Dominating Sword Immortal - Chapter 17 – Third Place

I am currently re-writing the first chapters of this story. They are quite rough and bounce around a lot and I can do better. At some point, I will replace these with the better chapters.Sometime in 2024 Aethon Books will publish the first volume of this story on Amazon, KU, and audible. This will mean the story will be stubbed. I will notify people far in advance of that.In the dystopian world of the future, life is rough when you live at the bottom. Jobs are non-existent. Far too many people live in poverty, crammed into huge buildings called Habitats. With no jobs in the real world, many people can only find work online in VR worlds as servants to the very rich. And it's getting worse. The old internet is unusable and hacked to pieces. The new system needs AI to run things, but all but one of them were destroyed. The last sentient AI is ordered to create a new game world so the rich can have a playground, and the corporations that rule the world can have a new global market place. Everyone wants a piece of the new game. The guilds are competing to be the first to find the dungeons and kill the biggest monster. The corporations are claiming land and putting in their online market places. Ozzy and his friends just want a paycheck.Four friends sign five year contracts as virtual serfs in a small village, and can't go adventuring at all to gain money. They don't have many choices. They can work as a blacksmith, barmaid and shepherd for all those years....or they can cheat and find ways to take advantage of the system and carve out a section of the game world for themselves, and earn a fortune in the real world.When they give you a mop and not a sword, you have to find the loopholes and change the rules.

«Farming wives in the apocalypse.» Getting a wife is possible. Getting Wives is hard. And in the apocalypse, it’s impossible. But what if you have superpowers that allow you to do anything? I mean everything!

Everywhere Leticia went, she was compared to her siblings.

Sadly, it was all too common.

She was not as pretty as her second sister Diana,

nor as smart as her third brother Emil,

nor as good with a sword as her fourth brother Xavier,

nor as talented with magic as her youngest sister Irene. However, she was never jealous or envious of her siblings.

In fact, she was proud of them. And yet, she never knew that her family was ashamed of her. Until the moment her family abandoned her.

“Young man… if you could go back in time, what period would you like to be in?”