Mature Content Warning Language and brief mentions of gore.

Author's Note: This is the last part of the second chapter. It's a little shorter than the last few updates, but it foreshadows things to come, and shares a very important aspect of this story.

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Chapter 2.3: I Hate That I Still Care

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Scott decided that he had dealt with the so-called, real world, long enough for one day. It was time to prepare for re-entry into a much more interesting place.

He quickly prepared and then ate a meal then washed it down with water. He had lived on caffeine for a long time, but in the last few days he had banished it from his life. The headaches had been intense at first, but he wanted to be able to sleep for as long as possible in the future.

In truth, the cold medicine was not just to ensure drowsiness. The lack of carbonated beverages in his system had been a tough thing to deal with. The medicine would help with headaches as well as provided a means of staying drowsy.

He had about a half hour before the eight hour mark would pass. That was enough time to study the dream world and the information that other people were providing about it.

Scott checked a few of his favorite online forums. There had been many updates since that morning. Most of them involved complaints about various national governments. It seemed that America was not alone in their efforts to try to control their citizens, even in their dreams.

Those types of threads were ignored in favor of more useful ones. Scott opened up his cold medicine then poured a capful of the stuff, the recommended dosage. He took a big drink of the minty tasting substance then sat it all to the side.

Something interesting had just popped up. “An auction house?”

Scott read through the information then snorted. Corporations were already moving in to exploit the world. Right now it seemed to just be rumors, but there were several game companies that seemed to be in the process of creating a method for people to trade items and Jerin.

Had he missed something? If the first dream was included, then at most people would have had access to the dream for roughly four days. A lot of time and money was being expended toward exploiting the phenomenon. He would have thought that people might wait a few weeks to see if it would fade away, like all good things in life.

“Whatever, I’ll worry about that later.” said Scott. He did not have enough money to even care about that sort of thing at the moment. What he cared about was actual dream related things.

He looked through the various websites and culled what information he could. Each person seemed to level their skills at different rates, even if they had the same skill. There were hidden stats that you could not see, such as stamina.

Before he shut down for the day, he found one more topic thread that had become wildly popular. “Death penalties.... Now we’re talking...”

He had not heard of a single person actually having died in the dream, yet. Scott had been greatly surprised about that to be honest. If an onion was dangerous, there had to be people unfortunate enough to arrive in that world, at a location that was not safe for noobs.

However, there had been no officially reported deaths till now. Scott read through the original post and his left eyebrow rose into the air. That was a pretty severe penalty. He read the information on screen once more to see if he understood it properly.

It’s true, people! I died earlier. It was terrifying at the time. I mean, ya’ll know how real that place feels.

Anyway... I was eaten alive by this big ugly guy. When my vitality hit zero, I collapsed but did not die immediately. I felt this ogre guy tear my arm off and I had to watch him eat it raw while I could do nothing but scream. When I finally died, it was a relief.

I woke up here! It took me a while to calm down, but I told myself that it was only a dream.

I managed to get back to sleep a few hours later, but when I woke up in the dream I was at some weird cemetary. I was naked and the world looked sort of weird, like everything was in black and white with splashes of color.

I wandered around for a few minutes then met a guy in a black robe who carried a scythe. He stretched out a hand and demanded that I pay the fee if I wanted to live again.

After talking to him for a few minutes, a new information screen became available. This dream world... it... If you die, you have to pay the grim reaper a token! If you don’t have one, then he’ll take you to the underworld... The way he spoke of it, it sounded like permanent death.

I don’t know if that just means that we’ll never be able to dream in the dream again, or if we’ll die for real. All I know is that I had three of those token things in my new status window.

The grim reaper took the token and returned me to the other side, but... I was in a completely different place and I was still naked! I looked online later and found out that I had been resurrected in an entirely different region, and without any of my equipment.

If you die in that world, you’ll be randomly transported to a different part of the world without any of your equipment! Worse, without tokens, the grim reaper will take your soul to the underworld.

My stats seemed fine, but I have to start completely over and I have nothing. Even my money was gone.

It was like, I had died but a token gave me one more chance... but all I got was a chance. None of my old stuff came with me.

Scott shuddered after reading that account. It made things far more real to him, however. It was not like some online game where everything was balanced. There seemed to be real consequences to actions made.

He read through the responses. Most of them called the original poster a liar, but none of them had died yet and could not really know for certain. A few of them asked how they could acquire tokens. The original poster did not know the answer to that. He simply counseled people not to take more risks than they wanted. Explorers needed to be careful.

The cold medicine had begun to take effect not long after he finished reading through the responses. It was only a slightly weak sensation in his body, but he knew what it signaled.

Scott closed down his computer then headed toward the bathroom. He would take care of natural business before he went to sleep. He did not want to be disturbed by his real life needs while he adventured in that other land.

Once he was done in the bathroom, he stripped down. Done and ready, he walked into his room then crawled under his quilt. He became even more drowsy as time passed. Soon, he closed his eyes. Not long after that, this world was left behind.