Chapter 3: Orphan Heart

Oh, Sage! Something terrible just happened! That final system prompt was definitely not a good sign! Orphan Crippler? What the hell kind of title is that? It already sounds terrible! How the hell am I supposed to come back from something like that?

“Sigh...”

At least I managed to set a new respawn point! If I had to hike that road all over again Sage only knows what accidents I may have run into.

Let’s see, what’s the time ... Holy Crap. It’s only midday. Let’s see, I got sucked in at 8:30 ... so that’s three and a half hours. In Game time that’s equivalent to four times that ... which is 14 hours! Man, this game’s so brutal.

I’ve only got 3 hours of game time, and I’ve already died more than three times. “Sigh...”

Well, I’ve been starving for almost 14 hours, so I should go and eat something. I wonder if Juwan is still home or not...

Guess I’ll go down and have a little peek in the fridge.

Sneak, Sneak, Sneak. Avoid the third step. Sneak, Sneak, Sneak.

‘Ping! A new skill has reached level 1. Sneak.’

Oh shit! The game system still works even out here in the real world! How is that possible? Hmm ... maybe I should experiment with the system in the real world as well.

“Growl!”

But first I should eat something. Ok ... Sneak, Sneak, Sneak. Hmm, let’s see what tasties are in the fridge. Cheese ... Milk ... Carrots ... mmm ... oh, there we go! Looks like Alice left some cake in here. Hmm ... I probably shouldn’t ... but it looks so good...

Num, num, num. Cake is the best. Whoever invented cake is a genius! Ok, back to my room!

Sneak, Sneak, Sneak...

“What the hell are you doing home you little shit stain?”

Ahh shit ... looks like Alice is home. Sage, I hate that bitch!

“Ah ... haha ... Hey, Alice! I didn’t realise you were home. I’m feeling a bit sick today, so I was just resting up. Heh heh...”

Ahh ... she’s making that face she makes. Like she wants to bludgeon me to death with a soft blunt instrument. Like a pillow. I assume that would be her weapon of choice because the longer it takes me to die, the happy she would be.

“Whatever! Just keep away from my stuff in the fridge! I know it was you who ate my pudding that last time! Let me warn you that if there’s a second time you’re going to get an ass whooping.”

Heh! You wish, you prissy little bitch. We both know you’ve never been able to get the upper hand on me.

“Oh, Little brother. How are you feeling?”

Ah great. This giant prick is still here as well. Oh is that what I think it is?

“Hey there Juwan. Is that a Dimension Key you’re holding?”

“A what? This is one of those things from the mysterious black thing in the city centre. A Dimension Key? You know what it is?”

Heh. Do I ever! Mmm. Yes ... Let’s introduce you to the world of Domain Warz. Let’s watch you suffer the endless torment of the twisted Game System.

“Hoh. Not really. I’ve only heard its name. If you want to interact with it, you need to splash some of your blood on it. Then you can do something like this.”

Log In!

Murphy didn’t get to see what Juwan’s face was like when he suddenly disappeared from the middle of the kitchen, but he liked to try and imagine it.

When he respawned, he appeared in a totally different place to the previous smouldering, decimated village. As he surveyed his surroundings, Murphy found himself in the centre of a bustling marketplace filled with a variety of shops and stores. His respawn point was the city centre.

Unfortunately, he didn’t get a chance to fully inspect everything in the market square, because a group of knights clad in shiny silver armour crowded around me with their pointy spears and swords facing my direction.

“Halt! You’re the one that crippled all those poor young orphans and left them on death’s door? How dare you show your face in Gateway!”

As this was yelled at Murphy, a knight in gold armour stepped up with a piece of parchment. He then unrolled it and started reading a list of very undesirable things.

“Murphy Law, The Unstable Lone Wolf Poison Master and nefarious Orphan Crippler, your renown has fallen below -20. Consider this an official warning. If your renown drops below -40 you will be marked as a wanted criminal by any law-abiding city. Take care in the future.”

He then rolled it up sauntered off with his posse of shiny knights, leaving Murphy standing in the middle of the market square with everyone giving him hate filled gazes.

If a stare were like a bullet, Murphy would have been riddled with holes and perhaps even completely vaporised by the magnitude of the burning hateful gazes he received.

If his Hurts So Good weren’t forcing him to enjoy all these angry glares, he’d probably have long since run away to hide. Instead, he just smiled his most amiable and charming smile as he wondered into the markets.

The first thing he did was found a quiet place to sit down and organise his inventory and to check his stats. He picked up a few interesting things from the Bear Caves. First among them was a set of boots. They looked like comfortable soft leather boots, but he felt there was a little more to them.

As he investigated the boots and tried them on, he realised that they drastically reduced the weight of his inventory. He decided that he would be keeping these boots for himself and left them equipped.

He also found a simple conical bamboo hat which seemed to make all those hateful gazes turn away and back to their own business. He assumed this hat must have some kind of attribute that hides the person’s identity or makes the person difficult to identify.

Either way, it was a Sagesend at this moment in time.

He also found a simple looking dagger with a slightly greenish blade. The moment he touched the tip he regretted. It seemed the blade was super sharp. So sharp that it could stab into his skin even after it had an endurance level approaching 18.

Even more disturbing was that his whole body suddenly lit up in ecstasy as a burning pain filled his every nerve. If it was anyone, the level of pain should have rendered them paralytic. Murphy, on the other hand, appeared to only be feeling a slight bit of discomfort.

He decided to equip this dagger to a little leather dagger sheath on his belt. He then sorted through all sorts of other things and tested them out to try and identify their properties. As he did, a system prompt popped up.

‘Ping! You have levelled a new skill to level 1, Identify.’

“Oh ... interesting. It must be a skill for identifying the properties of something.”

With that thought said aloud to himself, Murphy poured through all the equipment in his inventory and equipped to his body one more time. This time around, instead of a game overlay that just showed a name and basic description, he started seeing other stats and attributes of equipment.

He discovered that most weapons had a damage modifier, which increased the damage they would normally do. Armours and wearable items had some defence modifiers and accessories generally had some simple attribute bonuses.

The hairpin of the little beast girl gave a bonus of 2 to the maximum Mana. The Sword of the Bandit Leader had a sharpness attribute that made it sharper than normal. The Evil Instructor’s belt had two special effects. It could automatically pull potions from your inventory and also had a 1% chance to ‘magically’ duplicate a potion when it’s pulled off the belt.

To test this function, Murphy started pulling potions off the belt then throwing them back into his inventory. Probably thanks to his terrible luck score, he never got to witness the belt magically produce a free potion.

Unfortunately, out of all the equipment in his inventory, the armours were even more useless than his own body’s endurance and only added weight to him if he equipped them. Thus, he was better off staying in the dirty village clothes he’d robbed off those innocent villagers.

When he scrutinised the Dagger again, he discovered its name and properties. It wasn’t that it was sharp in the sense the edge was sharp. It was rather that it was incredibly pointy. The attribute it had was simply defined as Super Pointy.

It was also apparently poisoned with a level 2 poison enchantment, which Murphy had already discovered. What he found strange though, was that even if it was poisoned, the enchantment was only level two. The reason this confused him was that it still seemed to do plenty of damage and hurt a lot, by comparison, he managed to reach the point that he could stroll around mostly unaffected in the green poison smog, which was considered a high-class poison recipe.

The last thing identified were the potions and the magic scroll. The Magic Scroll had the apt name of Flaming Balls of Fire. When broken the scroll would summon 4 balls of fire that fired in the direction the caster pointed in.

The potions varied and unsurprisingly were mostly poison. He’d used the two super rare ones, so he wasn’t sure what they were, but the remaining ones made him even more curious about the state of his poisoned dagger.

This was because the purple fog poison was apparently Level 4 ... and he suspected he could probably breathe that stuff like normal air by now.

He thought he understood the reason when he finally got around to checking his stats properly.

When he went to his Status Place, he felt that it was starting to get very crowded. As such he tried altering what his stat screens showed.

After some playing, he simplified it a little more so that he could keep track of everything easily. The discovery that he could customise his status screens led him to imagine some possibilities in the future, but he chose to ignore it for the moment.

Murphy now understood why the poison from the little dagger could still affect him. It was his own damn fault! Poison Assassin allowed the poison of the dagger to negate some of his poison resistance. He could see this being a good and bad thing ... but mostly bad.

He had long since come to the conclusion that poison was the best method for him to help increase his bodies endurance through taking damage. It was a constant damage over a prolonged period of time and could affect nearly every part of his anatomy.

With Poison Assassins passive buff to his poison, it meant he could use poison to keep damaging his body to make it even more durable.

The downside is, letting Please Sir and Hurts So Good operate sped up the rate that his weird Masochism skill levelled. Just looking at it, he could tell it was only 20,000 experience points away from tipping over into level 11.

He hated this skill because it gave birth to those creepy special traits. He didn’t know how the game system assigned these skills in the beginning. He was definitely not a masochist. In fact, he hated pain more than anyone.

Somehow though, the system seemed to think otherwise ... either that or this entire game was a huge joke!

I could only consider this entire game as a joke at this point! All of my stats were wacky and twisted. How it’s possible that I ended up with some disgusting skill like masochism was beyond me. Unfortunately, for now, I would just have to silently suffer.

With a long sigh of dejection, I rose from the quiet street corner I’d been sitting at and moved to a nearby vendor to trade all the junk I’d picked up. Thanks to my new bamboo hat, the vendor didn’t recognise me.

I was only guessing, but I suspected all my titles and negative renown would impact my ability to sell or buy from the NPC’s. It hid my identity and renown making me look like just another normal customer.

After some haggling, I sold some of my things. Some of it I had to keep. Even the vendor seemed to think it was junk. I then spent 3 hours walking around trying to sell off everything and empty my inventory.

While I was exploring the city and checking out shops and vendors, I heard some rather disturbing rumours about someone who fell from the sky and obliterated a little orphanage in town. My heart bled for these little buggers.

I should know how tough life for them is, after all, I too was once a lonely orphan. However, this sentiment quickly became bitterness when I realised that the heartless bastard who destroyed a full orphanage and crippled half the residents, was actually me!

I was the Orphan Crippler! If it weren’t for Hurts So Good somewhat holding my feelings in check, my heart might have literally started bleeding from the bitterness and unfairness of the world. To think that my accident would create such a cruel state of affairs.

With that in mind, I decided to fix this situation no matter what! I would help those orphans even if it came at the expense of my own life. With this resolution in my heart, I started exploring the city with greater vigour and purpose.

Strangely, on this planet, the sun was very slow to cross the sky. By now I’d spent more than 24 hours in the game, and the sky was still bright and sunny. Based on the position of the sun it was just after midday. In the real world, it should have been getting close to 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

However, even though the real world was moving much slower, I was running on the game world’s clock and was starting to get tired. That being the case, I grit my teeth and firmed my resolve again by thinking about my time back in the orphanage.

For the first time, I tried to use magic. I intuitively knew that I could summon my Spell Tome from my Status Place. Therefore, I found a nice quiet place out of sight and summoned my Spell Tome.

With a little flash that lit up the dark alley for a second, it appeared in my hand. I then opened the book and focused on the only spell I had. After a little while ... I realised I had no idea how the hell to even cast the spell. Most of the stuff I needed to know was intuitively gifted to me when I claimed the Tome and it filled my head with information.

I assumed that the spell needed me to use Mana Manipulation somehow, but I wasn’t sure how. I sat down in the dark alley and tried to remember everything that had been forced into my head at that moment. After contemplating on that information for a while, I found a method.

I closed my book and practised for a moment. I focused my mind and tried to imagine the Mana in my body slowly flowing around like gas in a container. I then tried to imagine it flowing into my finger.

Once I managed that, I opened my eyes to discover my finger dully glowing. I then touched it onto the page with my only spell. A strange pattern lit up on the page of my spell book. It was complex and difficult to make out all the different lines. Along with the strange pattern was some strange words that I couldn’t understand or comprehend.

“Cast!” I quietly commanded the book. With that, the strange pattern briefly lit up, and the colour of my finger changed to a dull red glow. At the same time, I felt the Mana focused in my finger change in a subtle manner, like it wasn’t just some neutral energy but had instead become sinister and evil.

“Gulp.”

Although I am a cowardly person, and really didn’t want to cast some evil curse on myself, the thought of the suffering I unintentionally caused those poor orphans pushed me forward.

I pointed my finger towards myself and willed the spell to fire. I then felt a strange sensation as a gloomy dark red light shot into my body. All the tiredness and sleepiness from a moment ago dispersed like dust being wiped from the cover of a book.

I felt refreshed and not even the slightest bit tired. At the same time, I started to feel calm, relaxed and clear minded. If I had to guess, that feeling was a result of my Hurts So Good automatically reverting the impatience and irrationality of the curse into a positive sensation.

I checked my status and witnessed my Masochism rising at a slow and steady rate. At the same time, my Mental Fortitude in my Endurance Stat was also very slowly rising. Thank you ‘Please Sir’ trait for being so useful.

I calmly considered the potential repercussions of this. For the moment, nothing bad would happen, but eventually my Hurts So Good won’t be able to quell the tide of my rising irritation, and I will start to feel it.

With that in mind, I quickly sent my Spell Tome back to my Status Space and head off into the city to complete the mission I’d set for myself.

After another hour of searching, I finally found what I’d been looking for. Around the city was a few alchemy shops with herbs and ingredients and everything needed for alchemy.

I bought some equipment from these places, but the two things I needed most were a recipe to help heal the orphans and a guide that can teach me how the alchemy system works.

To my dismay, both of these things were very expensive. I could only afford one. Considering that, I felt that the need to know how alchemy worked was more important. That could at least give me a steady source of income, and I could eventually find a way to heal the orphans from that.

I didn’t want to create another accident like the incident in the forest with the bears. If I set off a poison fog in the orphanage, I’m sure not even the Sagely ‘Hurts So Good’ could prevent the regret and heartache from literally killing me on the spot.

As such, I chose the guide. The guide I found was an amiable looking old man with a gentle smile and fluffy white beard. He was a bit rotund and if I were to liken him to anyone he would resemble the image of that ancient Santa Clause fellow from the old era on earth.

He wasn’t wearing a red suit though. Just normal commoner clothes. After paying him an exorbitant fee of 200 silvers, he invited me into a simple alchemy laboratory filled with all sorts of equipment. The centrepiece of the lab was a big black cauldron that looked like it was stolen from a witch’s coven.

I then delved into the glorious laws of alchemy. Which actually turned out to be somewhat complex with all sorts of strange rules. If I had to simplify it, then alchemy in the game was basically using certain ingredients to create a potion that gave the desired result.

In this game system, the probability of successfully ‘refining’ a potion will depend on your Alchemy skill. Later on, once you gain more experience with certain types of potions, you can gain Mastery’s which also add modifiers to your potions. In my case, I’d accidentally managed to get Poison Mastery.

It took me almost 3 hours just to complete the basics. Just completing the basics course raised my Alchemy to level 3. At the same time, I levelled up another skill to level 1 and raised my Identify skill to level 2.

Memorisation: The higher the level of memorisation, the easier it is to memorise and remember things.

I was somewhat surprised that this sort of thing could become a skill, but it was a happy kind of surprise. The reason this skill managed to level up was that one of the most important parts of alchemy is memorising how certain attributes interact and affect each other during potion refinement.

Identify levelled up thanks to the huge number of potion ingredients I had to learn to identify. Thanks to ‘Identify’ I didn’t have to worry about memorising the herbs attributes because once I identified a herb, the system remembered it for me and I could view its attributes and special effects in potions just by looking at it.

Of course, I came to learn that Identify wasn’t omnipotent. If I tried to Identify something with higher levels and stats than my Identify skill, then it either wouldn’t show its attributes or would only show part of the objects information.

That meant that I might still not know all the stats of the equipment I was wearing. Luckily, I found a way to determine if my Identify failed to learn everything the system could show. If an object were fully identified of all its properties, the overlay that appeared on it to show its name and attributes would have a little # symbol in the corner.

I didn’t notice it before, so I suspect it was a result of Identify reaching level 2.

Continuing from my deviation, 3 hours and a few lab accidents I won’t mention later, I waved goodbye to the kind, clean-shaven Santa and left the city.

Don’t ask why he was clean shaven, I refuse to discuss it.

Anyway, I left the city because if you wanted to properly identify the properties of something then you must either buy expensive books filled with boring lines of text describing it, or you would have to investigate the item in question and test its effects yourself.

So, even though my heart bled for the Orphans, I, unfortunately, didn’t have the money to buy the recipe for a rejuvenation potion that could help them. Worse still, after investigating, I found out the potion was nearly level 6.

That meant my failure rate wouldn’t even be 50% unless I had an Alchemy level that was equivalent. Worse still, ingredients for that sort of potion were all expensive.

Luckily, the hills and forests surrounding Gateway City were exploding with alchemy ingredient. Unluckily, they were also filled with endless amounts of danger, as can be attested to by the few incidents I had stumbled into on the way to the City.

As I ambled about in the forests scrutinising everything in sight, my Identify skill was getting a severe workout. It soared by leaps and bounds thanks to the nature of my method to identify something’s properties. Whenever I encountered something I couldn’t get any information on from the system, I would think of those poor orphans, firm my resolve and eat it.

I suspect thanks to my luck stat, almost everything I ate was a deadly poison of some description. By the time it was afternoon on Newb Planet, My Poison Mastery, Endurance and Identify Skill had all gone through substantial growth.

At one point in my collecting, I got an alert from the system.

‘Ping! Masochism has passed level ten and evolved to Pain Mastery!’

When I got this notice, I jumped back to my Status Space and investigated. Sure enough, Masochism had become Pain Mastery. Apart from the name change, the experience and level reset to 0 and 1 respectively.

Interestingly enough, even though the experience counter had dropped to 0, gaining experience in the skill was now a great deal slower. What would have increased my Masochism by 100 points before, now only gave Pain Mastery about 20 points.

The only thing that made me feel good about this development was that it wasn’t named something as perverse as ‘Masochism’. In addition to the change to the masochism skill, the special traits specific to it also seemed to have evolved.

The moment I returned to the city I checked my status.

From what I could see, I had some increases in all my stats ... except for wisdom and charisma, which both still sat in the negative levels. I couldn’t figure out why exactly these stats remained in the negative. From the sub-stats under the average scores, it seemed to indicate that I was just generally a complete idiot when it came to any form of social interaction.

Earlier, when I managed to convince that giant stupid bear, by charisma stat increased, only for it to fall again after the whole thing involving the orphanage. Wisdom was much the same. Although it seemed to indicate that I was wise in matters that I was detached from, in personal matters my wisdom dropped through the floor.

Unfortunately, for a change, I couldn’t argue with the systems evaluation of my social skills. I will readily admit that my ability to socialise properly are all rightfully portrayed by negative figures. Unfortunately, I knew that these stats definitely affected other parts of the games system.

For example, I had a sneaking suspicion that things like Mana Manipulation would require high wisdom and intelligence and if these stats were high, then Mana Manipulation would most likely have a boost in experience gain.

That was just a personal suspicion though. I hadn’t found anything yet to validate that thought.

It would most likely be the same if I wanted to gain a skill like bartering or leadership or something. These things would most likely require a high charisma stat to increase quickly.

I’m not entirely sure which stat affected the speed of growth of my Pain Mastery, but if I had to guess, it would be the Cement Stat. I still couldn’t figure out what this stat was supposed to be.

It seemed to be like luck, and didn’t have sub-stats or anything that needed averaging out. This made it difficult to determine what exactly the hell it was. Just reading the name of it makes me remember an old proverb I heard from Uncle Calligso on regular occasion when he first started training me.

“Eat a tablespoon of cement and harden the fuck up.”

“Sighh...” Just thinking about the potential origin of this strange stat brought back a flood of unpleasant memories.

I also took note of the Introspection Stat. It apparently had levelled up at some point as well, but what I did to accomplish that was beyond me. Once again, after some pondering, I speculated that it was from all the time I spent considering the origin of some of these stats, or possibly from when I did the imagining technique to visualise mana ... or maybe both of these things?

It was too hard to guess exactly what the fuck was going on with these crazy stats.

My Luck had apparently dropped again, but after Santa lost his fluffy white beard, I already expected to see that happen.

After my return to the city, I looked around and found an old run down cottage on the outskirts of the city that was abandoned. It was quiet and out of the way, which suited me perfectly.

By this time, it was about 6 o’clock in the real world. Just as I had settled into my new cottage and was about to, for the very first time of my own accord and without dying, log out, I received a system prompt.

‘Ping! Another player is attempting to log in nearby your log in point and is requesting to create a party. Would you like to accept?’

This was the first time I’d received a system prompt like this, and it left me speechless for a moment. For the sheer novelty of it, I unhesitatingly accepted. It was only after I said ‘yes’ that I considered who it might be.

After remembering that I’d told Juwan how to activate the Key, I realised I’d just agreed to form a party with the person that I hated the most. By that point in time, it was too late to take my words back, and I was forced to watch on with a bitter expression as Juwan materialised out of a flash of light in my rundown little cottage.

“Yo, Little Brother. I was worried about you!”

Ahh shit! Why the hell did I accept the party request? I should have known better. Do I truly lack that much wisdom ... or perhaps, in this case, it should be considered common sense? Damn!

“Err ... hey, Juwan. Fancy meeting you here.”

Ok, let’s just be polite for a few minutes then log out.

“Little Brother. This is some game you’ve discovered. Took me all this time just to finish the Instructor’s tutorial quests. Luckily when I asked about you, the Instructor knew how I could get in touch with you.”

What? Your Instructor actually gave you such useful information? My Instructor was ... hmmm ... well, never mind about what happened to my Instructor. I’ll just learn these things as I go. More importantly, let’s try something.

Identify!

‘Ping! This player’s skills are too high a level to inspect.’

“ARGH!” Fuck my head! It’s killing me! What the hell! Is this some kind of backlash? How the hell can Juwan be so powerful already?!

“Little Brother! What’s wrong?! Oh! You must have tried to identify me, huh? Sorry about that. The Instructor told me that there were some accidents when you first started and you haven’t finished your tutorial yet. If you want, I can help you out. There’s a lot of important things you’ve missed.”

What ‘help me out’? What ‘important things I’ve missed’? Shut up you smart ass! Trying to rub it in! It’s not my fault I was born into this world with negative luck stats! What the hell do you understand about adversity?!

Wait...

“How does the Instructor know who I am?”

“Oh, well, she said that you were spawned into her original village and killed everyone because of a mistake. Because she’s a guide, she was respawned in another village, which was where I first spawned when I logged in. She did ask me to get her hair pin back though.”

What?! That vicious little beast girl was the Instructor? Ahh ... my luck really is no good. No good at all. Hmm ... I’ve spent more than 24 hours in the game now. I wonder if it’s ready again?

Hah! Excellent. Ok, make it look casual. You just need to touch him.