'Ding!' A notification sounded in Ian's mind, rousing him from a deep sleep.
He raised his head, looking around in surprise.
This was a somewhat old inn room. The rickety bed, the wooden table darkened by grime, and the long-uncleaned curtains all made the place look cheap.
A slight drizzle fell outside the window, bringing little coolness and making the weather even more oppressive.
Ian felt sticky and uncomfortable all over. He gently lifted the quilt and found his whole body soaked with sweat.
For some reason, Ian's brain suddenly compelled him, and he bit his forearm fiercely. It wasn't until the sharp pain clearly registered in his brain that he relaxed his mouth, looking at the tooth marks on his hand with a wry smile.
This feeling was so real.
Although the organizers were well-known in their industry, he'd never doubted their capabilities.
But actually appearing in another world, in another body, still felt too dreamlike.
After sitting for a few minutes, Ian tried hard to calm himself down.
At this point, he suddenly found that he truly had new memories in his mind. While these memories didn't include specific people or places, there was a complete, consistent background story.
The clearest among them were intellectual details, such as stories of minor nobles in the Vale that Alex (now Ian) hadn't known in his previous life (let's consider this "previous life" as before entering the game, as all the book's content takes place in the world of Ice and Fire). There were also heraldries, the complete process of the Andal knights' vigil in the sept, and a bit about horsemanship and sword fighting techniques.
As the auxiliary AI had said, having these memories would be a great help in pretending to be a real mercenary knight.
**Hedge Knights** were also known as landless knights. Their only wealth was their equipment and horses. They were so named because they often had to sleep under hedges in the wild.
Of course, a player starting as a Hedge Knight wouldn't be in *that* dire a situation, otherwise Ian wouldn't have chosen it.
Taking a deep breath, Ian climbed out of bed and walked to the window.
The sky outside was gloomy, and the thick, gray glass reflected Ian's striking blond hair. He hurriedly opened the window, and suddenly a majestic tower appeared in his field of vision. Its tall black body still stood out among the nearby castles like a giant among chickens.
However, the top of the tower, which pointed directly to the sky, was tilted to one side due to melting and deformation, looking like a huge, half-melted black candle.
"Is that melted stone? A masterpiece of Dragonflame? Is this **Harrenhal**?" The scene before him perfectly overlapped with a memory of Ian's. He licked his parched lips, his mouth suddenly feeling dry.
Ian turned and walked to the table, picking up the water bottle and pouring its contents into his mouth. Instantly, he felt a faint spicy and wheaty aroma spread on the tip of his tongue.
"Mudd! This is terrible luck!"
He'd made the right choice to start in the Riverlands, but the Riverlands were vast. Why did he have to start in Harrenhal?
Harrenhal was the largest fortress in Westeros, built by the last king of the Iron Islands and the Riverlands, Harren the Black. He had spent 40 years and exhausted the financial and material resources of the Riverlands building it on the shores of God's Eye Lake.
Its walls were thicker than Storm's End, and its gate was as massive as the main castle in Highgarden. Harren the Blackheart had called it an "unbreakable fortress."
However, just as an unbreakable alliance could collapse, Harrenhal's unbreakable walls and towers didn't fall to a ground siege. Instead, they met the dragon ridden by 'Aegon the Conqueror,' Balerion the Black Dread, who rained dragonfire down from the sky.
Harren the Black was eventually burned to death in the tallest tower along with all his children. The half-melted black candle in Ian's vision was fittingly named the 'King-Burning Tower.'
Since then, Harrenhal had been shrouded in the shadow of a curse. Not only had the families granted Harrenhal all lost their descendants, but everyone who had occupied the castle in any form had basically died a miserable death.
"What bad luck." Ian wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and asked in his mind, "By the way, when did we start?"
"Hand of the King, Jon Arryn, has just died. King Robert Baratheon is preparing for his funeral. He plans to go to Winterfell after the funeral and invite Eddard Stark to come south to serve as Hand of the King," Annie replied.
Ian nodded, understanding.
When the original *Ice and Fire* books began, King Robert was already approaching Winterfell, but now Robert was still in King's Landing and hadn't yet set off.
The land distance from King's Landing to Winterfell was about 2,300 kilometers [Note 1]. Considering that Robert's royal entourage would take the Kingsroad, it should have taken him about two months to reach Winterfell.
In other words, the current time was approximately three months before the beginning of the original work, which placed it at the end of Aegon Calendar 297 AC.
This was still more than a full year before the outbreak of the War of Five Kings.
In other words, Westeros still had peace for over a year.
This made Ian doubtful again. When he originally signed up, the organizer promised that all the game's designs were prepared *before* players traveled through time. Once the game officially started, the organizer would no longer intervene in any way (meaning they wouldn't even fix a bug if one was discovered).
So, what kind of mechanism had the planner designed in advance to make players give up peaceful development and choose to compete with other players during peaceful times?
He knew that in this type of game, there was no room for error in the early stage. If you were killed, it was game over. Players shouldn't choose to be aggressive so early on.
"Okay, AI, now tell me the detailed mechanics of this game," Ian asked his auxiliary AI, his doubts growing.
"There are three main mechanisms in this game," Annie began to introduce directly.
"The first is the **killing mechanism**: For every player killed, 4 points will be awarded, and all unused system resources of the killed player will be inherited (including points, attribute points, skill points, and system items). The system will also provide certain additional rewards based on the killed player's development.
Among these, the player gets the full benefit from personally killing the target. However, if the target is killed by the player's subordinates or other 'employees' assigned by the player, the player only gets 50% of the kill benefit."