Yujun and the Rainbow Sticker
Yujun drew Koihem's longsword from his inventory—the blade he had affixed the Rainbow Sticker to.
Was it the Agility +20 riding on its options? His body felt a full measure lighter.
Well… a stat of twenty is about what you'd get from climbing another seven levels.
Of course he was meant to feel it. Koihem's longsword carried an equip requirement of 130, and its attack power was monstrous to match. He also spent the ninety unallocated stat points he had gained upon reaching level 31, dividing them evenly among Strength, Agility, and Constitution.
He did not stop there. Yujun equipped the armor locked behind a level 25 requirement as well—full plate, gloves, boots, even a helmet. All four pieces were Rare. Most of what sat in his inventory demanded a high level to wear, and among genuinely low-level gear, high-grade pieces were scarce. That was a shame. For now, Rare was the best he could manage.
Even so, this is enough.
He had Koihem's longsword, and its attack power was overwhelming. In truth, simply being level 31 and clad in a full set of armor was already remarkable. Most low-level users had to clear dungeons clinging to one or two items.
With the cash shop gone, items will only come from trial rewards or dungeon clears. Or crafting, I suppose.
No-Pay Casual Gamer's inventory. Even now, that inventory surely held things that were absolutely impossible to obtain.
He stepped through the portal at the heart of the residential sector and returned to the Waiting Room of the Tower of Infinity. The moment he entered, cold air washed over his whole body. Every item was already equipped. There was nothing left to prepare—except, perhaps, his mind. It was the first time he would face a trial in reality rather than as a game, and yet he was not trembling at all. Just like the tutorial.
My mind is calm.
A hologram window rose before him as he stood in front of the portal.
Tower of Infinity, 1st Floor
Tower of Infinity Residential Sector (Under Lv. 100)
He selected the 1st floor of the Tower of Infinity. His vision blurred as if filmed with dust, then sharpened by a degree—and he was standing in a space nothing like the waiting room.
The 1st floor of the Tower of Infinity. It felt like arriving in a new world. A vast forest ran on without end, and cliffs sheared as if by a blade showed far in the distance. Countless dungeons dotted the woods. Yujun had little interest in them. Rather than step into the forest where they lay, he turned his gaze to the enormous stone statue close at hand, easily five meters tall.
A colossal figure stood in a pose of victory, a pointed spear lifted toward the sky. Lay a hand on that statue, and the trial would begin. Yujun set his palm against its knee.
The trial will begin shortly.
Moving to the trial site.
A familiar message. Yujun tightened the hand closed around his weapon. Was it the stats his equipment had raised? An unplaceable strength seemed to well up through his whole body.
Set down in a new space, he swept a look around him. A dark sealed chamber. Black enough that he could see nothing at all.
Skree. Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!
Sounds a rat might make reached him.
Figures. It's these things.
Fortunately, the trial unfolded exactly as it had in War of the Gods. Giant Rats—enormous rats, each about the size of a medium-large dog. Faintly, their shapes were just barely visible.
It's been a long time.
Seeing creatures he had known only as game graphics in the flesh, they were thoroughly revolting. The frightening thing about a Giant Rat was not only its sharp teeth. There was the tremendous breeding rate, the relentless stamina, and the vicious tenacity. Bite once, and they clung on and would not let go.
Good thing my Agility went up.
It was dark, but not so dark that he could see nothing at all. The higher Agility let him secure a workable field of view. Yujun bent at the waist and dropped his stance.
Skree! Squeak!
Reacting to the movement, the Giant Rats charged all at once. Yujun swept the sword out in a long horizontal arc.
Shhk!
Three Giant Rats that had leapt in at him were cut down. One, though, had stayed outside the blade's path, and that one bit hard into his leg.
Clamp!
The spot was sheathed in solid iron. A faint tooth mark remained, but Yujun took no damage at all. He drove the sword into the crown of the Giant Rat clinging to his knee.
Thuk!
Then he shook the leg hard at the empty air and flung the dead rat off. Four of them, finished in an instant. Giant Rats were famously stubborn about staying alive, but before Koihem's sword every life was equal. He cleared the rest in a flash. Passing the first-floor trial was an utterly simple matter for Yujun.
You have cleared the trial. Move to the 2nd floor?
▷ Move to the 2nd Floor
▷ Move to the Waiting Room of the Tower of Infinity
Having cleared the first-floor trial in the blink of an eye, Yujun moved straight to the second floor and laid his hand on the statue nearby once more. The second-floor trial began.
Shhk! Swish! Crunch!
The time it took to clear the second trial did not even reach five minutes. Having passed two trials back to back in an instant, Yujun wore a satisfied smile.
No question… with gear, this is far easier.
If anything, it felt easier now than when he had run the trials as a game. It was not merely a mood. It was actually true. A scrubby level 30 user was swinging a level 130 Legendary weapon. There was no world in which he struggled through a trial built for low-level users.
Finished with the fight, Yujun flicked the blood from the sword onto the ground.
Already the third floor?
Arriving there, he did not touch the statue this time. There was one thing he had to do before challenging the third trial: find the hidden dungeon.
The question is whether it's even still here…
If it wasn't, nothing to be done. If it was, all the better. He knew the location exactly, and it didn't seem likely to waste much time. You never knew. He decided to look.
The third floor's setting was a dense forest as well. Yujun stepped into the trees without hesitation. The path he had seen on a monitor and the scenery he walked through in person differed a great deal, but finding the way was not difficult. The memory of discovering the hidden dungeon had been that vivid.
He called up a memory from several years ago, not long after he had started War of the Gods. Back then he had formed a party with other users to raise his level. Each of them sat three or four levels above him. In truth, Yujun had joined in the manner of someone being carried. They had been hunting smoothly for about thirty minutes when the party leader suddenly kicked him from the party—and attacked at once. Yujun answered with a dodge.
Unbelievable.
He never learned whether they had done it for fun, out of a grudge, or to take his items. He only wanted to live, and he fled them with mouse and keyboard. He ran without rest for an hour. They ought to have given up, but whether spite had taken hold, they chased him to the end, intent on killing him. In the end he shook them by exploiting the brief stiffness that hit a character when it changed direction.
Once the users were gone, he ran into another predicament. He had lost the way back. More precisely, there was no way back. Alone, he could not handle the monsters of the forest. Even if he chose death, he would only revive near the spot where he had died. He could not return to the village.
Having suffered something so absurd it barely felt real, he had no choice but to walk on blindly. In the midst of that wandering he found a dungeon—and of all things, it was a hidden one.
I got lucky.
Hidden dungeons were so difficult to find that money could hardly buy the chance. Anyway, because of that experience, Yujun could recall where it had been.
That was why I started paying.
He had never wanted to be stabbed in the back again. Before entering the hidden dungeon he had spent a considerable sum and armed himself with good items, and thanks to that he had cleared the place he had found without much trouble. That same experience was why he was profiting through his inventory now.
Should I actually be grateful to the bastards who backstabbed me?
The idle thought made him laugh. He studied the distinctive features of the ground near where the hidden dungeon had stood.
I remember all of it.
It came back so clearly that he wondered whether his memory had always been this good.
Could this be another effect of the world turning into this?
Becoming a player had raised his stats. His body was on a level no ordinary person could match. Perhaps his intelligence had developed along with it, and things like memory had improved enough to notice. Otherwise there was no explaining how he still held a memory from four years ago, intact.
Monsters. Seven of them?
He met a pack of lizardmen. Lizardmen were monsters of the Tower of Infinity's third floor—taller than a grown man, thick with muscle, and armed with blunt weapons. They traveled in groups, a burdensome fight for anyone alone rather than in a party. They were that sort of opponent, and yet—
Crunch! Swish!
Yujun put all seven down with ease.
"……This is way too easy."
The fight had ended far too cleanly. He had not even been hunting in a party. He had fought alone.
My weapon really is broken.
Because this was reality and not simply a game, it landed even harder. Lizardmen that other people struggled to hunt in parties, he had hunted by himself. If another user called it unfair, he would not have had a word to say.
Hogging it alone makes the points pretty sweet, too.
Another 370 points came in. After that he reached the place where the dungeon lay without meeting another monster.
"Huh?"
Arriving where he had meant to go, Yujun's face went blank with confusion. The dungeon was not there. The cave mouth that should have been tucked tight behind mossy vines—the dungeon that had once stood in that spot—was gone.
Did someone already clear it?
Most likely. It had been five years since the world had turned into this. Given that much time, the odds of a hidden dungeon still remaining were slim. He had come just in case, and in the end the trip had been a waste.
"What a shame."
Even so, he did not turn back. He searched the surroundings from end to end.
I might have remembered it wrong.
But he could not find so much as a trace of the entrance, let alone the entrance itself. So it had been a fool's errand after all. Yujun decided to go back. His foot came down on ground buried under thickly grown weeds.
Whoosh!
In the instant he thought he had missed his step, his body dropped straight down.