“Granny, these are the herbs I gathered today. There aren’t many left nearby anymore, so we’ll probably have to figure out some way to get them from farther away in the future.”
The young man handed the old woman in front of him a basket that wasn’t quite full of medicinal herbs.
“Thank you for going through all that trouble, Young Yakumo. It’s so dangerous outside with demons everywhere.”
The old woman accepted the basket and, without giving him a chance to refuse, stuffed two loaves of bread into Yakumo’s hands.
“You’ve been running around all day. You must be hungry, right?”
“Come, come. Sit inside for a while. I’ll pour you some tea.”
After saying that, the old woman went into the house first.
The young man she called Yakumo followed without hesitation.
It wasn’t his first time visiting her home.
While the old woman carried the basket inside to put away the herbs, golden words suddenly appeared before Yakumo’s eyes.
No one besides him could see them.
Level Up
It was the sign that he had gained another level.
Don’t misunderstand.
This wasn’t some virtual reality game, nor was Yakumo trapped inside one of those games without a logout button.
As for why he was so certain?
Because he was something everyone had already seen far too many times.
A transmigrator.
Before transmigrating, he’d just been an ordinary university graduate from Earth who’d entered the workforce not too long ago.
He watched anime and played games in his spare time.
He jokingly called himself a filthy anime watcher but never dared to call himself an otaku.
As for how he’d transmigrated?
He still had absolutely no clue.
He hadn’t been electrocuted.
He hadn’t been hit by a truck.
His computer hadn’t exploded either.
He’d simply transmigrated.
It had been rather sudden.
Naturally, the next standard feature was a system for the transmigrator.
His system sounded rather cliché too.
It was a game system.
It wasn’t tied to any one game.
Instead, it could randomly draw from a large selection of different games.
In this world, he’d drawn a game he’d played for years back on Earth.
A true classic.
MapleStory (Private Server Edition).
Yes.
It really did have “(Private Server Edition)” written after the title.
However, perhaps because his level had been too low, Yakumo had never been able to tell exactly what had been modified.
So far, the only things he could use were the convenient features commonly found on private servers.
Things like the Quick Shop and instant Job Advancement.
But that brought him back to the same problem as before.
He hadn’t reached Level 8.
Without reaching Level 8, there was no way for him to try features such as Job Advancement, while everything inside the Quick Shop was nothing more than window-shopping material.
It wasn’t that the shop itself didn’t work.
It was because…
He had no money.
He was genuinely dirt-poor.
The place he’d transmigrated to was a small rural village, and the local currency was copper coins.
The exchange rate seemed to be roughly one copper coin to ten mesos.
And don’t go thinking that meant making money was easy.
In this village, just a few copper coins were enough to cover an entire meal.
Meanwhile, a Red Potion that restored a mere 50 HP cost 50 mesos.
That was five copper coins.
Please forgive Yakumo.
Even after all this time, he’d only managed to painfully save up a little more than ten copper coins.
Considering he’d probably need to replace his weapon sooner or later, saving his money was definitely the better choice.
Then there was the matter of gaining experience.
Before transmigrating, he’d been nothing more than an ordinary office worker.
He didn’t know martial arts.
He didn’t know swordsmanship.
And he definitely didn’t know any mystical cultivation techniques.
The beginner stage of the game had given him the skill Three Snails, but that was a fixed-damage ability.
During the time he’d spent in this world, it wasn’t as though he’d never encountered the “demons” the villagers talked about.
Unfortunately, he’d been instantly killed during his very first encounter.
In fact, Yakumo had already died more than once.
The first time it happened, his heart had nearly turned to ice.
But after dying enough times, he’d stopped caring all that much.
Apparently, death worked the same way it did in MapleStory.
He would revive in a nearby safe area, with the death penalty deducting some of his experience.
Aside from that, his body didn’t seem capable of sustaining actual injuries.
Damage only reduced his HP.
Once his HP hit zero, he died.
Pain, however, still existed.
For example, if someone stabbed him with a knife, it wouldn’t actually impair his movements, but he would most certainly feel the pain of being stabbed.
In the end, the only thing he could do was run errands around the village to gain experience, hoping to reach Level 8 as quickly as possible so he could try advancing to a job.
He’d discovered this method by accident while helping the village chief chop firewood.
Once he’d finished the task, a notification appeared telling him that he’d received experience.
Of course, there were also commissions that required him to leave the village.
For example, the old woman’s herb-gathering request today.
Other people had asked him to collect wood, stones, and similar materials.
Naturally, he’d also had plenty of experiences getting killed by “wild mobs” along the way.
On a continent where demons existed, magical beasts naturally existed too.
Most magical beasts were fairly powerful.
They weren’t something the current Yakumo could handle.
Fortunately, he also had the game’s inventory system.
He could simply throw things into his inventory, so he didn’t have to worry about dropping them when he died.
Finally, there was the Cash Shop system.
Since there wasn’t any GM around, no one had given him any beginner benefits.
However, the private server did have a system that awarded points based on time spent online.
By slowly accumulating those points, he’d managed to unlock every slot in his inventory.
For the time being, he didn’t have to worry about running out of storage space.
For requests such as the old woman’s herb-gathering quest, medicinal herbs went into the Use inventory, while weeds went into the ETC inventory.
Both could be stacked.
The medicinal herbs could be turned in to complete the quest, while the weeds could be sold to the villagers who raised cattle as animal feed in exchange for a few copper coins.
After completing today’s quest, Yakumo had finally reached Level 8.
That meant he could finally undergo his first Job Advancement and become a Magician.
Back when he played MapleStory, he’d originally started out as a Cleric.
Now that the system was letting him choose his own job, he still intended to follow the Cleric path.
There were two main reasons.
First, it would save money on potions.
Second, this game system appeared to be based on an early version of MapleStory.
If he became a Cleric, he’d eventually gain the area-healing skill Heal, while MP Eater would allow him to recover MP during combat.
That would save him quite a lot of money on potions.
As for the other jobs, this was an early version of the game, so none of the late-game jobs introduced much later existed.
And judging purely from the game’s storyline, among the original five job branches, including Pirate, the Magician path had eventually produced the Black Mage.
Perhaps that meant this path had the greatest potential?
Yakumo didn’t know whether he was permanently stuck in this world or whether he’d be able to transmigrate again in the future.
Either way, choosing Magician seemed like the safest option.
More importantly…
Yakumo simply couldn’t stand the idea of waiting all the way until Level 10.
Right now, he just wanted to blast those magical beasts with an Energy Bolt so that the next time he died, he could at least die with some dignity.
Yakumo opened the system interface, selected Job Advancement, and directly chose Magician.
The moment the advancement succeeded, the Ability System and Skill System were unlocked.
A Level 8 Beginner Gift Pack was also issued.
“Huh?”
Yakumo hadn’t even gotten the chance to inspect the Level 8 gift pack before his attention was drawn toward the skill window.
It wasn’t that he’d immediately noticed some major skill rework.
Rather…
There were three separate skill tabs in front of him.
At first glance, there didn’t seem to be any difference between the three.
Each contained the Magician’s first-job skills.
Yakumo experimentally put one point into Energy Bolt on the first tab.
Then he put one point into Max MP Increase on the second.
There was no conflict whatsoever.
Both skills actually took effect.
“Wait. Let me calm down for a second…”
“Don’t tell me choosing a job actually gives me the skills of every advancement branch under that job?”
“Holy shit!”
“The Magician branch was an insane choice if that’s how this works!”