I wake up to find that, unexpectedly, all the pain in my body has disappeared and I didn’t get any of the muscle pains normally present after a hard workout, ‘neat’. My body seems to be the same as when I slept and my mind is clear, I am wide awake. I have had the best sleep of my life, in the middle of a prairie, on grass covered dirt ground.

I immediately try to sit on a meditative position to study the purple particle in the air as I’d decided previously, but I can’t because of my body, so I just sit up and leave my legs where they are. I check my inventory just in case to see if I got anything while I was sleeping, you never know if you’ll get an arbitrary reward in your sleep ‘yeah, totally’.

I really don’t know why I opened my inventory, maybe I wanted to rejoice in the infinite slots, but I am delighted when I see a new button on the bottom right of the inventory screen, the good old iron gear symbol of settings greets me. I open it immediately with a thought.

{

·       Pain yes/no

o  Pain while exercising yes/no

}

That’s all there is for the moment, I guess feeling so much pain while exercising caused such a setting to appear. ‘Still no log-out option, huh?’, it’s probably Kat ensuring I don’t leave before I break the first seal, ‘that’s fine I guess, I never meant to leave anyway’. That’s right, after entering this game, unless it proved to be extremely boring or actually worse than real life, I never meant to leave the game, I didn’t care what happened to my company as long as I had the [Black Box] device, and the company had reached the point of being able to run itself a long time ago anyway.

I had already left control of the company to my most trusted confidants and [Archibald] would make sure they didn’t misuse their power, and if [Archibald] misused his power, which I believed would never happen, I didn’t really care, the company’s creation was mostly his work anyway, I never understood why he let me be in charge and decided to stay as my butler instead of taking control of the company.

My new life in the game had just begun, and I couldn’t care less about what happened in the ‘real’ world. I was in a virtually indestructible box that could keep me alive indefinitely for f*ks sake.

In a world that magic was real, a world where stat upgrades were permanent and training paid off without needing to maintain it, why would I ever want to return to the ‘real’ world where I could only dream and read about all these things.

With these thoughts in mind, I immediately turn off the pain while exercising setting and start trying to focus on the purple particles in front of my eyes. Trying to see if I can affect them in any way whatsoever.

After hours upon hours of restless meditation and many notifications of:

{Mind▲, Spirit▲, Intelligence▲, Wisdom▲}

I somehow gain the skill [Mana Manipulation (Lesser)] and can finally slightly move the particles around, though I still cannot absorb them or control them to a greater degree probably due to my low level 2 stats.

Thinking about how I got the settings button after suffering from muscle pains for a whole day, I check my inventory screen to see if I got a new icon for abilities, and voila, there actually is an icon with the symbol of a book representing abilities, entering the page there are unexpectedly two abilities:

{[Running (Lesser)], [Mana Manipulation (Lesser)]}, ‘hurrah for abilities’, maybe they will help my training speed, but regardless, I’m sure they’ll be useful in the future.

After trying to manipulate the [Chaos Particles] for a while longer and gaining a few more stats a much appreciated notification comes once again:

{Level▲1, All Stats▲}

‘Hurrah for free stats!’

‘Today I’ll allot all my time into studying the chaos attribute particles and my mana control’, I make up my mind on my choice of action for the upcoming days, a day of physical and a day of mental exercise, if I do this continuously I’ll surely get stronger in a much more balanced and overall better manner. Although I have no desire to become a physical fighter class, I’ll work hard on my physical abilities too, at least until my body shape changes to an acceptable degree.

Thinking this way, I wholeheartedly continue training for a few days. And before I know it, I reach level 5 and both of my skills rank up to (Medium).  My body changes from severely obese to severely chubby and I can now run even faster than the average human albeit my inconvenient body.

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I am also finally able to absorb the [Chaos Particles] which increases my speed of mental stat gain; it completely eclipses my physical stat gain speed now. I am actually beginning to feel the large amounts of [Chaos Particles] I have absorbed into my body and I’m sure I’ll be able to actually use them to fight after my [Mana Manipulation (Medium)] skill ranks up again.

Since many games bring something new at every 5 level, I thought something special might happen at level 5 like a class choice, but I guess not. I may have gained additional stats since I feel like the stat increase was more obvious this time after I leveled up, but since I cannot see my stats, I can’t tell.

I’m starting to feel like running around and meditating is beginning to become less effective for stat gains but I’ll push on until my body becomes pleasing to the eye and more convenient; I can’t stop until I break the first seal.

I don’t know what to do, and I don’t want to go to the settlement without prior knowledge of the situation, even though the guards have started ignoring me after the first few days, I don’t trust human civilization enough to enter it barehanded in a fantasy world.

It’s been more than a week of my monotonous studying already, but I’m unexpectedly not getting bored at all, I guess the stat-ups are giving me motivation enough to keep me going.

I’ll push on until I break the first seal, which will hopefully happen at level 10, after that, I will go see Kat and ask her what I should do next, I hope  she’ll be more willing to help me after I break the seal.

Secretly, I really want to see her mind-numbingly sexy body and her mesmerizing eyes, even though I know that her body is just something she created to motivate me, I cannot help but be attracted to her. Her cold personality and her straight to the point attitude are unbelievably attractive in my eyes. Even though I don’t really know her yet, I want to learn more about her and get closer to her, and I’m hoping that breaking the seal will give me that opportunity.

I know that Kat is supposed to only be the consciousness of the [Black Box]; I cannot help but think that there is something more to her than that, a race so advanced like the [Lord] race wouldn’t create something as simple as an AI helper for beginners.

Well, hopefully I’ll know more once I break the seal, but for now let’s just focus on the problems at hand, which is reaching level 10 as soon as possible.

Thinking that way I continue on my training with renewed vigor.

***

On another dimension [Kat] is laughing her ass off:

‘Oh god, what is that idiot thinking, falling for me after just seeing my body and hearing me insult him a little, is he such a masochist, or is a beautiful body all he needs to fall in love? Well, he’s not wrong with his guess though, and I like his determination, he may actually become a perfect candidate if cultivated well enough. Let’s see what happens after he reaches Level 10, will he be able to pass the test I wonder.’

***

A whole two months pass before I finally reach Level 10, I have already reached (Higher) level in all my skills including the newly gained [Meditation] and [Perseverance]. From what I understand Mana Manipulation just lets me manipulate mana, [Running] increases my running speed and decreases stamina exhaustion during running, [Meditation] increases both mana and stamina recovery during meditation, and [Perseverance] decreases both stamina and mana loss during exercise though I don’t know how effective it’ll be in a real battle and not training.

Also, it seems that the stat gains increase every five levels since the extra stat gain stayed the same till I reached level 10 when it increased once again.

Level 10 also brought a new button to my inventory, it has the icon of ‘a man going super saiyan’ is what I can best describe it as; it’s marked [Attempt Seal Break (1st Seal)]. Although I am tempted to open it immediately, I will rest first as the word ‘attempt’ scares me, breaking the seal may not be as easy as I thought.

I train till night to spend my time effectively instead of sleeping when I’m not completely tired, after which I fall asleep like every day since the day I started training, on the grass. Thankfully, my body cannot be considered fat anymore, and I would even go as far as to say that I’m well fit or even muscled, so doing acts like lying down on the ground, which was a struggle beforehand, are as easy as breathing to the me of today. I fall asleep thinking about Kat like I’ve done for many days now, somehow, thinking of her calms me down.