Never Abyss

"Status Window!"

I'd been hit with the absolutely broken Stage 4 debuff Abyss's Needle—movement speed, attack speed, and cast speed all down 30 percent on top of every single stat getting chopped in half—but at least the terrain scouting for the map was already finished, so I supposed I should count myself lucky.

"Having a vanilla max-level field pop at this level was already rotten luck to begin with."

The event map known as the Abyss only ever appeared through fixed events or sudden events, and every single monster inside it was elite at minimum. People went there to farm gear dripping with every prefix imaginable. It was not a place a low-level scrub like me had any business entering!

And because it had spawned as a sudden event, I'd refused it—only for the debuff to land on me anyway. Fuck.

I'd even installed a mod that was supposed to block this exact bullshit. Why the hell hadn't it worked? I thought of the famous one that proudly sat inside the top ten of the "Top 50 Recommended Anti-Eok-kka Mods for Beginners" list and shouted,

"Never Abyss mode check!"

"So the mode wouldn't activate because my level was too low…"

This reality patch really was a complete piece of shit.

There were ways to bug your way up in levels by diving into the Abyss map while still low-level, but I had zero intention of testing any of that with my actual body. The second I hit level 200, I was flipping that thing on.

"In that case, first things first!"

Rest.

The debuff only lasted a single in-game day, which was a genuine mercy. If that monstrous thing had stretched for months or years, I wouldn't have been able to do a damn thing the entire time. No—I probably would've been holding sacrificial rites and praying for an event that would lift the debuff to show up.

The sudden Eok-kka event had left both body and mind completely drained. If I'd been dragged into the Abyss and died, I would've walked out with even worse debuffs, permanent ones, and ended up as an Abyss thrall.

"…Come to think of it."

Only after seeing the Abyss did the thought finally hit me.

In this shitty game, every event—vanilla alone, no mods—numbered well over a hundred thousand. They split into two kinds: events that only spawned under specific conditions, and events that just popped whenever the hell they felt like it. The Abyss belonged to the first group.

The spawn condition was simple: it only appeared near altars, sanctuaries, secret rooms, or golden treasure chests. Getting slapped with an Abyss debuff while cracking open a chest was such pure misery that an entire mod had been made for it, and chests were the most common trigger by far.

The terrain scouting was finished, so any sanctuary should have shown up on the minimap. It wasn't an altar either—no altar buffs or debuffs had kicked in just from stepping into its range of influence.

"…A secret room, then."

Secret rooms never appeared on the minimap. They guaranteed at least one "secret chest" instead of a normal treasure chest, and simply entering one rolled a random positive event.

"Not-So-Secret Secret Room mode ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠check."

"Activate mode."

Just two mode checks and one activation attempt completely drained my spiritual energy. The message window cut off mid-sentence, my spiritual root twisted inside me, and the innate ability that was my Status Window stretched and sagged like taffy. I flopped straight onto my back.

"Fucking hell."

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

I was so wronged I could've cried.

Couldn't even do that!

This was a game that sold every emotion expression beyond the five basic ones—Greeting, Anger, Disappointment, Gratitude, and Rest—as paid DLC.

Greeting was basically a recommendation you gave other players; Disappointment was a downvote. There were even achievements for racking up ten thousand recommendations or ten thousand downvotes, which basically functioned as a fame system. Anger stacked if you spammed it, granting an uncontrollable body-stat buff that made you flail basic attacks everywhere until the stacks ran out. Gratitude, used once on a neutral NPC, permanently raised good-alignment gain rate by 1 percent and positive event chance by 0.5 percent until you visited another village. Rest regenerated health and mana.

A tiny minority argued that attaching buffs to emotion expressions made the DLC worth selling. The overwhelming majority said selling emotion expressions as DLC was crossing a line. Obviously I had been in the latter camp.

Now that the reality patch had locked me out of everything except those five, I desperately regretted not buying the emotion expression DLC!

Still, once my spiritual energy recovered and the debuff finally lifted, I set out to find the secret room.

The mod that would have highlighted the entrance for free freeloading was off-limits, and the reality patch meant I couldn't just rub against minimap borders or spam object interactions to reveal it quickly either.

"Doesn't take a genius."

This was a volcano map—a mountain, properly speaking—that had once been overflowing with flowers. If a secret room existed here, it had to be a cave or something underground. No way one was just floating in the sky out of nowhere!

I couldn't dig with slaughter energy, but a body stat of 331 meant I could carve through dirt like tofu with my bare hands. The problem was that once you started walking the immortal path, your body half-locked into its current state, so these short arms and legs still couldn't scoop out huge chunks at once. It was going to take a while.

"Tch. Only one secret chest."

Depending on level you got anywhere from one to five. I hadn't been expecting five, but two would've been nice.

"Please be an artifact! No—Dharma Treasure! Dharma Treasure! Dharma Treasure!"

The secret chest drop table started at rare gear and unique consumables, and on top of that it had a full 18 percent chance of spitting out a random Dharma Treasure! Almost no duds, and because the drop table locked in at map generation, not even the miracle of save-scumming could change it. It was basically a guaranteed pull.

The important part was that a Dharma Treasure could drop here!

Sure, it might be trash, but having one empty equipment slot left was something my gamer instincts complained about every single day now that my innate Status Window had forced me to see the world as a game again. Especially when my equipment ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠bonus was still stuck at Magic rarity and it was driving me insane. How the hell was I still missing even one rare lower-body piece so I couldn't trigger the rare equipment bonus?

Of course that made no sense! Fuck! If it weren't for the NPC Personal Trade mode! If I could've just deactivated this goddamn mode! If it didn't mess with the save data so hard that removing it would brick everything!

And of course, when the secret chest opened, brilliant effects burst out in blue, gold, purple, and red—but platinum never showed.

It wasn't that the 82 percent had hit.

It was that the 18 percent hadn't.

Thanks to this shitty reality patch, I'd only found my first secret room on the fourth map, the secret chest had only spawned one, and even then no Dharma Treasure. Goddamn it, this mood was foul.

Of course finding a secret room at all was good. But human greed had no bottom, did it?

"And still not a single lower-body piece. Is this for real?"

Gear from rare all the way up to legendary had popped out one after another, but with no pants the equipment bonus upgrade was dead in the water again this time.

Almost level 200 and still rocking a Magic equipment bonus that wasn't even rare? That idiot was me. Fuck my life.

If it weren't for the NPC trade mode.

Difficulty-raising mods mixed with difficulty-lowering ones, convenience mods mixed with inconvenience mods—the whole hybrid mess just made me angry. The most infuriating part was still the reality patch itself!

Anyway, I'd lucked into a secret room, so I checked the map again and started moving along the route I'd planned earlier, scooping up the remaining elites, named monsters, and treasure chests.

"Wiiiiiiing!!!"

"Oh, for fuck's sake?!"

An elite named, and one wearing the Tier 1 prefix Dazzling no less, had just popped out.

After losing an Auto-Battle to that cherry blossom tree with the powerful prefix earlier, I couldn't bring myself to call Auto-Battle again. I immediately raised slaughter energy disguised as spiritual power.

"Hup!"

Chopsticks formed of crimson slaughter energy shot from my hands in an instant, homing in on the bee—but the Tier 1 prefix Dazzling was no decoration.

When a monster wore it, hit rate locked at 50 percent and evasion locked at 50 percent, so any single-target attack had a coin-flip chance of missing. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠The result was that the majority of my chopsticks simply veered off course.

It was the second-most infuriating prefix a monster could carry. There was even a mod that deleted the Dazzling prefix from the pool of elite affixes entirely. In late-game fields crawling with elites—the Abyss, for example—it was one of the main things that stopped you from AoE farming.

But the power of the reality patch was absolute. Hit rate, evasion, and even critical hits had all been nerfed into the ground!

"You get a taste of the reality patch's Eok-kka too!"

The chopsticks that had missed all snapped around at once. Made of slaughter energy that hungered for a living thing's death, they weren't something you could simply dodge—you had to block them!

The bee, of all things, belched flames from its body trying to burn the chopsticks away, but one of them finally punched straight into its torso.