Chapter 60
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Translator: 8uhl
Chapter: 60
Chapter Title: Divine Protocol (1)
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A dream.
In a deep dream, I was walking alone down an empty street.
Even while dreaming, I was clearly aware that this was a dream.
A lucid dream.
In this imperfect world, I understood who I was.
Thud. Thud.
On the empty street, only the sound of my own footsteps echoed clearly.
As I continued walking forward for no particular reason, the shape of a person eventually came into view at the edge of my vision.
"Hello?"
A black-haired girl holding a black parasol.
The girl, whose clothes were also dyed black, looked at me.
The monochrome girl had eyes like a bottomless abyss.
The longer I met her gaze, the more I felt like I was being pulled deep into somewhere.
It didn't feel like I was facing a person.
After staring blankly at the girl for a moment, I opened my mouth to speak to her.
"You are"
"Wait. There's a condition for asking each other questions."
"A condition?"
I asked, puzzled by the girl's words.
A condition for asking a question.
The question I was about to ask was nothing more than a simple introduction.
To think there was a condition for just asking a name.
She was a truly difficult person to deal with.
Since it was just a dream, there was no point in dwelling on it, so I decided to keep listening to her.
Hearing my words, the girl nodded and explained her condition.
"To ask someone a question, you have to win a game."
"A game? What kind of game?"
"Well. A board game like chess would be fine, or something like poker or dice wouldn't be bad either."
"Do we really have to go through all that trouble?"
I didn't dislike games, but I wasn't in the mood to play one, especially in a dream.
To have to play a game just to ask for someone's name.
Why go through such trouble just to hear someone's name?
But the girl's attitude was extremely firm.
Despite my complaints, she insisted on her condition.
"The rules must be fair to everyone. Only the winner of the game can ask the other a question."
"Are you saying you're going to ask me a question?"
"Only if I win, of course."
She was just someone I met in a dream.
I could gladly answer whatever she asked.
After all, even if I revealed my secrets here, there was no worry of them leaking out.
It was a situation where I didn't care much, whether the topic was trivial or difficult.
And yet, she said she would only ask me a question after winning the game.
My subconscious must have created the girl before me, but she had a remarkably peculiar personality.
"Alright. If you want to play that badly, let's play a game."
Seeing the girl's desire to play, I reluctantly accepted her proposal.
If she wanted to play that much, it wouldn't be a bad idea to settle things once and for all.
If I won the game, I could get an answer from the girl before me.
Though it would probably just be an obvious answer created by my subconscious.
As I accepted the game, the girl asked me what game I wanted to play.
"What game do you want to play?"
"A game, huh? What game should we play"
"Any kind of game is fine."
"Then let's play poker."
Perhaps because it was a dream, my head felt a little fuzzy.
If I played a game like chess in this state, I might lose without even putting up a fight.
That's why I chose poker, a relatively intuitive game.
When I chose poker, the girl pointed a finger at the ground and spoke.
"Now that you've chosen the game, create it."
"Create what?"
"The tools for the game."
Unexpectedly, the girl was asking me to create the tools.
She must have judged that since it was my lucid dream, I could naturally create the tools.
Well, it was my dream, so there was no reason I couldn't do as I pleased.
As the girl requested, I thought about creating the tools for poker.
As I wished for a poker table on the ground, an empty table suddenly materialized out of thin air.
I felt a strange sense of wonder at the table that had appeared before my eyes in an instant.
"This actually works."
"We'll need chairs, too, right?"
"Chairs right. I need to make chairs, too."
Making the chairs wasn't much different from making the table.
When I imagined chairs, a pair of them appeared around the table.
To think I could create things just by picturing them in my head.
The more I saw it, the more amazing it felt.
For a moment, as I created the objects, I even felt like an omnipotent god.
As soon as the chairs appeared, the girl sat down and set her parasol aside.
I, too, sat across from her and created a deck of cards in my hand.
"How are we going to play?"
Shuffle.
As I handled the newly created cards, the girl asked me about the rules of the game.
Even within poker, there were many different variations.
Among them, the one I was most familiar with was Seven-Card Stud, where four cards are revealed.
It was the version of poker I had the most experience with, both online and offline.
Other than that, I had played a little Texas Hold'em.
I shuffled the cards in my hand and answered the girl's question.
"The rules will be Seven-Card Stud Let's make it a single round with no betting."
"You mean we decide the winner in one game?"
"Yeah. I don't think I can stay here for long."
A dream is bound to end eventually.
There would be nothing more frustrating than waking up from a dream before the game was over.
Besides, we each only had one chip to play with.
That was the reason for deciding the outcome in a single round.
After I finished shuffling the cards, the girl nodded and said.
"If you're fine with that, let's do it."
"Is it okay if I deal the cards now?"
"Alright."
I dealt the cards one by one according to the rules of Seven-Card Stud.
With only two people and no betting rounds, the dealing finished quickly.
After receiving all my cards, I checked my hand, making sure the girl couldn't see.
Four cards were face up.
Combined with the cards in my hand, I had a pair of 10s.
""
A pair of 10s.
Honestly, it wasn't a very good hand.
I looked over my hand at the girl's face.
Had she gotten a good hand?
She was looking at me with a relaxed smile.
Seeing her like that, I didn't think my pair of 10s held much value.
'Looks like I'm going to lose.'
Just by looking at her revealed cards, she already had a pair.
If we revealed our hands now, it seemed highly likely that I would lose.
Staring at the hand I was holding, I began to think of a way to win.
I couldn't change a predetermined outcome through conventional means.
So, the idea that came to mind was, naturally, an unfair one.
'In a dream, can't I just change my cards as I please?'
I could create a table and chairs just by thinking about it.
Creating the cards I wanted should be a piece of cake.
With that thought, I immediately tried it on the hand I was holding.
What I wanted was the ultimate poker hand, a Royal Straight Flush.
The moment I wished for the ultimate hand, the cards in my hand changed to what I desired.
Having drawn a Royal Straight Flush, I revealed my cards on the table and said.
"I win."
"It seems you resorted to a trick."
""
When I revealed my Royal Straight Flush, the girl revealed her own hand and spoke.
The hand she revealed was a Full House.
If the game had proceeded normally, my defeat would have been certain.
I couldn't help but feel a little guilty at the girl's comment about my trick.
To think she saw through my cheating.
It seemed my subconscious had broadcast it, since this was a dream.
"I'll let this slide, but only this once."
However, that was the extent of the girl's complaint.
She had no intention of making an issue of my cheating any further.
The girl messed up her cards on the table.
Then she looked at me and asked.
"So, what was the question you wanted to ask so badly that you'd resort to such a cheap trick?"
"A question?"
"You must have had a reason for wanting to win."
The question I wanted to ask her.
I stared blankly into the girl's eyes, thinking, and soon arrived at the very first question that had come to mind.
There had only ever been one question I wanted to ask.
Her name.
I had to endure this tedious game just for that simple introduction.
After making the pile of cards in front of me disappear, I asked the girl.
"What's your name?"
"My name an important yet simple question."
"I created all of this just to ask that one thing."
As I spoke while making the table and cards disappear, the girl covered her mouth and let out a small laugh.
Thump.
The girl got off her chair and picked up the parasol she had set down.
The black parasol cast a shadow over the girl's head.
The girl's jet-black eyes, now holding the parasol, looked at me.
"Alright. I'll tell you."
""
"My name is"
The girl's low voice reached my ears.
The moment her name, which had echoed so clearly in my ears, syllable by syllable, came to an end.
I woke up from the dream.
"Of all the weird dreams to have."
After finishing my shower and pouring hot water into a cup of ramen, I grumbled while looking at the game running on my smartphone.
As I stared at the game screen, the image of the girl I met in my dream flashed through my mind.
A dream about playing poker with a stranger I met in my sleep.
It was the kind of dream a fortune teller would have a field day with, spouting some nonsense.
It must have been a side effect of watching a video about card magic before I went to sleep last night.
As I reminisced about the girl, her name reflexively escaped my lips.
"Estelle"
It was the name I had managed to hear through the game.
Though the name was probably just a jumble of some memory.
It's not like we'd ever meet again, right?
In the end, it was a meaningless name.
Putting aside thoughts of Estelle, I turned my attention back to the game screen.
"It's probably nothing, so I should stop thinking about it and just play the game."
The first thing I looked for when I turned my gaze to the game screen was, of course, the event message that had appeared overnight.
Perhaps it was thanks to acquiring quite a bit of Karma.
At some point, my player level had gone up by one.
To check the changes that came with the level up, I examined the messages floating at the bottom of the screen one by one.
The message box at the bottom of the screen was already filled with messages related to the level up.
- You have reached Level 9.
- Observer's Eye (Lv.8) is growing.
- You have acquired Observer's Eye (Lv.9). You can now observe the continent with a clearer view than before.
The first thing I could confirm was the message about Observer's Eye.
With the level up, the level of the Observer's Eye skill had risen again.
The graphics had become cleaner and more vibrant than before.
If the previous graphics had a casual feel to them, the current graphics looked more realistic.
Even so, the characters' proportions still looked a bit off.
After confirming the changes to the Observer's Eye skill and my mana pool, I continued to scroll down.
- Warning: Excessively biased Karma in one direction has a high probability of causing an Inevitability Correction.
- The Scales of Karma have tipped.
- A low-level Inevitability Correction has occurred.
- Inevitability Correction Progress: 7
The next change was the shift in inevitability caused by the Scales of Karma.
Perhaps it was because Kueberberg's Karma acquisition rate had slowed down recently.
The correction progress was still at around 7, not much different from before.
I had thought it would rise quickly over time, but there were no drastic changes yet.
At this pace, it felt like I could grow steadily for a while.
"And I got a new skill."
Scrolling down a bit further, there was also a message saying I had acquired a new skill.
A new skill obtained without a skill book.
It had been a very long time since I'd gotten a skill through leveling up like this.
It seemed there were consistent benefits to leveling up besides just an increase in total mana.
With a sense of rising anticipation in my chest, I examined the description of the newly acquired skill.
- You have acquired Divine Protocol Device (Lv.1).
- This skill only responds to characters with the Fanatic trait.
- Skills activated through the Divine Protocol Device will consume your mana.
- The Divine Protocol Device skill has a 24-hour cooldown for each individual character.
- The skills that can be accessed will vary depending on the Divine Contribution of the character with the Fanatic trait.
The name of the new skill was Divine Protocol Device.
Unlike my previous skills, this one had a very complex description.
First, the Divine Protocol Device skill was not a type of skill I could activate directly.
It seemed that characters with the Fanatic trait could use it individually according to their own will.
Of course, even if another character used the skill, the cost would be paid entirely with my mana.
In other words, it was a skill closer to the concept of a macro that automatically activated a skill I possessed depending on the situation.
"So when the cultists of the Order pray to me, a spell is cast It seems to be that kind of skill."
A character with the Fanatic trait could choose and use one of the shared skills.
Naturally, it wasn't a system that allowed for the indiscriminate use of skills without any restrictions.
To use a skill, it seemed a certain value called Divine Contribution had to be met.
Furthermore, for the same character to use the Divine Protocol Device again, a 24-hour cooldown had to pass after using the skill.
It was a skill that enabled the use of magic once in a while, not one that turned every character into an Apostle.
"I can also set which skills to share."
If I scrolled below the Divine Protocol Device skill description, there was a separate settings section.
I lowered my gaze to look at the individual settings for the Divine Protocol Device skill.
There, a list of the skills I possessed appeared, along with buttons to set access permissions.
- Sharable Skills: