Irresistible Fate
It was perfectly natural for men to make their game characters female.
I was no exception.
So there I was, nearly an hour deep into character customization.
At last, I’d finished the face.
I’d tweaked and re-tweaked it until I finally had an expression I was satisfied with.
Now all that was left was the hair.
Since this was a martial arts game, of course I’d go with a ponytail. And long hair was a given.
As for the color… let’s see. White? Ordinary black? Hmm. White hair was better, of course.
Then I should change the eyes too. Red was a little too cliché, so I’d go with blue.
Red eyes were a bit much, anyway. It made her look like she’d been stained by bloodlust. Not my taste.
And so the white-haired, blue-eyed face was complete, and it was time to work on the body.
Height shouldn’t be too tall either. I was planning to use a taedo later, so I ought to make her a bit smaller.
There was something romantic about swinging a taedo as tall as you were, after all.
So I set her height a little on the short side. With that done, the rest was easy.
Body proportions weren’t hard. Narrow waist. Wide hips. Big chest.
The bigger, the better. Since breasts are one of the few things where more really is more, I pushed the slider to the maximum allowed by her height.
Huge. At this point, she was easily past a D cup.
Maybe the balance was a little off? I thought that, so I dressed her in one of the example costumes beside the model.
Not bad. This’ll do. With the body finished too, I was done.
Inside the screen, a white-haired, blue-eyed girl stood there—a beauty who could only be called devastatingly gorgeous.
I tried on a few more costumes, then nodded in satisfaction.
Exactly. This is why you can’t go with a male character. There’s no point in dressing a guy up.
And liking the sight of it would’ve been weird, too.
With the appearance finally complete, I pressed the next button.
Now came the real problem.
The new game: Zilpung Ganghorok.
It was a really tough sell in this day and age. A murim MMORPG? Seriously?
It had only been out for about half a year, and I’d ignored it completely in that time. It just seemed like another cheap Chinese knockoff grindfest.
But the game’s reputation spread by word of mouth day by day, and now it was so popular there was a server queue.
So I’d decided to check it out out of curiosity.
I wanted to see for myself just how fun it had to be to get this popular.
Anyway, next came choosing my starting martial arts.
In Zilpung Ganghorok, you get 100 points when you create a character.
And you can use them to choose the martial arts you want, or raise proficiency in them.
For example, something like that. You could even choose martial arts like the Heavenly Demon Divine Art of the Demonic Cult.
The problem was that the Heavenly Demon Divine Art itself cost 100 points.
People who saw it and thought, Huh? That looks insanely good, and picked it as their starter usually ended up deleting their character and starting over.
If you spent your 100 points on the Heavenly Demon Divine Art and began the game, you’d start in the Demonic Cult at the novice stage with zero proficiency and have an absolutely miserable early game.
At the “novice” level, you were basically no different from fighting barehanded.
Your internal energy was pitiful, and your abilities had barely increased at all.
On top of that, because of the martial art’s high scaling, the early miscellaneous quests paid almost nothing and even the quests themselves became harder.
Of course, if you somehow forced your way through and built the character up, it might shine later. It was the Heavenly Demon Divine Art, after all.
But among the people who’d stubbornly chosen it at the start, not even one in a hundred actually stuck with it.
It was just too grim. No matter how much it was a late-bloomer build, this was clearly not it.
So there were all kinds of guides about how to choose your starting setup.
But they all had one thing in common.
Don’t be seduced by a familiar martial arts name and pick something that merely sounds impressive.
According to the developers, every martial art available at character creation could eventually be obtained in-game.
So all the guides agreed: at the start, you were better off taking even mediocre martial arts and maxing out their proficiency, then breezing through the early game.
That’s why I’d looked through a bunch of guides myself and chosen the one I liked best.
The build I picked was one almost no one paid attention to.
It wasn’t that I had some sort of hipster disease. The guide just seemed pretty convincing.
The one I found recommended two external arts and one inner art.
One was an external art called Golden Dragon Body, another was Iron Body Weight-Adding Force, and the third was the True Origin Heart Method.
Golden Dragon Body was an external art that hardened the body and increased defense.
The stronger your physical power became, the better this art worked.
And Iron Body Weight-Adding Force was an external art that increased strength.
Because of that, the two external arts synergized to give you tremendous physical power and excellent defense, the guide claimed.
Of course, this was still a martial arts game, so in the end everything would come down to internal energy anyway.
These external arts were just tools to make the early game easier.
All I had to do was clear quests with them and obtain the martial arts I actually wanted.
Golden Dragon Body cost 10 points. To max it out to 12 stars, it took 3 points per star, for a total of 46 points.
Iron Body Weight-Adding Force also cost 10 points. But this one only took 2 points per star, so it came to 34 points total.
That added up to 80 points. Which left me with 20.
The True Origin Heart Method was the best inner art you could get for 20 points, according to the guide.
Of course, later on I’d have to merge it with another inner art or delete it altogether.
Still, it was a pretty solid guide.
The best thing about it was that both external arts started at 12-star mastery, so I wouldn’t need to raise or train them separately.
If they were stuck halfway at, say, 10 stars, that would have been annoying. So yeah, I liked it.
Of course, there were other guides too.
Half a year was plenty of time for people to optimize builds.
So there were starter builds based on martial arts everyone had at least heard of.
Twenty-Four Plum Blossom Sword Technique, Tai Chi Sword, Buddha-Subduing Palm, and the like.
The problem was that famous martial arts like those already cost 70 points just to obtain at base level. Raising one star alone cost 15 points.
That was why so many people built their guides around those sorts of starts.
They’d begin as part of a major sect or a renowned noble house somehow.
The downside was that those starts had almost no freedom.
You couldn’t even leave the sect until you reached a certain level.
That was a bit much.
So this was probably the right choice.
If it turned out not to be great, I could just restart.
It’s not like I was the type to play games by blindly following someone else’s guide anyway.
Anyway, with all the martial arts chosen, the only thing left was my name.
Honestly, this was where things truly began. Naming a character was a pretty important matter.
I fiddled with a few options, but after six months of the game being out, just about every decent name had already been taken.
Then, as I kept typing, the name Baek Harin appeared as available.
Ah. Should I go with it? Things like this are best decided on the spot when you get the feeling.
Let’s do it. Thinking about names is hard. If it’s available, use it.
With the name chosen, it was time to actually play.
I stepped away for a moment to use the bathroom, then sat back down at my computer.
And the moment I hit start, a message appeared before my eyes.
Welcome to the world of Zilpung Ganghorok.
Wait… huh!? Did that message just appear in front of my eyes?
As the world turned black, I had just enough time to think that before I lost consciousness.
When I opened my eyes, I was lying in a very shabby room.
My mind snapped back in an instant, followed by one flashing thought: no way?
I pushed myself up, and my body felt somehow both light and heavy at the same time.
What was light was my body as a whole.
What was heavy was a certain part of my chest.
"Oh my God."
It really was oh my God. Holy crap. Why the hell was this happening?
When I looked down, what I saw was the common dark gray beginner’s martial robe they give you at the start of the game, along with a pair of absurdly prominent breasts.
And draped beside them, white hair spilling over my shoulder.
I swallowed hard and touched my face with my hand.
Smooth skin. I was touching my own face, and it felt like this?
Not only that, but my hand was slender too. I could see it with my own eyes, and still I couldn’t believe it.
So I… accepted the situation for now.
I wasn’t the sort of idiot who’d spend forever denying reality.
I wished there were a mirror, but there was no way something like that would be in this rundown room.
Damn. What a shame.
Still, I didn’t really need to check.
If I was right, then this place was the murim.
The world of the game. Or rather, was it even the game anymore? I was here, alive, right now, after all.
Either way, looking at this ridiculous chest in front of me, I had no choice but to accept what had happened.
But there was one more thing I had to confirm.
The one thing everyone in this kind of situation always does.
Cliché or not, I absolutely had to check.
I slipped my hand inside the robe.
My own body, and yet the contours were completely insane. Smooth skin.
Past that, I carefully reached down between my legs.
And when I confirmed there was, indeed, nothing there, I let out a deep sigh.
"Haah."
Yeah. If there was something to check, I was checking it.
Only then did I fully accept the situation.
I’d entered the martial arts world that served as the game’s setting.
And I’d brought the appearance of my character with me exactly as I’d created it.
I wasn’t panicking or completely at a loss.
Getting worked up wouldn’t change anything. It was pointless.
So I started checking what I could actually do.
If I’d come into the game as my character, would the martial arts I’d learned still be there too?
"Status window."
The first command anyone would try in a situation like this.
But no status window appeared. So I tried other names.
"Skill window."
Then a screen appeared before me.
The three martial arts listed there were Golden Dragon Body, Iron Body Weight-Adding Force, and True Origin Heart Method.
Golden Dragon Body and Iron Body Weight-Adding Force each had twelve stars drawn beside them, and were marked as mastered.
True Origin Heart Method had twelve empty stars. That was all.
Well, thank God. At least I hadn’t been dumped in here with nothing but my bare hands.
So this time I tried calling up a few more things.
Nothing else responded. There was only one thing that did.
The quest window. And when I said it, another screen rose up.
Unbelievable.
I thought defeating some mountain bandit lord in the Green Forest or some pirate chief on the Yangtze would already be a stretch, and now this?
The Heavenly Demon General? The Blood Cult Leader? The Heretical Alliance Leader?
What kind of names are those? I have no idea what sort of hell they expect me to go through.
And the reward was ridiculous, too.
So whatever I earn here gets converted into real money back in the world I came from?
But can this even be cleared? Is fighting those monsters actually possible?
Still, let’s think positively for now.
At least there’s no Martial Alliance Leader or anything like that.
Wait, why isn’t there a Martial Alliance Leader? Ah. Maybe because the True Origin Heart Method is still a righteous orthodox art?
No idea. Anyway, my job was set.
Survive in this world by any means necessary.
And clear that quest so I can return to my original world.
For now, I should think back on the various guides I’d read.
Fortunately, the first things I needed to do were clear.
Get usable martial arts. And acquire internal energy to grow stronger.
I’d studied the guides hard, so I’d already noted all the early quests with good rewards.
My memory was fuzzy, but I felt like I could reconstruct them somehow.
The problem was whether those quests existed here exactly as I remembered them.
Well, I’d have to try.
I’d go out and check.
At least I had the beginner’s iron sword and a little silver to start with.
Not much, but enough.
So I left the place where I’d been staying.
It was a shabby inn, and the moment I stepped outside, I could feel countless eyes turning toward me.
Right. I had put a lot of effort into character customization.
Wow. This is way more pressure than I expected.
And not all those gazes were friendly, either.
Sticky, lingering looks mixed in with the curious ones.
Maybe I should buy a veil first? Or wear a bamboo hat and cover myself up when I go out?
Lost in those thoughts, I hurried out of the inn.
But before I could even make it all the way outside, a group of men stepped right in front of me and blocked my path.