Psycho in Ancient World
Copyright© 2026 by K.W
Chapter 6. Half-Human, Half-Character
At first, because things like the existence of martial arts, he even mistook it. He thought maybe, due to a game bug, some strange phenomenon had occurred in murim online.
However.
After observing for several weeks, Dong Bong-su became certain that wasn’t the case.
This place was reality. For sure. There was no longer any room for doubt.
He couldn’t understand the principle of exactly how he had come here, but the fact that this place was reality was something he absolutely could not deny. He could feel pain, and he was vividly alive—moving, breathing out a rough wildness. To the point that every time he faced Machil, it was hard to suppress the urge to kill.
Is Machil a player? Or an NPC (Non Player Character)?
Of course, he was neither.
There were many people he had met here. The first was Machil, and sometimes Machil brought other people with him. They would mount their horses with lightning-like agility and vanish from the stable.
Each time, Dong Bong-su checked people’s eyes. It was work to confirm whether they had emotions or not. Everyone was moving “alive,” each with their own emotions. There was no way those with eyes like that could be NPCs.
Then what about himself? What was he?
Was he human? A player? Was he even alive?
Dong Bong-su didn’t really know either. Only that he was different from the others here—at least that much was certain. He moved like a human just the same, but there was a decisive difference.
That was the hologram letters, “murim online.”
In other words, he—Dong Bong-su—was “half-human, half-character.”
He had the ability to open every window that had been possible in murim online: a status window, a skill window, inventory, map, and so on. However, not every function worked normally. Most windows were displayed as “?” due to errors, and the only window that worked 100% properly was the inventory window.
He still didn’t know how to use anything except the inventory window. He planned to figure that out little by little from now on. As the status window said “Lv .1,” after all, he was still only a level 1 novice.
Swoosh.
Dong Bong-su quietly raised his upper body. The wound on his chest throbbed, but it wasn’t so bad he couldn’t move. He slowly loosened the rope that was pressing down on his chest. Then he wiped off the thin gruel stuck to the rope and put it back into the bowl. It was still hot, hurting his hand and chest, but he didn’t care. Once most of the gruel was back in the bowl, he lifted it and poured it into his mouth in one go.
It was food worse than what dogs ate on modern Earth, but Dong Bong-su didn’t mind much. To begin with, for him food was something you ate to live, not something to enjoy for taste.
For him, the best food was a nutritionally balanced diet. From that perspective, this gruel was the absolute worst food. Gruel had almost no calories. To fully recover stamina by eating this would take quite a long time. So, for fast recovery, he had food prepared separately.
“Inventory.”
A translucent inventory hologram floated before his eyes. In fact, even this inventory was very different from the original one in murim online. In the original inventory window, it was a format where one item went into one slot.
But.
Here, it had changed from a slot system to a spatial system. The current inventory let him examine every corner inside, following the movement of Dong Bong-su’s hand.
The inside of the inventory was extremely wide. He couldn’t know exactly how big it was until he tried filling it completely, but he thought it was at least about a hundred square meters.
This was the first rule of this new “game” he had discovered.
Inside the inventory were hundreds of ants and fly larvae—maggots by the dozens—and hundreds of unknown insects.
That’s right.
The food he had prepared for quick stamina recovery was insects. Insects take up little volume while being very high in protein. That’s why, even on modern Earth, they’re in the spotlight as a future food source, aren’t they?
Given the same feed, you can raise several times more insects than cows or pigs, and their nutrients are far superior to cows or pigs of the same volume. Naturally, to Dong Bong-su, insects were excellent food. Low volume, high protein. That was enough of an explanation about insects.
Without hesitation, he pulled out all the insects in the inventory. Without caring about the type, he grabbed a handful and dumped them into his mouth.
Crunch.
A disgusting sound echoed through the stable, but that was by ordinary people’s standards— to Dong Bong-su, it was nothing.
For a while, Dong Bong-su stopped his brain activity and focused on eating. All of this, too, was proof that this world he was in was a game, but also not a game. In a game, you couldn’t eat food, you couldn’t defecate, and genitals didn’t exist.