What Lucius felt in that moment was pure desperation. Even death would have been better than becoming the Fool of Death, the worst fucking thing the developers had ever come up with.
It wasn't just a title but it had a passive skill that worked in a way that, when the player killed anything, let it be a boss, another player, or anything else, it absorbed their souls, and those souls surrounded the player, creating a dark aura, which would have been a cool cosmetic, like a dark entity showing off the player killed many beings, but hell nah.
The player who got the title was cursed by the beings he had slain, and from the outside it looked like an overpowered skill, as the aura of the Fool of Death debuffed every skill by 50 percent, not just that, but it could go up to 70 percent if the player slayed powerful bosses, but it needed to be fucked up by the developers and their grand plan with the whole thing, and they went far beyond with it.
There was a so-called Mental System in the game, which meant if the mental points went down to zero then the player couldn't enter PVP or do trades, or anything NPC involved, basically couldn't play the game as it intended to be.
It was originally punishment for players who behaved badly, rage quitted ranked games and so on, but for the Fool of Death the devs reformed the whole thing… for one single player.
As soon as the player became the Fool of Death his mental state went to zero which meant he couldn't level up or do anything in the game at all, literally couldn't progress, until he did one important thing.
Kill.
Yeah, but then came the questions… who did the player kill? How would he kill anything when he can't even play the game the way it was intended to be?
Well, once again it was the developers' grand plan, so what they made was that the Fool of Death could kill NPCs, but not just the hostile ones or ones that are in quests, no, the player could kill every NPC in the game, and the worst part was that the dark, corrupted aura itself told the player how many deaths it needed to get back to a mental state where he could play the game normally.
And if he didn't do that, then his character would have been deleted. Yeah, the whole character. So basically the devs wanted the player to become a serial killer, a mass murderer and they did it for one thing to introduce a big event, the "Murder Mystery: Hunt for the Killer."
They did all of it, to do another big event and it worked.
The murder mystery actually got solved, and the Fool of Death was caught and when he got jumped by four guilds and finally died he became normal once again.
That was the only time immortality is mentioned throughout the whole game as a skill in his character lore, "The Fool of immortality." The murderer, who thought killing innocent lives, who thought listening to monsters and the corrupted darkness would lead to immortality.
"But that wasn't immortality." Lucius whispered as looked at her. "It was just an event that was forced by the developers onto a player. He was untouchable only to the NPCs and nothing more."
"That is immortality." Miu said as she sighed.
"No, it's not." Lucius said again as she didn't get why Miu was saying it is immortality… somehow it all went past his head, yeah the key fact about the whole situation.
"Once again you are forgetting where you are." She said she outstretched her arms."You are in Eldoria, and everything living in Eldoria were NPCs once… do you understand it now?"
Yeah, he finally got it, he finally understood it. "F-Fuck me…"
"The Fool of Death is you, Lucius, and with it your journey waits ahead." Miu said as she still smiled… smiled at the straight desperation that went through Lucius as he realized more and more what it exactly meant. "But it is time now, I send you down to Briminia, and from there it is you who decide what you will do."
"Wait!" He shouted. "You said I am Lucius which means I'm like a new character… I killed nothing, so the mental state is still good until I–"
"The passive skill needs kills nonetheless." Miu interrupted him as she said the worst thing about the Fool of Death.
When they made the leaderboard to choose a player to be the Fool of Death the developers knew that a low-ranked player wouldn't be good as they might not know about the game lore much, so they made a change to it to a minimum rank, which was level 100, but there was a problem with that too.
Players could level up to 100 without killing anything, there was even a guild that worked that way, didn't kill anything in the game, only traded, did quests that didn't involve killings, so the developers made another change.
If the player who would have died the most during the April Fools event didn't have high-rank boss kills that would become the dark aura requiring souls to be calmed, then the player would have been pushed to kill the NPCs nonetheless, and those NPCs he killed would have become the dark aura requiring to kill more.
In this way the developers made sure that the upcoming Murder Mystery event could work.
"I need to kill to not die…?
"Kill to stay immortal." She smiled. "If we think about it, it is an endless circle of bloodshed… that is the Fool of Death."