Read Novel Full Chapter 754: Player Bjorn vs Eternal Realms
Chapter 754: Player Bjorn vs Eternal Realms
*Hey, come on, man. You’re not the first person to have gotten the hint of this quest.*
*Even Forza has tried to trigger it but has failed.*
*Eternal Realms and other Lucid games aren’t like other AAA games. It’s ever-changing and everything is unique. Why do you think that after nearly twelve months and more than 90,000 new players, the games are still bringing in audience?*
*Person above. Eternal Realms, Frontline and Genesis are insane. Genesis more even because of the fact that it connects the worlds of each players.*
*I heard that Frontline top player will soon be taking a position as the Governor of a planet in another star system in the Human Federation Republic.*
This was the comment section of a new Lucid user who’d managed to get his hands on a Lucid during the last pre-order event. And the reason the comments looked like that was simple. He was trying to trigger a quest that no one else had ever managed to trigger.
It had been a year since Nova Technologies launched Lucid, the full-immersion gaming gear that came bundled with its own catalog of virtual reality games. But Lucid games weren’t like anything that came before them. They were all online, always running, and their storylines were woven straight into the live gameplay instead of sitting behind menus and cutscenes. Frontline and Eternal Realms were the worst offenders in the best way as they were worlds that kept moving whether you were logged in or not.
Both games had a page buried in their systems labeled storyline quests. Trigger one, and it unlocked a piece of the game’s real backstory. That was the thing player Bjorn was chasing.
Across the Lucid gaming communities, on LucidNet and off it, players never stopped praising Nova for building something this hard and this fun at the same time. You could play casual. You could go semi-serious. You could grind yourself into the top one percent and call yourself pro. None of it mattered. Nobody, at any level, had ever triggered a storyline quest.
One player had gotten desperate enough to ask his Lucid AI assistant directly. The assistant told him it had nothing that could help him trigger one — but that doing so would unlock something called Reactive Cinematics, a kind of in-world feature where the triggering player got folded into a short cinematic sequence tied to whatever backstory they’d uncovered.
The player posted the exchange, and it tore through every gaming community on the platform within hours. That had been three months ago. Since then — nothing. No progress. No leads.
Bjorn wasn’t the only person chasing it. He wasn’t even close to the only one chasing it right now.
***
In first-person view, Bjorn walked through a dark forest. Red eyes blinked in the underbrush on every side of him, tracking his movement without ever moving.
He was level 15 and the monsters around him were level 400 to 700, easily. But he wasn’t worried.
Players who’d hit level 300, even 500, had tried walking this same stretch of forest and failed — torn apart within a few steps.
But Bjorn just kept walking, calm the whole time, and it pissed his audience off a little, because they’d seen this exact overconfidence before, from other streamers, right before the character died screaming.
Still. They’d be lying if they said they weren’t hoping for something different this time. And they were already getting it, whether they wanted to admit it yet or not — because Bjorn had just gone further into this forest than anyone in the game’s history without being touched.
He kept walking. No monster so much as looked at him twice, let alone attacked, and every other player who’d tried this had been jumped before they’d cleared the tree line.
Then the trees broke open, and he stepped out into a paradise.
The sky overhead was some impossible shade of gold-blue. Trees taller than anything in the forest behind him stood in loose, easy rows. Strange animals — or monsters, it was hard to tell which — wandered between them, unbothered, grazing on things that looked like fruit and glowing moss.
And every single one of them was low level. The highest reading Bjorn could find was a 10.
The chat exploded.
*we just walked through the most dangerous zone in the game and there’s BUNNIES on the other side*
*bro this doesn’t make sense. this makes zero sense.*
*lv 300+ pros die at the treeline and THIS is what’s behind it??*
Bjorn felt the same way they did. He’d braced himself for something worse than the forest. Instead he was standing in what looked like a nature documentary.
Immediately, a server wide announcement was heard.
{{Achievement Unlocked: Player Bjorn has discovered The Haven.}}
And a heartbeat later, a notification followed right behind it.
{Level reset: 15 → 0. All stats reset.}
The chat went dead silent for exactly as long as it took everyone watching to process what they’d just read, and then it went insane, because Bjorn had left his stat screen visible on stream — most serious players did, since every skill or action lit up the relevant stat in real time, and it made for good content.
Which meant thousands of people had just watched, live, in real numbers, a player’s entire level get wiped to absolute zero. Nobody had ever seen that happen before.
"You have got to be kidding me," Bjorn said, staring at his own blank stat sheet like it had personally betrayed him.
He wanted to crash out right there. He really did.
Because none of this had been cheap. Shortly after making his character, he’d converted something like a million and a half real dollars into solarium, and from solarium into gold — an amount that made his stomach hurt just thinking about it now, even though he was filthy rich in the real world.
It was all because some old NPC merchant, tucked away in a corner of the starting zone, had offered to sell him a map. A map that supposedly led to something called a beast god servant bloodline.
Bjorn had known, the second the guy opened his mouth, that it smelled like a scam. Everyone knew that vendor. Everyone had walked past him a hundred times and laughed.
But then the old man mentioned, almost offhand, that he’d sold a weapon once, then named it, casually, like it was nothing, and Bjorn had recognized the name instantly, because that exact weapon was currently strapped to the back of one of the top three ranked players in the entire game.
He’d paid without a second thought after that.
And it had worked. He’d gotten the bloodline. Triggered a server-wide announcement, the first one ever and one one even tied to an actual god-lineage in Eternal Realms, and picked up three hundred thousand live viewers off the back of it inside a single day.
The bloodline was the only reason he’d made it through the forest at all — it suppressed any monster carrying a lower bloodline grade, no matter what level that monster happened to be. Level 700 didn’t matter if your bloodline outranked theirs.
But he hadn’t expected this. Walking through the one deadly zone nobody could clear, only to get wiped back to nothing the second he cleared it.
He was still glaring at the number zero sitting where his level used to be when something in his peripheral vision snagged his attention.
The low-level monsters around him weren’t showing numbers anymore.
He blinked and looked again, as if he hadn’t seen it properly the first time. Where a moment ago there had been clean, harmless little 8s and 10s floating over every creature in the clearing, there was now nothing but rows of question marks. Every single one of them.
"What the fuck???" Bjorn said.
In the chat, several thousand people typed some version of the exact same word in the exact same second, because they understood, same as he did, exactly what that meant.
A level that showed as a number meant the system had measured it and it was within range to be understood. A level that showed as a question mark meant the system couldn’t — or wouldn’t — tell you. And that was never, ever good news.
"These aren’t low level," Bjorn said slowly, backing up a step without meaning to. "These are like... a thousand-plus minimum."
The chat, which had been a wall of noise a second ago, thinned out into something closer to dread.
*wait it’s true. ??? only shows past level 1000. i’ve never seen it on a live monster before, only on bosses in trailers*
*bro get OUT of there. get out right now. don’t even walk backward slow just GO*
*everything in this "paradise" was secretly over 1000 the whole time and it let you WALK THROUGH IT*
*this isn’t a low level zone. this was never a low level zone. we got played*
*the achievement literally said "discovered." not "cleared." not "survived." he wasn’t supposed to be fighting anything in here*
*I don’t think the reset was a punishment. I think it took his old numbers away because his old numbers don’t mean anything in here anymore*
*genuinely scared for this man. someone in the discord check if he’s okay after this stream ends*
*300k people watching a guy find out he’s standing in a room full of sleeping dragons and we have been calling them bunnies for the last five minutes*
Bjorn read maybe three lines of it before his stomach dropped the rest of the way to the floor.
Because they were right. He knew they were right. Every player who’d ever gone anywhere near a raid boss knew what a question mark meant, and it had never once, in the entire history of the game, shown up on something wandering around in the open like a rabbit.
And that was when a thunderous roar that caused his legs to quake, thundered from somewhere above the tree line, low and enormous, causing even his chest to vibrate.
Every low-level animal in the clearing froze at once, then scattered, and Bjorn barely had time to register that before a shadow — vast, impossibly vast — tore up out of the far trees and into the golden sky, blotting out the light across half the clearing as it rose.
Bjorn looked up, and every ounce of blood in his face went somewhere else entirely.
It was a dragon.
The first dragon anyone had ever laid eyes on in Eternal Realms.