The Hero Reward Chest

Someone once ran a survey on hunters.

The moment in a dungeon that hits the hardest dopamine rush?!

The sort of question you'd expect from a variety show—and with hunter programs genuinely popular, it had become one of those stock bits they kept recycling. Hunters stake their lives walking into dungeons, and yet they throw themselves into shows like that with real enthusiasm. Money, in the end. That's all any of it is for. Hunt the monsters, get your name out, and becoming a celebrity is the work of a moment.

The world has changed, but the road to influencer hasn't: stamp your name into people's heads. Nothing does that faster than putting on a show inside a dungeon. Ordinary people lavish attention on hunters like that. They devour the trivial stories, the private details no ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠one should really know. Heroes, in a way. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠And they go on living with the hope that someday they might become one too.

The right to become a hunter is given to everyone. It's so fair that the real problem is how many people gamble their lives on a miserable probability and live on the waiting. A great many had been looking forward to the results of that survey, and when they finally came in—

Most of the options overlap, of course. Getting an item is half the same thing as the reward chest, and clearing a dungeon is really just a lesser version of killing the boss. Bosses don't even spawn every run—they show up at a low rate—so taking one down is bound to hit harder than a plain clear. Not that any of that matters. It's all for fun.

Point being, the moment hunters feel the biggest rush in a dungeon is when they crack a reward chest open. Farming World's dungeons are no different. From what the players say, the thing they look forward to most the second they find one and step inside is that same chest.

And now that I knew this Farming World was the same as reality, I couldn't help expecting even more. In a sense, I was about to open in the real world, for the first time, a chest I'd only ever opened in a game. If anything, I was more excited than I'd ever been for a dungeon on Earth. Items out of the Rift Dimension sit at a resource rarity of SSS, so the odds of something rarer and better than anything in reality run high. More than that, the color of the chest was anything but ordinary.

"What the—? Fuck. A hero chest?"

I shook the filth off my feet in the clear water that had climbed to my ankles and made my way over to where Ruru was. There it sat: a chest about half my height, blazing with a brilliant violet light.

"This is amazing, Master!"

A reward chest counts as an item in its own right. That might sound obvious. A chest can be fairly large, but unless what's inside is itself an item, it can't outgrow the chest—that's just physics. So a chest is an item with inventory slots, the way a Small Chest is, and once you've taken the rewards you can haul it off and use it for storage. That's why dungeons are pretty important content in Farming World. They're also your shot at designs you can't craft, and at good chests with high stack sizes and plenty of slots.

Even so, reward chests have grades, same as any other item. A basic wooden chest or an iron one is brown, or silver. Step up to Rare, and the chest takes on a green glow. Every chest has its own design and color, but you know the second you look. Something like green smoke—an aura—drifts around it, and even if the box itself isn't green, the trim or some other eye-catching color gives it away. That's a one percent chance. The next tier, Hero, shines violet. Just like the chest in front of me. The violet aura runs a little deeper, and the patterns wrapping the box stand out more sharply too. The odds of Hero grade: 0.001 percent.

"Does that ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠even make sense?"

I can preach the gospel of long as it ain't me~! all I want, and it was still wrong. Hero grade. The probability is tiny, but it can come up. I'd already let the glass stone I'd picked up while mining rock slide, more or less on those grounds. Even a one-in-a-hundred-thousand drop isn't strange if your luck is good and you hit it in a sample of a few hundred. That's just probability.

But another Hero-grade chest, this soon? Was I simply absurdly lucky? Better to assume some kind of rate modifier was in play. That was how I chose to see it. Then the way Rare rewards had been dropping a little too well, and the fact that I'd already seen Hero twice—different places, sure, but only on day six—started to make a certain kind of sense. Besides, the Rare and Hero rates in my head were Farming World knowledge. This place was tied to the game, but I'd already confirmed that reward quantities shifted with resource rarity and differences in grade, so the probabilities themselves might have shifted a little too. There was also a map effect that boosted Rare and Hero rates by 500 percent.

Heart pounding, I reached for the chest.

"Please."

Even a Hero-grade chest lives or dies by what's inside. Then again, a reward chest of that grade is a god-tier pull on its own, even if all you do is take the box and use it.

Click.

I turned the latch, and the chest opened. I'd half expected a flash of light and a heap of items, but that wasn't how it worked. The inventory unfolded in front of my eyes.

"Whoa!!"

I clapped a hand over my mouth. Rewards packed into every one of the twenty slots plucked a string somewhere deep in my chest.

I didn't pull the contents out on the spot. Twenty items, and not all of them would be useful—and it was dark, and this kind of thing only tastes right when you crack it open at home. I gathered what I'd gotten from the chest and from Big Rats Mom, carefully butchered the Big Rats I'd killed on the way, and left the dungeon.

"Ended up with a better chest than I expected, way ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠too early."

In Farming World, players basically call it either a tool-upgrade game or a chest-upgrade game. There's plenty of other content, but the clearest sense of raising your resource grade comes from upgrading your tools until you can harvest what you couldn't before. On the other side of it, crafting higher-grade chests so you can neatly sort an ever-growing variety and volume of resources matters just as much. Even my own chest—an absolute mess, everything mixed together—already had me wanting to upgrade and swap it for something bigger.

Three hundred to a stack and forty slots would at least let me organize my basic resources cleanly. I could craft a few more of the starter Small Chests and sort equipment and seeds off into their own boxes. Is there anything more important than sorting chests by category?

Following the new path that had opened where I'd taken down Big Rats Mom, I came out onto a waterway running toward a fairly large lake. This place was tied into the sewers. If I opened a channel, ran it to wherever I wanted, and finished the link through the underground sewers, the irrigation for farming would be solved. I don't really know what principle makes that work. I don't know why the lake and the sewers are connected, and water from the sewer side climbing a fixed course is beyond anything my common sense will accept. But in a world where people use magic and cross a hundred meters at what amounts to teleport speed, do I really need a scientific explanation?

I'd open the waterway later, once I'd designed the yard a little more. For now I went back and dumped the chest's rewards out across the yard. I set the empty chest neatly on the stone base right beside the door, then made four more Small Chests at the Goods Workbench and lined all five up side by side.

Into the first, the Dungeon Medium Chest, went the basic resources—everything from stone, weeds, and wood. The second, a wooden chest, got the seed-type resources, and the third took the hides and byproducts from the Big Rats. The fourth I filled with meat, though the time it stayed edible was short, so that was only a stopgap. Still, at least some of it was sorted.

The chests were clean. The vegetable patch the Big Rats had torn through and eaten was still a mess. I did my best to look the other way and decided to check, one by one, the items from the Dungeon Medium Chest that had spilled across the ground. First up, the boss reward from Big Rats Mom.

The first reward was already a jackpot.