Do You Expect Me to Believe That? (2)
“Have you fallen for one of those crackpot religions claiming the Earth is flat and astrophysics is all a hoax? Don’t tell me you bought that bottle of red liquid from this so-called god at some outrageous price?”
Major General Michael, who had been listening with grave seriousness until now, spoke in a mocking tone and shook his head. Even though he clearly recognized the sarcasm, Elon Busker simply smiled. After all, he himself wouldn’t have believed any of it if Aaron hadn’t brought back the potion.
“After the project about implanting chips in human brains, you asked to meet in secret. I was genuinely curious what it could be about. But now, I can’t help feeling like I’ve wasted my time today.”
“I felt the same way at first. When I first saw the god and this thing called a potion, I thought it was all nonsense.”
To Major General Michael, Elon Busker looked completely unhinged. The way he sat there smiling with such baseless confidence made him seem like a madman.
“I’ll show you directly, General. You may record it with your phone camera if you wish.”
Curious about what Elon Busker intended to do, the Major General ordered his aide to begin filming. Once the recording started, Elon Busker pulled a small hammer from his electric wheelchair, placed his left hand on the table, and brought the hammer down hard.
[THUD!]
The index finger on his left hand exploded under the blow.
“What the— This crazy bastard just crushed his own finger.”
“Now, watch closely.”
Elon Busker dipped the bleeding finger into the glass bottle filled with red liquid. It was hard to tell whether more blood was flowing out or if the liquid itself was growing darker. A moment later, when he pulled his finger back out, it was completely restored.
“What!? H-how is that possible?”
“This is the effect of the potion. It is a liquid imbued with divine power.”
“…I saw it with my own eyes, yet it’s still hard to believe. I’ve seen plenty of so-called prophets running healing scams like this before. Unless you go straight to a U.S. Army hospital and heal a patient there on the spot, I cannot trust this.”
“Then let’s go. I’ll show you directly.”
Elon Busker moved his electric wheelchair first, and Major General Michael hurriedly followed. At the Army hospital, they sprayed the potion on the burn wounds of a Black soldier who had just been brought in. The potion caused fresh flesh to grow instantly. After witnessing that, not only the Major General but also his aides had no choice but to believe in the medicine’s power.
“How do you produce this potion?”
“Since it is a medicine containing divine power, we cannot produce it ourselves.”
“Then are you sending testers to the realm where these gods reside in order to obtain it? Where is this friend named Aaron who claims to have been there? I’d like to hear it from him directly.”
“Unfortunately, he is already dead. He was killed in that world.”
“Killed? Didn’t you say it was the world of the gods? And you mentioned transferring consciousness—does that mean if the hardware the mind is transferred into dies, the tester dies as well?”
“Correct. If you die in the place you’re sent to, the body here dies too. That’s why there have been so many sudden deaths.”
“Hmm. Then how did you bring this potion back? You’re only sending the consciousness, so how is it possible to bring back a physical object?”
“The god permitted it. We were able to retrieve it through divine authority.”
“A god… Then who exactly is this god? Can you communicate with him directly?”
“It is Busker, the God of Peace and Harmony.”
“Busker? That name…”
For a moment, Major General Michael wondered if Elon Busker was playing some kind of prank on him. But the treatment of the burn patient he had witnessed at the Army hospital was undeniably real, so he asked again.
“Is it simply a coincidence that the names are the same? Or are you playing this joke because you want to become a god yourself?”
“Hahaha. It really is just a coincidence. Or perhaps, because the names matched, Aaron was sent to the place where that god exists.”
Major General Michael could tell that Elon Busker wasn’t joking.
“By making requests to God Busker, we can send physical matter between worlds. However, there is a limit to the capacity, and the price is quite steep.”
“Hmm. In that case, could you send me to that unknown world? I feel like I can only fully trust this after seeing it with my own eyes.”
“Of course it’s possible. I’ve been there and back myself. A private jet is already prepared. Shall we go?”
“Haa…”
“Master. You look like something’s bothering you.”
“Hm? Yeah. I do have something on my mind. Sigh…”
Not only Yanne and Sezanne, but even Meni and the newly joined Rangers were watching me carefully, sensing my serious concern.
“Are you regretting selling the potion distribution rights?”
“No, it’s not that. For now, let’s head to the Green Dungeon. We still have to complete the request we accepted.”
While riding the carriage from Aiparak, Jinwoo’s head was spinning with complicated thoughts.
‘There are only twelve testers, yet more than twenty people have already died from sudden death…’
If he had simply been worried about suddenly dying, he could have just stopped logging in, as James Lee had suggested. But the fact that testers had been selected with this very factor in mind left him feeling both offended and somehow convinced it was true, causing anger to boil up inside him.
‘First, I need to prevent these sudden deaths. But why exactly are the testers dying like this?’
As he pondered the cause of death, one thing came to mind. He remembered Secretary Kim’s words and the manual that said if you died in the game, you would lose everything and start a new life on another continent.
‘What if dying here means you really die?’
He also recalled the pain option. The setting that determined how much of the pain inflicted in the game would actually be felt suddenly seemed suspicious.
He picked up a small awl from the carriage’s toolbox and jabbed it into the tip of his finger.
“Ugh…”
The moment the awl pierced his finger, an intense wave of pain surged through him. Ignoring the “No pain, No gain” message, he lowered the pain level all the way to zero.
“Kgh. The pain is the same.”
He pulled out the awl and immediately used a healing buff to treat the wound. Then, wondering if pain from an existing injury would continue even after changing the setting, he created a fresh wound.
But the pain was exactly the same.
“Fuck.”
If this had happened before meeting James Lee, he probably would have written a report thinking there was a bug in the pain option application. But after learning that the sudden death rate was at two hundred percent, this no longer looked like a bug. It felt as if the system had been intentionally designed wrong somewhere.
And the thought occurred to him that if you died here, you might not resurrect on another continent like the pain option suggested—you might simply die for real.
“Master. We have to walk from here.”
“Yeah.”
Even while walking, he kept thinking. The highest priority right now seemed to be not dying in this place. And to avoid dying, he needed to become stronger.
Thanks to traveling with Tom and Danny, there were no issues with the Rangers.
“The party that set out to explore the Undead Dungeon entered this morning. It was an eight-person party that included two priests. It’s already late today, so we’ll stay here for the night and head to the Green Dungeon tomorrow.”
With the Rangers’ help, they were able to eat comfortably by the campfire and pass the time.
“Sezanne. I have a favor to ask.”
“Hmm. You’ve been deep in thought the whole carriage ride. Does this favor have something to do with whatever’s been bothering you?”
“Yeah, it does. I’d like you to teach me magic.”
“Didn’t you say that wasn’t allowed? The magic of the Tulcherus school cannot be taught to outsiders. Since it specializes in fire attribute magic, there would be problems if Sir Jinwoo tried to use it.”
“I know the Tulcherus school’s magic specializes in fire attribute spells. But the magic I want to learn isn’t that kind of fire magic.”
“Then what kind of magic do you want to learn?”
“Support magic. I’d like you to teach me basic spells like the Hold, Sleep, Stun, and Light that you used before.”
Sezanne couldn’t help but hesitate. While each tower or school often had their own versions of support magic, these spells were manifested through standardized mana arrangement rules, so they rarely carried the distinctive traits of any particular school.
“Hmm. Originally, the Tulcherus school strictly forbids teaching magic to anyone who isn’t a member if they themselves learned it there.”
Sezanne glanced at Yanne once.
“However, the support magic you’re asking for exists outside of Tulcherus as well, and much of it is common knowledge. So I’ll teach you only those common parts.”
After much deliberation, she had decided to teach him only what wouldn’t violate their laws. That night, Jinwoo learned the Light spell that emitted illumination, along with Sleep, Hold, Stun, and Grease.
The method involved visualizing through association and reciting incantations to create mana arrangements. It was like solving math problems. Because the way to arrange mana had been formalized into equations, once you knew the formula, simply reciting the incantation would automatically arrange the mana.
Then, when you released the arranged mana from your body, it would flow according to that arrangement and manifest the spell. By memorizing the formulas the way one would memorize math equations—writing them down on paper—he quickly picked them up.
Once Sezanne had fallen asleep early, Yanne approached cautiously, watching his expression.
“Master. After I became a mage, you said you would help Sezanne unnie get into the Tulcherus Magic Tower.”
“Yeah, that’s great. The mercenary training center in Aiparak only teaches up to Fireball, I heard. If you become a proper mage there, you should be fine.”
“Yes. So Sezanne unnie already taught me Tulcherus’s Fireball and Firewall in advance. Here’s the mana arrangement formula.”
Yanne held out a piece of paper where she had secretly written down the arrangement formulas.
“They said you must never teach magic learned at Tulcherus to others, but since I haven’t officially joined the Tulcherus school yet, it should be okay, right?”
Yanne insisted that although she had learned the mana arrangement formulas, she hadn’t even begun her formal initiation, nor could she manifest magic yet, so she technically hadn’t learned proper magic. It was her own clever way of trying to help Jinwoo.
And from Jinwoo’s perspective, he was grateful. When he had learned the mana arrangements for support magic from Sezanne, he had gained a rough understanding of the Tulcherus school’s characteristics. Just by looking at the formulas Yanne showed him, he could roughly figure out how the mana was arranged.
He memorized the formulas on the spot. After sending Yanne away, he continued writing them down on paper by himself, double-checking the arrangements. Even after falling asleep and logging out of the capsule, he sat at his desk reciting the formulas like English vocabulary.
“What? You were in that capsule thing all day, and now you’re sitting down again?”
Normally when he came out of the capsule he would go downstairs to let his mom see he was okay, but today he hadn’t gone down because he was busy memorizing the mana formulas. So his mother had come up instead.
“Ah, Mom, I’m busy. I’ll eat later.”
“If you sit in there all day and then sit some more, all your sperm are going to die, you idiot. You need to go outside, move around, and exercise so your sperm can survive!”
“Ugh, seriously, Mom, can you stop with the sex jokes?”
“You don’t even have a girlfriend, so at least go water the flowerpots outside! That counts as exercise!”
“Fine, I got it. The gym is too far away so it’s annoying to go, that’s all.”
“Then buy a bike and ride it or figure something out. For now, just go water the flowerpots.”
Knowing that refusing his mother’s attempts to make him move would only lead to endless nagging, he quickly stepped outside. The old Western-style red-brick house had a small garden of about four or five pyeong. He connected the hose to the lake and watered the plants.
“Aigo, the Korean winter hazel is all dying. This one’s been around for a really long time.”
The winter hazel that had bloomed with a lovely fragrance in one corner of the yard since he was little was withering, apparently sick.
‘If only I had my buff abilities, I might be able to save this guy.’
Feeling regretful, he pretended to cast a healing buff and an activation buff on the winter hazel tree. Suddenly, colorful sparkling powder swirled before Jinwoo’s eyes and seeped into the tree.
“Huh? Why is this working?”