I Possessed an NPC

"Fuck. Where the hell am I?"

I was an ordinary office worker. The kind who collected a paycheck and killed evenings with whatever games happened to catch my interest. My name is Lee Yeon, and I died.

A car accident. A truly horrific one. I still remember my guts tearing open, my body crushed into something grotesque, my vision drowning red in my own blood.

In every anime and novel I had ever seen, dying in a traffic accident meant getting shipped off to another world. I got sent to another world too, in a manner of speaking. The problem was that the other world happened to be Soul Academy — the game I had poured more hours into than I cared to admit.

When I opened my eyes, I was standing in a strange village packed with people drifting back and forth. Every last one of them moved like an NPC, wandering the streets with empty eyes locked on nothing, not a flicker of focus in their faces. They were furniture. Tools dumped into the world to fill out the population count, same as I was supposed to be. The difference was that I had possessed this body myself, and that seemed to have shaken me loose from whatever script was supposed to run me.

I gave the village a once-over and slipped into a corner alley. First things first: I needed to calm down.

I had died, and I had come back. And I had come back inside the game I loved more than anything. This was a gift from God. Maybe I would awaken some ridiculous power, the way protagonists always did in these stories, and become completely broken. And more importantly — I would never have to clock in again.

Yeah. If I had been handed a second life, I was going to enjoy the hell out of it.

"Alright… something like this, I guess?"

The game itself was simple. You raised a character built from Soul and Body, cleared the story, and walked away with a happy ending. In-game, a character could lift a hand and spread their fingers to check the state of their own soul. Worth a try.

I raised my hand the way I had seen a thousand times on-screen and opened my palm. What appeared was not the blazing, radiant sphere I remembered from the game. It was a sphere that was nothing but an Outline.

And then the status window opened.

…What the hell.

No. Hold on. This was not supposed to happen. How was I supposed to survive like this?

Let me lay this out. Soul and Body formed a ratio, and that ratio was what built a person. The higher the Soul ratio climbed, the more your humanity — your emotions — drained away. Push Soul too high and the game would lock you out of quests for losing your humanity, which was one of its dumber systems. That did not mean raising Soul was a bad idea. In this world, the soul mattered a great deal. You could draw power from it, something like a psychic ability, and the measure of how much you could pull was called Spiritual Power. The stronger the soul, the greater the destructive force and the deeper the well.

A higher Body ratio, on the other hand, let you put your physical abilities to better use and padded your durability considerably. The catch was that you could not raise the Body ratio. Training the body was possible, sure, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠but actually increasing the percentage through exercise was impossible unless you forced it up by shrinking the Soul ratio.

And no — a higher Soul ratio did not mean your body vanished. You did not turn into a ghost. What it did mean was that your physical durability cratered, though you could paper over that by wrapping yourself in Spiritual Power if you had enough of it to spare.

The reason I was completely screwed right now was that both of my ratios were garbage. A normal human sat at 10% Soul and 90% Body. Which meant my Soul was stuck at the level of an ordinary person, and my Body was at 10% — I was less than a bug on the sidewalk. Even a starting player character opened at 30% Soul and 70% Body, a spread a notch stronger than the kids already enrolled at the academy, which was why players could grow at a decent clip from the jump.

Growing easily and actually clearing the game, though, were two very different things. The difficulty on this thing was unhinged. It was not unusual to watch streamers rage-quit so hard they nearly put a hole through their desks. What carried a player through to the end was not some ability or skill. It was a power that belonged to the player alone: die, go back, fight again. Learn the patterns. Memorize them. Win on the back of a hundred deaths. That was how a player cleared every episode.

I did not have that power. What I did have was a body that would lose a fight to a stray dog.

My soul was Soul and Body fused into one, and that soul of mine was a sphere with nothing left but the Outline. Not surprising, really. What kind of developer wasted detailed lore on a filler extra whose only job was to pad out a crowd?

Being in an Outline state was not a pure disadvantage, though. This game would not let you raise the Body ratio, but it would let you raise Soul — by killing enemies and absorbing what they left behind. The percentage barely budged each time, but it moved. And because I was an Outline, every time Soul went up, Body would climb with it. In theory, that meant 100% and 100% was possible.

In theory. If I actually pulled it off, I could steamroll the final chapter without leaning on a player's extra lives at all.

I stepped back out onto the street. Information first. I needed to know what point on the timeline I had landed in, or I would have no idea how far the current episode had progressed. A newspaper tumbled past on the wind, discarded and half-crumpled, and I scooped it up to see what had been going on.

So the entrance exams had wrapped about a week ago, and the new class had already been admitted.

Hmm…

I frowned, let out a thin breath, and dug through my memory of the game. The line from the prologue had been burned in.

This paper was calling a hundred students the highest number on record. The episode had not even started. Entrance exams ran once a year, which meant I had at least a year before anything kicked off. A year I would have to spend training as hard as I possibly could — and I had to get into Edelgard. That was where the quests were. That was where the benefits were.

I set my goal for the year. Hunt monsters, absorb their souls, and push both ratios up. Repeat that loop for twelve months and hit 40% Soul and 40% Body by the time the entrance exam rolled around. My soul was especially weak right now, so even a small monster would bump the Soul ratio by something like 0.1%.

Of course, in this body, I probably could not even beat a child. Walking out to hunt in this state was a one-way ticket to a stupid death, and I could see it coming from a mile away. For now, I would train the body. I had to push it as hard and as fast as a year would allow.

A low Body ratio meant two things: a slide toward losing your humanity, and a body whose insides were dangerously fragile. The humanity problem seemed to have been cancelled out by the fact that I was a transmigrator. The other weakness was still very much in play. Fragile insides meant internal injuries came easy. Set that aside, and I still had the speed and strength of an ordinary person — except my ratio was so absurdly low that one wrong move would put me at death's door anyway.

A Trait would not manifest until the Soul ratio climbed to around 20 or 30 percent. A Trait was, put simply, a skill — your own unique skill, shaped by whatever you imagined, whatever you loved, whatever ideals and convictions you carried. I was sitting at 10%. Body training was the only card I had.

Back on Earth I had never been much for exercise. Luckily, some older guy at the office had started dragging me to a boxing gym about a year before I died, and I had actually stuck with it. I had figured it was pointless. I was never going to get jumped in an alley. I was never going to be in a fight. Turns out I owed that man more than I could say. I never imagined those workouts would matter here, but I remembered every drill.

The problem was that I had nowhere to live. I was a filler extra in the truest sense — no connections, no background, no information, and almost certainly no family. A character spawned with a single keystroke. Of course there was no house.

I considered heading into the mountains to train, then thought better of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it. The hills were crawling with beasts and monsters. Training in the middle of the street while people walked past was not any better. That would look insane, and it would be mortifying.

So just skip the academy and live a quiet life?

Like hell. I wanted to get strong and throw magic around the way every other isekai protagonist did. Everyone had that fantasy. Getting into the academy was not optional if I wanted to become someone. That was where the tools were, and the quests, and — more to the point — they would feed me and give me a room. Only an idiot would turn that down.

Which reminded me. I was eighteen, so I would be going in as a second-year transfer student. Transfers never got a warm welcome, and I would be painfully weak on top of that. Surviving in there was going to be ugly.

Wait.

I did ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠not even have an ID. How was I supposed to apply?

Every single thing was a problem. Every last one. Ahaha. Fine. I would figure it out. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ID first. But before that, I needed to rest. My head was killing me.

I checked that the alley was empty, curled up on my side like a shrimp, and let my eyes slide shut. I was lost. Completely, thoroughly lost. What even was this? Whatever it was, it was a second chance I had barely managed to grab, and I was not about to throw it away. Possessing a body beat being dead. That much I knew.

Above me, the moon hung in a night sky whose clouds had already swallowed the sun.

I would think it through in the morning. Maybe I would wake up in a hospital bed back on Earth. Maybe this was all a dream. For some reason, though, I was not sure I wanted to go back. Spending the rest of my life drowning in overtime sounded worse than whatever this place had in store.

"Aagh! What the hell is that?!"

Never mind. Earth was better.

I slapped a centipede off my calf before it could crawl any higher and scrambled to my feet. Haha. I was actually going to lose my mind.

I want to go home.