I went straight to my computer, logged back into the game, grabbed the quest item and a teleport flower, and made my way back to the Golden Woods to the spot close to the portal.

I looked around to make sure there weren’t any players around and with a nod from Mom, I opened the portal to RLO once more.

I felt a bit uneasy going inside again. Sure, the updates usually happened on Tuesday and it was still Sunday, but the mere possibility of the devs doing something to me while I was in the game made it feel riskier than it probably was.

With that said, my smuggling trip went without a hitch. I ran to my player character – who looked exactly like me now – grabbed the quest item she was holding in her hands – can’t drop quest items – and booked it back into the forest and through the portal to my room.

“Wow… You move like a ninja…” Mom said with a small smile when I returned.

“Huh? Oh, uh. It’s because of this form.”

She chuckled.

“Maybe I should ask Elyssa to teach me this true form too,” she mused as I closed the portal behind me.

I stopped, briefly thinking about how Mom would end up looking if she were to use true form. Would she also look like a foxgirl or would it be something else?

I mentally shook my head and handed over the item I had just fetched.

“This is it.”

She nodded before focusing on the fancy decorated flask with orange shimmering liquid inside. I still remembered that one update where the devs had changed the color of the cure from golden to orange just to make it look less like…

“I wonder what would happen if you were to walk through the portal into the real world with your player character though…” she murmured, looking at my monitor where my character still stood idly.

“Huh? Oh…” I shooed away irrelevant thoughts. “That… I have no idea. The portal is in an inaccessible area so I can’t really try it…”

She hummed and then looked back at the item in her hands.

“So this is the miracle cure…?”

“Yeah,” I replied with a nod. “It should be able to cure anything. That’s what it claims, at least.” I shrugged.

She carefully took it, her eyes fixated on the glowing liquid.

“Anything…? Could you give this to cancer patients to cure them? Or would it make the cancer worse?”

I blinked.

“I… don’t know?” Cancer didn’t exist in the game so I had no clue what it would do to it.

Mom hummed and didn’t ask anything more. She uncorked the fancy lid, took a quick sniff of the cure, and her eyebrows shot up.

“It smells sweet…” She hesitated for a second… and then put the lid back on and screwed it shut again. “Actually, I think I’m going to hold off on this.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Whatever the eczema was, maybe it will just go away. No need to waste something like this.”

I frowned.

“But…”

“Worst case scenario, if it gets worse, I’ll drink it then.”

That was… reasonable, but I still couldn’t shake off the bad feeling. Sure, now that we had it with us, she could drink it at any time but…

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Maybe I was just overreacting. No need to panic.

“... Alright,” I reluctantly agreed.

With that, Mom went back to her room to rest some more and I decided to go back to RLO to actually try out all the water-breathing equipment in the bubble.

Unfortunately, not needing to worry about drowning didn’t completely nullify the effects of the bubble. My character’s movements were sluggish when submerged and there was no way I could fight one of those fish zombies in this state considering they were already higher level than me.

So instead, I opted to explore the ruined city while avoiding any monsters for the time being. I’d read about some kind of multi-step treasure hunt scattered around the ruins, so I tried finding the first step to it.

It was located in the basement of one of the houses. A rusty pauldron with a symbol of the sun – a circle and a bunch of triangles around it – engraved in it. The leftmost triangle had a line running through it. There was also a short message under the symbol.

‘Fight the curse. Don’t let the depths take you.’

Very ominous…

As hinted at by the symbol and the message, I climbed out of the basement and went west until I found a ruined church-like building in a sinkhole.

Searching around led me to the next step in the treasure hunt. A golden chalice with more engraved symbols along its rim and another message under its base.

‘The cure lies in the beast’s stomach.’

The cure, huh?

There were some theories online about the fish zombies in this area being former people who had been infected with something before crossing over to this world somehow. I guess the boss’s lore drop and all the engravings in this treasure hunt were the reason. It still felt incomplete, though.

I continued through the treasure hunt, figuring out where to go, reading more ominous engravings, and eventually having to consult with the wiki for some of the solutions.

Yes, I was cheating.

My excuse was that this was probably important for me personally, considering the dream I’d had. I still didn’t know why we would ever try to fight the octopus boss in our real bodies rather than just in game. Of course, there was that portal I had sensed, but why would it be so important that we would risk ourselves so much? Not to mention, if we were to do something so dangerous, Mom would have gone with us. But only me, Casey, and Frank were there in my dream.

So why?

Maybe I’d already dodged the future that would have made us go fight it?

No… I wasn’t going to tempt fate like that.

As I reached the end of the treasure hunt, I opened the hidden treasure chest and claimed the rewards. A trident called ‘The undead conqueror’s scepter’, a crown called ‘The undead conqueror’s crown’, and an oddly familiar tower shield called ‘The undead conqueror’s aegis’.

I stared at the shield for a few seconds before blinking in realization.

“Oh…”

This was the same shield Frank had used in the dream.

I suddenly felt uneasy. Was this proof that the dream was still going to happen…? Was me doing this whole treasure hunt all part of the inevitable fate? Was I just a lamb walking blindly toward slaughter?

I shook my head.

No, I couldn’t think like that. I had survived the spider dream, I would survive the octopus dream as well if it was going to happen.

I put all the loot into my inventory and climbed out of the ruined mansion where the treasure hunt ended.

The water in the bubble had cleared about halfway into my treasure hunt and I still had plenty of time before the bubble refilled. So without the water impeding my movement, I decided to take on some of the wandering fish monsters. Sure, they were higher level than me, but again, this was just my game character and not my real body, so it didn’t matter if I died here.

I soon found my first target. It wielded a trident and a shield similar to the ones I’d gotten from the treasure hunt, and its body was protected by the roman-esque armor. Sickly dark greenish blue scales covered its zombified skin.

I leapt at it before it could react.

Unfortunately, my surprise attack wasn’t enough to kill it in one go and once it noticed me, it turned into a war of attrition. I only barely managed to defeat it and I ended up losing most of my health in the process.

I really needed to level up more for this…

It dropped some coins and a handful of zombified fish scales. No idea what those were good for but loot was loot, so I took it all.

By the end of the evening, I managed to take down four more of the fish zombies as I slowly learned their patterns. Unfortunately, I had also died once and lost some gold because of it.

All in all, it was still worth it if only because I now knew how to fight them when… or if we ever were to go to this place with our real bodies like the dream had suggested.

As for the boss…?

I tried peeking into the arena to challenge it, already knowing I would die, and it had gone even poorer than I had anticipated.

The thing was fast and with so many appendages, I just couldn’t keep up. I had barely done any damage to it by the time I found myself back at my respawn point, my gold pouch lighter.

This was clearly meant to be a group boss. No way was I going to beat it solo… And I still had no idea how the three of us were supposed to defeat it.

Or why we would ever even try, to be honest. That part still didn’t make sense.

By this point, it had gotten fairly late already, so I opted to log out. I showered, brushed my teeth, and said good night to Mom. As I fell asleep, I briefly thought about Mom’s eczema and hoped that whatever it was, it would go away on its own.