“……”
The unfamiliar ceiling and smell didn’t stir anything like curiosity in him. It never did. He was apathetic about everything, listless. This depression was a chronic condition. He lay there blinking for a long while. Then he closed his eyes.
“Ugh…?”
He tried to sink back into sleep. Whatever else was going on, right now drowsiness had a stronger grip on him than depression. Unemployed or whatever, gaming-addicted shut-in or fatso……. He’d sleep on it, then decide whether to log back into the game or starve to death.
“Hgh—!”
But he couldn’t. A groan tore itself out of him involuntarily. Cold sweat broke out across his skin.
“Wh— what is……”
Pain. The kind he had never felt in his entire life.
Even when he cut his wrists it hadn’t hurt like this. Dizzy, maybe — but never this nauseating, this agonizing.
What is this? Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes. He couldn’t make sense of it. He didn’t want to hurt. This was an entirely new feeling. Trembling, he reached out. He curled his body into itself however he could. He didn’t know where the pain was coming from, but he made himself as small as possible.
It was then that he caught sight of white hair drifting at the edge of his vision, accompanied by that bitter herbal scent. White hair? Was there white hair attached to his head right now?
The pain didn’t let him dwell on it. He was in no state to think about hair. This overwhelming agony — somehow, somehow he had to——!
“Hgh, kuh— cough——!”
He started coughing as if something had gone down the wrong way. With every cough, his whole body ached and throbbed. Tears and snot streamed freely. Something surged up from the back of his throat. The bitter herbal scent was quickly overtaken by the metallic reek of blood.
Before he could even process what that meant, liquid in a familiar color splattered onto the blanket. He raised his hand to cover his mouth. The blood-stained blanket, the slender white fingers — all of it was something he had never seen before.
Blood soaked through beneath the white blanket. The transparent liquid pooling in his eyes spilled over and ran down. He just — he just wanted this pain to end quickly.
* * *
[Warning! HP is below 5%!]
[Current Status: Curse (Poison), Curse (Sloth)……]
When he opened his eyes again, he was curled tightly into himself. He was afraid of the pain that could return at any moment. A reflex so pathetic it almost made him laugh. He was supposed to be someone who wanted to die, and here he was, afraid of dying.
“……”
He stayed blank for a long time. When he finally realized the pain was gone, something else entered his field of vision.
The design was familiar. A small holographic window. And familiar text. It was a notification window from Limit — the game he had always played.
“What.”
Reflexively, he raised his hand toward the notification window. Pale white, slender, delicate fingers rose into view. Fingers that couldn’t possibly be his.
He looked down at his hand immediately. The dried, hardened, flaking blood was deeply unsettling.
His face instinctively scrunched. It was strange that his vision was this clear without thick glasses, and the white hair sliding down the side of his face felt equally foreign.
So it wasn’t a dream. Everything was unfamiliar. Not so much anxious as — unpleasant. The one and only thing he didn’t mind was the notification window in front of him. Nothing else came close to being this familiar.
“…Status window.”
So he said it quietly. The command he had always used in Limit. He felt like that, at least, could explain everything.
Whoosh —
Without even another thought, the hologram window stretched wide. Several things obscured his vision at once. He rolled his eyes over them to check.
[Hyeonwoo]
[Lv. 32
Race: Human
Attribute: None
Class: None
Alignment: Neutral
HP: 1,031 / 32,110 | MP: 25,510 / 50,120
STR: 30 | AGI: 19 | INT: 74 | VIT: 18 | WIS: 70 | DEX: ???
.
.
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Skills: Creation, Repair, Mineralogy, Herbology, Blacksmithing Mastery (Passive), Tailoring Mastery (Passive), Alchemy Mastery (Passive)……
.
.
.
Unique Abilities:
Midas’ Hands | The critical success rate of Creation, Crafting, and Repair actions is influenced by DEX. Critical success rate is increased. DEX stat has no influence on anything else whatsoever.
Creator’s Privilege | Equipment you have Created or Crafted can be equipped regardless of equipment requirements or class requirements. All effects are halved in exchange.
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.
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Current Titles: Curse Cultivator (A-), Lover-Hater of Good and Evil (S-), Dealer with Demons (S)……
Current Status: Curse (Poison), Curse (Sloth)……]
“……”
It was beyond anything he could have imagined. Above all else, the abilities were as unimpressive and sorry-looking as they come. Well — he’d spent so long staring at the status windows of maxed-out characters that his standards had naturally risen.
“Hyeonwoo.”
His real name, and the nickname of the character he owned. Now he was starting to get a rough sense of what this was, and what was going on.
But it didn’t feel real. He looked around. He’d thought everything was unfamiliar — but now, belatedly, a familiar structure caught his eye. Wasn’t this the house that Limit‘s “Hyeonwoo” used as both a residence and a workshop?
“Cough……”
The white hair drifted with the movement of his head. A shallow cough escaped him. What kind of delusional situation is this. Not taking his medication must have let the depression creep back in again.
He held his head in his hands. In moments like this, the depression tends to pour every insult imaginable down on him.
Hyeonwoo. My first character, who carried my real name, and who became my last. …The one whose deletion button I pressed myself.
Right now, he had become that “Hyeonwoo.”
[Warning! Current HP is below 4%!]
[Current Status: Curse (Poison), Curse (Sloth)……]
“…Come to think of it.”
Even if he couldn’t accept the situation, his body moved out of habit. Because this was a game. This was a game. Cough! Another cough. He felt something run along the corner of his mouth. He swiped it away with the back of his hand — blood. He looked down at it with an expression like it was nothing.
The character he made first but discarded last. “Hyeonwoo” was an artisan-type support character. The one who handled all the miscellaneous grunt work for the kids he was raising. Back when he barely knew Limit, he’d gotten caught up with a demon and ended up saddled with an annoying curse — and once he’d realized the character was a lost cause, he’d just left it to gather dust.
He had no intention of leveling it, so he left the curse alone. That said, it wasn’t entirely useless — there had been one cheap workaround he’d relied on as a last resort……
“Ugh……”
The pain was starting up again. A dull ache seized around his heart and squeezed his body tight. He sank to the floor and frantically looked around. As expected. On a shelf not far away sat a pipe and matches.
He grabbed the pipe and put it to his lips urgently. He checked that there were still some herb scraps left inside, then struck the match. Sshk, sshk. It wouldn’t catch properly and his nerves frayed.
At last a lukewarm flame bloomed on the matchhead, and he hurriedly crammed it into the pipe.
He drew deeply on the lit pipe. Murky smoke flooding through him, a hazy, bitter herbal scent. And more smoke……
“Ha……”
[The curse is suppressed.]
“…So that’s it.”
The pain vanished as if it had been wiped away, and his whole body went limp with exhaustion. He couldn’t believe that the agony that had felt like it would kill him could just disappear like this. Right — this is a game……
He leaned back against the bed. The smoke from the resumed pipe made his head swim pleasantly. Before he could even begin to process the sudden change, his mind went soft and slack first.
What kind of delusion is it this time. His body had changed, there was a system window, and here he was sitting in the house he’d only ever seen in the game.
Delusion? Hallucination? Then the culprit was the depression again, as always. Depression is the cause of everything. If this was the depression’s doing, then he just had to accept it.
“Huu……”
He exhaled smoke. Murky, for something that was supposed to be herbs. Out of habit his face twisted as he hung his head. It was then that he noticed, on the wrist holding the pipe, a long scar.
“Ha.”
He forced the corners of his mouth up into a grin.
“You’ve got one of these too.”
He didn’t remember customizing a scar like that. The Hyeonwoo of reality and the Hyeonwoo of this place were clearly different people. So was this something the Hyeonwoo of this place had left behind?
“Whether you’re me, or you’re you……”
He thought about it aimlessly, then laughed strangely again. Either way, both of them were Hyeonwoo. Loser Hyeonwoo, Limit Hyeonwoo…… Before he could even settle that question, both of them were Hyeonwoo, and that was that.
“Should’ve gone to the hospital when I had the chance.”
