Chapter 4 - Finally, a decent person
“Cheat console - on !”
As I shouted that, a window popped up in front of me.
“Cheat console activated. What would you like to do ?”
Below the question, there was a list with the multiple things I could do. Change my stats or my appearance, or enter a cheat code. Well, I did not have anything like a cheat code but changing my stats looked like it could be useful. If I was able to change them whenever I wanted, then it would allow me to adapt to a lot of different situations.
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CHOOSEYOURNAME, Hero class.
Reincarnated buff - active.
Human
Level 1
HP: 10/10
MANA: 12/12
INTELLIGENCE : 29
STRENGTH : 25
CHARM : 11
LUCK : 2
LIVES REMAINING : 1
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A different number of points was allocated next to each statistics. Thanks to my experience, I could guess that by removing or adding extra points, I could alter my stats. While I did not have any free points to allocate, I was able to remove them in a certain area to put them back elsewhere.
I decided I would not need so many points in strength since I did not have a weapon to fight with. I did not have a staff or know any magic either so intelligence was pretty useless too. Same went for mana. And with my current reputation, charm was kind of useless already.
Thus I decided to lower all my stats to the minimum and increase my luck to the max.
After doing so, the new stats page was displayed.
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CHOOSEYOURNAME, Hero class.
Reincarnated buff - active.
Human
Level 1
HP: 10/10
MANA: 1/1
INTELLIGENCE : 1
STRENGTH : 1
CHARM : 1
LUCK : 65
LIVES REMAINING : 1
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After confirming the change, I felt immediately physically weaker. After a few seconds, it felt like my body adjusted to the change by itself though. Now all I hoped was that my luck was high enough to allow me to travel all the way to the cavern without meeting any monster.
I was about to leave the house but as I was reaching out for the door, something caught my attention. There was a set of clothes lying on the bed inside the old man’s house. Could it be he had prepared them for me ? Maybe my luck was already acting ?
“Yeah right, as if.”
Well, the fact was that the grandpa was much smaller than me. As mentioned before, I am a tall guy with a mean look on his face. Even now, I still have the same physical features as before: scary face, height of 1m87, medium-length laid back brown hair and brown eyes.
Despite this, the clothes were a good fit. That must have meant that he had specially prepared them for me… seriously, how much into the future could this guy see ?
I was now heading towards the town’s gates. At the same time, I was wondering about a certain thing that had caught my attention while I was messing with my stats. The window showed that my Unspecified class had been changed to Hero class after I selected my class at the Adventurers’ Guild. In fact, I did not bother checking at the time but it was possible my class was changed the moment I was summoner as the “hero”.
But this basically made me learn a certain thing. My reincarnation and my summoning as the hero were two different things. After all, I was first reborn with an Unspecified class and only then summoned. Besides, the fact that my race could be chosen contradicted with the fact that I was to be summoned from the start.
So basically… I could safely deduce that I was summoned as the hero because I had decided to be reborn as a human. So what if I had been born as a demon ? Would have been born in the Demon Lord’s army or maybe even summoned by him ?
This was still confusing but I thought the old man would be able to tell me more, seeing as how it looked like he knew a lot about my circumstances.
As I was on my way towards the gates, I passed the Adventurers’ Guild. And suddenly I remembered what Cyath had said before killing me. She did that so that she could keep her cover as a senior guildmate and keep doing the same thing to other beginner Adventurers.
Now that I knew that she did not even have a guild card, I was free to expose her to the authorities !
But wait a second… I currently had put all my stat points in luck. That meant if she managed to try to kill me out of spite before getting arrested, I would barely stand any chance to survive. I decided that it would be a wiser decision to first meet up with the old mage and then come back to bring her business to light.
Alright now that my path was clear, I went outside of the town and headed straight for the cavern.
***
Perhaps my plan to redistribute my stats into luck was a good idea because I managed to safely reach the cavern without meeting any goblin or stray wolf. I did see some of them on the way here but it looked like they did not notice me.
So I was indeed correct about my gamer’s intuition. The luck stat was most likely something that influenced my random encounter chances (or rather here, my chances of attracting attention) as well as looting chances. In other words, increasing it improved my chances at being stealthy. Well, that’s good to know.
I saw the old man as soon as I entered the cavern. Its entrance lead to a single circular room in which he was waiting in the middle.
“I was waiting for you, young hero.”
“Well yeah, here I am.”
“I will now teach you what you need to know about this world. Listen well.”
“Ok.”
His face became serious and after clearing his throat, he started speaking with a grave voice.
“As mentioned previously, I am indeed linked with your summoning. My am the great mage Elzebor and I have lived over 600 years. During the first century of my life, I have accumulated great magical knowledge. But as I was getting old, I started to fear death and be scared of losing all of it. As I started to research how to extend my own life I began to experiment on myself until one day, I managed to unbound my soul from my body. As my first body died from old age, this soul of mine was sent into the body of a newborn. But as my body would recognise that my soul had already passed puberty, reincarnation would allow me to not waste any time and thus it would adapt and grow in the matter of a few days. Every time I would reincarnate, my body would become about twenty years old again…”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“That’s all good but can you please skip to my own reincarnation ?”
“Yes, yes. As I was saying, I am over 600 years old, and I reincarnated myself 5 times so far. And for that long, I have researched and tried to perfect this process of reincarnation. Unbinding the soul from the body is something I tried to replicate on other people but I had a hard time doing it. The biggest issue was the physical body of the person. For unbinding to be successful, the soul needed to be still alive while the body needed to be dead, or very close to death. You see, a soul cannot reside more than a few hours in a dead body.”
“I see… So basically, that means that if you were to unbind someone, they would have to die within the next few hours to be reincarnated or else it would fail, right ?”
“Yes, you catch on quick. Obviously, that meant that my research was very close to necromancy itself and I when the king at the time learnt about my activities, he banned me from the kingdom.”
“But… you met me in the human capital didn’t you ?”
“Yes, but the time I was banned was centuries ago, hahaha. When I reincarnated afterwards, my body wasn’t the same anymore. Even my personality changes to adapt to my new body. Only my knowledge and memories remain. So it was easy for me to be accepted into the kingdom again, although I could no longer conduct my research in the open.”
“And how does that lead to me ?”
“Since my research on reincarnation was limited and considered taboo, I decided to try something else. The research parallel worlds. After a very long time trying to find out if such a thing existed, I was surprised when I finally managed to create an interdimensional mirror that allowed me to witness events that happened in your world.”
“...”
“And thus, as I discovered about your world, I started interesting myself to its culture, languages, technology, and many other things. Watching your world had become my greatest excitement and my favourite hobby. And then, 2 years ago, the Demon Lord appeared. It was a being extremely similar to the ones that appeared in your so-called “RPGs”. The Demon Lord started defeating the king’s armies and taking over several towns, crushing any resistance. Seeing as how the humans were about to be defeated, the king decided to call upon a secret kept in the royal family: hero summoning magic.”
“Is that when I got summoned ?”
“... Not exactly.”
“What do you mean ?”
“Something that no one seems to have bothered telling you is that you are not the first hero to be summoned here. You are, if my memory is correct, the 18th one.”
“What the hell !? How come 17 heroes have been summoned before me ? Wasn’t a single meant to be enough to turn the tide of the war ?”
Elzebor’s face seemed to get darker as he answered my question.
“You see, I just told you there is only one parallel world to ours. So where do you think the summoned heroes came from ?”
“Could it be… my original world ?”
“Bingo. However, summoning is akin to merely teleporting a person through time and space. Nothing more, nothing less. So it is only natural not to expect any military prowesses from a random person from your world, who has no fighting experience at all.”
“So… what happened to them ?”
“As you could predict, the king had no knowledge of this. He thought the heroes were Godsent humans so he invested a lot, and by that I mean A LOT of money into their equipment, training and the preparations to send them to war.”
“So that’s why he lacked the money to provide me with anything, huh…”
“Yes, that’s right. After providing so much to the first 10 heroes who failed miserably and got crushed before being able to even reach the Demon Lord’s castle, the amount of goods and money the king was able to spend on the next 7 became extremely limited. In your case it was barely inexistent.”
“So what’s the difference between me and the other 17 heroes ?”
“In case you haven’t noticed yourself, you weren’t directly summoned from your world. The king became desperate after seeing how every single hero he had summoned had failed spectacularly in their quest. I used this opportunity to present myself to him, revealing who I was and offering him a solution in exchange for a certain favour.”
“Your solution was… let me guess, using reincarnation and summoning together ?”
“Once again, spot on ! My theory was that a soul in the middle of reincarnation was not bound by the same rules as someone already born. The proof of this lies in your “Reincarnated buff”. So to continue my little story, what happened was that I handled the process of your reincarnation and when it was done, the king summoned you. I took a look at what souls were available and yours had an especially good compatibility. I guess it was because your soul was already used to the idea of parallel worlds, Demon Lords and RPG settings to it made things much easier. Then as you finished your reincarnation, you got summoned. The rest of the story, you know it well.”
“So that’s how it is… that’s a lot to take in at once…”
The serious face on the pervy old mage disappeared and let place to a huge grin.
“Now that you know that, it’s time for you to REALLY start your quest ! I’m expecting a lot from you, you know ?”
“You know that me levelling up by killing smiles will take ages…”
“No ! That’s another benefit from your Reincarnated buff, you level up much, much faster than normal people.”
“I see… but I don’t even have a weapon… and I’m broke.”
“No worries ! Unfortunately, I cannot accompany you in your battles since I am too old now but it’s dangerous to go alone so take this !”
… A Legend of Hylda reference, really ?
“Hey, did you get the reference ? You did, didn’t you ? At least say something… do you know how long I tried to set up the conversation in way that would allow me to say that !?”
While harassing me, Elzebor took out a beautiful longsword from behind him.
“Could it be… Exca-”
“Yes, that’s right ! This sword is called Excavator ! Because with it, you’ll bury your enemies ! Smart, heh ?”
“Sigh… very smart.”
“Now go, young hero ! And don’t be sad when I die from old age, you’ll just have to find my reincarnated self for more guidance and help !”
“You’re going to die soon !? Heh ? Heh ?”
The cavern suddenly started to disappear along with the old man, as if it was an illusion. A mere moments after, there was no trace left of the perverted mage.
Oh well, at least I had an objective now. First things first, I had to try out this sword and see how fast I could level up. I headed towards the plains where I could find some low level monsters, preparing myself for my first battle since I arrived in this crazy RPG-like world.