Login & Logout
Grade:SSS+
Level:1
Type: Active Skill (Dimensional Travel)
▸ Logout to Earth. (Cooldown: 168 hours)
Login & Logout was a single skill, filed under an ability called Dimensional Travel.
Dimensional travel.
An unbelievable, faintly ridiculous power—but when I actually thought about it, the Secret Farming Map of the rift dimension wasn't a dungeon at all. It was another dimension, and I was already crossing back and forth through it. Seen that way, the idea didn't feel so alien. Was stepping into a dungeon even any different? Now that I'd gone into a real one and come back out, the question kept nagging, and it struck me the same way every time: the only real distinction was an open-world map versus a closed one. Monsters appeared. Resources appeared. The rest was much the same.
Which was why a large part of me wondered whether I even needed to hide it.
I hadn't shown Kim Sujeong my Farming Window for the simple reason that I didn't want to. All the same, registering as a hunter meant verifying the Farming Window before they'd issue a license matched to that grade, so it was a future I'd have to face sooner or later. Novels were full of people who hid their abilities to the bitter end, sure. If it were something embarrassing, like F-rank, I might have understood. An SSS+ Rank ability, though—the moment it went public, the whole world would take notice, and I'd have a genuine shot at becoming a star.
There's a saying that once you're famous, people will applaud even if you take a shit. Set aside the nuisance that came with fame, and there wasn't much to lose in how you lived. Most high-rank hunters already ran personal streams and collected both popularity and profit while they were at it.
I'd decided to think about that after I'd planted my feet in the rift dimension and raised my level. For now, the plan was to level this skill.
Farming Points required for Login & Logout Level 2: 8
"Hmm..."
I did mean to raise it. Even so, every time I looked, I couldn't help thinking how brutal the cost was. Eight points was enough to push an F-rank Farming grade up to at least D-rank.
"Let's raise it."
If I couldn't see what would improve, the way you can't with a random box, there'd be no reason to gamble eight points. But I could already see the effect waiting at Level 2, so after only a brief hesitation I spent the points and raised Login & Logout to 2.
True to its SSS+ Rank, the skill offered the groundbreaking effect of dimensional travel. Rising from Level 1 to Level 2 cut the login and logout cooldowns—the part I'd wanted most—by about fifteen percent. "About fifteen percent" was twenty-four hours. A full day, in other words. The cooldowns now sat at 144 hours: seven days down to six, which left under a day on the remaining logout timer.
The login cooldown was another matter. Last time I hadn't even waited a full day before heading into the rift dimension, so that timer had already been running for quite a while.
"A day, for eight points..."
A single day made a bigger difference than I'd thought. In the Farming World especially, twenty-four hours could be packed brutally tight if you put your mind to it. Under an SSS+ Rank map's effects, even Recovery Herbs matured in forty-eight hours—which meant that cashing in the Login & Logout cooldown twice bought me one extra cycle of them.
I told myself the investment had been worth something. Then I saw the points required for the next level had climbed to thirteen, and it was obvious that growing an SSS+ skill was not going to be an easy road. Level 3 would shave off another twenty-four hours of cooldown, so the higher I climbed, the worse the efficiency of buying time would get.
Not that I regretted it. And it wasn't only time that had been cut.
When using Login or Logout, you may bring one companion with you through dimensional travel.
That hadn't been the plan.
Was there even a plan to speak of? I'd simply been looking ahead. Even if cutting the login and logout cooldowns was inefficient for now, I'd been willing to spend eight points on the future. The cooldown dropped on its own terms, though, and the one extra effect tossed in like a freebie landed exactly where I wanted it. Looking at it that way, eight points felt more than worth the price.
"I can take one person to my farm?"
Logout worked in the other direction too, so maybe this was what Ruru had meant when she said it would be possible later. Even then, getting a function like this for a mere eight points was a little hard to believe. Still, Leap Slash had been the same, and the SSS+ Rank skills that devoured Farming Points had never once fallen short of what I expected of them. For now, I was glad.
How was I supposed to put this to good use?
"Take one person every six days, and that's five a month I could work as slaves on my farm."
I had no idea whether the function had been handed to me for that, but it was the only use that came to mind. Reckless transfers were a bad idea, of course. Bringing as many as I needed was my own business—but if I couldn't control them, they wouldn't be following my orders out on the farm. They'd wander as they pleased, gnawing through my resources and wrecking the place. Reactionaries. I had to remember that.
The map's size was unmeasurable. Exploring and clearing an entire SSS+ Rank map on my own would be hard in the end.
Maybe...
"Oppa. You don't need a manager, do you?"
"..."
I stared for a long moment at Kim Sujeong, hovering in the doorway with a perfectly serious face. She flinched and took a step back.
"What. What's with that look—like you just thought, perfect timing?"
"You ever farmed before?"
"As if. What. Why. Why are you even asking?"
"Never mind. Forget it."
Even so, shutting my little sister up on the farm like a slave and making her do nothing but farm would be too inhumane, wouldn't it? And there was no way Kim Sujeong would cheerfully accept a life like that. I decided to chew on it a little more before I headed home.
"Heading home, huh..."
The thought pulled a dry laugh out of me. I was already thinking of home not as this place, but as wherever the farm was.
Well. It wasn't wrong.
Bit by bit, I started getting ready to go back.
Right now, my belt gave me a seven-slot inventory.
◈ An all-purpose belt made for farming. It looks as though it can store a variety of items.
◈ Crafted at a size of 99 × 7.
◈ Item weight is reduced by 100% while stored.
◈ Can store items up to Small size.
Unlike the other basic tools, its grade was only F-rank—but that was because, in the Farming World, it was a unique bound item. Where other gear got swapped out as your grade rose, this belt was a growth-type piece you kept upgrading and using as it was. What it could hold was larger than a normal seven-slot item, and a full one-hundred-percent weight reduction was an absurd option: genuinely one of the broken, cheat-tier effects in the Farming World, the kind you could count on one hand.
Right now, this belt was the only way I could move goods between my rift-dimension farm and Earth. If I wanted to get through those six days without a sudden oh, right, I was supposed to bring that, I had to squeeze everything I could out of seven slots.
Slot 1, the Sewer Sword, was fixed. Farm or Earth, I had to carry it if I wanted to keep myself in one piece, so even if the dimension tore in half, I wasn't taking it off. I'd left every other tool back on the farm, which meant six slots sat empty. Filling them was my job before I logged in.
In my room, six big corrugated plastic boxes—the kind you use for a move—lay spread out flat, still unassembled. I'd been testing the limit of "small" by shoving all sorts of things into the belt, and the cutoff turned out to be about the size of one of those boxes. I meant to fill them with goods and haul them along the way you'd pack for a move. Last time I'd made good use of Kim Sujeong's carry-on, but it didn't hold much, and if I was packing anyway, the efficient move was to use the biggest boxes I could.
I returned the dirtied suitcase to Kim Sujeong, properly.
"Thanks, Oppa. I'll throw it out."
She said it with a smile, and the thing was condemned on the spot.
When it came to the actual packing, Kim Sujeong helped, of course.
"Where are you even going, packing like this? Evacuating? Off to camp in a dungeon?"
"If you're curious, tag along."
"For real?"
"It's not a dungeon. You'll see when you get there. I don't feel like explaining right now."
"I want to go. Let me go. There's something there, isn't there?"
Quick on the uptake—maybe she could tell that wherever I was headed wasn't an ordinary dungeon—she got worked up and made a fuss of it. Her rank was low, but her interest in dungeons ran deep, and Kim Sujeong had been running around hard ever since she awakened. Keep packing like this, suspicious as it looked, and she'd start to doubt me anyway. Taking her along once might not be such a bad idea.
If she wanted to go.
"If you come, you might not make it back for six days. If it runs long, maybe a few weeks."
"It's fine. I'm great at sleeping rough. You wouldn't know, Oppa, but when I was running dungeons I went on week-long expeditions."
"Fine. Then."
"Yes! Can I pack my stuff too?"
"Pack it all. If there's room left."
"You're taking exactly these six? Should I grab some as well?"
"Even if you pack it, you can't bring it in. Not unless you've got an inventory like a magic backpack."
"Oh."
"Since you brought it up, go buy one. With your money."
"...Guess I should."
It was half impulse, but the head count for the farm had just gone up by one.