March 27th.
Yasui’s points reached 306.
It was not a huge number, barely enough to scroll through a few pages in the System Shop before running dry, but earning it had been no easy task.
Every single point was paid for in genuine, unadulterated pain.
Not as a figure of speech, but literally.
That bastard of a System—when he read novels, other hosts earned points by completing tasks, killing enemies, and unlocking achievements.
When it came to him, it turned into pain-redemption vouchers.
Get hurt once, gain a point.
The sharper the pain, the higher the payout—fairly priced, with zero deceit.
Therefore, he had to stab himself every now and then.
The logic was actually quite simple.
The condition for using the boning knife was a blood sacrifice, and every use carried a sixty percent chance that the attack would simultaneously apply to himself.
In other words, as long as he stabbed himself, there was a greater-than-fifty-percent chance of triggering double the pain.
One stab gave the effect of two, and the points were doubled as well.
Stabbing Cursed Spirits was work; stabbing himself was financial management.
High risk, high reward.
The rougher the seas, the dearer the fish.
That was how Yasui understood it.
So, he began stabbing himself with extreme regularity.
It was not masochism—he kept the distinction crystal clear.
Masochism was a psychological need, whereas this was a financial imperative.
Clear objective, direct methods, stable returns, and zero drawbacks aside from the pain.
What was this called?
This was called investment.
After finishing a task, he would find a deserted spot.
Sometimes it was the rooftop of an abandoned building, sometimes a dead end at the bottom of an alley, and sometimes he simply leaned against a vending machine—after all, ordinary humans could see neither Cursed Tools nor wounds.
Pulling out the boning knife, the black blade felt frigid against his palm, no different from a chunk of ice.
He looked down at the edge, let out a smile, then cleanly plunged it through his forearm and yanked it back out.
The motion was practiced yet miserable, like an office worker tapping his ID badge against the sensor during the daily morning clock-in.
With a *ding*, points landed in his account, and today’s performance target was met.
Having stabbed himself, he was in no hurry to leave, leaning against the wall to rest for a moment while waiting for the sharp pain to retreat from the marrow of his bones.
Eyes half-lidded, unmelted tear tracks hung from his eyelashes, but his expression had already reverted to that lazy, completely unbothered look.
Viewed from a distance, one would think this guy had just woken up and was dazing off.
In the shower, the hot water washed over his skin until it flushed red.
Through the billowing steam, he looked down at his chest.
Water droplets streamed down his collarbone, gliding over several reddened marks that were currently healing, their color appearing somewhat deeper amid the vapor.
He pondered for a moment and felt he had not accumulated enough today.
The points given by that Cursed Spirit earlier were a bit meager.
There was no particular reason; he was just idle anyway.
And so he pulled out the boning knife once more.
*Stab.*
The blade pierced through skin wet with hot water, encountering even less resistance than when dry, entering faster and inflicting pain even more briskly.
The moment blood welled up, it was swept away by the hot water, swirling down the drain alongside the current, leaving a faint reddish trail on the white floor tiles that vanished in the blink of an eye. This story is hosted at novelping dot com.
The notification chime for the points rang out with a *ding-dong* in his mind.
Resting his shoulder against the icy porcelain tile, he exhaled a puff of white vapor, closing his eyes to wait for the wave of pain to pass, idly calculating how much he still lacked.
Before sleep, with the lights switched off as he lay in bed, he tossed and turned while calculating.
306 points.
The item he had his eye on cost 50 points; buying it would leave him with 256, pushing him further away from his next goal.
Yet if he did not buy it, it would be a true shame for his entertainment.
He rolled over, burying his face into his pillow, then rolled back, staring at the unlit lamp on the ceiling while two miniature figures in his mind pounded away at abacuses.
He could not sleep.
He was idle anyway.
So, he gave himself another jab in the dark.
The boning knife revealed no color in the night, yet its tactile sensation in his palm remained just as cold.
He aimed for his thigh—the flesh was thick there, so the pain covered a wide area without easily hitting bone, making it a high-value, cost-effective spot.
The instant the tip of the blade sank into flesh, the hundred-fold pain feedback began to take effect.
His instep snapped straight, toes curling to clutch the bedsheet as a stifled groan was pinned back in his throat.
Then he pulled the blanket over his head, curling his entire body into a ball, eyes wide open in the dark as he waited for the surge of agony to pass while pondering what to do tomorrow.
Nor was he idle while waiting; he tallied up an account with the System in his head: three stabs a day guaranteed a base minimum of points, plus how many if he got lucky and triggered double, totaling how much over a month.
Upon finishing the calculation, he felt it was still somewhat lacking, so he pondered whether to raise his daily quota from three stabs to four.
If he did four stabs, the last one would require a different spot—alternating between arms and legs.
Otherwise, stabbing the exact same location repeatedly would leave a residual ache no matter how fast the Reverse Cursed Technique healed it, affecting his blade-swinging feel the next day.
A normal person would not experience this, but with his hundred-fold Five Senses perception, the residual duration was extraordinarily long.
Of course, aside from hurting a bit, there were no other downsides.
Those were his exact words to the System.
His tone had been flat, merely reporting an objective fact, even carrying a hint of taking credit as if saying, “See how low-maintenance I am?”
The System’s response at the time had been a full three seconds of complete silence.
Three seconds, for an artificial intelligence, was equivalent to an ordinary human remaining silent for an entire meal.
Contained within that silence were altogether too many emotions that could not be conveyed via an electronic voice.
If they existed, it was likely a complex cocktail of emotions mixed with a touch of inexplicable, indefinable helplessness.
Yet what Yasui said was not actually a lie.
The wounds themselves were not an issue.
The moment Reverse Cursed Technique activated, the flesh could regrow within seconds, leaving not even a scar.
He looked down at a healing red mark on his forearm, watching it shift from deep crimson to light pink, and from light pink back to his skin tone.
Petals closing, retracting into the bud, shrinking back into the stem and leaves, retreating into the soil.
It possessed a bizarre ornamental quality.
He would sometimes deliberately steal a few extra glances before it healed, finding the visual quite captivating.
A red fissure, pink new flesh, and pale skin—three colors layered together, beautiful.
The real issue was the pain.
A hundred-fold pain feedback.
Every time the blade sank into his body, it was not merely the sensation of “being stabbed.” It was a hundred times “being stabbed”—a excruciating agony that exploded from the wound, surging wildly along the nerve endings, piercing every inch of blood vessels at once, then burning all the way to his heart, his brain, his fingertips, and his toes along the bloodstream.
Lying meant swallowing a thousand needles; even without lying, he was subjected to nearly the exact same feeling.
What did this count as?
Counted as him being greedy?
The pain was not a one-time event, but came in wave after wave.
Just when you thought it had receded and breathed a sigh of relief, it would surge back up the very next second—fiercer, more violent, and even more unreasonable than the previous wave.
Every time the knife plunged into his body, a thin sheen of watery mist would veil those gorgeous purple eyes. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Not because he wanted to cry.
He did not want to cry; he found crying far too troublesome.
After crying, his eyes would swell, his voice would grow hoarse, and he would have to wash away the tear tracks clinging to his face, which failed to suit his elegant, composed persona.
Yet that was a purely physiological reaction—the body’s instinctual response to a hundred-fold pain.
His eye sockets ached, his tear glands uncontrollably secreted fluid, his vision blurred, and droplets of tears hung unfallen from his eyelashes, glistening under the light.
The teardrops hung trembling on the tips of his lashes, hovering on the verge of falling, looking thoroughly pitiable.
That is, if one overlooked the fact that he was still holding a knife in his hand.
It was fucking painful.
Yet he did not mind.
He could even pull a single thought out from the gaps of this marrow-deep agony to admire his own face.
There was a small mirror in his dorm room, standing right beside his desk.
On several occasions, right after completing a stab with water mist still lingering in his eyes—
When he was so pale from pain that his lips lacked color and his body shook slightly, he insisted on propping himself up with his arms to sit up, tilting his head to steal a glance into the mirror.
The person in the mirror had slightly reddened eye sockets, his purple eyes appearing exceptionally translucent after being washed by tear light.
His eyelashes were damp, a few stray strands of hair stuck to his temples by cold sweat, and his lips flushed an unnatural crimson from having been bitten just moments before.
Yasui stared at that face in the mirror for a few seconds, then let out a smile.
Very beautiful, was it not?
What a truly fine face.
Leaning against the headboard of his dorm bed, he toyed with the black boning knife, twirling the blade around his fingertips so it reflected his eyes, where the tears had yet to fully recede.
The pair of eyes reflected on the surface of the blade still held lingering moisture, a thin flush resting at the outer corners.
Paired with that cinnabar mark between his brows, it was indeed a fine painting.
Staring at his own reflection on the blade’s surface for a while, he suddenly felt this visual was splendid.
He was truly beautiful.
This assessment contained zero self-love.
Well, fine, perhaps a tiny bit, but it was mostly a perspective reserved for viewing a work of art.
Pretty was pretty; he had known since childhood that he was good-looking, and that was an objective fact.
He even felt that being able to look this good while enduring such intense pain proved his beauty was innate, capable of withstanding the test of extreme environments.
Speaking of points.
Things like points were never enough.
Reaching 306 sounded like a lot, but for items in the System Shop, anything halfway decent started at three digits.
He had recently set his eyes on an ability listed in the shop at no cheap price.
He calculated it out: relying solely on hunting Cursed Spirits to rack up points yielded far too low an efficiency.
Cursed Spirits were around every day, but high-grade ones were scarce.
The points a Grade 1 Cursed Spirit could offer were meager, not even enough to fill the gaps between his teeth.
Though stabbing himself hurt, it was efficient, stable, unaffected by the weather, required no going outdoors or hunting for mobs, and could be done anytime, anywhere.
Unable to go outside to fight Cursed Spirits on a rainy day?
No matter—he could accumulate points tucked away in his dorm room all the same.
The sole problem was that a hundred-fold pain was truly beyond human endurance.
Every time he finished stabbing himself, he had to recover for several minutes, leaning against the wall or curling up on his bed, waiting for those waves of pain to slowly recede.
During those few minutes, he could do nothing at all; his mind went completely blank, leaving only the word *pain* echoing repeatedly.
After the pain ended, there would still be a period of collapse and exhaustion—his fingers numbed, his back drenched in cold sweat, and his clothes sticking to his skin wet and cold, thoroughly uncomfortable.
Was there any way to make this endeavor a bit less agonizing?
Or rather, to find some fun in it?