Dave scanned the street by the gate, excited to explore the town. Tianzhu certainly looked how he had imagined a small frontier town should look. It was muddy and the dwellings nearby were a combination of clay fired bricks and tent fabric. Kid gangs mobbed and robbed the individuals whom were unlucky enough to be their targets. Beggars sat by the roadside with their palms out trying to sell their tragic story to anyone who would buy. Dave"s nose told him that there wasn"t any plumbing in this part of town. Unlike the cities of modern earth, here the poor were pushed to the edges of town. The rich and powerful congregated in the central areas. The concept of suburbs didn"t seem to be a thing here. Dave should bear that in mind. He may be fine in market districts but would be likely to get violently a.s.saulted if he were to walk into the territory of the town"s n.o.bles. Having read plenty of novels, the last thing Dave wanted to do was get in contact with a "Young Master". Those guys were petty psychopaths!Thinking of the best way to get some information, Dave decided to look for a pub of some sort. Besides, drinking alone gave him an excuse to be mute. His true purpose was to eavesdrop and try to get a sense of the language. It was a strange feeling to be quite so isolated in a crowd. English was so prolific on earth that one would seldom go anywhere where it was not used or understood to some extent. Dave guessed he"d be working on his nonverbal communication for a while.
As he walked along the street Dave was mobbed by a gang of kids and felt little hands rummage around his waistband looking for his coin purse. Unfortunately for them Dave"s coins were all in his inventory. He felt that it painted a sad picture of human att.i.tudes in this society. These kids felt that they would not be able to survive if they asked for help genuinely and so instead reverted directly to thievery. This was a sure way to raise the next generation to have a screwed up moral compa.s.s. Dave could only sigh. Maybe it had already been many generations in the making?
Eventually Dave came to what smelled like a tavern. Even during the mid morning there was a low hum of voices from inside. As Dave turned the corner he saw a sign over the entrance. Though he had no idea what it said, at least he knew it was a business and not just a random person"s house. The script on the sign looked like the Chinese pictograms of earth but Dave couldn"t be certain. He was tempted to whip out his smartphone and take a picture for later reference but decided not to as it may attract unwanted attention.
Dave entered through the doors under the sign and walked through to an open air courtyard. There was a bar along the far wall, the keeper of which eyed Dave curiously as he walked in. Dave looked Asian enough to white people but looked super white to Asian people. His mom was Chinese. Unfortunately, Dave was, as a benignly racist old friend liked to say; "Banana as f.u.c.k" - Yellow on the outside but he only spoke English. The people of the Tianzhu region looked like the Han Chinese of earth so Dave could only imagine that they would regard him as an oddity. The stares from the tavern dwellers seemed to back up that theory.
Dave strode over to the bar, looked at the bartender and mentally pressed *e*. As he had hoped, the trade window appeared which allowed him to price the food and alcohol on sale. He exited the trade window again and set down three silver coins on the counter whilst making eye contact with the man.
"##@@%@&-." said the man with a smile as he produced a bottle of wine and a cup.
Dave smiled and nodded at him before taking the wine over to a nearby empty table. He had picked one of the more expensive items in the trade window as he didn"t want the bartender to refuse him service due to his inability to communicate. Money talks so Dave didn"t have to.
As Dave sat and nursed his drink he listened to the conversations around him. The chatter which had initially dulled due to his appearance slowly resumed as the patrons got used to his presence. Dave sat there for hours and by the evening he was already dead drunk. A few similarly drunk patrons approached him and introduced themselves as Mo Li, Lin Gu, and Bei Tian Fang. Dave similarly held his hand to his chest and introduced himself as Ma Sa (something similar to Mercer he guessed). The four of them raised their cups and continued drinking until the early hours of the morning. During the course of the day, Dave had actually managed to remember and recognise a few words. Nowhere near the point of beginning to speak the language but enough to begin understanding. Now there was simply the hard part of doing it all over again.
*~* [load Tianzhu362019] *return* *~*
Yup, Dave was going to relive the same day in Tianzhu over and over again until he learned the language.
****************
Thirty days later Dave had grasped the basics of the language. It was a complicated tonal language that was somewhat similar in sound to Mandarin but not quite. Dave could only tell since the only Mandarin he knew, "Thank You", didn"t match. He had been all over the commoners areas in town and met many new people. For the most part, the people of Tianzhu were kind and welcoming to an outsider like him. Of course, quite a few times he had also been held up for robbery. When that happened he just reloaded as he couldn"t be bothered with the trouble.
It was on this day that Dave first heard of the Seven Sword Sect in Tianzhu. A couple of mercenaries were discussing how terrifying the pract.i.tioners of the "True martial way" were. One mentioned that he witnessed an elder of the Seven Sword Sect split a man into his component parts in one swift attack. This got Dave a little curious and made him want to see the martial arts of this world in action. For the meantime, Dave went back to his seemingly endless loop.
Ninety days later Dave was finally fluent in the spoken language. The time he had spent in Tianzhu had been mainly uneventful except for the outbreak of running zombies from the movie "28 Days Later" on the forty - first day.
Dave deeply regretted sp.a.w.ning zombies. He thought it would be a good way to see how the martial artists handled a disaster. It turned out that they handled the zombies with no problems at all. Unfortunately, the martial artists had little concern for the lives of the common people that Dave knew. It was a ma.s.sacre. Life currently felt like a game to him. A game with no consequences once he reloaded. That was mostly true. There were no consequences for other people but for Dave, or rather "Ma Sa", watching the people he had spent over a month getting familiar with get torn to shreds by a tide of zombies was horrible. Who in their right mind would think this was a good idea?? It was at this moment that Dave realised that he wasn"t in his right mind anymore. Repeated days of just milling around Tianzhu and learning the language had detached him from reality. What Dave needed was an anchor.
*~* [load 362019] *return* *~*
That day Dave went back to his normal day to day life in Toronto. He went to work, dodged an ex-cougar, had drinks with Pete, hung out with Jaime and his family when they had the time, went knife and axe throwing for a day... Dave just tried his best to live a normal life without a console for a few months. He didn"t even save. Eventually he felt like he had healed his psyche enough to try again. No zombies this time...
One afternoon in the middle of a treatment session with Mary, a heartsink of the first cla.s.s, Dave finally had enough of the mundane life in Toronto. This woman was convinced that a demon from her past life wanted to kill her but somehow it settled for just giving her really bad abdominal cramps. It"s not like Dave could say for sure it wasn"t true considering the magical stuff that had happened to him but there really wasn"t much in the way of evidence to support her claims...
Zoning out in the middle of one of Mary"s past life tales Dave hit *~*.
[load Tianzhu362019] *return *
"Ah, I"m back!" thought Dave as he smiled. The familiar sight of Tianzhu"s southern slums brought a wave of memories with it. Some were fond, some less so, and one was simply grizzly. Luckily the save/load feature cleansed all sins. Dave made a note to pay more attention to his mental state while he was studying this time. The zombie episode must never repeat!
**************
On Dave"s ninety-first day in Tianzhu he had finally managed to hold conversations fluently. He may not know particularly advanced vocabulary yet but that would come later once he learned how to write. Over the last few months of grinding language skills, Dave had decided to reload his Wednesday in Toronto a few times and just relax. The breaks helped him to maintain his sanity.
*************
After four years of learning to speak and write the language of Tianzhu, Dave finally finished reading "A Comprehensive Historical Record of The Qian Continent". As Dave grinned with satisfaction at his progress...
[Speech Increased to 1]
[Level Progress----------------- 1]
"WTF!?"