Chapter 3: Game Start?
Chapter 3: Game Start?
Are you kidding me? Adventurer registration was only 2 silver, but a short stay at an inn costs 3 silver? Does that make any sense?
I could have understood if I’d stayed for half a day or something.
But I couldn’t even last long and shot my load in a flash! I was in there for less than an hour!
And what? 3 silver? You want my entire fortune?
I won’t pay! No, I can’t pay!
…is what I would have screamed if this were a game.
But as long as I’m not completely sure this is a game world, I can’t just go around acting like a lunatic when I don’t know how it might come back to bite me.
The fact that the clerk was quite a pretty young lady might have had something to do with it, too.
Guwon powerlessly handed over his entire fortune and left the inn.
What is this bittersweet feeling?
Being broke for the first time in my life, a sensation I can’t put into words washed over my entire body.
Is this what they call non-possession?
So this is how meaningless the world is.
At first, I was boiling with rage at Alicia for dragging me to the inn only to leave without paying, but now, I didn’t care anymore.
With my head now strangely clear, I could even understand why the inn was so damn expensive.
An inn where every room has a modern bathroom with a shower, in a city lined with buildings that look like they’re from medieval Europe? Of course it’d be expensive.
I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, but the bedsheets were also strangely soft.
Right, it’s not like I got ripped off.
I just paid a fair price.
Anyway, what do I do now?
My plan to gather information by grabbing someone at a bar and buying them a drink was shattered from the get-go. There’s nothing I can do.
Should I follow the game-world playbook and head into the dungeon to kill some monsters?
If I at least had a weapon, or if I were even just level 2, I might have given it a try.
But if I go into the dungeon at level 1, accidentally pull aggro, and die, there’s no one I can complain to.
Guwon absentmindedly pulled up his status window.
Name: Guwon
Race: Human 24
Job: Saint 12 / Adventurer 1
Level: 12
HP: 2400/2400
Essence: 1200/1200
Strength: 22
Durability: 22
Agility: 22
Stamina: 22
Intelligence: 21
Spirit: 22
Charm: 61
Bonus Stats: 55
Status: Normal
…Huh? What’s this?
Oh, right! That one round with Alicia!
There was no system window or notification, so I hadn’t noticed, but it seems I power-leveled from that one session.
Just what level is that Alicia girl to level me up so much from a single round?
It’s nothing to brag about, but I seriously doubt Alicia felt much satisfaction from our sex earlier.
She did seem to have an orgasm, but that was probably just a light one she barely managed to reach solely because my ‘tool’ was good.
In reality, I had no technique whatsoever; all I did was tense my entire body and hold on for dear life.
And yet I leveled up this much? Doesn’t that mean she’s a much higher level than I thought?
Don’t tell me I, not knowing my place, spouted that bullshit about telling a high-level warrior to go eat some more cum?
No, that can’t be it. I probably just leveled up a lot because I was such a low level. Yeah. That must be it.
Still, I should be more polite the next time I meet Miss Alicia.
This doesn’t mean I’m scared!
It’s just a matter of showing proper courtesy to someone who did me the favor of power-leveling me.
But I should probably apologize for telling her to go eat more cum, right?
Anyway, thanks to this, I have a rough plan for what to do next.
The so-called, “If you don’t have money, just earn it!”
I’ve accumulated bonus stats from leveling up, and my ridiculously overpowered Saint job leveled up along with me, boosting my stats tremendously.
With this, I probably won’t die at the dungeon entrance, right?
For reference, there are a total of three ways to raise your stats in this game.
First, by leveling up and allocating bonus stats.
This is a basic of basics in any game, so there’s no need to waste my breath explaining it further.
Next is by consistently performing actions related to a specific stat.
But there’s a limit to how much you can raise your stats this way.
Anyone who’s worked out knows that the heavier the weight gets, the harder it is to go up even one step. The system works on a similar principle.
And finally, you can raise your stats by increasing your job level.
In this world, you can acquire a job by meeting certain conditions, and you can raise the job level by gaining proficiency in it. When your job level goes up, at least one related stat has a certain chance of increasing.
For reference, the Saint job unconditionally raises all stats. It’s the protagonist’s exclusive job for a reason.
Even better, you gain job proficiency just by having sex, so you can kill two birds with one stone—level and job level—with sex. There’s no better job than this.
Hearing just this, you might think you could just get a bunch of jobs and raise their levels to get stronger without worrying about your main level. But that’s not how it works.
Because the cap for your job level is your main level.
If someone is level 2, no matter how much job proficiency they gain, they can’t raise their job level beyond 2.
Besides, your main level provides a bonus to all factors, even if it doesn’t show up directly in your stats.
For example, if a level 20 warrior with 30 Strength has a strength contest with a level 90 mage with 10 Strength, the level 90 mage will win.
In other words, level is king.
Can’t you just see the persistence of the Great Earth company, determined to make you have sex no matter what?
No matter how I think about it, they’re an amazing company, shining with novel ideas.
That’s not to say you don’t gain experience from combat like in a normal game.
You can level up through combat; it’s just overwhelmingly less efficient than sex.
According to an article on the official blog before the game’s release, they said to give it a try if you want to play this game until you die of old age without ever seeing the ending.
Then why bother making combat give experience at all, if they could have just made it so you can only level up through sex?
Apparently, it’s because “if you could only level up through sex, then none of the high-level heroine NPCs could be virgins!”
Man! The more I think about it, the more I realize what an amazing company they are.
I swear, the developers at Great Earth must do nothing but think about adult games after they eat.
No, even while they’re eating, sleeping, or awake, their brains must be pickled in adult games 24/7.
Even in this situation, where I don’t know if I’m trapped in a game or transported to another dimension, I just can’t bring myself to hate this company.
Lost in thought, I found myself back at the Adventurer’s Guild.
The Adventurer’s Guild building was shaped like a circle with a hole in the middle—a donut. The entrance to the dungeon was right there in that hole.
The manual said it was built with the concept of, “You never know when a vicious monster might pop out of the dungeon entrance, so the Guild, where the most adventurers gather, will serve as the final defensive wall, protecting this city from a disaster that could happen at any moment!”
Seriously? If that’s the case, then don’t build a city around a dungeon entrance in the first place. You could have at least built it a little farther away.
It’s convenient for adventurers, I guess, but are the residents here okay with this?
The dungeon entrance was packed with a massive crowd of adventurers, a sea of people.
When you think of adventurers, you tend to imagine a rough, live-for-the-moment, lazy bunch rather than diligent people, but seeing this in the morning, it seems that stereotype was completely wrong.
Even Alicia, who I presumed to be a pretty high level, was preparing to enter the dungeon early in the morning. Maybe adventurers are surprisingly diligent.
Before I go in, should I distribute some of my bonus stats?
I only plan to wander around the entrance, so nothing should happen, but just in case, I’ll put some points into Strength.
After pushing through the dungeon entrance, which reminded me of a subway during rush hour, I finally got inside and saw a giant pillar of light before me. It was a teleport, connected to somewhere else in the dungeon.
It had nothing to do with a novice like me yet, so I ignored it and walked on. I followed one of the many branching paths at random, and before I knew it, all signs of people around me had completely vanished.
The dungeon is so vast that even the first floor’s end is unknown. No matter how many adventurers there are, it’s probably rare to run into a colleague inside.
In fact, the paths are so complex that if you’re not careful, you could lose your way and become permanently lost. The terrain is like a dense forest, so there are no landmarks to serve as guides.
How do they wander around a place like this without getting lost?
Is there some kind of trick to it?
If it weren’t for the map function that automatically registers and completes the paths I’ve taken, I’m confident I would have been lost long ago.
Come to think of it, when I registered as an adventurer, the guide lady talked about levels and jobs, and Alicia said something similar. That means game systems are common sense in this world.
Could it be that game systems like maps and inventories are normal functions that everyone else uses, not just me?
In most novels about being transported to a game world, only the protagonist gets to use those features.
Rustle.
A sound, clearly different from my own footsteps, came from ahead.
Is this finally a battle?
Feeling a strange tension, Guwon clumsily raised his fists into a boxing stance.
I know my current stats are by no means low enough to feel threatened on the first floor of the dungeon, but the thought that this might be reality and not a game was lodged in a corner of my mind, so I couldn’t help but be tense.
Maybe I’d be less tense if I at least had a basic weapon like a knife.
Taking up a clumsy boxing guard, Guwon crept forward, and what he saw was a rabbit, peacefully munching on grass.
What is this?
Feeling like an idiot for being so tense, Guwon dropped his guard and approached the rabbit.
In a dungeon story, isn’t the standard starting monster a goblin?
I had steeled myself with the grim determination that I might have to kill a bipedal, human-like creature, even if it was a monster, but to think the first monster would be a rabbit.
Oh, Alicia. Weren’t you the one who said being an adventurer wasn’t a job just anyone could handle?
As I relaxed and approached, the rabbit soon noticed me, its round eyes widening as it looked my way.
It’s a cute little thing.
But the law of the jungle is a cruel one.
When I got about a meter away, the rabbit, which had been staring at me motionlessly, suddenly leaped up to my eye level and attempted a spinning kick.
“Agh! Shit!”
Whoosh!
If my agility had been at the base level, I never would have dodged that.
What was that sound? Is that a sound a mere rabbit can make with a spinning kick?
No, the fact that a rabbit is doing a spinning kick is weird in the first place.
It might look like just a rabbit, but it’s still a dungeon monster, after all.
Guwon shook off his carelessness and got back into his stance.
I’ll land a counter when it attacks next.
From that last attack, I definitely felt my statistical superiority.
If I land it properly, I can probably take it down with a single counter.
As Guwon took his stance and waited for the next attack, the rabbit, which had been staring blankly at me, suddenly turned and started running away like an arrow.
“Huh?! That’s not right! Hey! Stop right there!”
Anxious at the thought of losing his first prey, Guwon used his stats to sprint at full speed and attempted a soccer kick.
To get straight to the point, I caught it.
Thanks to the overwhelming stat difference, Guwon caught up to the fleeing rabbit in an instant. The soccer kick, thrown in a panic without any thought to controlling my strength, resulted in my poor form concentrating all the force into the tip of my foot.
The result was a sickening sound and sensation as the rabbit, which looked to be about 30 centimeters tall, was blown to pieces, its form barely recognizable as it splattered my right foot and leg in red.
“Heh. Run… The crimson dragon dwelling in my right foot is about to awaken.”
In a state of panic, I spouted some nonsense I didn’t even understand myself, but that didn’t improve the situation.
Guwon had succeeded in the hunt, but he hadn’t obtained any loot.
As a bonus, Guwon, a pure young man from Seoul who had never even seen a chicken’s neck wrung, suffered serious mental damage from the explosive show of a rabbit’s flesh splattering everywhere.
Not to mention my right foot, which was now soaked in blood and felt incredibly disgusting.
To make an excuse, it’s true I didn’t control my strength because I was in a hurry. But I also didn’t think there was any reason to, so I just let it fly.
Due to the nature of virtual reality, the sight of blood can be incredibly realistic and gruesome, so in Great Earth’s games, there’s usually just a red light effect instead of blood, and enemies disappear in a flash of light when they die.
This world is so much like a game, right? I naturally assumed this kind of depiction would be the same as in the game.
Even though I was aware of the high possibility that this was a dimensional transfer, had a part of my mind still not accepted that fact?
But thanks to this, one thing became certain.
It looks like I can’t count on a forced shutdown after all.