The Legendary Reward Chest

"A legendary chest? Is this for real?"

By Farming World standards, the drop rate on a legendary-grade chest was 0.001 percent. You could run a dungeon a hundred thousand times and still be looking at a coin flip for a single one — and if that chest came out at S- rank, getting it through effort alone was, for all practical purposes, impossible. Even among the veterans who lived on the Farming World forums, users who actually owned a chest of this grade were few and far between.

Luck being what it was, a newbie did occasionally wander in, put on the whole "is this any good?" act, and flex the thing. It happened. Just not often. Even that was a lottery with truly miserable odds. Heroic rank — B-rank — sat at 0.1 percent, roughly once in a thousand runs, and plenty of users who swore they'd grind dungeons until a warehouse was packed with Heroic chests quit long before they ever filled one.

On top of that, among legendary chests, anything of B-rank or higher came with one extra option. That was Auto-Sort, and it did not appear on chests of C-rank or below. Pull a legendary chest that happened to be C-rank, and all you really walked away with was an enormously spacious box. Which was why the player base split in two: users who ground low-level dungeons until a legendary chest finally dropped, and users who picked one up while running dungeons of B-rank or higher.

The reason you had to run B-rank and above, even when it hurt, was that obvious. In Farming World, Auto-Sort was flat-out broken. That single option was the first standard people used to decide a map had reached graduation tier.

Graduation meant exactly what it sounded like — the stage where, the way I'd done with my own Farming World 1, you sank years into a map, revealed every last corner of it, rode the tech tree to its very end, and decorated the place until there was nothing left to do. What you needed to get there was this Auto-Sort chest.

The option itself was simple, and viciously convenient. Put an item into the legendary chest inside your base, and it automatically sorted that item into the other chests within the base's range. No more hauling a mess of basic resources up to the second floor. Drop them in here, and they filed themselves into the resource ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠warehouse upstairs, each one where it belonged. You did have to decide in advance which chest held which kind of resource, but once that was set, it grouped identical resources on its own — identical categories, too — and organizing a chest by hand became a thing of the past. With that one option, you could more or less call Farming World's convenience problem solved.

There were mods that added something similar, of course. The real thing sat behind difficulty and luck this cruel. Even those mods, though, never felt like a single click. They only eased the farming difficulty a notch, which meant the genuine article still carried a scarcity of its own.

"Auto-Sort, this early? This map is blessed."

Calling it blessed felt a little sheepish, though. I'd already pulled far too much from the very start for that. I left the contents unopened and hooked the chest onto my belt, then set straight to butchering the corrupted ogre. The byproducts spilled out on a scale that belonged to a different world from the ogre young. Three items came up with them.

"Forest's still in one piece, at least."

The fog of chaos energy had lifted, and the corrupted forest was a corrupted forest all the same. I stepped out nearby and chopped a tree just to check, and what dropped was a Corrupted Tree. No telling how long it would stay ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that way, so I'd have to keep coming back and strip everything that could be stripped. Part of me wanted to circle the whole place and clean it out right now, but too much time had already slipped past for that.

It was already past two in the morning. I'd left early, which meant I'd been at this for ten-odd hours. It hadn't felt like that long — inside the fog I'd had no sense of time at all — and the forest was wide enough that simply walking it had eaten a good stretch of the night on its own. Even so, I couldn't just turn around and leave. As a last pass I butchered the dead ogre young I'd walked by from around the midpoint, the ones I'd left where they fell, and only then headed home.

"Master!"

"Oppa!"

The moment I stepped inside, the familiar shouts came ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠up to meet me, worry packed into every syllable.

"You two aren't sick of this yet? Just go to sleep. How long are you planning to live on edge like this? If I die, figure I'm dead and live easy."

"Hmm... should I? Yeah. That does sound like the right call."

"Hnn... I was worried, Master."

This time I really hadn't come back until dawn, so a maybe might genuinely have crept in. But as I'd said, they couldn't spend their lives watching only me, asking whether I was dead every time I failed to return. A wait with no promised end is the most blood-draining thing a person can endure, and if we let it start now, later there would be no fixing it.

This was the Level 0 Biome. That was the only reason I could still make it back in the night at all. Level 1, Level 2 — as the biomes widened, and given the size of this map, there would be nights I didn't sleep at home and stretches of days spent camped out. Were they going to pass all of that doing nothing but worry I was dead? Their worrying wasn't my problem. The problem was that it was starting to get in the way of daily life.

"Even if I'm not here, do the work. That's how you don't die."

It wasn't as if I had no sense of responsibility at all. I knew, at least, that I was carrying Kim Sujeong's life and Ruru's. Ruru could go into that eternal sleep, or whatever it was, until the next master appeared. Kim Sujeong could not. If I died, she would be stuck — not as master of this rift dimension, only as a resident — until she grew old, starved, or was eaten by monsters.

So she wasn't to wait for me, and she wasn't to worry. Even if I died. She had to do the work. Only then would she have something to eat, and a breath left to keep on living. That was the rule. The rule for surviving in this world.

"No. Honestly, I'm already getting numb to it. And I'm sleepy. Haaahm. From now on, if you just don't come back for a few days without a word, I'll take it you're dead. When you head out, Oppa, just tell me roughly when you think you'll be back. I'll set the presumed-dead deadline a few days out from that."

"Yeah."

Kim Sujeong seemed to be adapting, steadily, to life in the rift dimension. She said all of that, then climbed to the second floor with relief plain on her face at the sight of me alive, while Ruru flew in close and circled me, asking questions.

"Did you hunt the ogre?"

"You aren't hurt anywhere?"

"What happened to the chaos energy?"

"Tomorrow. You brat. I'll tell you all of it."

It didn't feel bad. Someone here to worry, when I came back. In Farming World the NPCs asked their customary questions whenever you returned from an expedition, but there was a difference between lines that had been programmed and the sincerity in Ruru's voice. More than anything, I was genuinely tired. Ten-odd hours outside with my focus locked in, nothing but walking and fighting, and that chaos energy had simply paralyzed all five of my senses to the extreme. The drain on my mind was no joke. I washed in warm water as fast as I could and threw myself onto the bed.

That flood of system messages was enough to make sleep come drifting in. I was closing my eyes when the door opened, and Ruru poked her head through, a small pillow clutched to her chest.

"Master..."

"Hm?"

"May I... sleep in your room tonight?"

Why did that careful little question make her seem like a puppy waiting to find out if it was in trouble? Had I really become someone Ruru had to watch so nervously? Well, I had been pretty rough with her from the start, thinking of her as a helper NPC out of Farming World. That was the unavoidable fate of a Farming World user. I'd already seen fairies like Ruru thousands of times — tens of thousands — and the way I'd always treated them simply came out on its own. Inertia, more or less. And my personality itself was that of a shut-in who'd never learned how to live around other people.

Even so, I'd thought I was looking after her with real sincerity, kind in my own way. From where Ruru stood, apparently not. Not that I intended to become kinder for her sake. This was simply who I was. Keep slipping her snacks the way I did now, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠look after her however I looked after her, and that would do. She was cautious, but she wasn't keeping her distance.

"Snore, and you're out."

My room had no kennel set aside for Ruru, and no dog cushion either, so I patted the spot beside my mattress. Her face lit up. She settled into place, and slept.