Guild Wars-Novel

Chapter 337 - Silent Assessment

The southern district wasn’t too outrageous. It was a well-developed and urban place that was frequented by many people of the village. Children and some a.d.u.l.ts also spent most of their time here.

... you guessed it, they were working on their Tradeskills. Teachers for schools, Songstresses for singers, Dancers for ballerinas, musicians for pianists and other musical delights, performer for circus and mimes or the like, and many others.

The amount of Tradeskills in Boundless was as many as the blades of grass in a meadowland. Basically, take it like this, if it was an occupation, profession, or any activity that one required a specific set of skills to perform which could be used to earn money, it counted as a Tradeskill in the eyes of the system.

Many Tradeskills overlapped with combat fields and specialties. For example, there was a beast tamer combat class where the fighter would be able to summon or capture beasts and fight alongside them.

On the flipside, there was the Tamer Tradeskill Draco previously had, which allowed its user to hatch eggs or domesticate beasts to become combat pets, mounts, or domestic pets. Both of these were the same on paper, which revolved around taming a beast. However, one was for personal use and the other was for trading.

Draco understood the essence and diversity of Tradeskills within Boundless. This was exactly why he had unhesitatingly expanded all his slots and removed Tradeskills he felt were meaningless to him.

One might think that 30 slots were too much, but to Draco, they were too little. As a reincarnator, he already understood so many fundamentals of Boundless that he could afford to branch out while others were still feeling around.

Or one could understand it like this: Draco was a freshman in college who had perfectly aced everything from kindergarten to his final year in senior high, as well as three extremely tough college courses.

Familiar with the system, he was now taking on multiple college courses at once while the others who were quite normal were struggling with one or two courses because they were completely new to the system.

After viewing the south, there was only the small circle in the center of the village left, which was where the town hall and Vishad’s own manor resided. People who didn’t have administrative Tradeskills usually did not even go there unless it was an important matter.

Smiling, Draco finally had a grasp of the culture and style of the various villages of the Treasury. These natives were dedicating themselves to the practice of Tradeskills to the very limit, and their innate talents in the field were too high.

However, Draco had identified some serious flaws in this whole system. In truth, anyone from the outside world could see those flaws, so he couldn’t help but wonder if previous outsiders had never brought it up with them.

The first flaw was their limited creativity. Oh of course, they had access to many recipes, new and old, thanks to the extensive heritage from the old era as well as through lucky draws in the Altar of Crafting.

However, after many generations of great and talented creators, they had become bottlenecked. The reason for this was simple. They were like frogs in a well.

They had lived in this small world for so long that they had reached the limits of what their minds could cook up, and they desperately needed inspiration or outside influences to fuel new ideas and galvanize their creativity.

One should not underestimate the kind of limitation a lack of diversity in a crafter’s life could cause, it was insane. The internet largely nullified this issue in the modern world, but in a classic world like this, it was a serious constraint.

The second flaw was their efficiency. When crafting, they used more to do less. This couldn’t be helped, as they had so many materials in abundance to work with that even wasting them purposefully was not enough to cause harm.

As such, when working, they tended to underestimate the value of the materials they were using and ended up treating them poorly. If a crafter of the same level used 1 unit of materials in the main plane for a design, the people here used 3 units!

It was like a poor man and a rich man being offered to dine a high-class restaurant. The poor man, feeling that this was a windfall, would eat everything put before him and even voraciously lick the plate.

The rich man would eat only from the plates with meals he liked and sneer at the rest, clapping for the waiter to get that rubbish out of his sight.

To the poor man, he usually had to eat lower quality meals, so when presented with such a high-quality meal, even the way he ate changed to make sure to maximize his pleasure and satisfaction, without wasting anything.

To the rich man, he ate meals like that about five to six times a week, so it was nothing special. Even if he wasted it, he could get another one in a jiffy, and it would cause him no pain. He had also eaten that type of meal for long that it didn’t feel like anything special in his eyes, it might even be considered the bare minimum!

The third flaw was their adaptability and versatility. They were unable to accept changes to their system easily, as everyone relied solely on recipes and designs laid down from the old era or acquired from the altar.

This was similar to the first flaw but slightly different. The first flaw was their lack of creativity and innovation, meaning they lacked the skill to make something new themselves.

This was referring to their inability to change to new things. So even if they managed to fix the first flaw and created a new system, they would have a hard time actually shifting from their current system to the new one.

This was what troubled Draco, as their conservative styles of crafting had been left on display to him when he walked through their areas. In order to fix this, he would need to spend a great amount of time and effort.

However, he was heartened because he had already thought up a perfect, cost-effective, and perfectly beneficial solution, but that required him to become the inheritor, so he put his considerations away for now.

Right now, he had Hoover lead him to the village’s resource zone. It was a mega large Area Zone attached to each village, and its size was more than 10 times that of the village itself.

When he had been high in the sky on Sheera’s back, as well as being far away, he thought they were average-sized, or at least somewhat similar to the ones he encountered in the outer section, but Draco realized that he could not have been any more wrong.

As multipurpose resources zones with every type or class of material growing or manifesting there, of course its size had to be prohibitive. In fact, what shocked Draco was the co-existence of many types of materials that theoretically should not be anywhere near each other.

For example, there were some materials with opposing properties that were forced together in this one zone. Herbs that required hot climates that were in the same area as herbs that required cold ones.

Animals being reared right beside rare monsters that should easily slaughter them by the hundreds, co-existing as if they were all the same race. Mines for rare ores and minerals adjacent to swamps.

It was a giant contradiction, but it was held together by a strange concept that Draco couldn’t quite put his finger on. He activated his Eyes of Caelo to take a deeper look, and what he saw naturally startled him.

He had thought that this was a single zone that was perfectly bound, but the truth was that it was like a torn piece of cloth that was stitched together. The only thing was that the person who did the stitching was a master tailor.

The seams dividing those individual zones were perfectly and seamlessly connected together to the point that only an Origin God would likely be able to even see them, hence the Eyes of Caelo’s ability.

What was even more astonishing was that the seams could be split open, allowing one to separate or rejoin these different areas at will. This might be how three resource zones had been moved to the outer section.

After all, those resource zones had specific designations, but the ones in the inner section were a mish-mash of different types. Hoover had explained that the ones sent out were from the core section, but he noted that it was only his speculation.

Had he ever been to the core section that he could state this with certainty? Clearly not. He was just making a reasonable conclusion, which is something many before him had thought of as well since there wasn’t anyone with something like the Eyes of Caelo to show differently.

Draco didn’t take anything from the resource zones. There were various Tradeskill masters such as miners, farmers, breeders, and whatnot who were working there to practice their Tradeskills.

So, the cycle was generally as follows: The harvesting Tradeskills collected resources and sold it to the vendor Tradeskills, who then sold it to the creation/crafting Tradeskills. Outside this loop but supporting every other one in its function were the service Tradeskills, of which the teaching and entertainment ones formed a subset.

It was a rather self-sufficient and good cycle. If the people here could leave to explore the outside world while being able to retain the sanctity and secrecy of this small world, their three flaws would be quickly fixed. In fact, they would never have come into being.

However, reality was not as nice or idealistic. Should any of them take one step out, who knew what could happen? Maybe the old enemies of the Refinement God were watching the main plane like a hawk from the Realm of the Gods, waiting for the slightest sign of the small world to reveal itself before pouncing.

Draco was only confident in taking them out because he could stuff them into various small worlds. Even then, part of his confidence stemmed from the goodwill of the Supreme Pantheon behind him, and Draco was willing to bet that the Refinement God was a member of this group for sure.

If there was any pantheon he suspected to have a hand in this... it would be Sigurd’s Pantheon of Power, and this made Draco’s eyes narrow. He had gained a lengthy period of time to grow without having to face absurdly overpowered enemies because he had cleverly outmaneuvered many powers into becoming his allies.

However, just like when it happened in the Flora and Fauna Quest, the True Gods had no such qualms. Draco had a weak backing up there, and the Supreme Pantheon would not break its neck for him.

Last time, the AI had pulled some strings for him due to its budding infatuation, but it had paid a price behind the scenes. Amber had long since told Draco of this when he was discussing Eva’s pregnancy and whether to use the pods in the lab or in the castle.

Draco understood in his heart that no matter what, claiming the inheritance would be easy for him. Any fool could see that after what had been shown so far, so everything up until that point would be mere theatrics.

The true problem would come when it was time to keep what he earned. Whether he could weather that storm, he was not yet sure. He had some plans in mind, but he could only hope some means would sprout forth to help him.

After all, if Draco could think this far, how could the Refinement God fail when he had done everything to perfection up to here? Whatever method the Refinement God had prepared, Draco could only hope that it was heaven-shaking and earth-rending.

After understanding and inspecting the whole village, Draco finally got down to the exciting part. He went back to the manor to enter the library, ready to learn new Tradeskills, designs, and recipes to broaden his knowledge!