Chapter 1
Hah... What on earth am I doing here?
When I open my eyes, a dreary landscape fills my vision.
The weather is always slightly overcast, the wind blows from the northwest, and the sun is only just peeking shyly over the horizon.
Merchants who set up shop at dawn hawk their wares to every valuable customer without exception.
A rusty dagger and, beside it, a longsword polished to a gleam were basking in the warm sunlight.
Travelers purchase weapons suited to their bodies and potions that each give off a different scent before heading onto the battlefield.
The corners of the merchants’ mouths who had made a fortune for the first time in ages were practically hooked to their ears.
On the other hand, there was one peculiar merchant meditating in the corner without hawking her wares at all.
Only after everyone else had left could I approach the cute fox-eared merchant.
“Give me one of these.”
“Sseuuup? Don’t get the wrong idea—I absolutely wasn’t asleep! Hmm? Is this definitely the right item?”
The fox girl hurriedly wiped away the drool running down to her chin before handing me the shoes I pointed at.
Noticing the mud on the boots, the girl quickly dusted them off with her hands.
I placed five silver coins in her fluffy hand.
“Fill the rest with potions.”
Since the only kind of potion she carried was low-grade health potions, she immediately put four additional purple flasks into the bag.
Of course, she couldn’t have miscounted, but I habitually checked the number of potions in the bag.
While I put on the smelly boots, the fox beastkin turned the silver coins in her hand this way and that, making the bizarre sound effect, “Hooe.”
Now the fox girl would ask whether that meant the transaction was over.
“Traveler! What else do you need@#!& ##!%&%@&?”
But contrary to my expectations, an unpleasant noise assaulted my eardrums.
When I turned around, the cause was standing squarely in front of me.
[■■■■■■■■: ■(sir)]
[■■■■■■■■: ■■■■ ■■ ■■■■■ ■■■ ■ ■■■■■ ■ ■ ■■■(NoName, the game has started. Keep an eye out here and see if any enemies come in.)]
What is he saying?
Get lost.
I thought you left earlier. Why are you back here?
When I continued to ignore him, the short, stubby spiny turtle began to lose its temper.
[■■■■■■■■: ■■ ■ ■■■■■ ■ ■■ ■■?(The game just started, so what the hell are you doing?)]
The spiny turtle in front of me was also a player in the game who would be with me for thirty minutes.
However, every voice and line of dialogue he produced was censored before it reached me.
So no matter how angry you get, I can’t understand a single thing you’re saying.
He seemed to keep ranting afterward, but I ignored him and proceeded with the secret quests for title grinding.
[Normal - Collect 10 Mysterious Murals (0/10)]
[Legendary - Collect 30 Mysterious Murals (0/30)]
[Mythic - Collect 50 Mysterious Murals (0/50)]
I’m lucky today. All three quests are mural-collecting missions that don’t involve combat.
On top of that, the mission to collect 50 murals was much easier than the other three-star quest missions.
In short, it was a game where I could take a break.
I couldn’t understand at all why they had introduced such a secret quest into a game where teams fought each other five versus five, but...
The one saving grace was that these secret quests could only be checked after the game ended.
If everyone had been able to see the quests from the start like I could, it would have been a world overrun by abusers and trolls.
Then hotheads like that guy would be unable to stand it and leave the game.
[■■■■■■■■: ■■■ ■■■ ■■■ ■ ■■ ■■■(Those fucking trolls xx are all fucking dead)]
Good grief, he’s persistent.
He looks ready to follow me around forever.
But once the game passed the one-minute mark, the turtle huffed angrily and slipped away into the forest.
Looking at our team’s overall composition, it wasn’t particularly good even if I had joined normally.
To make matters worse, since I would barely exist at all, the game would hurtle toward its end even faster.
I felt like this mission had an unusually strict time limit. I had wasted time for nothing playing a staring contest with the turtle.
Feeling pressed for time, I hurried down a side path opposite the turtle.
The fifty murals found on the battlefield were said to appear randomly, but in reality, they were generated at several of 256 designated points according to a few rules.
In other words, as long as they weren’t completely random, I could determine the locations of all the murals on this battlefield by checking the ten points I already knew about first.
The most important spot was, of course, the third central fortress. If there was no mural here, there was a high chance one would be in the enemy’s territory instead.
If our team got pushed back helplessly, that would mean the three-star mission was out of reach.
Click.
Fortunately, there was one.
With that, I could collect forty easily by planning a route that crossed almost in a straight line from the western forest to the southern forest. I’m especially lucky today.
[■ ■■ ■■■ ■■■■■■■(The first fortress has been destroyed.)]
As soon as I had that hopeful thought, a system warning rang across the battlefield.
I didn’t know the details, but it roughly meant that our team was losing overwhelmingly.
As I moved through the forest in an orderly fashion, I kept running into that turtle from earlier, so I raised a hand and waved at him whenever I passed without pretending not to see him or saying hello. I didn’t want to seem too cold.
[■■■■■■■■: ■■■(Get lost)]
I still couldn’t understand him, but he glared at me with an extremely hostile expression.
I didn’t know a turtle could frown that hard.
Click.
[Normal - Collect 10 Mysterious Murals (10/10) => Complete]
[Legendary - Collect 30 Mysterious Murals (30/30) => Complete]
[Mythic - Collect 50 Mysterious Murals (50/50) => Complete]
The game clock was racing toward the twenty-five-minute mark.
Unexpectedly, my turtle friend seemed to be putting up quite a fight. His kill score stood at 12/3/5.
Mine, on the other hand, was 0/0/4.
These days, the standards for punishing trolls had become strict, so even if someone engaged the enemy in the early game, the AI could brand them a troll if they failed to contribute enough to team fights in the mid-to-late game.
I suppose it had been introduced to stop junglers from only killing monsters after becoming upset midway through the game, or laners from endlessly pushing only the fortress on the opposite side.
But didn’t that mean they would look the other way as long as you participated in team fights?
Of course, team fights weren’t the only criterion for punishing trolls, but the fact that their relative importance had increased worked in my favor.
I could just work on the quest, join in whenever a fight seemed imminent, and make a token contribution.
I was willing to help if the game dragged on too long, but despite my turtle friend’s valiant effort, the game continued in a one-sided fashion.
Our team respawned together in the starting village, glared at me for a moment, then went panting off once again to defend the final citadel.
Naturally, there were no surprises.
[■■(Defeat)]
The citadel had fallen, and armed paladins stood in formation. I could even see the fox beastkin who had handed me the boots earlier being bound helplessly and dragged away.
“Did you really do your best...?”
The greatest struggle she could manage amounted to nothing more than glistening tears in her eyes.
Even though it was a game, I couldn’t hide how sorry I felt.
Still, a game was a game. Now it was time for reality.
I was automatically warped to a waiting room that displayed everything that had happened on the battlefield in statistical form.
Most people showed a common trait whenever they entered the waiting room: they became angry.
The moment I warped in, four people presumed to be my teammates came charging toward me.
[■■■■■■■: ■■ ■■■ ■■■? ■■ ■■■ ■■■ ■■■?]
[■■■■■: ■ ■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■■]
Since this was virtual reality and I knew they couldn’t physically touch me, they could only resort to verbal attacks, but I was invincible there too.
It was just a shame that I couldn’t tell them that.
Game statistics were useless anyway, so after confirming that my title had been awarded properly, I left the waiting room.
[Private Room]
As the name suggested, it was my own private room.
It was a tiny three-pyeong space containing nothing but a bed, a table, and a chair.
Despite how narrow the room was, it looked relatively comfortable, perhaps because there was so little miscellaneous junk. The perfectly white wallpaper, especially, had not a single pattern on it.
“I really feel like I’m going insane.”
Maybe I already have.
But I don’t have time to sit around like this.
I had to sell the title I’d just obtained and immediately join the next game.
Riot Games didn’t support any kind of auction where users could buy and sell things between themselves—the so-called cash-out content.
But there are always people who do something precisely because they’re told not to.
The only link connecting me to the outside world was the illegal title-trading market provided by this Chinese-made virtual reality capsule.
Some mysterious genius hacker had opened a server where people could buy and sell title data. Since it had little effect on the actual game and was extremely difficult to crack down on, the company seemed to be leaving it alone.
[Legendary: Would you like to sell the Indiana Jones title?]
{Accept/Decline}
Its market value was around 3,000 won, and I’d even managed to sell one for as much as 5,000 won when someone offered generously, so it wasn’t too bad.
I’d earned almost enough for today’s electricity bill. Now I only needed to make enough for food.
The daily electricity bill was around 4,000 won, mana expenses were about 30,000 won, and food was a fixed 30,000 won a day.
If I made an average of about 3,000 won per game, I calculated that I’d have to play at least twenty games from here on out—or twenty-three if I was unlucky.
Just thinking about playing more games made my head spin.
I’d only played one game. Why was I already like this?
I barely managed to lower myself onto the not-particularly-soft bed.
If someone asked what I could possibly be eating to spend 30,000 won despite having no money, I could answer them proudly.
Mana potions.
One thing I learned after coming to this world was that humans could survive just fine by consuming mana refined and processed as food.
Having lived in a world where mana didn’t exist at all—or one where mana existed but scientific knowledge was nonexistent—I could only marvel at it, but...
That was why the capsule provided mana potions as a paid product for people who spent all day in virtual reality. The only problem was that they were disgustingly expensive compared to those sold on the market.
How long had it been since I last ate real food?
‘I want fried chicken.’
As my body grew languid, all sorts of random thoughts flitted through my mind.
For instance, I wondered what my current daily quests had in common with day labor, a pointless thought like that.
It had been so long since I’d worked day labor that my memories were hazy, but the feelings from back then still remained.
It had felt as though I would starve to death tomorrow if I didn’t work today.
Amusingly enough, that was exactly what my current daily quests were like.
Was my situation any better, though?
“What do you think, Mom?”
I tightly clasped the hand of the woman sleeping beside me.
If anyone saw a mother and daughter crammed together on such a narrow bed, they would surely find it ridiculous.
But more than anything, the most ridiculous part was that the warmth conveyed through our joined hands and all those soft sensations were fake.
“Did you want me to live, even like this?”
There was no answer.
Not only was there no answer; not a single sound could be heard.
Was even the faintest sound of breathing a luxury in this desolate room?
Even a virtual-reality avatar breathes, reflecting the body in reality.
Yet her diaphragm still seemed not to know how to rise.
“I really feel like I’m going insane.”
In this life, my mother had probably died five years ago—or six. Sometime in between, anyway.
And I, living in this bizarre cohabitation with a corpse, had been trapped in this capsule continuously for seven years since birth.