EC (Web Novel)

[Tenzen12]

You shouldn't forget Till also herited Alfinas influence even among not-demihumans, though it was just barely touched so far.

[ctvd93]

Hello i'm new here
i just found this novel yesterday and already love it
but why i cant find any information about this novel anywhere other than re:trans website, even in some huge novel and ff site like narou i found nothing
can someone tell me more about this novel (summary, original name of the novel and author and if possible where to find its raw...)
thank and sorry for my bad eng

[Tenzen12]

Author: Otori Ishinei
original name: EC (same)

For reason why it's so little known I guess this post from Baka-Updates might be on mark.

Originally Posted by Laclongquan

It's an interesting read so far, and easily the best writings out of all the japanese web novels I've found. Futuristic Post apocalyptic Earth after a tech-destroying event get stuck in a weird medieval-punk setting. People discover a VRMMO game and have fun exploring it. But is it truly a VRMMO?
Two things going against this novel getting better known
-Its name. I can not imagine what possess the writer 鳳石生 to set its name like that. It's impossible to find on Net due to its so very generic name.
-Its total lack of presence on Net mean people can not read ahead to spoil themselves. The only source of EC is the translating group, who dont provide the raw text.
They are technical reasons why this novel get lesser known than other such as ReMonster or Shield Hero.

[ctvd93]

thank tenzen12
so basically it's nearly impossible to find its raw
but it should have a site in which the raw was posted in right, do u know about it?

[Tenzen12]

Nope, I don't read moon runes. I am consumer in purest sense of word. And even if I could I doubt I would want read this nightmare of translators....

Ps: If you ever got hand of these raws, feel free spoil me.

[Iume]

In all likelihood no copy of the original text is floating around unless you can figure out which Usenet group it was originally written in and hope it is available on some site archive. The only reason Sumguy has a copy is because he was involved in the original writing (3 authors credited as 1)

Read all about it: http://ecwebnovel.blogspot.com/p/about.html

[Tenzen12]

Wow I am at a loss for words...

-So our protagonists actualy singlehandly annihilated two huge guilds 3 years before Kirito for first type equiped his waifu
-They were solving issues between immortals and non-users 10 years before Hero for first time refused Lord of the useless meat.
- And they tamed Cerebus and accommodated personal army 9 years before Weed sculpted his first rabbit.

I was thinking EC is well writen result of recent fad and I was ok with it, but I just have to admire it's novelty now. It's pitty that with such circumistances there is no real chance for it gettting LN or even anime

[Altrelo]

Just picked it up today and I have to say, I quite enjoy it. It's quite easy for me to see to figure out who is the narrator, so the concern others have seems to be overly exaggerated. Except for the part where the mother fox was narrating, I thought it was Kun.

I kept switching my belief of whether or not Till was a NPC or Player. That is, until she had a chapter saying how she destroyed some of her teachers and bullies.

I also believe there's little romance going on. Rick and Bell are being built up that way, but there has been 0 romance so far.

[Tenzen12]

I half expecting that when Kun, Till or Bell return they will just in time on epic baseball match between dog soldiers and students.

[Namorax]

Half expecting? It was a foregone conclusion the second Rick started to throw his fastballs.
Maybe the author(s) felt he needed to do more then improve fertility all over the place^^

[Tenzen12]

It's here already... though I don't have clue how did ice fastballs turned into fight with arows...

In meantime students do decent (but unsucessfull) job to sell their goods. First I thought that fatass were sabotaging their effort, but he looks too dumb, so it's probably really work of resident merchants who doesn't want concurents.

They might start sell it to soldiers and families of kids first, they have good products so they might as well build their bussiness that way.

[Tenzen12]

There few nice chapters out and this thread looks rather... Dead I really like this so decided giving it at least one kick in form of this doublepost before letting it die.

Students did good job and build some contacts and De'muel got his first crush... On married MILF. And I am starting suspect something in Till x Rick direction (I always suspected Rick is good harem material).

Well, I will not make it triple post, whatever happen so be it.

[Namorax]

Its kinda hard to talk about anything in here, at least for me... the story goes... somewhere, it appears, but considering that we are basically kept in the dark by the author(s), there isn't really much to do but lean back and enjoy the ride.

The main-characters don't appear to have any goal in mind, they just deal with a problem (or make plans on how to deal with a problem) and the story moves on. We don't have an antagonist to talk about (or at least we dont know anything about the antagonst until the characters already dealt with said antagonist).

Same goes for the world/game itself. We get tidbits and are told it works like this (though the thing with Gui becoming a player really stretches it IMO), but basically we know nothing.

Its kinda hard to talk about something we know nothing about, isn't it? And considering the alleged rarity of the RAW volumes, there are next to no people who can give us sneak-peeks or explanations from future volumes.

[IAmAsianNoob]

This has potential, but it can be really confusing at times to know what's going on. The fact that I tried to read everything really fast in one go didn't help either :P. Hope it becomes more clear later on.

[Tenzen12]

It's pretty easy once you get used to it and it's actually lot of fun read it again when you already know context.

[IAmAsianNoob]

Yeah I'll probably reread it at some point.

[Namorax]

Anyone interested in speculating about the future plot and/or possible background?
Or what EC stands for? xD

Spoiler:

Something I find rather unusual is the premise that the "players" actually leave bodies behind when they "log out". I think there was another game/story where players can be "robbed/assaulted" while they "sleep" but that was more like an extra to push the difficulty-level of the game upwards (as in: "This game is NOT for casuals"). But we weren't really given any reason WHY the players still have to endanger their personal possessions/skills everytime they have to log out.

EC doesn't really feel like a game, doesn't it?
If it wasn't for all the thechnical pop-ups the immortals all receive and their unexplainable immortality (What happens to their old bodies if they respawn? Can they actually walk back to see their own corpse?) this would feel more like a story with an "alternate worlds"-theme instead of an VRMMO-Theme.
Our only excerpt that doesn't deal with a member of the established cast so far is the bit where some mysterious company-man tries to get martial arts masters to use their Virtual Reality in order to "leech" their skills into the system, and the bit about that strange videoclip they got from I-don't-know-where with the "unknown" language.
It looks like the clip is a recording of an event that happened a long time ago in the game-world, or maybe some other place... what to make of it?

My personal speculation right now is that at some point, there was an "original Earth", lets call it "Earth A" (EA) for simplicity . That was the place where all of our legends, myths and that recording took place.
EA tended more towards a magical society and after a while they developed a great high fantasy world with empires, powerful mages etc... and somewhere along the lines they discovered magic to travel to other dimensions!
Lets call the new place EB, shall we?
The people of EA send over their "players" to EB and start to influence the world and the NPC's over there: they (re)create their own stories, become gods, halfgods, heroes and whatever... but sooner or later, they screw up and create a catastrophe that nearly wipes out the world, severing the contact between EA and EB. Maybe EA was completely wiped out, no idea...
And now that EB has slowly recovered and created their own portal into an ew dimension... Earth C, EC.
Which would mean EB is in fact OUR world, that we were once the NPC's in somebody else's game. Kinda like the NPCs we see in the story.

For all we know the "players" from EA might still be around on EB, trying to find a way back to EA or maybe even get to EC to make their way into ED...
For me, the plottwist of the story would be that while the "players" all think they interact with a game, and that the "other" peoples are jut "NPCs", we are no different from them: We were once "NPCs" as well or just as much NOCs as the inhabitants of EC are. There might even be EA-immortals on "Earth" trying to influence everything from the shadows, trying to find a way back home.

Anycase, my suggestion is that EC means "Earth C", because of the reasoning listed above.

[Tenzen12]

That's not particulary bad idea, but citizens of "virtual world" are rather pragmatic about myths, religious and you don't see much of hero worship either. It's pretty unlikely it has relation with our mythology, considerong they have almost no mythology on their own.

My theory is far from perfect too, but I would guess that Second Phantasia is world that was created/discovered to escape from the Catastrophe and Tills mum company found some old records and recreated (with few differences) methods of reaching it.

And methods itself, it appear to me that they use solid mana to create "avatars" and connect them with consciousness using TIES, though it's rather suprising it can emulte even smell on level that Gui can identify.

ps: I can't really get rid of impression Mamare works are heavily inspired by EC, I wonder if he were reading it back in 1999...

[Namorax]

True, but I also got the impression that the "immortals" only appeared recently, meaning that there are still a few people around who seem to remember a time without immortals pushing everyone around.
They appeared only recently, and that would be consistent with the release of the game. And being around for only a few years/decades isn't really enough to start herosworship of any kind, especially since there are heroic and villainous immortals.

I don't know how they create the avatars, but if they create them out of "solid mana" as you said, wouldn't it be easier/safer for them to just dissolve the avatar and re-create it when they login again?
The part with Gui seem to be a hint that all the game-mechanics seem to be some kind unneccessary add-on from the company's side: The popups look like they try to send messages to specific parts of Guis brain, but since he isn't a human he only get the garbled stuff we saw in the story.

If it wasn't for those messages people would probably start treating the game like the real world... and wasn't the maincast shown to start developing beyond the framework set by the "game"? At least thats what I understood after reading how they developed their own, unique skills and stuff.

[Tenzen12]

When I said heroship, I meant THEIR heroes, they don't seems to have anyone who would serve as originator of Beofulf, Heracles or Gilgamesh legends

If you kill someone his body will get destroyed (dissapear) and it takes time before it materalise again. Going by common sense creating something take energy and time, disolving something take energy too. By mana theory everything is made from it, but it still folow same rules as our atom based matter. Once it's created it just simplier keep it.


Anyway system assistented spell/spell/growth mechanics proves, that company have control over magic, creating avatars is only natural next step (not mention their real bodies remain in capsule)