Prologue: Why Did I Do That?
Why did I do that? Even though ten years had already passed, I still couldn't forget that day.
"Ah, I've seen all the endings."
Lee Kyu-an, age 20. Two months before starting university. Like every kid my age, I spent all my spare time grinding away at games.
Diable Fantasy: Academy Edition—a game with brilliant (total shit) controls and a highly praised (extremely negative) story! It got flamed from every angle and ended up completely buried.
But with way too much time on my hands, I stubbornly latched onto it out of sheer spite and finally managed to unlock every ending. Out of barely 10,000 users, I was the only one who'd collected them all.
"Huh, what's this? Custom mode?"
A custom feature that unlocked at 100% ending collection rate. With nothing better to do, I started messing around with it.
'Oh. You can tweak pretty much anything.'
Appearance, talents, and all sorts of miscellaneous stats—I got completely absorbed in the feature for ages.
And that's when one thing caught my eye.
Back then, brimming with curiosity about every little thing, I spotted that cursed name.
'What's this debuff? Self-imposed hardcore mode, huh?'
How tough could it really be? With that thought, I hit start game.
Someone should've smacked me upside the head right then.
'...How the hell did it come to this?'
Ten years into being stuck in this game. Today, like always, I sat alone in my room, gloomily staring at the blue window.
Mark of Distortion (EX)
Distorts the target's appearance, traits, talents, and ability scores to their absolute minimum values.