Chapter 1382 - Gate of Abundance

It was a close shave, but Jake finally made it away as he breathed out a sigh of relief after realizing the damn Magi hadn’t come back for him. He was currently hiding out beneath a set of stairs leading up to a house as beams of light killed several Administrators all around him who’d decided to be idiots and cause too much of a ruckus.

As far as Jake could tell, they hadn’t even been discovered. Instead, two groups had apparently run into one another in a shop, and with the store owner already dead, the newly arrived group decided it was a great idea to try to kill the other party to claim all the loot inside.

The result was as one would expect when one side wasn’t overwhelmingly more powerful than the other. Their fight dragged on, and eventually, the losing side decided to flee, made it into the streets, and from there, things only escalated. C-grade civilian cyclopes had been caught up in the battle, random missed attacks killing several dozen, garnering a response from the local police force, who quickly reached out for further assistance, seeing the number of casualties.

All of it had happened within less than two minutes, meaning Jake, who was just trying to sneak by, couldn’t get far enough away to feel safe when the Cyclops Magi suddenly appeared in the sky once more, not wielding a staff for totally unrelated reasons to Jake.

Instead, he simply used his hands, showing that while losing the staff probably sucked, he was still more than capable of, relatively effortlessly, killing the Administrators who’d invaded the Inner City.

“Fucking idiots,” Jake muttered to himself after the final Administrator appeared to fall. The Magi looked at his handiwork, satisfied with having taken care of the threats, and after one final scan of the ground below, and a few grateful bows from local Cyclops Officers, the high-tier B-grade teleported away again.

Jake didn’t know if it was because the Magi had lost his staff or if he was just tired of cleaning up what the Officers couldn’t handle, but he’d gotten quite sloppy, missing not just one person, but two. Jake was one of them, but one of the people from the attacking party had also managed to survive by using an escape skill that replaced herself with a clone of stone as she appeared on the other side of a building, hidden beneath the ground.

She slowly emerged when the Magi was gone, looking quite haggard, but rather than escape, she turned her attention toward where her comrades and those they’d tried to kill had died. Understandably so, seeing as a statue was floating in the air, and Jake was pretty sure those statues were still important.

Sneaking around the building while remaining inside the stones of the cobblestone streets, she quickly made her way back to reclaim the loot that all the cyclopes seemed to simply ignore. Well, that, or they were busy dealing with the fact that corpses now littered the streets with Officers trying to calm the populace and clean up the dead.

The statue floated a few hundred meters in the air, and the Administrator was very careful as she waited to take her chance to claim it. Once she saw her shot, she erupted out of the soil, flew up, grabbed the statue, and quickly teleported down to the ground again, everything happening within the blink of an eye, with none of the cyclopes around noticing anything. Again, they were quite busy.

After diving through more stone, she soon appeared behind the same building she’d initially used to hide, letting out a loud sigh of relief as she emerged from the ground and leaned against the building. It was clear her escape skill had taken a lot out of her, and seizing the statue had been her overextending herself.

She let her boosting skill deactivate as she tried to take a moment to rest... right as a faint line of blood appeared around her neck, and her head fell off to the side, severed before she’d even noticed it. Her body faded away into blue wisps of energy before she’d even registered the attack, all the treasures she’d obtained appearing around her in floating bubbles, two statues among them, meaning she also had one herself.

The killer appeared right then, stepping out of a nearby shadow as she smiled, walking towards the loot she’d so easily obtained. Five steps before reaching her sweet loot, she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, her body frozen, as a moment later, her entire upper body was sheared off by an arrow, killing her instantly.

“Well, that was a bit awkward,” Jake muttered, standing on a nearby rooftop as he scratched the back of his head. He’d originally intended to kill the earth mage because he’d been kind of annoyed they’d attracted a Magi, but also because he knew she had at least one of those statues he still got the feeling was important.

However, just then, an assassin from the Court of Shadows had struck, killing his target before he could get the chance to strike. Thing is, he’d already been charging his Arcane Powershot by the time the assassin appeared, so really, was it his fault she walked straight into the line of fire? It would have been such a pity to waste a good Arcane Powershot.

Seeing the result, he couldn’t complain too much either. Killing her in one shot was kind of as expected, as the elf hadn’t looked to be the durable kind, but more the kind to strike from the shadows and evade attacks, a bit like Jake himself. What’s more, she had apparently been quite good at it, given the kill notification Jake got.

You have slain [Dark Elf – lvl 357 / Grand Shadowthread Assassin / Illustrious Umbral Weaver]. 12,032 Prima Credits earned.

Jake remembered that the dragon he’d killed with Sandy and Jasper hadn’t even given a tenth of that, and given the number of treasures she dropped and how people tended to save them to cash in at the Palace of Abundance, the best explanation for all her Prima Credits was likely killing other Administrators.

The number of treasures she dropped also made Jake believe this, as there was no way in hell the lady had collected that many golden flowers. She’d dropped more than sixty of the damn things, most of them with less than five leaves, so it wasn’t super exciting, but still.

There were also plenty of other treasures, including another two statues, meaning Jake now had four more floating in front of him. Combined with the ones he already had, he considered whether he should start a collection or something. Should probably figure out what their function was first, but for now, he’d just collect them.

They were clearly important, seeing as one had still dropped even after the Magi had killed the Administrators. When another Administrator killed someone, all the treasures they’d gathered and hadn’t transformed into Prima Credits already would appear, giving extra incentive to kill other Administrators.

Meanwhile, if one of the NPCs, a trap, or anything other than an Administrator was responsible for someone’s death, they wouldn’t drop anything. Except for weird eight-armed golden statues, apparently. Also, thinking back, when the Magi killed those members of the Holy Church he thought had the staff, they'd also dropped the store items... maybe because the Magi had killed them specifically to search for their loot? That, or maybe this just wasn't a consistent rule.

Anyway, after giving the dropped treasures another look, seeing if there was anything interesting other than the statues among them, he stored everything away. There wasn’t anything that caught his eye, with all of them just items to get more Prima Credits inside the Palace of Abundance. Something he rushed back to after being momentarily delayed by idiots starting a fight in the middle of the street and attracting the ire of the Magi that Jake had already pissed off earlier, nearly giving him a heart attack in the process.

Fortunately, over the next few hours of rushing towards the Palace of Abundance that seemed so close, yet remained so far away, he didn’t run into any other annoying situations. The amount of Prima Credits he got for killing someone did make him consider cosplaying as an assassin for a little while, but ultimately, he decided against it as he really didn’t see the point. Yes, it had been a lot of Prima Credits for one kill, but he also risked making enemies, and honestly, he wanted to focus more on getting the real rewards from this Central Domain. Something that surely had to go beyond mere Prima Credits.

Rewards that would even work in the real world had been promised, and while Prima Credits were nice to have, they couldn’t compare to potential permanent bonuses like titles or special, unique treasures.

Jake had long since passed by where the Magi lived and was approaching the Palace of Abundance, which now not only appeared close due to spatial distortion but was actually getting closer. Soon, the wall surrounding the Palace even entered his Pulse range, and when it did, Jake frowned.

Yeah, alright, no digging through that kind of wall, Jake immediately concluded upon seeing what the system had cooked up. Rather than a curtain of spatial distortion, the Palace of Abundance appeared to be blocked off by a large wall; however, it wasn’t the kind one could ever hope to go through.

It was effectively a fake wall, given that, less than a millimeter beneath the surface, all Jake saw was a whole lot of nothing. The same kind of nothingness Jake saw when he looked outside the boundaries of dungeons. In other words, it was somewhere the system had fully blocked off, and Jake would bet everything that not a single being present at this event could leave the tiniest mark on the Palace wall. Shit, even if Valdemar appeared and took a swing at it with full strength, he wouldn’t be able to do anything, as not even Primordials could defeat the supreme power of system-fuckery.

He could try to fly over or dig under the wall, but honestly, was it even worth a try? Jake could already tell this invisible no-fucking-way-to-pass barrier extended down into the ground, and while there didn’t appear to be anything extending over the top of the wall, he saw no way where there wasn’t some invisible pressure or other method to stop people from trying to fly over.

Jake also started to realize why one had been able to see the Palace of Abundance from all sides so clearly ever since entering the Outer Gardens: it was to communicate where the entrance would be.

The location of the gate had always been visible, and now that he was this close, he realized that the entire Palace of Abundance had only an outer wall roughly a thousand kilometers in diameter, perfectly circular, the same as the Inner City.

Slightly correcting his direction, Jake continued towards where he believed the Gate of Abundance had to be, and as he got closer, he started picking up a lot of people with Pulse. Lots of cyclopes, sure, including way more Officers than anywhere else, but also a lot of Administrators that were seemingly hiding out.

Unlike the area closer to the wall between the Outer Gardens and the Inner City, this area was entirely peaceful, with no one causing any trouble, and the locals looked entirely unbothered.

Among the Administrators present, Jake recognized quite a few. Some from Nevermore, and others, friends or even those he considered family. Their company did take him by surprise, though.

Sylphie, whom he had been wondering about throughout this event, was in a group with six other elementals, including Wintermaul, giving him some complicated emotions. They were all hiding out on the fourth floor of a mostly empty building, its location also giving them a great view towards the destination Jake and everyone else were going for:

The Gate of Abundance.

Quickly getting into a better position to make visual contact, Jake soon saw the Gate of Abundance in all its glory, and damn, was it gaudy. The sole way to get through the wall and enter the Palace of Abundance was a grand golden gate; the issue was that it was lined by guards on all sides. Hundreds of them stood guard, and naturally, Jake threw out a quick Identify to see what kind of cyclops they were dealing with.

[Abundant Cyclops Gatekeeper – lvl 415]

Not at all close to the level of the Magi or Blademaven, but still a touch above the Officers and also stronger than the Investigators, which weren’t designed for combat to begin with.

Of course, Jake fully assumed that should one mount a frontal assault on the Gate of Abundance and start killing the Gatekeepers – something that was totally possible given the Administrators Jake saw within his Pulse range – one would provoke a response for sure. Likely in the form of the Blademaven, Magi, or perhaps several of such creatures appearing. Based on the staff he got, there were eight such elites, and Jake could totally do with never encountering all of them.

The closer Jake got to the Gate of Abundance, the more familiar figures he spotted, including the Heartsoul Daolord’s Chosen and Azal the Ghost King, but perhaps most importantly, a certain worm that was chilling inside another abandoned house, not that far away from where Sylphie also was.

Jake considered reaching out to Sylphie, but quickly abandoned the idea. It was good for her to have some independence and strike out on her own, and based on how she sat as far away from Wintermaul as physically possible while still remaining within a veil summoned by a water elemental in their group, Jake didn’t feel a need to get involved.

Sandy looked very relaxed, just lying on their back, waiting for something, as far as Jake could tell. What or why the worm was waiting, he had no idea, which was why he wanted to touch base and get an update on what Sandy had learned. He also guessed they had at least one familiar face within their stomach. Likely Jasper, though Jake could also see a world where the little guy was way too busy robbing the entire city blind to ever regroup with the spaceworm.

While flying to them, he also scanned the sewers that appeared to stop right before one would reach the Gate of Abundance, forcing everyone who wanted to enter the Palace to resurface and enter like everyone else. Hopefully, they would also be required to shower before being allowed into such a fine establishment.

Unsurprisingly, there were also a few people down in the sewers, though it was pretty evident that Jake was still one of the first people to reach the Gate of Abundance despite having a few hiccups along the way and doing plenty of robbing. Well, it could also be that many people had already entered the Palace, but based on how people were waiting outside, he doubted that was the case.

Shortly, he’d made his way to the house, where Sandy was chilling inside, and after entering through the window, he tried to see how close he could get before the worm noticed him. He hadn’t even landed before Sandy’s voice echoed in his mind, the worm clearly sending out telepathic communication to everyone nearby.

“Oh, hey Jake! Fancy seeing you here,” Sandy said in a cheerful voice, making Jake frown as he hadn’t even felt Sandy detect him. Still, he revealed himself, believing there were more pressing matters to discuss.

“I wouldn’t say it’s particularly fancy. I would assume everyone is making their way here, given the Gate of Abundance is right over there,” Jake chuckled, motioning towards the entrance to the Palace casually. “Which begs the question: why are you just lazing about here and not trying to enter the gate?”

“Wow, asking questions before even greeting everyone. Get into my stomach and say hi to the others!” Sandy said, opening their maw wide as he felt the suction force, and the worm at least somewhat answered his question. “As for why no one has entered yet? We’re obviously waiting for the guards to go on their lunch break. Duh.”