A Comment Has Been Posted

The moment the doubt took root, he turned it into action and stepped into the search bar.

He tried every word he could tie to SoTop. Nothing came back.

…No way.

Just as the doubt was hardening into certainty, another thought cut across it. Do the other possessors not realize this is a world inside a game?

Tadak, tadak. There was no reason for a sound like that when all he was doing was tapping a finger against a hologram, and yet.

"…Oh."

Plenty of posts came up, but the one that snagged his eye was the very last.

Right. No way nobody noticed. Classes, potions, the monster roster — these were settings anybody would clock as a game.

"…."

No. I'm telling you, it is a game.

He nearly dropped a comment before he caught himself. He could hardly be the reason some ignorant possessor went and hanged himself. Not that I even have proof to argue with.

And honestly, he couldn't refute the part about everything past Floor 11 being closer to torture than a game. Why else would even SoTop's head mod tell newbies to stop at exactly Floor 10 and quit?

…More to the point.

The conclusion settled. He was the only one who knew this world was a game — the sort of conclusion that suddenly called up the title of a light novel he'd read ages ago, but anyway. The other possessors seemed to take the world inside SoTop for nothing more than a brutally unfair otherworld.

So what was he supposed to do now?

Climb the Tower, first.

Set aside the hunger to get out of this garbage world as fast as he could. If he wanted even a slightly better life, he had to climb. Selling nothing but the loot that dropped on Floor 1 would already put an ordinary commoner's income to shame.

…Except how, in this body?

Walk into the Tower right now and he probably couldn't even handle a Marine, the weakest thing on Floor 1. For the record, Marine was the nickname the SoTop Gallery liked to hang on goblins. The bastards only showed sexual interest in living humans, and once a fight to the death was over, the ones left standing were mostly men—

Setting that aside, he couldn't do a thing in a body like this. Not unless luck dropped some broken starter in his lap — a basic spellbook, a qi manual, a tome of black magic.

Fuck. Why isn't there a single hidden arrangement outside the Tower….

If there'd been even one, he wouldn't be sitting here chewing on it. A head overflowing with knowledge of the Tower didn't mean a thing if he couldn't get inside. In the end it was useless.

Ah, shit. What do I do….

He was still turning the circuits over in his head when he went back to the gallery notices, and one line caught his eye.

…Points?

As if bewitched, he opened the notice.

"…Oh!"

Light broke through. Especially the part about spending points to get items. He hit the Shop tab at once.

The potions he'd lived on as a newbie cascaded up the window. Torches, drinking water, and plenty of other things a Tower climb called for were there too.

…Anything besides this stuff?

He dropped his gaze.

Yeah, no. I don't need practice weapons built for people who die in one hit. Am I looking to get myself killed?

He scrolled farther, past bows, hand wraps, guns, knuckles, and every other weapon besides, until the list finally gave him what he'd been hunting.

"…Huh!"

The spellbooks he'd been desperate for caught his eye at last. In a kid's body like this, the only jobs worth taking were mage or warlock, and both of their starter items were sitting right there on the shelf.

…But holy shit, they're expensive.

Even if he bent over backward and bought the qi manual — the one that at least demanded a little physical work — that was thirty thousand points. Filling it on attendance checks alone meant logging into the gallery every single day for three hundred days without missing one.

Wouldn't I die before that?

Probably. Beaten to death or starved, one or the other. Which meant he had to write posts and farm upvotes if he wanted the points at all.

…And that means something like six hundred upvotes.

In ten years on DC Inside, the most upvotes he'd ever pulled on a single post was somewhere around a hundred. Add up a pile of shitposts and the number got bigger, sure, but points were calculated off whichever post he wrote that day got the most upvotes. Either way, it wasn't easy. Doing both at once would at least let him gather them a little faster.

What kind of post do I even write… wait. Hold on.

A good idea flashed through his head. If I turn what I know into a guide, couldn't I pick up some upvotes?

He went straight back to the search bar.

…Huh? What? Why isn't there a single one? You'd think at least one strategy write-up would show up. …Should I try a different word?

"…."

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Apparently there was no kind soul out there posting guides for free the way he meant to. But why, no matter what they sold, was it only garbage like this? One of them was bad enough that following it would get your character deleted down the line.

Stuff like this would pop up the second you searched the internet a little….

…Right. They couldn't use that internet. The weight of information hit him all over again.

Well, if this is the level that's actually selling…

He didn't need to write anything truly rare. A light note on the hidden points newbies absolutely had to hit might be enough. Those didn't stop being a honey pot just because word got out, so there was no harm in sharing them.

…Is writing it like that a bit much?

He softened the term the gallery used.

Hmm. This ought to be fine.

Looked decent enough. He hit post. A brief load spun, and the thread went up on the gallery.

…I just need to write about a hundred of these from here on, right?

"…Oh."

How long had it even been since he posted, and there was already a comment.

"Hm?"

Why the sudden abuse?

No, fuck, it's real.

"…."

Was this how Plato felt, looking at the prisoners trapped in the cave?

Haa. I should just go to sleep….

Looked like the points would have to come from attendance checks alone. How was he supposed to stay alive for three hundred days?

The next morning.

"…Huh?"

The moment he opened his eyes, a blue message filling everything in front of him stole the words right out of his mouth.

Fuck. What is this….

He opened the notifications.

"…."

He had no idea what had happened overnight, but even a rough look put the comments well past several hundred, stacked in a long spill down the thread. And along with them—

"…What?"

Six hundred upvotes. That was what he'd needed to buy the Basic Qi Manual. Floating in front of him was a post with more than three times that many.