The Secret Farming Map
A stale, musty stench stabbed at my nose. Cold air clung to my skin and a shiver ran through me; coarse cloth rasped with that unpleasant cheap scratch, my lower back protested a mattress hard as bare floor, and the pillow—wherever the hell they had scrounged up that piece of shit—left my neck stiff even while I lay there.
I knew this feeling.
"Ah. Fuck. What the hell."
I opened my eyes. The soaring ceiling was gone, replaced by the low wooden roof of a hut. There was a window, but the tall trees crowding it shut out the sun, so the inside stayed dim—and the bed was so narrow that the slightest twist left my arms and legs hanging in empty air.
"Give me my Farming World back, you bastards!"
I lay there shouting and thrashing, but nothing carried me back to my mansion. They had simply thrown me out by the authority of the game itself.
Who?
I had no idea. Whether this was a quest the game had intended from the start, or the company had reached in and reclaimed my server by hand, there was no way to tell.
Congratulations! You have become the master of the Secret Farming Map!
Whether it could read my mood or not, this tactless message was the only company I had, and all it did was piss me off.
"Ha..."
The Secret Farming Map is the first and only map ever provided, exclusively to the single user who accepted the hidden quest.
This map is the sole Rift Dimension across all dimensions……
The explanations rambled on—five hundred characters at a glance, easy—so I skipped them. The map data, though, I read line by line. Ten-year fossil that I was, even fury couldn't stop me.
"SSS-rank resource rarity means..."
In Farming World, a map's resource rarity is exactly what it sounds like: how rare a resource can get. Put it in RPG terms, and it's a question of how high the item grades go.
A tutorial map usually sits around C-rank rarity. The map is small and the deposits are thin, but the point is simple—on a tutorial map, C-rank is as precious as resources ever get.
Say it like that, and it's perfectly normal to have no feel for what C-rank actually amounts to. If I hadn't played Farming World, I wouldn't have had any reason, or any need, to care about the grade either.
Still, there's one thing that makes the scale feel familiar to anyone living now. The resources that come out of Farming World are, by and large, a lot like the materials you pull from the so-called dungeons that open in reality—from ores with unfamiliar names all the way to the weapons you can process them into.
Plenty of people argued the game was just copying reality. But a dungeon isn't something a game company invented. Copy the names, copy the performance—it didn't matter. They just went ahead and did it.
Which meant a map with SSS-rank resource rarity was a place where you could farm SSS-rank materials that had never once appeared in reality. In the game, at least.
"But is that even possible?"
The game places its elements by reflecting reality in the first place. There is an A-rank resource called octagonal stone. A single raw chunk the size of a fist goes for around five billion won, and fewer than five of them have ever reached the market.
The moment materials like that show up, word spreads like a ghost story that the same thing has appeared in Farming World. Some people flip it the other way. They say it was in Farming World first, then showed up in reality, and once the news got out, people went digging through the game and found it. Does that even make sense?
Either way, with ghost stories like that floating around, I could be as annoyed as I liked. Curiosity still got its hooks in.
"Ha..."
Of course, in this shabby wooden hut—something that couldn't even keep the wind out, that failed at being a house by more than half—seeing an SSS-rank resource looked impossible. An S-rank one, for that matter.
"This is such bullshit."
I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. Ten years had passed, but I hadn't spent them playing only max-difficulty maps. To perfect that final map I had dug through countless other worlds, and tutorials like this—I wasn't exaggerating—I had cleared on the order of ten thousand times.
So I was sick of them.
"I'm not doing it."
I didn't know how things would turn out later. Whether these Farming World bastards had really kicked me out and handed me this because they meant to take my world, or whether a quest-accept bug had forced the quest onto me and I could still get my world back. I could look at the result when the time came, and decide then whether to bother with this Secret Farming whatever-it-was.
Right now, I just wanted out.
"Log out."
Logout is impossible until the tutorial is complete.
"Heh."
These worthless bastards really did know how to annoy a person right to the end. I could see the scheme plain as day.
Fine. Enjoy the tutorial first, and if I don't like it, then I can demand a refund, a rollback, a complaint. That was the offer. Shove it into my mouth by force, and if it tastes bad, we can talk again after.
Unbelievable.
Was this some porn clip where you thrash and say you don't want it, then whimper in pleasure the second they put it in? An experience this unpleasant would only stir up resistance, no matter how well made the map was, no matter how much charm it had for someone who couldn't help himself. Someone like me.
"It's not fun. Log me out."
Logout is impossible until the tutorial is complete.
"Ha..."
I kept that shit up for about ten minutes, and in the end the one who surrendered was me. Yelling at the wood of an empty hut didn't seem to be reaching any admins, either.
"You sons of bitches. We'll settle this when I get out."
Nothing else for it. Trapped inside the game, the only thing I could do was clear this shitty tutorial—or whatever it was. The one and only clue I had, and the only hope.
I sat on the edge of the bed and read through the system messages sprawled out in a rambling list.
"SSS+?"
The privilege sitting at the very top of the list made me bolt upright off the bed.
SSS+ rank. The grade worked a lot like the hunters out in reality. Every hunter ability has a rank, and the higher it climbs, the more power you bring to bear hunting monsters in a dungeon. The difference is that in the real world, SS-rank is the ceiling.
Well. I had never seen an SSS-rank in Farming World either, not until this Secret Farming Map.
Anyway, inside this game, SSS+ rank was a realm past broken. Even the final standard grade, SS+ rank, was enough to make you a god in-game—at least within that one ability, capable of essentially anything. Hit SS+ rank in swordsmanship, for instance, and you could freely wield the kind of ultimate techniques martial novels love. Flying swords and all.
It still insisted, rather pointlessly, on realism. You needed the stats, and plenty of other things besides. Even I, after ten years of play, had only reached SS+ rank on a handful of abilities, and only in the last year or two. That was how hard it was to hit.
And they were handing me SSS+ rank for free?
"Hmm..."
My anger seemed to cool, just a little. If they were giving out a growth privilege like this at the very start, the conversation might change.
Ask why starting Farming World over was such a pain in the ass, and ninety users out of a hundred—not just me—would give you the same answer. The early growth. It was tedious, and it was brutal. Realism and freedom were just nicer words for a hellish grind and zero courtesy.
Wipe one piece of that away completely, though, and the difficulty of everything chained to it was bound to drop hard.
Say I used the SSS+ ability selection I held now on Farming and pushed it to SSS+ rank. Overnight I would gain farming skills even the character I had raised for ten years had never earned, and I could build, right beside this miserable hut, a farm bigger and better than the fully automated one from my own world.
Of course, pile the realism back on and I knew gathering the resources for a farm that good would be impossible. I had no intention of spending an SSS+ pick on something like farming.
"What should I choose?"
Whatever it was, clearing the tutorial meant I had to pick an SSS+ ability. A few options came to mind right away. An ability that would let me devour the early game for free. An ability that would let me clear the tutorial fast. And, if things somehow twisted later and I ended up back on this map, an ability I would stay fond of for a long time—one with plenty of use still left in it.
Looking for what they had in common narrowed the list to a handful. Split those again, and I was left standing at a fork with only two ways forward.
A base.
Or the hunt.
Of the two main pillars running through all of Farming World, I had to choose just one.