The Return (2)
Sifting calmly through his memories, Sanghyuk confirmed that his recollections of Sword & Magic in the year 2027 were razor-sharp. It could hardly be otherwise; around this period, the game had committed a colossal blunder, telegraphing well in advance that it would surrender the throne of top dog to Eternal Life (EL).
It hadn't happened yet, but nine months from now—in September 2027, to be exact—Sword & Magic would roll out its fourth major expansion patch. That disastrous update would play the decisive role in turning the beloved title into what players bitterly dubbed "Shit & Magic."
Even after that monumental blunder, the developers racked up several more petty mistakes, finally crumbling completely once EL—hailed as a true revolution among Dream Network (DN) virtual reality games—surged in popularity.
Still, that was the future. Right now, Sword & Magic reigned supreme as the undisputed king of VR gaming.
What Sanghyuk had his eye on was a single specific adjustment tucked inside that fourth patch.
The change had come out of nowhere, drawing torrential backlash from the player base, but from Sanghyuk's vantage point, it was pure, unadulterated gold.
Wearing the helmet-type VR rig, Sanghyuk deftly brought up the Dream Network's default interface. First-time users typically fumbled even with basic navigation, but his fingers moved with ingrained familiarity.
The stark, blindingly white expanse surrounding him was known as the D-Room. In simple terms, the DN was a colossal intranet that bound together every virtual reality service on the planet.
From these personalized D-Rooms, everyday users could access any VR platform they desired. Naturally, Sword & Magic was among them.
Playing Sword & Magic required a monthly subscription fee of seventy thousand won, a fairly steep sum. While free VR services did exist, they forced users to watch ads or relied on aggressive microtransactions, making paid subscriptions the accepted norm on the DN. Besides, though seventy thousand won felt pricey by current standards, it paled in comparison to the staggering one hundred twenty thousand won per month that EL would eventually demand.
Having pre-loaded his account balance with gift cards, Sanghyuk paid the seventy thousand won without hesitation and logged into the game.
DN games, particularly sprawling RPGs like Sword & Magic, inevitably featured lengthy, convoluted tutorials. For Sanghyuk, however, going through the basics was a total waste of time. He promptly skipped the tutorial and plunged straight into the game world.
At its core, Sword & Magic was a well-crafted masterpiece. That was precisely why it had held the crown as the DN's undisputed top title for three consecutive years. By the same token, however, it was notoriously difficult for new players to close the gap with veterans. Naturally, Sanghyuk had no intention of grinding levels from scratch just to chase after the established player base.
His sole objective was to strike hard, make a killing, and cash out quickly. To that end, he bypassed random selection and meticulously handpicked everything from his starting region to his initial class. Ironically, every single choice drew from the brutal experience he had accumulated during five agonizing years of slave labor in the sweatshop.
Selecting Archer—the first-tier class boasting the highest baseline Strength and Agility—and Panwood, a mid-sized mountain city that few players ever picked as their birthplace, Sanghyuk smiled wryly the moment he spawned.
"Back then, everything felt like pure hell... but looking at it now, the scenery isn't half bad."
The memories he harbored of Sword & Magic were universally bitter. It couldn't be helped; back then, he hadn't played for fun, but under relentless duress. To understand why, one had to look toward an incident that was still ten months away from taking place.
In his past life, when Sanghyuk was a high school senior, strangers had visited his orphanage. As he recalled, their business cards bore a rather lengthy and benevolent-sounding title: "Self-Reliance Mentors for Children in Need of Care." Naturally, he only discovered how hollow that title was much later, but at the time, they seemed like saviors to teenagers with bleak, uncertain futures. Claiming they were there to foster self-sufficiency, they conducted an aptitude test on every ward slated to age out of the orphanage within the year.
That evaluation had been a VRA measurement test. Screening for kids who possessed monetizable potential, they brandished contracts, sweet-talking them with promises of glamorous jobs where they could play games and rake in a fortune. In truth, it was a predatory slave contract, but to the naive, young Sanghyuk, their words were intoxicating. He signed without a second thought. The orphanage staff had enthusiastically urged him to sign as well, completely disarming any suspicion. Looking back, they were vile adults, though given that Sanghyuk had encountered far more scoundrels than decent human beings in his past life, he felt little lingering outrage over it.
Sanghyuk had posted absurdly high scores on that test, utterly flabbergasting the so-called youth mentors—or rather, the scum operating a DN sweatshop. Drunk on their lavish praise and blinded by the rare sensation of validation, young Sanghyuk had signed on the dotted line. Following their guidance, he abandoned high school before graduating and moved into their workshop under the guise of early employment. What followed hardly needed saying.
For five grueling years, Sanghyuk was locked away without so much as stepping outside, worked to the bone like a literal slave. Had the police not raided the facility following a tip-off about human trafficking and forced labor, his captivity might have dragged on even longer. Dragged in at nineteen, freed at twenty-four. Because Sanghyuk's talent was so extraordinary, the sweatshop thugs drove him far harder than the other kids. Eventually, an accident occurred. While the aftermath brought a sliver of relief from the relentless grinding, the price had been devastating: Sanghyuk lost his brilliant, dazzling talent. Starting from scratch at twenty-four after surviving that living nightmare had been an ordeal. Yet while those five years in the sweatshop were horrific, every lesson he learned there remained etched into his mind. Acquired in a desperate struggle for survival, they were impossible to forget.
"Back then, I gathered herbs like a maniac just to dodge beatings and earn a scrap of food... and now I'm doing it to get rich, huh?"
For six months, Sanghyuk's sole duty in Sword & Magic had been harvesting herbs. Every sweatshop had its own method of generating revenue, and the outfit that ensnared Sanghyuk possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the game's herb respawn nodes. Sanghyuk had scoured those routes relentlessly. Most herbal gathering zones required a minimum level of thirty and a second-tier class, but Sanghyuk had roamed those perilous sectors at a mere level ten. The only reason he could pull off such an impossible feat was his extraordinary talent.
Like most RPGs, early progression in Sword & Magic was brisk. Sanghyuk reached level ten within five hours of logging in. While general users wasted precious time acclimatizing to the virtual motor controls, Sanghyuk hunted with seasoned precision from the second he spawned. Because the time required to level up spiked dramatically past level ten, he stopped grinding there. Having swiftly hit the bare minimum requirement for herb gathering, Sanghyuk headed straight for the Panwood Cliffs, celebrated as one of the game's three greatest scenic sights.
The Panwood Cliffs were a treacherous expanse where even level seventy players—the current level cap—dared not wander carelessly. Monsters didn't spawn there at all; the terrain was so brutally sheer that a single slip meant falling to one's death, an environment too harsh for even beasts to inhabit. High-level players often grew arrogant, relying on their stats and physical capabilities only to plummet into the abyss. If near-cap players tread with extreme caution, low-level users treated the region like a forbidden zone. Panwood was the least chosen starting point precisely because of these lethal crags. Yet Sanghyuk, at a measly level ten, marched into the cliffs without the slightest hesitation.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been suicide. But for Sanghyuk, it was second nature. He had traversed these very cliffs as a level ten rookie long ago.
"Being here in person definitely brings it all back."
Whoosh, thwack!
Leaping lightly toward the opposite rock face, Sanghyuk caught a protruding ledge with his fingertips. Dangling effortlessly as if adhesive coated his skin, he held his ground. Where a general user would have plunged to their death, Sanghyuk scaled the vertical surface with practiced ease. His body could channel exact force straight into his fingertips thanks to his extraordinary, hypersensitive motor control.
This was the majesty of a 350 VRA.
"Over there... and over there."
As expected, standing on the terrain jogged memories of respawn nodes that had previously slipped his mind. These weren't the standard coordinates fed to him by the sweatshop; they were secret caches Sanghyuk had discovered on his own once he mastered the cliffs. There was zero danger of anyone else poaching them. The routes were treacherous, but terrain meant nothing to him. Even if he slipped and died, he had virtually nothing to lose. At level ten or below, death incurred no level penalty and caused no gear to drop. With no risk holding him back, he scaled the cliff with fearless abandon.
Why didn't other low-level players attempt the same? The answer was simple: they couldn't take three steps without plunging into the ravine. A 350 VRA was not a number anyone could pull off. Even if someone possessed that caliber of talent, they would never waste their time gathering herbs here.
In other words, this operation was an exclusive monopoly that only Sanghyuk could execute.
Scaling jagged precipices barehanded without climbing gear, Sanghyuk drifted between sheer cliffs. The plants he harvested were rare herbs that fetched tidy sums of gold on the market. Cashing out that gold would yield far more than working part-time at a convenience store, but he wasn't after pocket change. Sanghyuk had a specific plan for the gold. Through that venture, he intended to hit an astronomical jackpot.
A jackpot that no one else in the world could ever replicate.
A windfall exclusive to a regressor who knew the future.
The moment he had remembered Sword & Magic, that grand scheme flashed in his mind, and herb harvesting was merely the stepping stone to finance it.
The singular overhaul arriving in the fourth major patch eight months from now—because he knew exactly what was coming, Sanghyuk understood precisely what he needed to do right now.
Scrambling up another precipitous bluff, Sanghyuk pulled two roots of Nine-Leaf Crimson Grass, worth a hundred gold apiece, before pausing to admire the breathtaking panorama.
"Man... this sensation... I really missed it."
Sanghyuk was well aware of how perilous this free-climbing was. But back when he had lost his dazzling talent and found himself helpless to move like this even if he wanted to, the suffocating frustration had nearly driven him mad.
"Still, compared to EL, this is child's play."
Sword & Magic was certainly a fine game, but it couldn't hold a candle to Eternal Life. EL was the ultimate undisputed pinnacle of virtual reality gaming.
Eight months until the patch... I need to stockpile as much of that as humanly possible before then!
After catching his breath and soaking in the dizzying view, Sanghyuk stashed the Nine-Leaf Crimson Grass into his bag and resumed his ascent.
In his past life, he had climbed these cliffs like a madman under coercion; now, he scaled them of his own free will.
Armed with a second chance, Sanghyuk's new life was officially underway.