Karen's memories of his past life suddenly flooded back.
At that time, he was about to lay his hands on the CEO chair, but ultimately lost his life at his desk due to crazy overtime shifts! Thinking of the massive fortune he had traded his life to accumulate but hadn't managed to spend a single penny of, his whole body broke out in goosebumps again!
So that tragedy would not repeat itself, right from when he was still in the cradle in this life, he had sworn to the sky.
In this life, he would live a life of leisure! Let that energy-draining work regime from dawn to midnight of his past life go straight to Hell!
...
The next morning, when the sky was only faintly brightening.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Deafening knocks on the door rang out in rapid succession.
Karen frowned, pulling the animal skin blanket all the way over the top of his head, trying to tightly cover his ears. However, this wooden room was inherently too small and shabby; no matter how tightly he covered himself with the blanket, the barbaric sound outside still pounded directly into his eardrums.
The boy snapped his eyes open, glaring up at the straw ceiling, lying motionless in the hope that the disruptor outside would give up.
But he was wrong. Not only did the knocking not stop, but its intensity grew fiercer and fiercer, seeming as though it was about to shatter the hinges entirely.
His limit of endurance snapping, Karen irritably kicked the blanket away, jumped out of bed, and yanked the door open.
Outside, his father was standing there like a bronze statue, his expression extremely stern: "Get out to the yard quickly! Start the physical training with me!"
Karen: "..."
Good heavens, what time was it exactly?! If calculated by the clocks in his old world, it was only about half-past five in the morning right now!
"Father, at least let me wash my face first!"
But Mr. Blackwood was not moved in the slightest. He directly grabbed his son's collar, dragged Karen straight out to the packed dirt yard, and forced him to start performing the basic defensive stance of a warrior in strict accordance with the family's training tradition.
Karen truly could not endure this hellish schedule: being dragged up at half-past five every morning to train. He decided he had to find every possible way to resist.
"Father, I'm dying! I can't hold it anymore, I have to go relieve myself right now!"
"It's almost noon! I have to go to the kitchen to help mom prepare the meal!"
"Father, you don't need to stand guard over me forever like this, I can practice Swordsmanship alone! Do you have nothing else to do? Could it be that a Monster Hunter doesn't need to go into the forest to hunt?"
"Mom, I want to learn Alchemy! Crafting potions and extracting herbs must surely be very interesting!"
"I'm craving meat so badly, can you go into the forest and hunt a wild boar for me? Mom's health is very weak lately, she needs to eat some meat to nourish herself!"
"..."
Karen racked his brains, throwing out every excuse on earth, but Mr. Blackwood and his wife were not swayed in the slightest. He truly suspected that even if the sky were to collapse and a Wyvern flew right over their heads, they would still force him to swing his sword and maintain his defensive stance as usual.
They were exactly like magic Automatons that had command matrices pre-engraved inside their cores, executing the predetermined plan without a single millimeter of error: for example, at what age, at what exact time, what action must be performed.
That evening, feeling overly stifled, Karen sneaked out to breathe the air of freedom.
The Blackwood family's wooden house was located at the very edge of Oakstone village. One side of the house leaned against the treacherous mountain slope of the Black Forest, while the other side bordered their only neighbors - the Miller family.
To take a walk to the village's central square, he definitely had to pass by the Miller house.
During the day, every time Karen passed by here, old Elara and her granddaughter Lily always stood motionless in front of the door. But the bizarre thing was, now that night had fallen and darkness had enveloped everything, they were still standing in the exact same spot!
Old Elara was elderly, while Lily was about his age; the old and the young just stood rooted at the threshold from morning until pitch black. Could it be they didn't know fatigue?
Karen originally intended to head straight towards the center of the village, but his footsteps suddenly halted. He turned around, curiously approaching the door of the Miller house.
"Elara, Lily, have you two had dinner yet?" He flashed a smile, calling out a greeting.
Old Elara gave a kind smile, replying in a flat tone: "The clothes washed yesterday still haven't dried, I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow to bring them in!"
The little girl Lily beside her immediately followed up, her voice clear but hollow: "This game is really fun!"
The corners of Karen's mouth twitched.
Every time he passed by here and struck up a conversation, whether it was early morning or late afternoon, every single time they answered with those exact two lines of dialogue. Regardless of whether he asked about the weather, meals, or the monsters in the forest, they still reacted exactly like string puppets, endlessly repeating those two meaningless sentences.
He had thought that when darkness fell, they would have a different communication script, but who would have expected everything to remain exactly the same!
He suddenly felt depressed, lazily walking a lap around the muddy trails in the village before slowly wandering back home.
However, this short walk also helped him confirm a few strange hypotheses. The villagers' behavior seemed nailed to a fixed mold: the farmers going out to the fields at the exact same hour every day, and old Elara standing at the threshold every day.
But there was a contradiction: the group of farmers knew the way home to eat dinner and sleep when it got dark, whereas the ones assigned to stand at the door did not... Of course, he also did not dare to be completely certain. What if they only went to bed when he was already snoring soundly?!
Even so, Karen became increasingly unable to understand what on earth kind of principle this world was operating on! If he were to say the people in the village were all inanimate machines, he had touched the hands of his parents and the other children. Their body temperature was warm, their flesh and skin soft; no matter how he looked at it, they were humans made of flesh and blood!
...
On the Capital Planet, at the headquarters of the Apex Virtual Reality Entertainment Corporation, inside the lab of the Testing Department.
The door of a Virtual Reality Simulation Pod (VR Pod) slowly opened. The male tester stepped out, his expression still dazed and exhausted.
"How was it? Was the feeling inside that fantasy land okay?" The data analyst standing nearby, gripping an electronic tablet in his hand, asked in a serious tone.
"It was okay, the Mana system operated quite smoothly, but I found the world inside... not very interesting."
He was being very polite by saying that. What did he mean "not very interesting"? It should be said that it was so overwhelmingly boring it made one want to commit suicide!
The analyst immediately pulled out a stylus: "Boring in what aspects? Please list them in detail."
"There are a lot of problems!" The tester scratched his head, trying to rummage through his memories from the entire month in the virtual world: "The NPCs in the game are terrifyingly artificial! Except for a few key NPCs with their own storylines, the other background characters speak exactly the same, as if they were copied and pasted.
There are even people who refuse to go to sleep when it's pitch dark outside, just standing blankly like statues in front of their houses; they almost gave me a heart attack because I thought there were ghosts! Moreover, I stayed there for a full month, and every single day the sky was clear and blue without a single cloud, and even the wind direction was fixed every day, blowing from East to West! Furthermore..."
If forced to recount the weaknesses of this game, it would probably take him all day. As a grinding expert, the number of Open World and Role-playing games he had experienced, if not reaching the thousands, must be at least several hundreds.
To speak truthfully, if this Epic Fantasy title did not take its main selling point as the realistic simulation of the residents' lives on the Magic Continent, it truly wouldn't even have a shred of competitiveness on the market!