[Forbidden Fruit of Eden]
[Effect: Usable once per player.
Increases all base attributes by 50% upon consumption.]
[Negative Effect 1: The eater gains the Original Sin attribute, marking them for pursuit by every angelic race.]
[Negative Effect 2: If killed, attributes revert to normal.]
This one felt almost like a novelty item.
Powerful and garbage, somehow, both at once.
A twitch crossed the corner of Roy’s mouth.
The item was genuinely powerful, because a player’s base attributes never changed except through leveling up.
Countless players had racked their brains over class builds, all chasing higher stats and better skills.
And here was a World-tier item that just handed out a flat 50% boost to base attributes.
In-game, the downside was brutal, the world’s number-one guild was a Seraph guild, so eating this thing was basically a death wish.
But would there even be angels hunting you down in the New World?
Roy figured he could pair this with the Wings of the Fallen Angel.
Generate a Satan-class NPC first, then feed it the Forbidden Fruit of Eden, and see if the effect still applied.
Looking it all over, Roy couldn’t help but marvel.
World-tier items really did cover everything imaginable.
Sure, he’d read through the backend scripts on the test server, but he’d never actually held any of it in his hands.
Now, claiming them one after another, he was experiencing a kind of gaming joy he’d never felt before.
Onward, sweeping up the rest.
The twenty-first item: the Forbidden Book of Magic.
[Effect 1: A spellcaster class player who reads the forbidden book learns one random forbidden spell.]
[Effect 2: After learning the spell, the player receives a random, unremovable debuff, whose duration scales with their overall strength.]
[Effect 3: If the learned spell’s tier far exceeds the player’s own strength, the negative effect grows correspondingly worse.]
Forbidden magical knowledge, not unlike Ainz’s own Dark Wisdom.
Except his came with no cost at all.
Through PvP alone, he’d racked up as many as 718 spells, a genuinely broken outlier.
This forbidden book, though, had no upper limit.
Not bad at all.
Roy pocketed the spellbook.
He’d already collected the vast majority of magic in the game.
But there were still plenty of specialized spells that simply couldn’t be obtained by building custom NPCs.
With the Forbidden Book in hand, sure, there’d be side effects, but for something running on the Immortal class, nothing that couldn’t be worked around.
So he kept right on collecting World-tier items.
Roy had originally planned to stop after twenty items and take a break.
Instead, some deep-seated gamer instinct had kicked in.
The collector’s compulsion.
Item after item after item poured into his vault.
Even with a full walkthrough in hand, the sense of accomplishment never let up.
After all the money he’d spent, all the years he’d spent preparing, this was the first time Roy actually felt the fun of the game itself, a pure, uncomplicated joy.
The twenty-second item: Eye of Cthulhu.
[Effect 1: Offer a sacrifice to the unnameable being.
In return, inflict a random debuff on your enemy, the richer the sacrifice, the stronger the debuff.]
[Negative Effect: You have made use of the abyss.
The abyss makes use of you in turn.]
Ooh, yikes.
It just slapped a group debuff on the enemy, one that normally didn’t clear even after the target died, and lasted a long time regardless.
By the game’s own standards, it wasn’t especially broken, more of a tribute to Cthulhu Mythos flavor than anything else.
But in the New World, something like this turned genuinely dangerous, with real risk of serious spiritual contamination.
Using it on an enemy meant taking on some of that same psychic corruption himself.
Best left unused unless things got truly desperate.
Roy quickly pulled out a dedicated sealing artifact and locked the thing away.
The twenty-third item: Vial of the Great Flood.
[Effect: Uncork the vial to unleash a world-ending flood.
The waters never stop, capable of drowning an entire world, lasting seven days or more.]
A genuine world-ending item, easily one of the top twenty in the game.
Except it didn’t seem to actually do much of anything useful.
Even in-game, all it probably did was open up some super-dungeon, with zero real upside.
No matter how far Roy was willing to take things, he wasn’t about to flood an entire world.
Strictly a curiosity for the collection, then.
The twenty-fourth item: Ryza’s Sage Cauldron.
[Effect: Using sacrificial materials, the holder can produce alchemy’s ultimate achievement: the Philosopher’s Stone.]
Any player with the Alchemist life-skill class could brew items from raw materials, and among them, the Philosopher’s Stone was considered the ultimate all-purpose material.
It could upgrade the quality of any weapon.
A single Legendary-tier item, refined with a Philosopher’s Stone, might well ascend all the way to Artifact tier.
A genuinely great item.
Whether the New World even had enough living creatures to actually produce a Philosopher’s Stone remained an open question.
But it was clearly the single greatest treasure any Alchemist could hope for.
Thoroughly pleased, Roy kept right on sweeping up more.
Pretty much every World-tier item, it turned out, served some specific purpose.
One after another, they kept surfacing.
Ma Liang’s Feather Pen.
Jiang Ziya’s Fishing Rod.
The Golden Cauldron of the Food God.
The Original Codex of Pathology.
The Plow of Abundance.
Nidhogg’s Vial of Dragon Blood.
The All-Seeing Eye…
Not every single World-tier item packed serious combat power.
But they were, without question, wildly varied.
If Roy’s cash-out succeeded, this hoard alone would be more than enough to live comfortably in any world he ended up in.
By the time he’d finally rounded up the last World-tier item, only five days had passed.
The hundredth item: Laplace’s Demon.
[Effect: Gathers any information you wish to know from anywhere in the world.]
Laplace’s Demon.
The very idea of omniscience itself.
In-game, of course, it wasn’t nearly that absurd.
It just let him eavesdrop on sounds and conversations happening in public spaces.
In practical terms, it was the equivalent of planting a listening device anywhere in the public world at will.
Private spaces were off-limits, or players would report the company for violating their privacy.
Which made it one of the weaker World-tier items, nothing especially game-breaking about it.
More than enough.
Over these past few days, not a single other player had managed to claim even one of them.
Counting the World Crown, Roy now had a full hundred World-tier items safely in his possession.
In a sense, he could have openly declared that every treasure this world had to offer now belonged to the World King.
Fantastic.
He couldn’t put a single one of them down.
Roy sat in his vault, admiring the fruits of all his hard work, and for a moment, he actually forgot about his own final task.
.
“Roy’s still in the game?”
His eldest brother, Arthur, wasn’t a patient man.
Even with a month agreed upon before any final decision, he’d still been tracking Roy’s movements every single day.
His subordinate reported back:
“Yes, young master!”
“Young Master Roy logs into Yggdrasil for over sixteen hours a day.”
Arthur asked, puzzled:
“Nothing else unusual?”
“No, sir.”
“Young Master Roy hasn’t even spoken with his maids or his butler.”
“Aside from the game, he hasn’t done a single other thing.”
“We couldn’t get any video footage, but our nanobot lie-detection tech confirms he isn’t lying about any of it.”
“Our contacts inside Yggdrasil also confirm Young Master Roy logs in like clockwork every day, and seems to be having a genuinely great time.”
Arthur read through the entire report, a look of bewilderment crossing his face.
What was Eighth Brother actually doing?
Arthur’s butler couldn’t help but speak up, carefully:
“Based on everything we’ve gathered, the game shuts down in another two days.”
“Perhaps…
Young Master Roy simply intends to deal with everything else after that.”
Arthur ground his teeth:
“Living the easy life while the rest of us deal with everything.
What a bastard.”
There were times Arthur genuinely envied Roy, even though Roy’s wealth didn’t come close to comparing with his own.
By now, Arthur controlled a real stake in the Sigma family’s holdings, with far more social capital at his disposal than Roy could ever hope to command.
Bluntly put, if Arthur shot someone dead in the street, he could make the whole thing disappear.
Roy could never get away with that same kind of lawlessness.
And yet Roy was the one living happily.
Just playing some game for the lower classes.
Was losing yourself in a video game really that satisfying?
Arthur genuinely couldn’t understand it, and it ate at him with envy.
The rest of them were tearing each other apart every single day, and Eighth Brother got to just coast through it all.
Seeing the look on Arthur’s face, the butler couldn’t help but ask, puzzled:
“Young Master Arthur, Young Master Roy poses no threat at all.
Why worry about him so much?”
“The master’s just fond of him, that’s all.”
The butler had served Arthur for years, and could naturally afford to speak a little more honestly.
Arthur’s expression shifted, and he spoke with real weight in his voice:
“That’s exactly what you don’t understand.”