8. A Curse To Someone (1)

In a world where the Melting had not yet come, there were no proper monsters.

Occasionally I'd cross paths with wild animals, but they were harmless herbivores—deer, rabbits, that sort of thing.

There was one thing worth noting, though.

Despite not having eaten a single meal since transmigrating here, I felt no hunger whatsoever.

I suppose dying so many times had simply erased the concept of appetite from my brain entirely.

So I ran. For days, without stopping, eyes fixed straight ahead.

Part of it was a deranged fixation—some irrational hope that a portal might materialize somewhere and send me back to Earth.

As someone who had watched everything around him reduce to data, I sometimes felt a creeping terror that I myself might be nothing more than a clump of data.

I wished I could show my situation to those ancient philosophers who'd spent their lives trying to prove the self existed.

If they'd seen what I was, they might have gone mad on the spot and killed themselves.

But I was a being to whom even death was not permitted.

So, to keep from going insane inside an infinite loop that was eating my mind alive, I began going insane instead.

Running for three days straight—no sleep, no food, no rest—was the kind of madness that couldn't even be attempted, no matter how far gone a person was.

My throat, which had been desperately gulping air, was parched and cracked, leaking a faint metallic taste of blood.

The soles of my bare feet, which had pounded across dirt riddled with twigs and stones, were scraped down so badly the bone was nearly visible.

Thud—

Then my foot caught on a tree root I hadn't seen, and I pitched forward.

"Gkh—!!"

I'd been on a slope. Once my balance twisted, it didn't come back.

Rolling, rolling.

And rolling again.

I slammed into a tree, got stabbed by branches, and the skin across my back caught on a jutting rock and tore open in a way I'd rather not describe.

My body tumbled down the steep incline in an unintended descent, rolling for nearly four minutes before the slope leveled out enough to finally bring me to a stop.

"…"

The pain of fractures throughout my entire body didn't wring a groan out of me.

My throat was too dry and too agonized to produce one.

Death was clearly approaching, but I wasn't afraid anymore. Not even slightly.

I'd die and come back anyway. Caring about something like fear felt beneath the scale of whatever I'd become.

I envied those five NPCs who'd inherited their memories and stats intact.

Unlike them, I'd plummeted from level 999 to level 10, and I'd transmigrated without a single piece of equipment to my name.

The hierarchy that had made me untouchable in the first playthrough had flipped completely. I was now at the bottom of the food chain. The sheer injustice of it made my teeth grind.

"…"

Equipment.

If I at least had equipment…

Even something that could block a single sword strike—if I'd had that, things would have gone differently.

I wouldn't be a leveling shuttle that got killed every time someone felt like it.

In that state, I quietly ran through the useful gear in my memory.

Having lived as a murderous villain through the entire first playthrough and collected every piece of equipment there was, the right weapons came to mind quickly.

*The Beast's Hammer for crowds of mobs… Rakho's Dagger for fast-moving ones.*

I narrowed the mental list down, filtering for the weapons players had called broken.

But what I needed wasn't something for fighting monsters. I needed a weapon with an overwhelming advantage in combat against people.

*For one-on-one PvP…*

There were too many decent options for monster-fighting—players argued endlessly about which was best. But for PvP, there was no argument. Everyone called the same weapon the strongest.

*Ferd's Fang.*

The dagger you obtained by killing the Giant Serpent Ferd, guardian of the Rift Labyrinth.

Just hearing the name, you might ask how a dagger could possibly dominate PvP.

But Ferd's Fang had one particular mechanic.

Feed the weapon the player's blood, and it would respond to the owner's power—transforming from a fang into a long, slender estoc.

That alone wasn't what made it dominant, of course.