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First, I took Life Absorption, Deadman's Hand and DoT and upgraded them one level. Laughably little, just enough for a level-10 Necro. Still, I had to concentrate on the pet. He was my main weapon. I switched to the Summoning branch and spent three points on increasing the summoned creature's level. You only had that opportunity once every ten levels, so it was better to use it when one could. Now the summoned pet would be three levels higher by default.

Next. A heal for my zombie. This was something I really needed. Now the raid team was complete: I was three points poorer but at least I had a tank and a healer. Cast time was too long, almost three seconds, and only restored 170 hit points, but I wasn't a healer any way you looked at it. Then I spent three more precious points on passive skills.

Intellectual: The summoned creature receives 5%*3=15% of the killed creatures' experience.

Vampire: The pet receives back 1%*3=3% of the damage dealt as restored life points.

Lich: The pet has a 0.1%*3=0.3% chance of receiving one of the killed creature's special attacks or skills.

I had a funny feeling I'd
 
jumped the gun. It was probably a better idea to take those skills after level 100 when I didn't have to change the pet every five minutes because of the level gap. But I loved the process of improving my mini tank so much I couldn't help making him as tough as I could.

Next, I moved on to buffs:

Fire Shield. Deals 7 points fire damage per each hit received.

Agony Armor: Raises the summoned creature's armor level 80 points.

Zombie's strength: Raises the summoned creature's strength 30 points.

Bigfoot: Raises the summoned creature's life 300 points.

Finally, as a caster, I had to splurge on a few mandatory spells:

Reincarnation point: Allows one to set up a resurrection point in any location in the world.

Teleport: a slow (7 sec cast time) spell sending one to his reincarnation point.

Sending you there alive, mind you, all your stuff included. And once I reached level 50, I could have an improved teleport for the whole group, counting pets.

That was it. I'd spent it all and now was a full-fledged level 30. Still, on the outside my char remained a mystery. At first sight, you could take him for a warrior which should discourage those wary of challenging heavily armored targets. Once they saw my pet or my own magic skills, they'd take me for a Death Knight, and rightly so. But if they decided to select my pet as target, his level reading would come as a nasty shock. To surprise the enemy is to defeat him, whoever said that.

Closer to lights-out after their miserable excuse for dinner, I decided to inspect my bag. I poured its entire contents onto the floor and started sorting all the stuff into separate piles. I reminded myself of Robinson Crusoe surveying his salvaged treasures.

I made an inventory of the bracelets.

Gray: 66

Black: 41

Red: 85

Almost twenty gold, not bad at all. I wondered about the dungeon exchange rate of bracelets to French fries. I had to ask the sergeant if he was willing to barter. Life wasn't much fun on an empty stomach.

Pieces of armor, 4

Class Restrictions: Death Knight

I had gotten them off the King and it looked like I could use them soon. It wasn't as if I was going to sleep in full armor, but I might dress up a bit before checking out.

Soul Stones: 114. I had so many because at a certain point I'd forgotten to dump the low-level ones. I divided them into two piles: one for those level 26 and over, and the other for the lower stuff. The latter I'd have to pulverize and research the market.

Gimme!

I started. The hound stared at me through the rusting bars.

Gimme!

"Give you what? I'm all out of steak, babe. Next delivery tomorrow morning."

The hound waggled her head. I could see the beast was tense and ready to fight. Whatever had come over her?

Stone!

As if she would know what to do with it. Oh well, it wasn't as if they were in short supply. I chose one of the worse ones and pushed it towards the hound. The creature sniffed it and flicked it away with an angry paw.

More!

"Hey, send it back my way, will ya? Waste not, want not."

I chose the worst of the best stones and pushed it toward the creature. She tossed it away the same way as before.

More!

My inner greedy pig raised his ugly head. I shook myself free from his grasp and picked the best stone I had which contained the soul of the level-29 Gnoll Priest.

"There. Please give it back to me if you can't use it."

Cringing, the hound sniffed the rock for a while. Her glare switched to the remaining stones. Finally, convinced that this was the best I could offer, she leaned over the poor gnoll's final refuge and sucked in the air in a very peculiar way. A light wisp of mist reached from the stone to the hound. The stone lost its shimmer. Curious, I looked at its properties.

Empty Soul Stone. Ready to take a restless soul.

Help me, the Dark One!

"What kind of help do you want, babe? I'm not giving you any more stones."

The hound looked up into my eyes flooding me with a tidal wave of déjà vu. The already familiar basalt plateau, studded with smoke pillars, ran with rivulets of liquid fire. I saw a powerful pack of hell hounds, led by my steak lover. A small image of herself appeared, struggling free out of a summoning pentagram. A heavy chain around her neck. A bastion encircled in a ring of powerful spells. A freedom lost. A wild, overwhelming surge of despair.

New quest alert! Unique quest available: Hell's Temptation!

Help Hell Hound to gain her freedom! The Gray Bastion is safely concealed from other reality planes. Even in death, Hell Hound can't go back to Inferno. Place her soul in a Soul Stone and deliver it to a Dark Altar of your choice.

Reward: Unknown

So! 
Accept
, what else. One question remained, though. "How do we cram your soul into the stone?"

The hound answered with the emotional equivalent of a knock on my forehead. 
Kill me.

"What? What with, may I ask? I've got no weapons. And I've got this wretched Negator on my neck."

Remove it.

"Pardon me?"

Same emotion, doubled. I felt my forehead itch.

The key!

"Which key, you numbskull?"

The master key. From a top level Negator,
 
the hound pointed her nose at the crystal key from the Drow collar lying in the heap of unsorted trash.

Could it be that... because if it could, then I was a dork to end all dorks. Slowly I brought the key to my collar, afraid of scaring away my luck. It clicked. Yes! I was a regular dumbass. Any inferno mutt was apparently smarter than myself. What's that grin on her face, was she reading my thoughts or something? I gave the hound a look of suspicion, but all she did was shift her paws, impatient.

"Oh well. Thanks for the tip. But even so, babe, you're level one hundred freakin' fifty. All the mana in the world won't be enough to polish 
you
 off."

The hound gave a mental face palm. Then she shook her head parting the armor plates that covered the back of her neck. She sat back like a dog about to scratch its ear, protracted her pale blue claws and slit her own throat open. A thick jet of blood hit the wall. The mutt lay on the floor watching the dark pool grow around her. Her life bar began shrinking. You couldn't really commit suicide in a game by slitting your own veins. Any blood loss would only cause life to shrink deep into the red zone. After that, it would restore gradually—so in any case, you'd need a 
coup de grace
. There were other ways to end your own life, though. You could always drown yourself or jump off a cliff. Whatever.

In less than a minute, the blood flow almost stopped. The hound had five percent life left at most.

Do it.

I began reciting Life Absorption, over and over again. Although the spell was advertised as foolproof, I kept running into resists. When the mutt's life bar had shrunk to a hair, she sent me one last message,

Thank you.

You've received experience!

Congratulations! You've reached level 31!

Racial bonus: +1 to Intellect

Class bonus: +1 to Strength, +1 to Constitution

5 Characteristic points available! You now have 5 Characteristic points!

1 Talent point available!

Almost straight away, another chain of messages ran across the screen. Thirty two. Weren't they generous. Having said that, you had to be an optimist to celebrate your luck behind bars.

I didn't get any Fame points this time—apparently, because of the Hound being a quest monster.

A stone glowed in the pool of blood on the floor. I peered into it.

Soul Stone. Contains the soul of a level-150 Hell Hound. Use Summoning the Undead spell to raise the monster.

Oh, no. Did I say Hell's Temptation?

The next morning was hectic. Guards, investigators and officers of all ranks ran up and down the corridors questioning everyone. I just kept shrugging, showing them my empty hands and pointing at the collar around my neck. In any case, didn't they see the hound was all of 120 levels out of my league? The interrogators scratched their heads and moved on.

The hound's corpse and blood had disappeared a few minutes after it had died. I had swung the chain as far along the corridor as I could. The two smaller Soul Stones lay abandoned on the floor for another hour. No one but me could pick them up, apart from an NPC like the hound herself. But in her absence, all dropped items had a limited life. Game developers didn't want their world to be cluttered with trash. Besides, you never knew whose hands the item may end up in.

So technically, the guards had nothing to confront me with, apart from the fact that my level had soared overnight. But I was prepared to feed them a story about some particularly complex meditational quest. They were welcome to prove it wrong if they thought they could.

All night I had been fighting off a desire to use the teleporter and leg it. Then reason took over. If I
 
jumped the jail, I had to leave town, and it was something I wasn't prepared to do. I had only just made myself a few friends and began learning the lay of the land. I'd been lucky enough to come by a few quests and a place to stay. I really didn't feel like giving it all up in order to run to either the neutral lands or the Drow's' territories. So I'd made a conscious decision to do my term and go out with a clean reputation. I had used the master key to lock my collar and crashed out. In the morning, all hell broke loose.

They delivered my prepaid breakfast only in the evening, apologetic about the unprecedented concentration of top brass per square foot. By then, the place was back to its normal quiet, disturbed only by the shuffling of a guard who'd replaced the runaway bitch. The Hell Hound. Another headache, as if I didn't have them enough already. On one hand, the raised pup could be my free ticket to level 50 and beyond, regardless of the summon limits. On the other, I had a quest, an unknown reward and my own word. Which word? Who had I given it to—a binary combination? To AI? Or ultimately, had I given it to myself? Nothing but questions.

Days dragged by. I loafed around. The guards only showed up during the daytime and slept it off in the guardroom at night. That gave me a bit of time to play around with the settings. I removed the Negator, summoned a low-level pet and fitted it with all the buffs I could think of. This was an entertaining but rather unproductive way of reminding myself I was still a Necro. At least I got rid of a few rats scurrying about.

In the evening of day five I was scrolling through the Wiki, bored and listless, when an admin message popped up.

You've received a personal money transfer: 3000 gold.

A note has been added:

Hi, son, how are you? Love, Mom.

Oh. I sat up in bed. The quick note felt like the first letter from home for a rookie. From home... from my mom. For a brief second, I couldn't fight the desire to go back. My eyes searched for the log out button. Stop now. Get a grip.

I checked my available funds. 3002 gold, 4 silver and 31 copper. Well done, mom. I had indeed asked her to send me a hundred bucks, and do it on the tenth day of full immersion. She'd done it on the seventh. Couldn't wait. Mothers! Now we were rocking.

I stood up, walked to the bars and called out to the bored guard.

"Listen, chief. I'd like to pay up and get out. Think you could get hold of some top brass?"

The guard gave a lazy yawn and didn't budge. "Inspector has already drunk his nightly shot of Dwarven Extra Dry. He'll be heading home in a minute. Pointless looking for him now. You'll have to wait till tomorrow, dude."

"Hey, did you hear me?" Anxiety took over me. The freedom, so close only a moment ago, had flapped its wings departing in a direction unknown.

I produced a heavy gold piece and tapped it against the bars. "If you make it quick, you won't regret it. You can tell Inspector he won't be out of pocket, either."

The coin disappeared into the folds of his uniform. The guard hurried out. About ten minutes later, I'd already started losing my patience when an unhappy inspector made his appearance.

"You'd better have a damn good reason to impose on my personal time," he said meaningfully, rubbing finger and thumb together.

I flashed the gold coin but the inspector didn't bite. Behind his back, the guard signaled me with his open paw, apparently signifying the size of the baksheesh. Those game developers were barking mad. Having said that, it could be a clever way to remove superfluous funds from circulation. I just loved the way they did business. All you needed to do was draw some pictures of virtual gold and sell it to the players for hard cash, then prevent the inflation by charging the in-game currency for various services and consumables. If a player paid vendors just one gold a day, multiplied by forty million players, the company would rake in a hundred twenty million bucks a month. In reality though, the amount of money changing hands had to be a hundredfold more. Selling game gold wasn't a problem: the problem was acquiring considerable amounts of it as the Administration limited hard cash deposits to ten grand a month. If they didn't, the first relocated billion would be enough to crash the world economy. Having said that, an interested millionaire would always find common ground with the game owners—this was business and not a charity bazaar. All they'd do, they'd charge him for a palatial residence complete with vestal virgins, but he'd still have to queue for his cash with the rest of us. The best the Admins could do for the likes of him was to offer them a more agreeable exchange rate.