I woke up coughing.
I turned to the side, and my hands rested on a cold, hard surface. As my eyes regained focus, I realized it was a circular stone ledge—the edge of a fountain. And I was inside it, completely drenched.
It took me a while to overcome the confusion.
Where was I? What had happened?
Slowly, the memories came back to me.
I took three long, deep breaths, and then... I started laughing.
The whole situation was unbelievable. After being attacked and poisoned by the spider monsters, I hadn't died. I had survived long enough to reach the right fountain, stumbled, and fallen into it while unconscious.
After putting myself in completely unnecessary danger in an absurd way, I had saved myself.
For over half a minute, I continued laughing, sitting in the fountain, unable to believe the absurdity of the situation. Still unable to accept that any of this was real.
Well, the pain had been realistic enough to convince me once and for all that this wasn't a dream.
Slowly, I got out of the fountain, dripping water. I calmly assessed my condition.
There wasn't a single burn mark or any injury on my body, and I wasn't feeling unwell at all. Quite the opposite—it was the first time in a long time that I felt so good.
If it weren't for the state of my clothes, torn—or rather, corroded in some places—I might well have thought it was all in my head.
To confirm, I checked my status with the system. The response was that the poisoning effect had completely disappeared, and all the damage I had taken had been healed. That water was truly miraculous. But that wasn't all.
[You have once again proven that luck is on your side and received +1 to the Luck attribute.]
[You ingested a large amount of a beneficial substance with possible side effects.
Effects: All poisonings and curses have been nullified. All injuries have been healed.
Rare bonus effect: +5 to the Intelligence attribute.]
It seems that even being brought to the brink of death was part of my luck. Otherwise, I wouldn't have risked discovering which fountain was blessed, much less plunged into it. Now that I knew, a range of possibilities opened up before me.
I stepped out of the fountain and roughly wrung out my clothes without taking them off.
After that, I faced the dragon statue in the fountain. Could it be a statue of Ragnor?
I touched my waist just to make sure. The small bag was still there. I checked the strap, and unlike my clothes, it was intact, in perfect condition.
I was certain, however, that the spider's acid had splashed on it. That only proved the resistance of the material it was made of.
I then remembered that I had gained a lot of experience points for defeating the spider, and apparently, that happened because it was an opponent levels above me.
"System, how are experience points calculated?"
[Activating skill Peer Beyond.
Answering the player's question…
Answer: Experience points are calculated based on the difficulty of the opponent faced or the task performed, and the result achieved. The greater the level difference between the player and the opponent, or the more difficult the task is judged to be, the greater the number of points received.]
I had found two reasons to store my experience points:
Since I could increase my attributes without leveling up, I could keep my level low and then defeat monsters above my level, which would increase the amount of experience points I received.
Considering that every time I leveled up, all my basic attributes would increase by half the value of my Luck attribute, the higher my score in that attribute when I leveled up, the better.
In other words, the ideal for me was to stockpile as many experience points as possible for as long as possible, while increasing my base attributes in other ways. And, of course, finding a way to increase my Luck attribute.
That way, I could level up more easily and quickly later, and with a higher Luck score, my other attributes would increase even more when I used the stored experience points to level up.
'If I don't do anything else stupid, I can become very, very strong.' I thought, my hand on the small bag at my waist.
I left the Temple more than four hours after I had entered and was met with an atmosphere of complete parental despair.
My mother was trembling with red eyes, and my father seemed unable to decide whether to slap me or hug me.
"I'm fine, I'm perfectly fine" I assured them.
"Do you know how much time has passed since you disappeared?! Do you have any idea how worried I was?!" my mother shouted at me. "And what happened to you? Why are you wet? What happened to your clothes? Why are they torn like that?!"
"We'd better go home before we talk about this" I said, glancing at the forest around the temple.
My mother started to object, but my father, always the reasonable one, interrupted her and said it might indeed be better to return home as quickly as possible.
We made our way back almost in silence. I used this time to organize my thoughts and reflect on how I would tell them everything.
When we were all properly seated at the kitchen table, I began to tell them everything relevant they needed to know.
I explained about the fusion of worlds, described the Temple of the Knowledge of Astar and everything inside it (leaving out the part about the giant spiders, the dragon, and the catacombs), and justified the torn and wet clothes with a made-up story about accidentally getting tangled in some thorny branches and falling into a fountain—well, part of the story wasn't a lie.
I don't know if my parents believed it, but with so much information and not knowing what really could have happened inside the Temple, they didn't express any doubts about my fabricated story.
I also explained about the Player System, attributes, and skills. I explained the differences between a player and a common person. I also talked about the possibility of other intelligent species besides humans roaming around.
Unlike my made-up story about how I tore my clothes, they seemed to have more difficulty believing everything else I was saying.
"That's impossible!" my mother exclaimed consternated. "That's completely impossible to be true!"
To try to prove what I was saying, I first made my small bag visible to them, which was enough to surprise them. After that, I took the dragon book from it, which was at least four times the size of the bag. Well, combined with the fact that I had disappeared and reappeared right before their eyes twice, it was enough to make them start believing my words.
All of this without mentioning that our house had been transported to a completely different place.
"This is all too crazy!" my mother exclaimed, rubbing her face with her hands. "What are we going to do?"
"The only thing we can do is stay here. At least for now. We can manage for a while with the food we have, the vegetable garden, and the plants from the Temple. Especially since we can refrigerate." I stopped talking and stared at the lit refrigerator light once again. "By the way, I've been meaning to ask for a while, but how do we have electricity if all the poles and power lines disappeared?"
My parents stared at me and then looked at each other in surprise. They had no idea how that was possible either.
After tempers had calmed and the ideas had been digested a bit, we had a meal and began discussing plans for the near future more practically. We would explore the protected zone carefully and gradually.
My mother and father would take charge of cultivating the plants, while I would try to figure out how to safely pass through the protections, since I was the only one with access to the Temple.
We agreed to train every day as well, to try to increase our attributes, and nothing was more convenient for that than having an optimized training zone in our backyard.
After that, each of us was lost in thought.
I was completely exhausted and lay down to rest for a bit, but I couldn't sleep because my mind was too agitated. It was too much to process: our world had fused with another world, Mundus, and, somehow, our house, with us inside, had been transported to a completely different and unknown place.
The most concerning part was that we were trapped in this area for an indefinite time, with no communication with the outside world. It meant we had no means of knowing what was going on out there, nor could we contact anyone else, including my older sister, Liliana.
We were all worried about her and my nephews, especially my mother who was constantly with her phone in hand, dialing my sister's number and trying to complete the call. It was unecessary to say that her efforts were in vain.
There was no phone signal, internet, or television.
However, for some reason beyond our understanding, although the power had gone out the previous night, the electricity was now working perfectly.
I then began mentally recapping everything that had happened since I entered the Temple earlier today. I had spent just over four hours inside, but between near-death experiences and inexplicable luck, it felt like days had passed.
'Access my profile.' I needed something shorter than that phrase to access my profile or someone else's profile, or something.
I did some tests and realized that just the thought in my mind was enough to open the profile. I tested it with the Peer Beyond skill, and the same was true for activating or deactivating a skill.
Then I began critically analyzing my profile.
I retrieved from the inventory bag, where they had been automatically stored, the attribute points in Luck and Intelligence that I had gained after waking up in the dragon fountain.
However, I didn't touch the experience points. I also configured the item to continue automatically storing experience points but not attribute points, since there was no plausible reason to keep them stored.
[Profile
Name: Lilia Costa
Status: Player
Age: 25 years
Species: Human
Level: 1
Experience: 0/10
Attributes:
Strength: 4
Agility: 5
Defense: 2
Endurance: 2
Intelligence: 18
Luck: 6
Class: (Unavailable)
Skills: Peer Beyond (Open skill description); Stroke of Luck (Open skill description).
Achievements: "Recognized by the Temple of the Knowledge of Astar," "The One Whom Luck Smiles Upon," "Triumphant Underdog."]
Aside from my basic physical attributes, which were a complete embarrassment, and my level, which I was intentionally keeping unchanged, it was a pretty impressive profile.
I had 8,720 experience points stored in my inventory bag. How many levels would those points allow me to reach?
[Activating skill Peer Beyond.
Answering the player's question…
Answer: The player has 0 experience points at level 1. If 8,720 experience points are added, the player would have 1,120/1,150 experience points at level 21.]
It was no surprise to me that the amount of experience points needed to level up increased considerably with each level; that was something I had already considered.
I then began analyzing how much my basic attributes would increase with each level.
My Luck attribute was currently 6. Therefore, my basic attributes would increase by 3 points per level. That meant if I used all my experience points now, I could increase each of my basic attributes by 42 points.
However, if I could increase my Luck attribute a bit more before using the experience points…
The big question was how I could increase my Luck attribute.
If it was defined by how lucky the system considered me, I needed to prove, in some way, that I was even luckier.
Fortunately, after questioning the system, I discovered that points wouldn't be deducted if I were unlucky from now on, which was a possibility when the passive function of Stroke of Luck was deactivated as it was now.
However, I didn't get specific answers about what the system considered lucky enough to increase the attribute.
I sighed. I would just have to trust my luck from then on because, considering it was luck, there was no real strategy I could devise regarding it.
I mentally listed the other things I had obtained in the Temple:
- The skills Peer Beyond and Stroke of Luck;
- The titles "Recognized by the Temple of the Knowledge of Astar," "The One Whom Luck Smiles Upon," and "Triumphant Underdog," each with their own set of effects; and
- The items Global Map, Infinite Inventory Bag, and the dragon book.
Aside from the dragon book, which I didn't really know what it was about, all the other things were too good to be true.
Realizing I wouldn't be able to sleep, I took the book out of the inventory again. The red cover still emitted a faint glow, and the drawing of the eye was so realistic that I felt as if the dragon Ragnor himself was looking back at me.
Of all the things that had happened in the Temple, speaking telepathically with a dragon was the one that seemed farthest from reality.
Maybe because I hadn't seen the creature in front of me, maybe because I always imagined dragons as extremely powerful mythological beings—and, well, mythological—or maybe because the conversation seemed like something straight out of a game, but I was having difficulty believing it had really happened.
If I didn't have the book in my hands, I might think that event was just a dream when my mind was delirious from the Aracna venom.
'I could have made all this up because I passed out looking at the dragon statue in the fountain.' I thought before opening the book on my lap and having absolutely everything I believed since then shattered to pieces.