Jin walked through the forest, his eyes scanning the area for any sign of movement. He was on a hunt for some goblins who were a quick and easy source of decent quality items. His trusty sword was at the ready, and he was ready for any ambush the goblins might try.

He moved quietly, his steps carefully placed as he followed the trail of the goblins. The hunt was slow-going, but he knew that the rewards would be worth it.

As he crept through the trees, he spotted a group of goblins huddled around a small campfire. They were chatting and laughing, completely unaware of his presence. Jin slowly drew his sword and began to move closer, taking care not to make any noise.

He approached the group and struck swiftly, taking them by surprise. They fought back, but Jin was too fast and too skilled for them. He activated his Shadow Force to move quickly and cut the back of their necks increasing the damage dealt by 20% due to the assassin’s backstrike bonus. He looted the items as an arrow fired from a nearby rare goblin archer bounced off of his Shadow Shield that he had preemptively cast. Jin activated Shadow Strike and used its quick movement capabilities with Shadow Force to basically teleport to the goblin archer and quickly decapitated it. He quickly collected their loot while Shadow Force was still buffing his movement speed and moved on to the next group of goblins.

His hunting speed was unparalleled, but why was he hunting these weak mobs? Well that’s a story that starts right after he logged out of the game.

Jin had always been an ambitious person, someone who had been driven by his desire to succeed in life. He had worked hard in college, studying diligently and earning his degree in computer science. After graduation, he had landed a good job at a software company and had been steadily climbing the corporate ladder ever since.

However, life had a way of throwing curveballs at people, and Jin had been hit by a series of them in quick succession. First he lost his god who had been murdered by the unfortunate power struggle that was occurring within the realm of the gods. Then, he lost his job when the company he worked for downsized. If that wasn’t bad enough, his girlfriend of five years, who had been his rock during tough times, had broken up with him, saying she couldn't handle the stress of his unemployment and his gaming addiction.

Jin felt a sense of overwhelming sadness wash over him. He had always been confident in his abilities, but losing his job, his girlfriend and his god had completely shattered his self-esteem. He felt like a failure, a disappointment to himself and everyone around him. He may have received the backing of a new god but he was still just a poor and lonely guy in the real world.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

He spent a couple months moping around his apartment, scrolling through job listings on his laptop, and sending out resumes to various companies. But, to his dismay, he didn't hear back from anyone. He couldn't help but feel like he was being rejected again and again, which only added to his growing sense of worthlessness.

Then, one day, as he was mindlessly scrolling through his phone, he saw a live stream notification appear. One of the games streamers, Nora live-streaming about someone who had sold a unique rated weapon for over a hundred thousand dollars. Jin was amazed. He had been playing Eternal Quest for quite a long time, but he had never considered that he could actually make money from it.

Suddenly, he realised what he had been forgetting for his entire gaming career. He realised that if he could grind for a while and sell some rare items, he could make a decent living for himself. He spent a couple hours each day slowly beginning to make progress, selling small items for a few dollars here and there. He was making quite a bit of progress, and that was something he hadn't experienced in a long time. He had only been reset to level 25 just a few months ago so he hadn’t been able to experience that period of massive growth yet and it had been many years since his first character had reached that point.

After several weeks of selling items, Jin had amassed a considerable amount of gold. He converted it to real-world money and was surprised to find that he had made around $3000. This means that with his 8 hours a day of playtime over three weeks he was making around $18 per hour, now this wasn’t that much compared to his past job as a data scientist who would make around $50 per hour even with just a basic entry level position, however he was pretty satisfied with this.

He had managed to turn something that had initially seemed like a mere distraction from his pathetic life into an actual job that was earning him atleast minimum wage.

Jin continued to grind, gradually building up his reputation among the lower levelled players as either a sucker who had no clue what items were worth or a generous person who was selling materials for far below the average market price. He started to make some connections with a few other players and started to wash away some of his past negative stigma about him being a jerk, bastard, asshole or just a bad person.

Eventually, Jin's hard work paid off. He received an offer for a job selling items directly to one of the game’s big guilds. They would send him a list of items and their prices and he would be able to go out, collect those items and sell them in bulk directly to the guild. He immediately accepted the offer, grateful for the opportunity to make a lot more money.

Now he was making anywhere from $30 to $120 per hour depending on what type of items they were looking for. Sometimes they were after items that drop from super rare mobs that are hard for normal players to find, however Jin had recently learned the Tracking skill and was able to find those monsters with relative ease and quickly make a giant amount of cash. The other type of requests required him to kill a lot of monsters to get some extreme luck based drops or just to collect a large number of lower valued items which didn’t usually make him that much money. Either way he now had connections to one of the game’s largest guilds and had a proper source of money. The only thing he couldn’t easily replace was love…

He didn't have high standards or anything, the issue was that he didn't have a social life. Before he had lost his job he took pretty good care of himself, he had money and was fairly attractive, however in that time when he was moping around the apartment looking for jobs he had neglected his family and friends and was basically a social outcast in his town.

He knew he was gonna be lonely for quite a while and there was simply nothing he could do about it except for log into the game and try to ignore the pain of being alone.