Log Horizon - Volume 11 - Chapter 1.4

4 
The city headquarters was an old-fashioned single-story house on a large lot. 
When Zhu Huan, guild master of the Lelang Wolf Cavalry, passed through the gate, he smacked his companion, a Wise Wolf, lightly. His intelligent partner wagged its tail once, then went home to its wolf kennel. 
Wolf mounts were practically the Lelang Wolf Cavalry’s trademark. They were large wolves that were summoned with whistles, and there were several different kinds. Creatures were summoned and put to work, so according to this world’s logic, once the summoning period was over, they went off somewhere. However, with high-level summoning whistles, the summoning period was longer than twenty-four hours, which made it possible to keep them active indefinitely. 
Of course, if an Adventurer sent them away when they weren’t being ridden, then there was no need to worry about feeding or grooming them. However, because some members of the Lelang Wolf Cavalry wanted to live with their wolves in the guild house instead of sending them away, the guild kept a headquarters with multiple lodges and kennels on a large plot of land. 
Unusually for central Eured, the mansion also had a hedge. 
There were fig and apricot trees in the garden behind that hedge, but at this time of year, the scenery was rather forlorn. Of course, everything was dry in the center of the continent. Even the rocks had the moisture leeched out of them, and exposed as it was to drastic temperature fluctuations, the land seemed somehow brittle. Compared with those grassy plains and wastelands, the city that was their home was quite fortunate. 
“Hey, it’s the captain.” “It’s the captain!” 
Two small figures came charging at Zhu Huan, brandishing tree branches; they ran into him, then rolled on the ground like puppies. It looked like something out of a manga, but Zhu Huan and both members of the pair were level-90 Adventurers. They had the leisure to horse around like this. 
“Yion, Aruen, what are you doing? Are you stupid?” 
“I’d rather you didn’t call us stupid.” 
“Well, stupid’s what you are.” 
“Shhh. You know that’s a secret.” 
“It might have gotten out already.” 
“Hey, Captain, has it gotten out?” 
“I know, you idiots,” Zhu Huan told them, wearing a sullen, thoroughly disgusted expression. 
The pair, who wore fluffy furs, squealed over that comment for a few moments, but then they abruptly looked awkward and made a report. 
“A long-face is here.” 
“Somebody snooty is here.” 
They were troubled, but at the same time, they seemed vaguely out of sorts. Their expressions tipped him off, and Zhu Huan asked his aide Ma Bao—who’d appeared from the depths of the building just as soon as he’d walked through the door—for the particulars. 
“It’s exactly what you think. It seems as though they might be forcing things.” 
“They’re insisting we sign on as their minions?” 
“‘If you don’t join the Blue King faction, you’ll regret it. The White King or Red King would massacre you, plus all the People of the Earth in this city. Hurry up and become our vassals while we’re still discussing it peacefully,’ they said.” 
“Vassals, huh? Are their heads full of The Records of the Three Kingdoms? What era are they from anyway? Lousy country bumpkins.” 
Thoroughly fed up, Zhu Huan threw his pack aside roughly, then went through the dirt-floored room and out into the courtyard. 
Winters in this area were extremely harsh. The landscape turned white and gray, then stayed that way for several months. 
In the courtyard, there was an oven made of grimy-looking bricks, with a cranky Salamander lying lazily inside it. Around the oven, guild members were boiling water and roasting meat, trying to get their chores out of the way while there was daylight left. 
It was cold, but not freezing. The scene was filled with lively energy. 
The visitors to the guild house had been messengers from the Singing Sword Company. 
They’d stopped by frequently over the past two months, demanding that they form an alliance or become their subordinates. It had been happening a lot lately; they might have finally gotten serious. 
Why were they making these proposals? It had to do with one of the quirks of the Zhongyuan server, the vast region that stretched across Eured from its center to the east, the land that was the equivalent of China. 
Elder Tales was an MMORPG that had been developed by the American Atharva Company, and its game world, Theldesia, was enormous. While its size had been cut in half through the Half-Gaia Project, it held a nearly exact replica of Earth’s topography. 
This immense in-game world had been recreated through 3-D modeling. You were free to go anywhere, and there were almost no game-type partitions. It was what was referred to as an “open world.” 
The attractions of this sort of game were the sense of liberation and freedom, and the fact that it stirred up a spirit of adventure. However, on the other hand, it was extraordinarily hard to provide content for all that space. For example, if you created a village, then set up an attack event there, the number of players who’d manage to stumble onto that village by accident was far too small. Since the world was so large, if you created events at random, they’d end up as events no one could find. 
The orthodox solution was to prepare a prodigious number of events, then design things so that, no matter what location you chose in this wide world, you’d find intriguing challenges. However, to do that, you needed a massive, truly astronomical number of events. 
In Theldesia, the area of Zhongyuan was approximately 2.5 million square kilometers. In order to have one event for every 5 square kilometers—the area a party of six Adventurers could explore in a day—you’d need one million events. When you considered that several designers, 3-D modelers, and programmers had to work for about a week to create a single event, the required budget would far surpass the scale of the game. 
Having anticipated this, Atharva had outsourced each area to operating companies in countries all over Earth, but the company that had been assigned the Zhongyuan server, the Kanan Internet Corporation, hadn’t had astronomical development funds, either. As Elder Tales had grown popular, profits had gone up, and so they’d hired brilliant designers and programmers, but it really hadn’t been possible to fill the vast Chinese server with captivating adventures. 
As a result, Kanan Internet had come up with two big policies. 
One was to set up a priority ranking for content preparation. They had begun preparing content for Theldesia starting with the coastal areas, in what would have been Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing on Earth. More players logged in from these areas, and so they were already equipped with player towns. It made sense to increase the number of dungeons, folklore, stories, events, and quests starting within their vicinities. All regional operating companies had done it like that. It was just like the way content preparation in Japan, on the Yamato server, had begun in Akiba and its surroundings. 

The other distinguishing feature of the Zhongyuan server was the guild wars. 
On this server, fighting between guilds was commended. 
Of course, it wasn’t a system of unrestricted warfare, but even so, it was true that large-scale player-versus-player combat had been encouraged. When guilds fought in the battle zones that had been set up all over the place, the winner would receive guild points corresponding to the results. With enough points, the victor could become the ruler of the city located near the battlefield. This was true even for player towns like Yandu and Dadu. 
In this system where players fought each other, there was no “Content cleared” end point. Even if a guild won and became the ruler of the nearby territory and cities, that guild would be challenged by another one. In other words, it was necessary to defend. Struggles between guilds were essentially limitless events, intended to accelerate their military expansion and their accumulation of items. 
As a result, compared with the trouble of creating events, the operating company had believed it would become extremely long-lasting, perennially interesting content. By and large, it had succeeded. 
Naturally, that system was from the days of the game: Kanan Internet had felt that creating a vast amount of content would be difficult, and it had hit upon the idea of having the players pick up some of the burden, and the result had been the guild wars. However, Theldesia was now reality, while that system remained in effect. 
The result was that there were still Adventurer players on the Zhongyuan server who went along with that system… An overwhelming majority, in fact. 
True, if you accumulated enough guild points, you won sovereignty over a city. Once you controlled a city, you could make the surrounding People of the Earth obey you as well, without exception, which meant it was possible to live like ancient royalty. 
In the players’ defense, in the interests of fairness, they did none of this out of cruelty or acquisitiveness. They acted to defend the places they called home, out of fear and suspicion of each other, and to secure their own safety. 
As game content, the guild wars hadn’t been a bad thing. In the days of Elder Tales, even Zhu Huan had raced across battlefields on wolfback. 
However, in Theldesia as it was now, he thought they were the root cause of chaos. Immediately after that transference incident, Zhu Huan and the other Lelang Wolf Cavalry members had seen this coming, and they’d left the player town of Dadu and run here, to Shimanaikui. 
But apparently, they hadn’t managed to get away entirely. 
“The Blue King is that one, right? The sort of bovine-looking one.” 
“I am unable to answer questions regarding whether he eats grass.” 
“He seems like an omnivorous ox.” 
“Yes, that’s the one. Even though that Singing Sword Company guild has a stylish name.” 
“Mr. Blue King makes himself out to be the civilian-rule type, you see,” Ma Bao responded, offering him some warm-looking socks. 
“Well, it’s late in the game, but I expect he caught on.” 
“Caught on to what?” 
“To the fact that if they wage unending war, the People of the Earth will suffer for it. Even if they acquire a territory to rule, if the People of the Earth flee on them, both the fields and commerce will stop dead. As a matter of fact, quite a lot of them have fled over here.” 
“Ah. Is that what it’s about? Yeah, you’re right; they are running here.” 
Not just People of the Earth, but Adventurers as well. 
The twins who’d been all over him a short while ago hadn’t been members of the Lelang Wolf Cavalry to begin with, either. They’d picked them up on the way over. He thought they were still around ten years old. 
In Zhongyuan, the People of the Earth seemed to live together in clans. Relatives by blood and marriage lived in groups, and if people shared their last name, even if they lived far away, they’d help them for that reason alone. 
Since that was the case, if they were fleeing the area where they lived, the entire clan would work together to do it. They might even run as a group of several hundred people. Shimanaikui was on the outskirts of Zhongyuan. To be accurate, the city lay on the border between verdant Zhongyuan and the wilderness of Aorsoi. Due to the peculiarities of its location, it was no wonder that many People of the Earth who weren’t fond of the turbulence in Zhongyuan came here. 
Lately, in addition to merchants with a sharp eye for opportunity, even wealthy farmers who should have been tilling the fields often arrived as entire clans. 
“I wonder if something’s up.” 
“Do you suppose it’s the Ritual of Coronation?” 
“You think that’s connected to this?” 
“I couldn’t say.” 
Still, Zhu Huan thought, this was a nuisance. The major guilds were too greedy. If they were lucky, just maybe, they might strike it rich: That was all they thought about. Small and midsized guilds like his own tended to wing it, living from hand to mouth, but that was enough. When men of small caliber were idle, they did mischief. 
“It would be nice if those great heavenly immortals would do just a little more work.” 
“Please don’t say inauspicious things. The situation is already out of control; if the Ancients forced their way in, it would be nothing but trouble.” 
“You think so?” 
Zhu Huan tilted his head to one side, considering it. 
The man he’d delivered to the Bai Tao Shrine a little while ago had seemed pretty skilled. He was a full-fledged general. Zhu Huan thought someone like that would bring some good combat power to the table, but either way, ever since that transference incident, fairyland had fallen silent. As a smaller guild, they had no intention of stirring up trouble. It would be fun if a hero like that led the armies of the outlying regions and dominated Zhongyuan, but he couldn’t get engrossed in that sort of pipe dream. 
After all, his daily duties were important. 
For that reason, Zhu Huan loudly issued orders to his subordinates, then had the materials for the week’s contract work brought to him. Personal preferences aside, as guild master, he couldn’t exclusively work outdoors. The wasteland winter was deepening, but that didn’t mean an end to monster attacks and trouble. 
The term hibernation wasn’t in Theldesia’s vocabulary.