Some say life is precious. That's true.
But in another sense, it's cheap.
There are many ways to live. Some stand high above others; some live on their knees. Some drown in luxury, while others drift through life accomplishing nothing. Once the basics of survival are secured, isn't it only natural to want a better life?
Besides, living has never been a one-person affair. Happiness threads people together and binds them tight. In a whole and beautiful world, it can give rise to countless hopes and dreams.
At the very least, when someone cares for you, when someone looks after you, you can relax and watch TV.
You can watch stories about superheroes saving the world, about heroes upholding justice.
And yet, the actor playing that selfless, righteous superhero might care desperately about his pay and his future. Even the writer pouring his whole heart into the story still has to learn to read the producer's expression. After running into wall after wall, all he can do is compromise with a picky market that doesn't want what he wants to write.
Cruel beyond words.
Safety and danger coexisted, hidden all around. There was no fairy-tale sheen to decorate it.
That was reality.
By now, he should have understood it deeply, everything life, or even simple survival, forced a person to accept.
In the end, surviving by nothing more than the instinct to stay alive was its own kind of torture.
It was just that...
He still didn't want to die.
He hated death.
He should have been able to have more happiness.
But that desire, that thought, was deeply selfish.
A level 1 player who had left the absurdly safe starting town alone and fought his way, step by step, all the way to Yerika Village certainly had guts. But after worrying about his own survival, he had no room left for the kind of heroic spirit that dreamed of single-handedly cutting through all the monsters on a hundred floors and liberating everyone.
Now that the game had become reality, then reality was how it had to be fought.
How to do that... anyone being ground down by the struggle to survive already knew.
...
Satoru still had that shoddy curved blade clenched in his hand. He stared fixedly at an empty patch of ground a few meters ahead. The grass around it stood thick and wild, sharp as thorns, every blade like clawing strands of wire. It was a pleasant green, but the quiet only added to the pressure building on him.
He held the stance for activating a Sword Skill, but he deliberately stayed just a hair short of the system's required standard.
Because he was only waiting.
His prey hadn't appeared yet.
A few seconds later, crystalline digital particles suddenly bloomed out of thin air in the empty space he was watching, like special effects from a sci-fi movie. Within that hazy shimmer, the outline of a fat wild boar took shape.
Now!
He sucked in a sharp breath. The movement he had imagined and repeated dozens of times burst out in an instant. The curved blade, already almost in position, snapped upward into a perfect opening stance. The moment the system recognized it, orange-red light flared over the dark blade, and then he shot forward like an arrow off the string. The orange-red trail behind him slashed across the wild boar before it had even fully spawned.
Even with the weak stats of a level 1 player, if Reaver landed cleanly and struck a weak point for bonus damage, it could kill a wild boar outright.
Killing a monster with a single skill might sound unbalanced, but this wasn't the kind of game you could play well with a mouse and keyboard.
When you had to face monsters in person, and death itself was chained to the experience, even drawing your sword and taking a step took real mental resolve.
But a game was still a game. In the end, it was ruled by numbers.
As long as even a sliver of HP remained, you could still move.
So all he needed... was calculation.
That was how he had made his living, rising to the top tier across one game after another.
After grinding here for hours, Satoru knew this would be another clean fight.
He had aimed Reaver at the wild boar's head. Struck by a player who had been lying in wait before it had fully spawned, the boar followed its usual AI routine and let out a single pained squeal. Then its body broke apart and scattered, the fragments fading together with the lingering spawn effects.
Clink.
A purple panel appeared, listing the EXP and materials he had obtained.
Satoru slowly let out the breath he had been holding before the attack. He glanced at the HP bar in the upper left. It was almost full.
"Simple and boring..." he muttered to himself.
There were no other players here. He had the only spawn point under seamless slaughter.
Still, just getting here from the starting town had already cost him blood, sweat, and nerves. This place was at least meant for Level 2 or Level 3 players. If he wanted the profit from it, simply taking the road here was already close to suicide. By the time he arrived, he had sat on the ground for half an hour just recovering his nerves.
After that, it had been nonstop grinding.
If he couldn't adapt to this fighting style, there was nothing to talk about. At first, the boars would knock him around, and it took him over ten minutes to kill a single one. Then, little by little, he discovered how critical hits worked. In the end, he got skilled enough to kill a newly spawned boar before it could resist at all. By now, his curved blade had probably cut down well over a hundred of them.
Information was as valuable as gold.
Even this excellent spawn point was something he had only learned about after asking Kirito one last time. Unless he absolutely had to, Satoru didn't want to rely too much on other people for information. This game... wasn't simple anymore. He stayed wary on instinct.
The sky was already starting to darken. He wasn't sure whether monsters would change once night fell, whether extra nocturnal monsters might appear. His boar grinding had finally become steady and efficient, but he would rather give that up and play it safe.
So he put away his beginner curved blade, now worn down past half durability, turned, and slipped into the forest. Carefully, cautiously, he avoided each monster's aggro range, even taking the trouble to roughly memorize those ranges in his head. It took focus and effort, but before the sun fully set, he managed to return to the village, exhausted.
The village entrance was nothing more than a few wooden fences. Honestly, they wouldn't withstand a wild boar charge at all. But as long as he was inside the village, he was safe in the truest sense.
The moment he stepped in, faint pastoral music drifted through his ears, mixed with the sounds of cows and sheep. Satoru gave the place a quick glance. The village wasn't big. He could take in almost all of it at a glance, and every marker he saw belonged to an NPC. There wasn't a single player.
So compared to Yerika Village, was Horunka Village, the one Kirito had gone to, still the higher-priority choice? For closed beta players, maybe that place was more profitable. As for players who hadn't been in the beta, they probably hadn't even left town yet.
Satoru sighed and walked deeper into the village.
Naturally, his first stop was the blacksmith shop with its blazing furnace, run by a middle-aged man with his chest bare. Satoru sold off all the production-skill materials he had collected, along with the curved blade that was nearly worn out. With the small amount of Col he got back, he bought a new weapon and a new upper garment.
Once he equipped it, white light flashed, and a thick leather coat settled over his body. His forearms were still exposed, with the cuffs of his rough cloth shirt sticking out. It looked mismatched, but what he cared about was the coat's higher defense.
The new curved blade had a cleaner design, and its edge was free of scratches. It looked fresh and reliable.
After that, he went to the potion shop and spent all the money he had left on potions.
He had already completed every quest in the village that didn't involve killing monsters, all the errand-type ones. And the few hours he had spent hunting boars had also finished off several other tasks. Hesitating, Satoru headed toward one particular spot in the village.
It was a humble cottage made of wood and thatch, with a thin ribbon of smoke rising from the chimney. He could hear movement inside. The sound of stir-frying mixed with a vivid smell that made him a little hungry. There was nothing fake about it. It felt exactly like stepping into some real country home.
He had already been here once, so he went in without hesitation.
But the moment he stepped inside, the housewife busy in the kitchen, or rather the NPC, turned and walked toward him. Normally, if a man carrying a blade walked into someone's home, they'd be on guard immediately. But this housewife's reaction was both unnatural and perfectly routine.
"Good evening, traveling adventurer. You must be tired. I'd like to offer you something, but I have nothing to serve right now except a cup of water," she said in a simple, flat tone.
"Okay."
Satoru didn't bother saying more. That was effectively the same as accepting the task through dialogue. There was no point in extra politeness, no point saying a long string of things like sorry to trouble you, thank you for your hard work, I appreciate it. In essence, none of that was any different from this one word. And the moment he reminded himself that this lifelike housewife was nothing more than a binary AI, it became even harder to summon that so-called politeness.
The housewife smiled at him, a little stiffly, poured a cup of water, set it on the table, and returned to the kitchen.
Satoru walked over, drank the entire cup in one gulp, and sat down on the rough chair. A candle on the table in front of him burned slowly, casting only the bare minimum of light. Its warm yellow glow fell across his face. He had already been a little thirsty. Strange... this was obviously just a game, but the clear satisfaction of drinking water still eased his fatigue.
Then a child's coughing came from the closed bedroom.
The housewife's hands paused over the food, and a standard look of sorrow spread across her face.
The atmosphere was great and all, but could this move a little faster?
Satoru complained inwardly.
People who chased efficiency were different from players who cared about scenery or story. If all this drawn-out stuff offered no practical help, then it was just a waste of time.
Finally, a golden marker appeared over the housewife's head.
"What's wrong?" Satoru immediately asked.
"Adventurer, actually, my daughter... has fallen gravely ill. The ovule of a plant in the western part of the forest can help her. But that plant is dangerous, and something is guarding it. If you can help me, I will be sincerely grateful."
Her delivery was emotional.
Her facial expression was right on target.
And especially with the unbearable coughing of her daughter coming from the bedroom, her words were filled with sorrow.
Satoru listened through it with patience. After confirming what he needed to know, and after understanding the housewife's pain as well, he quickly nodded.
"What's the reward?"
That much was an acceptable question.
"It's my late husband's weapon. It's still in very good condition."
"At night, do more wild beasts appear around the village?"
"No... they don't."
Satoru glanced at her instinctively.
That question wasn't part of the quest. She might not have answered it at all, but she had. And she had hesitated. That uncertainty didn't fit an NPC following prewritten lines. If anything... it felt like a plea.
"Really?"
He couldn't help pressing her.
"Yes..."
Was that just the developers trying to make the experience feel more immersive? As a mother, she would naturally sound pleading when asking for help. But if that was the case, then whether monsters appeared at night became a serious consideration. Was she forcing herself to lie because she was playing the role of a mother unwilling to give up on curing her daughter? Or was it something else?
But if the game's detail went that far, it was almost frightening.
Surely not.
Satoru fell silent for a while.
Without any more prompts from him, the NPC could only stand there waiting. The housewife, too, had gone stiff like a statue, probably because there was no longer any trigger for her to react to.
This was the last quest in the village, the final quest in the Yerika Village chain. Completing it would bring greater rewards and more points. Under normal circumstances, he definitely would have accepted it. But this character only had one life.
His plan had always been to grind boars until his level rose a little higher before taking this on.
But after several hours of hunting, even though his level had increased, the EXP bar wasn't filling as quickly anymore.
And that plant... that meant a new kind of monster.
With so little experience fighting it, he found the whole thing troublesome.
Maybe... better to wait.
Satoru still wanted to back out.
"Sorry. I'm not ready," he said.
The housewife moved.
"Adventurer, please help me."
Did he need to refuse one more time to exit the dialogue? Satoru rejected her again.
"Adventurer... please."
Satoru froze, then irritation rose inside him. Being hounded by a program felt awful.
"I'll do what I can too, so please."
Just as he was about to refuse for the third time, the housewife said that, and at once a system prompt appeared in front of him.
'You have gained one skill point.'
Sitting in that battered chair, Satoru went completely still.
A hidden branch?
That was the first thought that jumped into his head.
His next reaction was to wonder whether he could interrupt the quest and accept it again to repeatedly gain skill points, but he immediately rejected the idea himself. A loophole that obvious probably didn't exist.
"I'm really begging you..."
The housewife even lowered her head. Satoru had a feeling that if he refused again this time, the quest would be cut off for good. But it was strange. He had already come here once before to confirm every quest detail, so why hadn't this branch appeared when he refused back then?
And while he had only been thinking about quest details, he hadn't realized that the NPC's once-flat voice had begun to change.
There was a noticeable tremble in the housewife's voice. Behind the bedroom door, the coughing of the sick little girl lying in bed sounded out again. Maybe it wasn't any different from before, but the feeling hanging over his heart had somehow deepened.
He fell silent, tapping his fingers slowly against the polished old wooden table.
After a long while...
"Fine. I accept."
Even his answer no longer sounded formulaic. It carried helpless resignation.
The golden exclamation mark above the housewife's head flashed once, then disappeared. She raised her head, the expression on her face returning to the calm it had at the start, then turned and walked back to the kitchen without another word. The quest had already appeared in his task list. He stood up and walked out of the shabby house.
Even then, what Satoru was still thinking was that he should stay put and wait, at least until tomorrow.
But from behind him came that intermittent coughing again, faint yet unmistakably clear.
His expression changed.
He looked back once at the shabby room, where a single candle burned and pushed back the gloom.
In the end, he touched the curved blade on his back and strode away.