I sat alone inside the windless cave. When I first saw the blood after being stabbed by the awl, I thought it had gone in fairly deep. Apparently, I’d been mistaken. The bleeding had almost completely stopped before I knew it.
“Ah, shit.”
More precisely, it had stopped, then opened up again. For a goblin, the shaman had been stronger than the others, befitting its status as a mutant. While its underlings bought it time, it chanted a spell and fired a gray mass of air.
And I’d taken it square in the stomach.
“It was probably Wind Fist.”
It was an early-game skill, so I was probably right. I tore strips from the clothes the bastard had stolen from me and turned into a robe. They were covered in dirt and dust, but….
“This won’t get infected, will it?”
I turned my head uneasily and saw the cauldron lying on its side. During my fight with the goblins, one of the creatures I’d kicked had crashed into it and knocked it over.
“Washing it once is still better than using it like this.”
They must have filled the cauldron nearly to the brim, because quite a bit of water remained even after it spilled across the floor.
“Krgh.”
After wringing out the cloth, I wrapped the wet strip around my stomach as a makeshift bandage. The damp fabric clung to the wound. The goblins I’d fought had been fiercer than expected.
‘They were still only around an elementary schooler’s level, though.’
The creatures, none of them even a meter tall, had charged at me while throwing absolute fits. Since they were still monsters, they could probably beat actual elementary schoolers, but they were badly outmatched against a grown man.
“Would it have been difficult without this?”
As I gathered the Copper Coins the goblins had dropped upon dying, I picked up the bone awl as well. The purple blood that had stained it had vanished along with the monsters when their bodies dissolved into glowing dust.
“Pick one. Either be a game or be reality.”
There I stood in my underwear, with a bandage made from torn clothing wrapped around my stomach. In my hands were an ominous bone awl and a long wooden pole.
“What a sight.”
Anyone who saw me now would probably scream and run away. In one corner of the goblins’ lair, bones that appeared to be human and the belongings of their former owners had been piled up.
“I need to put something on.”
CLATTER.
After observing a moment of silence before the mound of bones, I began rummaging through it. There wasn’t much worth salvaging. I found a shirt and a pair of pants riddled with holes.
Better than nothing.
I also found a notebook about the size of my palm.
“Normally, finding something like this leads to the next quest.”
Rustle, rustle.
The writing in the notebook was neither Korean nor English. I had never seen the script before in my life, but fortunately, I could read it.
The notebook turned out to be a diary. I hadn’t expected a diary to be organized according to the five Ws and one H, but this was impossible to understand. It read as though someone with bipolar disorder had written it in the middle of an episode.
“I should keep it, just in case.”
[Madness & Abyss] might have been filled with unfair bullshit, but it wasn’t a game that included pointless actions. Even items labeled as trash eventually had moments when they became necessary. For example, a bundle of candy received as a quest reward could later be used to skip a battle against a colossal monster.
FWOOSH.
I took a torch from the wall and examined the cave. I hadn’t noticed because my survival depended on focusing entirely on killing the goblins, but the cavern was fairly large.
It was about the size of a school gymnasium.
“First, the altar.”
I headed toward the altar where I’d been bound. The altar was a rectangular stone coffin. A cross-shaped wooden frame had been placed on top of it, and sacrifices were tied to the frame.
I set down the torch for a moment and pushed the coffin lid with both hands. It was heavier than it looked and barely moved.
“This is heavier than I expected. Hoo—ngh!”
THUD.
When I shoved with all my strength, the lid inched aside before falling to the floor.
SWISH. SWISH.
I examined the inside of the coffin with the torch, but there was nothing there. At most, there were a few cobwebs. I pressed down on the bottom and even climbed inside to lie down, but nothing happened.
That was disappointing.
“Moving on.”
Behind the altar stood a statue. It depicted a monster with the body of a gorilla, the head of a goat, and bat wings on its back. I knocked on it to check whether it was hollow and tried turning it in different directions, but unfortunately, nothing happened.
CRASH. SHATTER.
I also threw the large jar in front of the statue onto the ground and smashed it.
“Oh, found something.”
Inside the jar was a glowing stone the size of my thumbnail.
“A gemstone? Or a Magic Stone?”
Either way, both were magical materials. If I’d had access to the system window, it would’ve told me automatically. In the game, item descriptions appeared on their own and let me distinguish between things.
Even though the game’s difficulty changed between [Normal], [Difficult], and [Hardcore], it still let you use the system.
“If you’re going to kidnap someone into a game, then at least let him use the game’s features, you son of a bitch.”
I could forgive not knowing the bastard’s name, age, or even gender, but if it had kidnapped me into a place like this, didn’t that mean it wanted me to clear or save this world like in the game?
What an unbelievably unhelpful bastard.
I should’ve known from the way it designed the game.
No wonder no one had ever cleared it.
“I’m guessing the one who kidnapped me was the bastard who wrote that letter-like thing near the end.”
What had that letter said again? I’d skipped through it by pressing the space bar, and that had been over a month ago.
There was no way I’d remember it properly.
“……Is this all?”
I had searched every corner of this place that resembled an abandoned altar to an ancient evil god, yet all I found was a single purple gemstone.
“Activate! Haaap! Summon! I demand a contract!”
I gripped the gem and tried everything that came to mind, but nothing happened. A wave of intense embarrassment washed over me. My face heated up, and a sigh escaped on its own.
“……Let’s get out of here.”
When I left the chamber containing the altar, I found a straight corridor. Crystals embedded in the ceiling gave off a faint glow. Thanks to them, it wasn’t so dark that I couldn’t see an inch ahead, as it had been in the mountains the previous night.
“Still better to have a torch.”
Holding the torch out in front of me, I walked down the corridor.
RUMBLE.
One minute? After what felt like three minutes of walking, the cave began to shake. My pace quickened.
“Fuck.”
Before I knew it, I was running with the torch thrust ahead of me. Far in the distance, a white ring of light floated in the air.
RUMBLE—.
At the ominous sound, I looked back. The cave was collapsing from the entrance to the chamber where I’d been.
“Goddammit.”
I threw away the torch and sprinted toward the light.
SHHHH.
***
“Whew. I thought I was going to die.”
In the game, defeating a dungeon boss started a time limit. During that time, you searched the boss room and obtained hidden items.
Then came the loading screen.
Afterward, the characters would be standing outside the dungeon portal.
“It’s been cut in half.”
The wooden pole, which had been nearly two meters long, had been cleanly severed in half. The cut surface was smooth. Beneath the empty space where the portal had been, the grass had been burned black.
Since this was reality, it seemed there were differences from the game I knew.
“……It’s broad daylight.”
Outside the portal, the sun hung high in the sky. After being inside the cave, the bright light made me squint automatically. According to the setting, the vegetation in the Black Forest was thick enough to block the sun even during the day, but daytime was still daytime.
“This is….”
I bent down and picked up what had fallen on the ground.
“Hardtack.”
What I found was a hardtack pouch. The bottom had been torn open, and only two pieces remained inside.
“There’s another one over there.”
As I searched while squinting, I found another piece of hardtack four or five meters away. Was this how Hansel and Gretel had felt? Following the pieces of hardtack and picking them up as I went, I eventually found the bundle bag I’d been carrying on my back.
“What a fucking mess.”
The goblin that captured me must have searched my belongings, because the mouth of the bundle had been left open. Everything inside had been scattered in all directions.
I picked up the items one by one and put them back into the bag.
“There aren’t many.”
Only a few objects had been thrown onto the ground, so it didn’t take long to gather them all. I recovered one Iron Jar, a reagent vial that had somehow survived without breaking, three small ceramic pieces, and a book.
“Jar Crafting Manual.”
I hadn’t known something like this was inside the bag.
“Right. There were a lot of different jars.”
It had been so long since I used a Jar Warrior that I’d forgotten. The jars this character threw came in many varieties. In the game, all I had to do was gather the ingredients and press the crafting button, so I hadn’t known a manual existed.
Now that this was reality, I supposed I needed something like this.
FLIP.
The open book was packed with writing and illustrations.
At first, I had seriously trained a Jar Warrior because the mechanic of fighting by throwing jars seemed novel. I had made jars with all sorts of different functions.
At some point, however, I stopped using the class.
The greatest reason I gave up on the Jar Warrior was money.
“It cost a ridiculous amount of gold.”
The ingredients used in jars were relatively easy to obtain. For example, the ‘Flame Jar’ on the very first page required only ‘Charcoal,’ ‘Mushroom Spores,’ and a ‘Smoke Larva.’
However, claiming alchemy required gold, the Jar Warrior took one portion of Gold Dust for every jar.
“Five portions of Gold Dust made one Gold Coin.”
To manage the stress of NPC companions, we stayed at an inn for a week after completing an adventure. That cost one Gold Coin.
But a single dungeon run consumed ten to twenty jars. Add another Gold Coin for lodging after the dungeon, and….
“It cost three to five Gold Coins.”
It was the most gold-guzzling problem a child could imagine.
Was the Jar Warrior exceptionally powerful compared to the other NPC companions?
Not at all.
It simply cost several times more gold, so its cost-effectiveness worsened the further the game progressed.
Right. It had definitely claimed it needed Gold Dust.
“It doesn’t require Gold Dust?”
Not a single grain of Gold Dust appeared anywhere in the crafting methods written in the manual.
While hunting or exploring dungeons in the game, the player character and companion NPCs gained stress from numerous factors.
It could come from hunger caused by a lack of food or from stepping on a trap. They could gain stress because an attack missed, or even because the monster they were fighting was ugly.
Characters whose stress exceeded a certain level began behaving bizarrely.
They might steal rewards obtained from monsters or demoralize their companions by hurling abuse and insults about their parents at them. The worst was when they stabbed a companion in the back and fled because they were afraid to fight.
The ridiculous part was that after fleeing the dungeon like that, they sometimes returned with their faces practically plated in steel and shamelessly asked to rejoin the party.
Beyond that, the characters in this game each had their own circumstances according to the setting and occasionally behaved bizarrely even without stress. Their background stories were available on the official website, but who bothered looking those up?
At least I didn’t.
“……That bastard.”
The Jar Warrior’s bizarre behavior was ‘Embezzlement.’
Was this what people meant by having their noses cut off while their eyes were wide open?
***
[You have learned ‘Secret Art: Jar Crafting’.]
[Jar Crafting is now available.]