The Tattered Scroll didn't have a glowing map marker or a convenient "Start Quest" button. It was just an item, inert and cryptic. Kage stood perfectly still in the quiet clearing, the bodies of the wolves already a distant memory, and he thought.
Item description: weathered parchment, script illegible. Insignia is the only clear element.
Most players would see this as a dead end. A piece of worthless flavor text. Kage saw it as a filter.
The scroll is not the clue. The scroll is the key to reading the clue.
His research had hinted at environmental puzzles. He opened his map. The clearing he was in stood at the edge of the [Grasping Woods], bordering a region marked as the "Murkwater Fen." A swamp.
He remembered a line from a developer's blog post about Crown of Destiny dynamic environments. "The world itself is a character. Pay attention to how it reacts to you, and how you react to it."
It was a long shot, but long shots were his specialty.
Kage moved, his path a straight line toward the bog. The air grew thick and heavy, smelling of damp earth and decay. The cheerful chirping of woodland birds gave way to the low croak of unseen frogs and the maddening buzz of swamp flies. The ground turned from firm soil to sucking mud.
He found a small pool of stagnant, mossy water. He paused, opened his inventory, and selected the scroll. He then held the virtual parchment close to the water's surface.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a faint glimmer of light traced lines across the scroll. The faded, illegible script slowly resolved into a single, spectral line of text.
Proceed through the swamp by way of the ancient stones.
[Quest Started: The Founder's Legacy]
Grade: Unique
Objective: Follow the path of Valerius, the benevolent king who liberated the land from tyranny and distributed his treasures to the worthy.
Kage's lips formed a thin, satisfied line. Satisfaction, yes, but laced with a pressure that tightened his chest, the weight of Elara's disappointed voice from that morning's call. Every puzzle solved was a step toward keeping the machines beeping.
The 'weeping ground' was the swamp. The 'fallen giants' had to be a landmark. He scanned the horizon. In the distance, half-submerged in the murky water, stood a circle of massive, moss-covered stones. They looked like colossal teeth jutting from the bog.
Other players were already there. A party of four, decked out in a mismatched collection of beginner gear, were bumbling around the stones.
"Maybe it's a sequence?" one of them shouted, a thin Mage with a twig. "Try hitting them in the order they appear in the sky!"
"What order? There are no constellations here!" a burly Warrior replied in frustration.
Noobs.
The party of four was treating the ancient stones like a faulty raid boss. One was literally hitting a rock with his sword, a durability-draining exercise in futility.
A DPS check on scenery.
The Mage was shouting about constellations, trying to brute-force a logic puzzle with random inputs. Pathetic.
Kage filtered out the noise. Their shouting, their wasted mana, the pinging of durability-loss notifications. All of it static. He focused on the data that mattered. The stones themselves. Seven of them. A loose, sloppy circle.
Except it wasn't sloppy.
An instinct, honed over a decade of breaking game systems, flared to life. The spacing was deliberate. The large, jagged stone off to the southeast. The cluster of four to the north. A single sharp one to the west. This layout had a purpose.
He pictured the insignia from the scroll, the image burned into his memory from hours of study. He overlaid that mental blueprint onto the stones in front of him.
It was a perfect match. The stones were the insignia, blown up to scale and rendered in mud and rock.
He read the layout in an instant. The large stone: the Talon. The four clustered together: the Broken Crown. The sharp western rock: the Beak. And the small, round stone in the center. The Hawk's Eye. The other party was trying to play the game without reading the patch notes.
A flicker of a thought crossed his mind, remembering the notification warning him about his low artistry stat.
An Artistry-based player might see this differently. Perhaps for them, the stones hum with a faint light, or the insignia appears as a spectral guide when they get close. An intuitive, artistic solution.
He smirked internally. But a puzzle with only one solution is bad design. There's always a back door. A path for pure logic. And that was the path he walked.
The layout was the map, but he still needed the activation sequence. He put himself in the tyrant's head. What was the story here? It was a narrative of power, told in stone.
First, the ambition. The vision. Then the strike. The grasp. Finally, the consolidation of the prize.
He waded into the bog, his boots making sucking sounds in the silt. He walked to the central stone. The Hawk's Eye. The vision. His palm rested on its cold, damp surface.
A low hum answered, the system acknowledging the correct input.
[Sequence Initiated 1/7]
One of the noobs shouted something. Irrelevant. Kage was already moving. He crossed to the western stone. The Beak. The strike. A second hum.
[Sequence 2/7].
Then, the long walk to the massive, jagged stone in the southeast. The Talon. The grasp.
[Sequence 3/7].
His path was a nonsensical zig-zag to the watching party. An exercise in bad pathing. To Kage, it was the only optimal route.
He approached the last four stones. The Broken Crown. He touched them methodically, one by one, like a player collecting the final pieces of a gear set.
[Sequence 4/7].
[Sequence 5/7].
[Sequence 6/7].
[Sequence 7/7].
With the final touch, all seven stones flared with a synchronized green light. The ground trembled, and the water in the bog began to churn violently. A system window flashed in front of Kage's vision.
[You have solved the riddle of the Sunken Stones.]
[You are the first player to do so.]
[As the world resonates with your solution, you are affected by [Riddle's Echo] for 5 minutes.]
[Riddle's Echo]
Type: Debuff
Duration: 5:00
Description: Puzzle solution registered. Interaction with related objects is temporarily disabled.
Effects:
Mechanism Lockout: Cannot interact with similar puzzle mechanisms for 5 minutes.
Reduced Detection: Enemy aggro radius slightly decreased while out of combat.
INT -5
[Due to the intelligence stat hitting 0, restrictions are placed upon you.]
[Informations will be simplified.]
For a fractional second, Kage tried to calculate the optimal pathing to the next objective and found his mental projection lagging by a fraction of a second.
He blinked.
I must account for this.
The thought itself felt... simpler than usual.
Before he could analyze it further, another window superimposed itself over his vision.
[Would you like your name, 'Kage', to be displayed in the Region Announcement?]
Kage's finger moved to the 'No' button without a flicker of hesitation.
Fame is a liability.
A known name is a target.
The best players are ghosts.
Immediately, a grandiose announcement echoed across the entire starting zone, written in shimmering gold letters in the sky for all to see.
[Regional Announcement: The ancient Riddle of the Sunken Stones has been solved by the player ****.]
His name was censored. A ripple of confusion and speculation immediately filled the region chat.
[Region Chat] Player9544: Whoa, someone solved a hidden puzzle already? I am still doing the Slime quest…
[Region Chat] SwordBoi_77: LOL who gets a region first and censors their name? What a weirdo.
[Region Chat] LilyPad: Maybe it's a GM testing things? Or a bug?
[Region Chat] Axemaster_Popo: The guy who did it was right here! Just walked up and touched them! His nick was Kage!
[Region Chat] 4Chill2Player0: yo @Player9544 equip a bow and tag the slimes before other players ez
[Region Chat] Numero: @Axemaster_Popo ye and my gf is The Goddess Sophie…
Kage ignored the chatter. He waded to the central plinth and picked up the reward.
[Sealed Stone Tablet]
Description: A proof of competence for the Founder's test.
He turned his back on the stones and the gawking players before the plinth had even begun to sink back into the water. The warrior took a half-step forward, arm outstretched as if to ask a question, but stopped, utterly dumbfounded.
They saw. Bad.
The simple, two-word assessment was all his debuffed mind offered. It was enough. He was already moving, leaving the liability behind.
[Quest Updated: The Founder's Legacy]
Grade: Unique
Objective: GO TO CAVE. CAVE IN MOUNTAIN. MOUNTAIN IS BIG ROCK WITH STEAM.
A cave. The clue was almost… insultingly direct?
Doesn't matter.
He opened his map. Just north of the swamp, bordering it, was a mountain range, the "Dragon's Tooth Peaks." Littered across its base were dozens of cave icons. Another filter. Which one?
MOUNTAIN IS BIG ROCK WITH STEAM.
He zoomed in on the map. Most of the caves were just black spots. But one, nestled in a hidden ravine off the main path, had a unique environmental marker next to it: "Geothermal Vents." Steam. The mountain was breathing.
He broke into a run. Time was now the most critical resource.
The entrance to the cave was exactly where he predicted it would be, tucked behind a waterfall and shielded by overgrown vines. No sane player would have found this by just wandering around. You had to know where to look.
The air inside was warm and carried the faint scent of sulfur. The quest objective updated as soon as he stepped in.
Objective: SLAY THE [Ancient Cave Bat].
It was probably a mini-boss. Kage drew his rusted sword. He adjusted his grip, his eyes scanning the darkness, his mind already cycling through the bat's probable attack patterns based on its name. 'Ancient' suggested slow but powerful attacks. 'Bat' suggested sonic abilities or life-draining skills.
He moved deeper into the cavern, his steps silent. The main chamber opened up before him, a vast grotto lit by phosphorescent moss. He saw his target.
And his heart, for the first time, skipped a beat.
The Ancient Cave Bat was already dead.
It lay in a crumpled heap on the cavern floor, a colossal creature with a wingspan of at least fifteen feet. Its leathery hide was riddled with clean, precise cuts. It wasn't the work of a clumsy party hacking away. It was the work of a master swordsman.
Kage's eyes darted around the chamber. Nothing. No one. He approached the corpse cautiously. A faint, ethereal shimmer pulsed around the bat's body.
The despawn timer.
[Despawn in 1:12]
His mind went into overdrive. The body was still here, which meant it had been killed recently. Despawn timers on mini-bosses were usually short. Five minutes, maybe ten at most.
He quickly checked his log. [World First: Riddle of the Sunken Stones] was still there. He glanced at his status bar. The [Riddle's Echo] debuff was still active, its timer a mocking red: 2:32.
The math didn't add up. It was a paradox.
I was the first to solve the stones. No one could have gotten the clue for this cave before me. So how can someone be ahead of me?
His internal monologue, usually a stream of cold logic, hit a wall. He scanned the area around the corpse, looking for any clue. A discarded potion bottle, scuff marks from a skill, anything. There was nothing. The kill was clean. The site was sterile.
A single player, he deduced. Not a guild. The damage is focused. They're efficient. But how?
His mind went still.
He wasn't angry. He wasn't frustrated. He was something far more dangerous.
He was focused.
He thought back to the system warning. Some quests and their clues may be locked for you.
He forced his mind to break from the linear path. The developers are smart. A single, linear "secret quest" is a bottleneck. It's poor design. A single person getting stuck would halt the entire event chain.
The logical solution? Multiple entry points.
My scroll started the quest chain. It led me from the wolves to the stones to this cave. But what if it wasn't the starting point? What if other high-level mobs in other parts of the starting zone dropped different clues, all leading to the same constellation of locations?
His path, started by the Alpha Wolf drop, was a logical path. It required analysis and combat. But what if there was another way?
What if his rival didn't dump his stats so ruthlessly? What if they had found a different clue, one Kage was literally incapable of seeing?
The thought solidified in his mind with the force of a revelation. This wasn't a single track. It was a braided cord. He and his rival, or rivals, had simply started on different threads, and their paths had just converged for the first time at this cave.
They didn't solve the Sunken Stones riddle. They couldn't have. They must have followed a different clue—one that led them here directly.
This changed everything. It meant his rivals were operating with a completely different set of information. It also meant his "world-first" at the stones was a genuine lead, but a narrow one. He had solved a puzzle the person who was ahead hadn't, but they had clearly solved a different one he was physically blind to.
Kage felt a ghost of a sensation he hadn't experienced in years. The thrill of true competition against an equal.
A name surfaced in his memory, a handle from other games. A player who was always there, always at the top spot, a legend in the gamer community for their inhuman speed and efficiency. A name synonymous with single-minded victory. A swordsman.
Asura.
He had no proof. But he knew. He could feel it. It stirred something dangerous. Facing a worthy opponent, heart pounding with the fire he'd long extinguished.
I have one advantage. He realized.
The quest was weaving a heroic narrative, but the landmarks screamed hoarding tyrant. Asura might be buying the surface story; I need to use what's underneath.
Standing over the cooling corpse, Kage understood. This race wouldn't be won by being fast. It would be won by being smart. His rival was following the path.
Kage needed to get ahead of it.