Chapter 1
Chapter 1
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: penny
Chapter: 1
Chapter Title: Third Life Armchair Advisor
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A white screen flickered before his eyes.
The internet.
A short clacking sound rang out briefly, and soon a new post appeared online.
Memorize lotto numbers from round 2 and become the youngest chaebol.
Revive our chicken shop that went bust because of those damn bat bastards.
Living three lives would be so boring you'd die. Repeating decades three times?
"......"
They say the internet is a sea of information.
Countless people access it at once and chatter away, leaving behind just as many traces. Those become a kind of information in this world.
Among them are nonsense, hard truths, and unverified novel hypotheses running wild.
Some genuine knowledge exists too, but it's just a handful amid the flood.
Even so, the internet is fairly useful under the name of collective intelligence.
Just by posting one article, without discerning truth from lies.
It's great for aggregating the opinions of the anonymous masses.
No better place to gauge groupthink.
I calmly scanned the comments piling up on the post.
People's thoughts were all much the same.
Earn money for an easier life, even if just a bit.
Fix past regrets or seize missed chances by force for a successful life.
"Hm..."
I felt the need to tweak the question.
With tiny eight-year-old fingers, I clacked away at the keyboard.
Buy the world's top eight guilds and power-trip all over lol.
"As expected..."
I muttered softly to myself.
"People's thoughts are all pretty much the same."
Truth be told, I didn't need to whisper.
I was the only one living in this small house.
Maybe because it was daytime, it didn't feel dreary.
An empty house.
The furniture looked like display models in a showroom, covered in thick dust from disuse, evoking a sense of emptiness.
A laptop and desktop closest to the bed.
And the top-tier chair—if it weren't there signaling human habitation, you'd mistake it for an abandoned place.
You'd think such a house would be deathly quiet, with no noise at all.
Surprisingly, a solo home wasn't silent.
Quite noisy, in fact.
Because...
...the noise blasting from the white screen was so loud.
Modern civilization indeed.
An era where you can live buzzing with dopamine.
What kind of being do you become if granted three lives?
I was confident I could answer this question perfectly.
If you live three lives, honestly, you crave doing what you couldn't before.
As you can tell from repeating what others live just once.
My lives were far from smooth.
First off, to clarify: Third Life isn't regression.
It means I've lived three lives.
I.
In my first life, I was a destitute hunter scraping by in back alleys.
In my second, a hero battling the demon king in another world.
Living like that, I came to yearn for one thing.
A comfortable, safe, good life.
In simple terms, an ordinary one.
I wanted that too.
And so, I got a third life.
I hoped to live the life I couldn't before, sure.
But I didn't exactly ask for more lives.
At this point, I had no clue how many more might come.
Second life felt like a jackpot.
But by the third, a vague fear crept in: maybe this reincarnation loop never ends.
So I set a rule for this life.
Unlike before.
Live it as satisfyingly as possible before going.
In that sense.
The collective intelligence of the internet is truly great, even if it hits abruptly.
Why?
It roughly nailed my goals.
I wanted to live ordinarily.
Because I couldn't before.
And fun.
Because I couldn't before.
Chasing that so-called dopamine hit.
So where do you find dopamine?
From hobbies, of course.
I glanced at the monitor.
Closed the browser tab where I'd posted.
There, filling the house with 100% of its noise, was the streamer.
Her name: Yura.
A gaming streamer maining League of Worlds.
The game sweeping the world right now.
Anyway, that's my hobby these days.
Streamers and their Money Bird... ahem.
No.
Armchair advising.
In the monitor, Yura—now pumped with cash instead of blood in her veins—shouted brightly.
The chat flooded with 'Yura's such a Money Bird' and 'Money Bird Yura,' but she ignored it all and lightly hit the Tower Climb button.
Then.
The game began with that sound.
League of Worlds—Yura's current game, abbreviated as League—has three modes total.
Ranking Match: PvP between players, what Yura was about to do.
Exploration Mode: exploring the game's world.
And.
Tower Climb: scaling the tower.
Yura entered floor 1 first.
Floor 1 is nothing special.
You can skip it fast.
Just a layer of slime monsters.
A level 1 newbie character can take down slimes in two or three hits.
Let alone Yura's level 21 character.
A mage too.
One Fireball—the slime's liquid weakness—should clear floor 1 easily.
Yet on the monitor, Yura was firing Fireballs twice.
Tower Climb is basically a time attack.
But Yura committed the crime of casting cooldown-needing Fireball twice.
Yura, riled up by the chat, yelled back.
This was prep complete.
Watching chat while playing meant seeing donations too.
Time to proceed.
I fired off a donation without delay.
In my first life, I climbed a tower.
Clung to it desperately.
Unlike that cheap in-game tower, it was brutally vicious.
Back then, summiting it was my life's goal.
Maybe that's why.
Watching others climb made my mouth itch.
Maybe that's why I became an Armchair Advisor.
These days, it's my little joy in life.