Chương 4: Book 1: Chapter 3 - Yōma [Part 1]

"Life of man, fifty years, under the sky, nothing but a dream and an illusion. Is there anyone who has lived and not died?" - Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582). Shimon Ayanokouji laughed until his throat hurt. It was not a good laugh. It came out thin, broken, and wet at the edges. The dead man at the cave mouth remained dead, and the orange screen remained open.

Quest Complete: Survival Objective Complete: Survive until dawn Optional Objective Complete: Find suitable shelter Optional Objective Complete: Kill more hostiles Rewards Unlocked: Basic Class Selection 45 Experience gained. Congratulations, you have advanced to the next level. You have been assigned advancement points: 3 Attribute Points and 1 Skill Point. Bonus points awarded for completing all quest objectives: 3 Attribute Points and 2 Skill Points.

[All advancement and bonus points must be spent within 20 minutes or they will be randomly assigned.]"No," Shimon uttered weakly.

"No congratulations. This is bad, this is very bad." But a part of him realized that it could be much, much worse. Attribute points? Skill points? He knew they were important. He had played enough games to know that. Had made a life of it, in fact. A quick look at his status showed him that simply leveling up had increased both his Health and Stamina to ten, while his Mana had risen to twelve. He sat up slowly, every part of him objecting to the endeavor. His back felt like a lost cause.

His neck felt stiff, his hands were dirty, and blood lay dark in the cracks around his nails. The spear lay near him, just out of reach. The two stolen swords dug into his hip with a quiet insistence. Outside the cave, morning had arrived in shades of grey, dull in its almost-normalcy. Hesitantly, Shimon assigned one attribute point to Body. The effect was immediate. He felt more solid, as if some invisible weight had settled properly into his bones. He felt more hale, whole, and stronger.

But he could not afford to get lost in the strange sensation. The clock was ticking. Shimon checked his status again. His Health and Stamina had both risen by one point to eleven, but his Dexterity sub-attribute had shot up by six points to forty-nine. Alright, this is information, I guess. Wanting to distract himself, he looked again at the dead man. The man had attacked first, he justified to himself, and Shimon hated how quickly the thought came now.

He hated how well-worn that path of thinking had already become. The man had attacked first. The man had lunged. The man had died. It was not his fault.

"That was not my fault. You attacked me," Shimon told the corpse. The corpse kept its silence. He forced his attention back to the experiment and placed one point into Mind. And, as if summoned, sharp needles filled his skull. Shimon sucked in a breath and grabbed at his head as something scratched behind his eyes, thin and bright and horrible. It was over in a few seconds, leaving only a sharp headache and the unpleasant knowledge that the system could hurt him from the inside.

Shaking his head, he reviewed the changes. Nothing had changed. Absolutely nothing.

"Great," he muttered. And, because he was apparently a masochist, he put another point into Mind, wanting to prove that Mind had to be useful somehow. This time his Mana went up by one point to thirteen, which he had sort of vaguely expected. What he had not expected was his Health also rising by one point to twelve, and that his Charisma going up by one point to ten. Shimon stared at the numbers and shook his head.

"What is up with that?" the lost man said to no one in particular. Perhaps the system doesn't display fractions, he surmised. There was one more attribute to test, Spirit. Girding his loins, he mentally assigned the point. He felt odd. Lighter, almost, as if something inside him had loosened by a fraction. Almost serene and less weighed down, as if the world itself had adjusted its grip on him. But, for all that, the result was rather anticlimactic, with only his Fortune sub-attribute increasing by one.

He now had three attribute points left and three skill points.

"That is mostly not my fault," Shimon amended to the corpse, but the dead man's expression did not change in the slightest. The dull orange light brightened at the edge of his vision, and before he could object, a second panel opened. Basic Class Selection Available. Class Options: Merchant, Onmyoji, Priest, Gambler, Bandit, Ronin, Ninja, and Classless. Shimon stared, and for a while, he simply had nothing as the options hung across his vision, clean and bright and absurdly tidy. Like a game. This was his life now.

"Merchant," he said, and the word felt almost insulting to his situation. Merchant implied accounts. Ledgers. Buying low, selling high. It was not a terrible choice in theory. Money was civilization. Money was shelter, food, bribery, medicine, and the ability to make other people solve problems for you. Unfortunately, Shimon had arrived in a place where people seemed far more interested in stabbing you than making deals.

"Onmyoji," he read next. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. He knew the word. Every Japanese-adjacent fantasy story had an onmyoji somewhere. They usually worked with divination, spirits, barriers, and demons. Very useful, assuming the class came with a manual, which he doubted. Magic was real. He was fairly sure he had come here by magic, unless the universe had discovered some exciting new branch of physics. But again, the problem was training.

He had absolutely no idea where to start, and no formal instruction. Perhaps he could pick it up later, he thought wryly. Priest was worse, because priest implied moral authority, and Shimon was currently sitting beside the body of a man he had killed, wearing clothes taken from other bodies, with money taken from a battlefield. If there were gods here, he had already made a poor first impression. He doubted the myriad gods of this land would be eager to answer his prayers.

Still, gaming logic dictated that priests might have very useful spells at their disposal. Maybe he would try praying at a shrine once he worked this whole thing out. Gambler sounded suicidal, though a tiny, treacherous part of him noted that Fortune was one of his sub-attributes and he did have nineteen points of it. Winning, if he could win, might be easy. Protecting his gains would be the difficult part, and he most certainly did not want to gamble with his life.

Bandit was so offensively true that he almost selected it out of spite against the universe. He had, after all, robbed the dead. He had taken money, weapons, clothing, food, and shelter. It was as if the system, or whatever it was, was making a professional assessment of him. The young man swore at it under his breath. His gaze stopped at Ronin. A masterless warrior. A man with no lord, no protection, and no place.

Also a man with two swords at his hip and a spear in his hand, which might be enough to survive the next adversarial conversation. It appealed to his sense of romance, which was embarrassing, and to his sense of immediate survival, which was harder to mock. Ronin would likely provide skills and abilities useful in his current situation. Then there was Ninja.

Ninja sounded exciting until one remembered that actual infiltration and ninja-ing involved climbing walls, sleeping outdoors, carrying messages, avoiding biting guarddogs, and being executed very creatively if caught. The kanji for it was, in fact,"to endure," and Shimon felt he had endured quite enough. That, and he had never liked annoying stealth games. Classless was last. At best, he predicted that it would make him allow a loser jack-of-all-trades, effectively gimping his character.

At worst, it would give him nothing. Specialization, if you wanted to win, was everything. The lost man, truly lost now, looked at the sky above, then at the trees. And, for one precious minute, he lost himself completely.

"Full diagnostic," Shimon whispered, willing his chip to obey as he put off the inevitable. A cool blue interface unfolded beneath the orange memory of the system. It was not the same. He could tell that immediately. The system notifications had a strange weight to them. The chip overlay was cleaner, thinner, familiar in a way that made his chest hurt.

[DIAGNOSTIC REQUEST RECEIVED] Neural Interface: Stable Cognitive Load: Elevated Sleep Quality: Severe Disruption Hydration: Low Blood Loss: Minor Infection Risk: Minor External VR Feed: None Detected Visual Projector: Disengaged Auditory Overlay: Disengaged Olfactory Overlay: Disengaged Motor Assist: Passive System Error: None Found Shimon stared at the final line.

"No error," he complained. System Error: None Found.

"That is impossible." System Error: None Found.

"Do not repeat yourself at me… you useless…" The chip, being a piece of experimental hardware rather than a supportive human, did not care. Insulting it would do no good"Network access," the young man ordered.

[NETWORK SEARCH INITIATED] Local Device Mesh: No Connection Cellular Network: No Signal Satellite Uplink: No Signal Archive Link: No Connection Emergency Company Channel: No Connection Civilian Internet: No Connection Unknown Carrier Signal: Intermittent Shimon's breath stopped, then he found himself asking, "Unknown carrier?" Unknown Carrier Signal: Intermittent Signal Type: Unclassified Protocol Compatibility: None Connection Status: Low For less than a second, he felt it. Not in his ears, not in his eyes.

It was the ghost of a connection, a brush against the inside of his skull, the faintest pressure of something vast. Not consciousness, but raw energy. Energy.

"Nope," he decided.

"Absolutely not dealing with that until after breakfast, which I do not have. Too many things on my plate." First, he had to choose his class. Shimon chose Ronin because, somehow, it felt right. This was different from assigning attribute points. This felt like the piece of a puzzle slotting into place, heavy with the importance of the moment. Memories filled him. Not his memories, but they felt like his. Putting on armor. Basic drills. Riding a horse. Drawing a bow. Swinging an axe. Lifting a hammer.

The rhythm of footwork, the weight of steel, the discipline of becoming one with his weapons while trying to become a weapon himself. He experienced those moments a hundred times as echoes of his own life. It was all so dizzying in its power and scope. However, they were also quite generic, and when he tried to focus on a detail, he found that he could not.

His base attributes were boosted across the board, and several new skills bloomed inside his status: Swords, Ranged [Bows], Hammers, Axes, Riding, Unarmed, Spirit Boost, Mind Boost, Heavy Armor, Medium Armor, Light Armor, and Body Boost. His other skills, except for Analysis, had also risen by a single point. Three attribute points and three skill points remained to be assigned. The three attribute points he put into Body because it felt like the safest option.

The young professional gamer then placed one skill point into Spears and one again into Swords. Again, safe bets. The spear had already saved his life twice, and the swords at his hip were the lie he would use to survive society. The final skill point, as a test, he placed into his new Body Boost skill. Predictably, it raised his Body attribute by two points. The "Boost" skills he assumed were a way of trading skill points for attribute points. Shimon stared at the results of his choices for a long moment.

His Dexterity now seemed to be his defining attribute, more than double what it had been at level one.

Ayanokouji Shimon [Human] Class: Ronin Level: 2 Health: 16/16 Mana: 15/15 Stamina: 16/16 Exp: 43/120 Main Attributes: Body 15, Mind 14, Spirit 13 Sub Attributes: Dexterity 92 [Enhanced], Fortune 23, Charisma 12 Skills: Lightning Reflexes 15/20, Analysis 11/20, Spears 3/20, Pain Tolerance 2/20, Swords 2/20, Ranged [Bows] 1/20, Hammers 1/20, Axes 1/20, Unarmed 1/20, Spirit Boost 1/20, Mind Boost 1/20, Body Boost 2/20, Heavy Armor 1/20, Medium Armor 1/20, Light Armor 1/20.

Whatever had happened, whatever he had chosen, he was in a much better place than he was before when he came here. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat and gave the next command before uncertainty could talk him out of it.

"Where am I?"