Divine Glitch: I Regressed With Endgame Knowledge

Blade Runner wasn't greedy. She had set the price at just ten cents, but to her surprise, the modest fee brought in over a thousand dollars in less than half an hour.

Ryan had decided to let Nightwalker post the video. As a guild member, Nightwalker was practically invisible on the forums—more of a shadow than a presence. But just as he was about to upload it, he stumbled across a paid post already selling the Guardian's coordinates.

He immediately messaged Ryan instead.

"You're telling me someone's already posted the Guardian's location?" Ryan's surprise deepened when it sank in that someone had beaten them to it by only a hair. His gaze swept the area—nothing but scattered monsters. Which meant someone had been trailing him. A rogue, most likely. Or maybe a druid.

It didn't matter who. Whoever it was, they weren't a guild player. A guild would have passed the information to their own leadership, not slapped it on the forums for a quick payday.

"Guild Master, should I still post the video?" Nightwalker's voice crackled in Ryan's ear after a pause, repeating the question when Ryan didn't answer right away.

"No need. Someone's already done the work for us." Ryan gave a quiet laugh. "When the big guilds get here, focus on your quests. They'll be too busy tearing each other apart over the Guardian to pay you any attention. Maybe a few lone wolves will try to pick you off, but as long as you stick with your team, you'll be fine. I trust you to handle it."

"I know there's some rogue out there watching. If I learn your name, you won't get off easy!" Ryan raised his voice deliberately. If the stalker hadn't been Alliance, they'd have struck while he was fighting monsters. That meant they were almost certainly on his side, and would certainly understand what he had just said.

He toggled his ID on for a moment, letting it hang in the air like a signature, then shut it off and walked away with a chuckle.

Some time later, a gnoll guard near a patch of herbs crumpled silently as a wooden club materialized from thin air, knocking it cold. A Night Elf rogue emerged from stealth, quickly gathering the herbs before fading back into invisibility.

Blade Runner's brow furrowed as she recalled the Paladin flashing his ID. Featherlight was a name people knew. While same-faction players couldn't corpse-camp her, there were subtler ways to make someone's life miserable. She decided to watch him leave.

She understood why he walked away. Featherlight was a marked man, hunted by more than a few Dark Horde guilds. The moment he stepped into the open, enemies would converge. He wasn't a raid boss who could smash through endless waves alone—no matter how strong, one player could only withstand so much.

By the time Ryan reached the Bloodfang Stone Forest entrance, players were streaming in from all directions. The instant he spotted the first arrivals, he shifted gears—leaving now would look suspicious, and they wouldn't let him walk away.

He merged into the growing crowd at the forest's mouth, eyes narrowing at the enemy faction across the path. For a tense moment, both sides watched each other, the air thick with hostility. Then someone made the first move, and chaos erupted in another all-out brawl.

Ryan acted as though the fight at Bloodfang Stone Forest didn't interest him, steadily backing away from the entrance and putting more and more distance between himself and the chaos. A handful of rogues and druids—either reckless or simply clueless—tried to ambush him along the way. He cut them down without much effort.

Those unlucky enough to fall to him had to be fuming. From their perspective, anyone who could dismantle them so easily had to be carrying top-tier gear. Why, then, would such a player walk away from a major battle? Maybe he was one of those rich players whose entire set had been bought with cash.

The respawn point for this area was far off. By the time they revived, Ryan would be long gone. If his Hearthstone hadn't been on cooldown, he would have already left the Arid Plains behind and returned to Astral City.

Instead, he lingered just outside the main battle zone, pretending to farm monsters. More and more players streamed past toward Bloodfang Stone Forest. A few Alliance of Light players invited him to join their party and take advantage of the chaos, but he turned them all down. Several Dark Horde players even took a shot at the lone Paladin they spotted, only to realize halfway through the attempt that even their entire group couldn't bring him down.

When the flow of players finally thinned, Ryan decided the act had gone on long enough. He pretended to finish his quest and started toward the outskirts. Leaving now wouldn't draw attention—plenty of players were already giving up on the Guardian and heading off in frustration.

Only a fraction of the game's player base could even reach the Arid Plains, and they were among the most capable. Many of them knew better than to clash with the massive guilds now converging on the Guardian. Instead, they used the time to complete quests elsewhere.

Following his memory, Ryan headed for the far bottom-left corner of the Arid Plains. Here, the monsters ranged from level twenty-four to twenty-seven, but his target was a specific spawn point for level twenty-four creatures.

He was only level twenty-one, which meant a slight disadvantage from level suppression. But Ryan's stats were strong enough that a mere three-level gap hardly mattered.

The spot he sought was Cragshore, a dried riverbed crawling with Death Sand Crabs. These creatures lived in the sand and surfaced in packs of four or five. Each group nested in a shallow, circular pit scattered along the riverbed. Ryan's goal was a particular patch of Cragshore where four of these pits clustered together.

As soon as he stepped into the first pit's range, four crabs erupted from the sand. They were small, no taller than his shins, and began hammering at him with their claws. The blows were almost laughable, chipping away at his health in meaningless slivers.

Because they spawned in groups, Death Sand Crabs had slightly lower health and attack than other monsters of the same level. Tanking four at once felt no worse than fighting two regular level twenty-four mobs.

Ryan triggered the other pits one after another, drawing a total of eighteen crabs. The constant pecking at his health did knock it down a bit, but two swings of Divine Storm erased the entire swarm and restored him to full in an instant.

A satisfied smile tugged at his lips. The pits, which had vanished when their crabs emerged, reappeared again—though now only three remained. As long as he kept clearing them, they would continue spawning monsters without end. And for Ryan, monsters meant only one thing: experience.