I walked towards the one seat that was left empty either coincidentally or intentionally next to Katalina.