The cheerful green fields of the Whispering Woods felt like a personal insult. Sunlight dappled through the leaves, birds chirped a maddeningly pleasant tune, and in the distance, Kage could hear the happy, percussive chimes of other players leveling up.
He had spent the last of his coppers at the Oakhaven Auction Market, on another flimsy [Novice's Rusted Sword]. It was his fourth. A ridiculous thought struck him: he was probably the only player on the server to have broken, bought, and re-bought the worst weapon in the game this many times. The irony was so thick he could almost taste it.
It felt light and wrong in his hand, a pathetic joke compared to the power of [Founder's Justice] that he didn't even get to use. And yet… it was also familiar. He knew its exact, pitiful damage range. He knew the precise number of parries it could withstand before turning to dust. It was a predictable, reliable piece of trash. In a strange way, the sword was growing on him, like a recurring symptom of his new, infuriating reality.
He needed a baseline. A control group for his experiment in misery. He needed to test if standard grinding was still an option.
His eyes scanned the field, settling on the perfect target. A fat, lumbering insect with a glossy carapace, wandering aimlessly through the grass.
[Stubborn Beetle - Lvl 3]
HP: 165/165
It was a trash mob. Something a skilled Level 3 Warrior would kill in no time. A speedbump on the road to leveling.
Kage moved to engage. His body, tuned to the muscle memory of his real-world Kendo, fell into perfect form. His footwork was flawless, his posture immaculate as he closed the distance.
The beetle registered his approach and charged, a simple, straight-line attack.
Kage's mind calculated the parry window. With his old Agility, it would have been a generous, easy opening. Now, with his Agility at a measly 10, the window was a razor's edge. He timed it perfectly, his blade flashing to intercept.
Clang.
A successful parry. But it wasn't a perfect parry. There was no stagger effect. The beetle was unfazed, merely resetting for its next attack. He countered with a basic swing. His form was a study in efficiency, every muscle contracting in a perfect sequence honed over a decade of training.
The sword hit the beetle's carapace with a pathetic tink.
[-10 HP]
Kage froze.
Ten. Ten damage.
The beetle's health bar had barely budged. His old build would have cleaved off thrice as much.
The beetle attacked again. Kage, still reeling from the shock, dodged. His movement felt sluggish, a half-step behind his intent. The 10 Agility was a lead weight chained to his avatar. He dodged the brunt of the attack, but the beetle's mandibles grazed his leg.
[-12 HP]
The humiliation was a physical blow. He, Kage, the Ghost of the Rankings, had just taken damage from a Level 3 beetle on a starting field.
The fight became a long, tedious, resource-draining slog. He was forced to parry and dodge perfectly out of sheer self-preservation. His strikes were pitiful, chipping away at the beetle's health in single-digit increments. His skill was immense, a ghost of the prodigy flowing through his movements, but his new stats betrayed him at every turn.
In the distance, a group of players laughed, their voices carrying on the breeze. He felt their phantom eyes on him, a Level 1 player struggling life-or-death against an insect. The shame was absolute.
Finally, after an agonizingly long exchange, the beetle collapsed, dissolving into a shower of pixels.
[You have defeated Stubborn Beetle!]
[EXP Gained: 18]
Kage stood there, breathing heavily. He pulled up his log, and the Operator's mind ran the numbers with cold, mounting horror.
EXP-per-hour has plummeted by over 85%. It's fallen below the viable threshold for profitable play.
The problem wasn't that he was too weak to survive. It was worse.
He was too inefficient to succeed. Every second spent in this pathetic state was a second he wasn't earning. And every second he wasn't earning, the real world kept ticking.
The profit margin is negative.
Physical combat was a dead end. A net loss.
Kage retreated to a secluded grove, hidden from the judging eyes of other players. If the class's stats were garbage, then its only hope must lie in its unique skills.
He sat on a mossy rock and pulled up the interface for [Verse-Crafting]. The system presented him with the only option available: [Compose One-Word Poem].
He needed to test its functionality. A methodical analysis required a control group. First, use the skill exactly as the instructions dictated. He targeted a small, harmless rabbit chewing on a patch of clover nearby. His eyes scanned his pitiful Lexicon. The only available damage-oriented keyword was [Strike].
Establish a baseline. Quantify the inefficiency.
He filled the empty spaces in the virtual interface with his will.
Title: Damage Test Alpha
Poem: Strike
[Composition Weak. Awen Cost Increased.]
The skill worked. A faint, wispy shimmer of red energy materialized on the rabbit. The creature barely flinched. A number floated above its head, so small it was almost comical.
[-2 HP]
A notification chimed in his log.
[-70 Awen]
Kage stared. Weak composition. Is the system mocking me?
His mind did the math in an instant. 70 Awen for 2 points of damage. The awen-to-damage ratio was catastrophic. His basic, un-skilled auto-attack with a rusted sword did five times that damage for zero resource cost. The intended function of his class's core skill was, officially, worse than useless.
His initial hypothesis was confirmed. The "intended" path was a dead end. Now, for the real test.
The intended function is a net loss, he concluded with cold certainty. There has to be a back door. An undocumented feature. A hidden syntax that unlocks its real power.
He re-targeted the rabbit.
Title: Skill_Activation
Poem: Power_Strike
[Invalid Composition]
Sandboxed, Kage scowled. Fine. He escalated.
Title: System_Override
Poem: Inflict_Mortal_Wound
[Invalid Composition. Your artistic spirit is lacking.]
Kage stared at the message. It was a profound, digital insult. He had methodically tested the system. He had proven its intended use was a joke. He had proven it was locked down against any clever exploits. And for his efforts, the system had responded with a philosophical error message.
Artistic spirit? His mind recoiled from the concept. It's a line of code. A set of inputs that produces a set of outputs. There is no 'spirit'.
This was the moment of true, bottomless despair. He had analyzed the class and found it wanting. He had tested its physical limits and found them pathetic. He had tried to use its core mechanic and found it to be illogical, non-functional, and, worst of all, it was mocking him.
He felt the cold, familiar grip of the Impostor of the Heart. The fear that he wasn't good enough. Not as a son, not as a brother, and now, not even as a gamer. His one tool for providing for his mother, his singular purpose in this virtual world, was fundamentally broken.
He was trapped.
***
Defeated, Kage was on his way back to Oakhaven. Combat was out. He needed a way to fund the agonizing grind to Level 25. He needed money for repairs, for potions, for the basic cost of existence.
His feet carried him to a stream shimmering in the sun. Beside it grew a patch of common herbs, their yellow flowers nodding gently in the breeze.
[Sunpetal Herb]
Gathering. The most fundamental economic loop in any MMO. Harvest raw materials, sell them. It was tedious, low-yield, but it was a guaranteed income. It was something.
He knelt, his hand hovering over one of the plants. Without the [Harvesting] life skill at even level 1, success was pure RNG. A roll of the dice.
[Gathering Failed]
He tried again.
[Gathering Failed]
Again and again.
Frustration, hot and acidic, began to bubble in his chest. A Level 1 player could do this. A child could do this. But he couldn't. He tried again. And again. And again. Failure after failure.
He wasn't even thinking about the game anymore. His mind was a storm. Anger at the class. Anger at his powerlessness. Anger at the ticking clock in the real world. The smiling face of the Chronographer, the smug laughter of other players, the condescending system messages—it all coalesced into a single, white-hot point of pure rage.
He glared at the stupid, pixelated flower, all his frustration, fear, and desperation focused on it like a laser. He clicked to gather one more time, and a raw, unthinking thought, an unfiltered command from the very core of his being, cut through all the noise.
Just.
WORK.
It wasn't a poetic plea. It wasn't a logical command. It was a guttural, primal scream from the depths of his soul.
Instead of the simple failure notice, the herb node erupted in a soft, golden light. A system chime, deeper and more resonant than any he had ever heard before, echoed in his mind.
Lines of text blazed into existence in his log, searing themselves onto his brain.
[Conceptual Resonance Achieved!]
[Sunpetal Herb x3 (Quality Increased)]
[EXP +6 From Harvesting]
[New Life Skill Gained: Basic Harvesting (Lvl 1/10)]
[New Conceptual Keyword Discovered: [Growth]]
Kage stared.
He stared at the notifications, then down at the three gently glowing herbs in his hand. They seemed… brighter. More real.
His analytical mind, the Operator that had an explanation for everything, was completely, utterly silent.
He had no framework, no data, no theory to explain what had just happened.
Or, more importantly, why it worked.