Edit Changes

Due to needing more consistent chapter word counts for the Audiobook, the following chapters have been merged:

0.1 - 0.4 -> New 0.1

Minor fixes

Added:

“You were chosen randomly from the people involved in the car crash.”

I sighed.

Going back was the sane decision, likely even the smart one. Continue to live life as I always had.

So why don’t I want to do that?

Perhaps it was because of that strange sensation. Yes, it was probably that.

When I first opened that message in that crashed bus, I could hear my own heart beating. I could feel the flow of my blood as adrenaline spread through my veins.

And I felt fear, but also anticipation, an excitement at a situation that broke through my boring, mundane life.

1.1 - 1.2 -> New 1.1

Minor fixes

1.3 - 1.4 -> New 1.2

Minor fixes

Removed him getting the Herbalism Kit since that has never been relevant.

1.5 - 1.6 -> New 1.3

Minor fixes

1.7 - 1.8 -> New 1.4

Minor fixes

Added:

Mentally calculating the mana I had, the cost of Poison Spores and its damaging radius, I found I just came up short. I might be able to take out 50-70% of the goblins if I spent all my mana, but that would leave me with two of my racial debuffs active. Sun Sickness and Mana Dependency, both severe debuffs to my stamina. The damaging radius of Poison Spores was small, while the clumped up status of the goblins was ideal, the sheer number of them made the attack unfeasible.

So it was teaching something else, it was teaching me to expect to die.

1.9 - 2.0 -> New 2.0

Large overhaul, suggest reading it yourself. Added section where Dustin considers his strategy, changed it so that Hendrix told Dustin the encounter was a ‘High Score Endless scenario’, where there were more rewards the better you did, removed his anger at the situation. Hendrix notes that there is an option to not be cloned on logging in.

Added:

I had multiple disadvantages.

The most obvious were numbers, but my build was a largely AOE focused zone controller, I should be able to deal with such a problem easily.

The second disadvantage was my mana.

I simply didn’t have the capacity to quickly create a kill zone filled with Poison Sporages that could tank the entire force of the goblins. If I had time, say an hour, I could achieve this, but until then, I would be in a precarious state where I would have no mana to defend myself and only a half-completed net of Sporages.

Given the nature of Sporages, I would have to set up in a confined space where I could funnel all opponents into my kill zone, however, from my memory of the mall, such a location would also leave me without an escape route.

The third disadvantage was the mage goblin. It completely outranged me and had at least one party buff spell, given the nature of the encounter, it likely had more.

Thus my main win conditions were as followed,

One, successfully set up a large scale kill zone with my sporages, then lure the goblins into it.

Two, keep the goblin horde from massing into the larger force that can take me out. Slowly whittle away their numbers until I can take down the rest.

The former option was… risky. Constant patrols by goblin groups required me to be on the move or be quickly discovered and I would be left in a low mana state trying to set up the kill zone. It was the strategy that played by this build’s strengths.

It was high risk, high reward.

The latter I found to be the safer option, moving into guerilla warfare and silencing each group one by one, but it also required some of my build’s dump stats to work, that being high agility and stealth.

It was safer, but it didn’t play to my strengths.

Both options had their downsides, both options had their strengths.

In the end, I simply took out a gold coin, and flipped it.

“Fifty-eight out of hundred, that’s pretty good.” He said.

I winced as I sat up. “There were a hundred?” I asked incredulously and only slightly pissed.

“How the hell is that balanced? One level one against a hundred goblins and a mage?” I asked.

Hendrix only shrugged, “If it makes you feel better, you weren’t supposed to be able to win that encounter. It was designed to get more difficult as the numbers were whittled down.”

“But not in a way that directly affected their strength,” I noted.

“Indeed,” Hendrix agreed, “their AI got smarter the more you took down, this was supposed to be a high score scenario, where you could earn more the better you did.”

“That’s the two wisps you have, and you’ve levelled up, significantly putting you ahead of the competition. Now you have three stat points to distribute.”

Interlude: Felinology

Minor fixes

Added Zoe realising Peps was a Traveler

But something about him tasted even weirder. He wasn’t a real Elderwood, his sound was too glurdled, and his relation to the Last Scritcher was too distant, but it was familiar…

‘A Traveler,’ she realised, remembering the taste she felt during her fourth life.

2.1 - 2.2 -> New 2.1

Minor fixes

Changed his thoughts on reporting Eve to the coppers into this monologue

I mentally considered it. Sure what Eve was doing was no doubt so illegal a court lawyer would rather have a seizure than try to defend her, but the achievements of she made was well… literally all around him.

Calling the coppers would be the easiest way to antagonise her, and I wasn’t doing that until I explored more of the world first.

2.3 -> New 2.2

Minor fixes

2.4 - 2.5 -> New 2.3

Minor fixes

Old 2.3 and 2.4 I kept separate because I liked their Epigraphs coming in succession

2.6 - 2.7 -> 2.4

Deleted the Debon / Hendrix interaction at the start of 2.6

Minor fixes

2.8 -> 2.5

Minor fixes

Added the last part of the last chapter to here.

Added

Declan didn’t bother hiding his smirk anymore, “Should I find a rose to hold between your mouth? Perhaps you should pose like one of those models?”

“Fuck you,” Matt sighed.

Reworked the mage questioning interaction completely, was too uncomfortable and I don’t know why I wrote it like that.

Added

“What now?” Matt asked.

I thought about it for a moment, then replied, “I have no idea, we have plenty of options ahead of us.”

“The rats are an obvious quest thread,” Matt agreed.

“Do you want to do that?” I asked.

He looked conflicted for a moment, thinking it over, before shaking his head, “Nah, the rat thing- and this whole world is just the side dish to Indiri right?”

I nodded my head.

“Let’s not get too stuck up in sidequests, I want to see how ‘real’ this other world is.”

“So we focus levelling and move in as soon as possible?” I asked, mostly as confirmation.

Matt nodded, “Sounds good.”

“Then first…” I murmured, glancing at my now activated Character Sheet, “I’m level 3 now, I need to get to a Wayshard to spec new class skills.”

“Great, I’ll check out the area, see if there are any good internal grind spots.”

“Before you do that,” I began, “can you find me in the real world…”

3.0 - 3.0.5 -> New 3.0

Minor fixes

Interlude: Eve.Say(“Hello World”);

Minor fixes

Added this passage

Because in the end, what was left for Eve, other than this?

What can she do after all she has done?

3.01

Added:

Note: This will be the only time a quest is directly offered by the system, objectives will occur naturally in the world, it will be your job to find them.

Updated the character sheet to fit current conventions

3.02 - 3.03 -> New 3.02

Added

They’re basically handymen, but for violence.

Added

But just in case, I looked over the normal papers. A few extra clauses regarding death or injury on the job, how you were responsible for injuries but minor compensations would be given for any deaths.

3.04 - 3.05 -> 3.03

Minor fixes, changed a small part of Noam’s conversation with Lung

Added: This section on Dustin learning magic

Thumbing through the book on magic, strangely titled ‘So you want to throw a Fireball? A Comprehensive Guide to Magic for the Intellectually Deficient’, which if you got past the name and the casual insults the text lobbed at the reader, was a rather comprehensive primer on simple magics.

Apparently this system was belief based, where magic is a product of people believing they can do something, which with repetition made them better at doing that through confirmation bias. The book acknowledged that the various schools of magic each represent a different belief of how magic should function, and that most schools were largely incompatible with others, meaning a person would be stuck to a single magic school of thought unless they, say got amnesia and forgot their training.

Magic was apparently getting simpler to use in recent years, a god ascended some centuries ago who named himself Manatheres, giving rise to mana, which is a resource that greatly expedited casting. An anology might be that it acts as the lubricating oil in a large machinery. It is certainly possible to cast without mana, but mana makes it more efficient and useful.

I was honestly engrossed in the book, and would’ve probably read it until the dawn came if not for the fact the menus to the side of me updated again.

Matt just died again.

3.06 - 3.07 -> 3.04

Minor fixes

Adding a line saying he found a receipt at the end

3.08 - 3.09 -> 3.05

Minor fixes and shit

Added

Step one, create a mass demand for healing services. Step two, offering healing services for gold and clout. Step three, get taken over by our first customer?

3.10 - 3.11 -> 3.06

Minor fixes

Altered the Hendrix Bob and Pop encounter a bit.

3.12 - 3.13 -> 3.07

Minor fixes and stuff

Noam and Cindy Fight simplification and removed a lot of the words

3.14 - 3.15 -> 3.08

Fixes and stuff

3.16 - 3.17 -> 3.09

Fixes and stuff

Added

It was kind of petty really.

Added

even if Ethelinda was muscling into his monopoly.

3.18 -> 3.10

Fixes and stuff

Changed phrase to:

That idiotic and childish dream of having something worth doing forever.

3.19 -> 3.11

Fixes and stuff.

Streamlined the Noam Cindy fight again, added a bit where Noam’s horn cracked (it got better)

4.0

Fixes and stuff

Reworked the pork kilograms numbers to be slightly more sane.

4.01

Changed Epigraph to:

“Strength is just misunderstood weakness.” - unknown.

Man, it was so strange to be happy about a mere 2.8k words back in the day

Fixes and stuff, no chapter merge since this is nearing satisfactory average wordcounts.

Lmao, I still laugh at my old jokes

To separate Matt and Max’s parents, I shall now refer to Denise as their mother and Sarah as their mom.

Fixed an old mistake where I wrote Oyster Sauce instead of Fish Sauce for the KBBQ Chilli sauce recipe, also added sugar. Though if you want to make it yourself, using soda to sweeten is also an option.

4.02

Minor Fixes and stuff

Interlude Cook

Moved here to be between 4.02 and 4.03 for a better timeline

Minor fixes

4.03

Fixes and stuff

Added this phrase to give context to Dustin’s mental defense:

In Dustin’s mind, he was constantly imagining the scene of Giles hanging by a rope.

4.04

Fixes

4.05

Fixes

Added

“We are fellow birds trapped in a cage, and though we have grown to become its master, the largest fighting dog in the pit is still trapped.”

Added

Instead, I saw myself lying on a couch, a friend beside me, together we played games as the sun went down, together laughing and complaining till the dawn came. A friend who made a boring life bearable, if only for a fleeting instant.

4.06

Minor fixes,

Removed the first few lines for brevity

4.07

Minor fixes

Added this after Eve dropped Decs again

She’s a child.

A literal fucking child.

Whoever came up with the trope that children were ‘innocent’ and ‘to be protected’ did not consider the fact most children were sociopaths who have yet to internalise empathy.

Even I was a dickhead back when I was a kid, god complex and all, the only difference between a young me and current Eve was that she actually had the shit to back it up.

4.08

Minor fixes

Added when first touched the eye of Analyse

And my mind flashed with information, forged from what I already knew, a way to cheat the system.

4.09

Minor fixes

I’ve removed the part about the Grimm’s nephew monologuing about the 8 heavenly chefs, honestly it was really fun, and I wanted to keep it in, but for a more serious release I had to get rid of it.

Moved the first part of 4.10 to this chapter to fill out word count, the bit when Dustin is examining himself as he respawns.

Added Dustin’s Analyse character sheet to give context to it

4.10

Minor fixes and shit

4.11

Fixes and shit

4.12

Fixes as well

4.13 - 4.15 -> 4.13

Welp, first merge of the 4.0 series, this is all three party introduction chapters rolled into a single one!

Fixes and shit

4.16 -> 4.14

You know the drill, got some fixes

4.17 -> 4.15

Fixes and proof reading shit

4.18 - 4.18.5 -> 4.16

Actually no fixes at all. Lmao.

4.19 -> 4.17

4.20 -> 4.18

Minor fixes

4.21 -> 4.19

Minor fixes

4.22 -> 4.20

Heh.

4.23 -> 4.21

Added:

“I disagreed with her,” I continued, my voice quiet and introspective, “on a fundamental level, I cannot agree with that sort of ideology, so I wish to prove her wrong.”

And added:

We don’t have to be better, we just had to set a trend that others will imitate.

Interlude: Journey

Placed here.

Part 1 - 3

Minor fixes

Part 4

Changed the CEO dude who gave Sarah the offer to be a subsidiary instead of the parent company.

Part 5

Author’s Afterword

Removed the parts regarding patreon and editing, only for other site releases, Royal Road remains the same.

Interlude: Blue -> Sidestory: Blue

Moved here to be epilogue bait