Prologue

The year 2045 saw the release of Second Life, a VRMMORPG that was developed by the same company as the VR headset it was played in.

The vastness of the map and the volume of content in the game were the main reasons why this game gained popularity.

When the VR headset was first made available to the public, everyone went crazy for it because playing that game felt just like real life.

This game attracted hundreds of millions of players and received investments from companies all around the world.

In the year 2050, though, everything changed. People gained abilities from their in-game characters as the real world and the game became connected.

But that was not all. When the world changed, monsters began emerging from dungeons that appeared and began wandering the surface of the Earth.

Cities became overrun with monsters. But monsters weren't the only things that appeared through the portals.

The NPCs that were only in the game became real and started to enter Earth through the portals as well.

Although some were good and wished to help, others were evil and instructed the monsters to slaughter humans.

In order to adapt, humans created a new profession requiring them to enter dungeons and battle monsters. They were the people who had previously played Second Life and thus became "players".

Because it paid so well, players began to appear like mushrooms in the rain. Even though it had a high mortality rate, those that survived would lead opulent lifestyles.

Most players were strong, but there were some weak players that couldn't even defeat a low-ranking monster and thus barely had money for food and rent.

As the world changed, everything started to cost a lot more.

Although some of the buildings that used to be expensive got a lot cheaper, nobody wanted to live there because they had a high risk of being destroyed by a rampaging monster.

This made more secure homes and flats extremely expensive.

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One of those weak players, if not the weakest, was Finn.

Finn entered a PPC (Public Player Center) where unaffiliated players could take missions. He was a player who took on these missions to earn money.

Unaffiliated players were those who weren't part of a guild. This gave them more freedom, but they lacked the protection that the players who were in guilds had.

In order to put food on the table and pay his rent, he came here today to accept a mission.

There were multiple lines of people, so he joined one and waited. Soon his turn came, and he came face to face with the worker tasked with giving out and accepting missions there.

It was a young woman, maybe no older than 25. She wore a white shirt and a pencil skirt. She had hazel-brown eyes and brown hair tied in a ponytail.

Briefly glancing at Finn, she opened her mouth with a bored expression.

"Name, portal, and what mission do you want."

"Finn Graham, F-rank portal Golden Desert, hunting a golden locust, please."

He made an attempt to display what was likely intended to be a smile, but it made him appear sad and pitiful instead.

Finn was a 30-year-old guy with black hair that had a few grey strands, and he had unfocused blue eyes. A big part of his life was filled with misfortune, so he looked a lot older than 30.

He was only surviving every day, and without parents or friends, his life seemed meaningless.

After accepting the mission, Finn headed to a nearby area that used to be a public park.

When he entered, he saw a two-meter-high and one-meter-wide red portal that kept moving as if it was trying to devour the air around it.

The area around it was filled with sand, and there was a soldier guarding it.

The portals leading to dungeons were ranked based on their color: red was F, orange was E, and so on.

As the portal he was entering was red, it meant that it was of the lowest rank and not that dangerous, so only one soldier was more than enough to guard it.

All dungeons had an entirely different world inside of them, filled with dangerous monsters.

If the dungeon didn't get cleared after a certain amount of time, then the boss monster of the dungeon would command all the monsters inside it to march out of the portal, destroying everything around it.

But players discovered that if they imprisoned the boss monster without killing it, the dungeon would remain in the same place without the monsters ever breaking out, so they did just that.

The portal Finn was entering was one of those dungeons.

Finn came up to the soldier and showed him his player pass that he needed in order to enter the dungeon.

The soldier checked its authenticity, and after making sure that it was real, he let him through.

As soon as Finn entered the red portal, he was assaulted by intense heat.

Since the desert sand reflected the sun's rays and took on a golden hue during the day, the area he was in now was known as the "Golden Desert."

There were no other players around him because F-rank dungeons weren't profitable, and usually only weaklings would rely on them to make money.

Finn was wearing a white T-shirt with short sleeves, brown shorts, and black leather shoes. Those clothes made him show a lot of skin, but he was still hot, nonetheless.

He had a backpack with his camping gear to help him survive the night because the monster he chose to hunt was good at concealing itself, so he would spend a few days in this dungeon.

His mission consisted of hunting a golden locust, which was this dungeon's weakest monster.

All he had to do was find this small bug, kill it, and bring its corpse back, something that even a weak person like him could do.

Finn chose a random direction and began walking in the scorching heat.

He clenched his teeth and continued walking despite his shoes sinking into the soft sand and the sweat running down his brow.

He knew that the task would be simple because the dungeon only had a rank of F.

SCREEEEEE!!!

As Finn was walking through the desert, he suddenly heard a loud screech. He looked in the direction he heard it from and saw a large sand mound, the size of a bus, moving quickly towards him.

"A Desert worm!? How unlucky can I get!"

Finn shouted and started to run in the opposite direction of the sand mound. Well, Finn felt like he was running, but with his heavy backpack, it was more like walking a little faster.

As the worm was coming from the direction of the portal, Finn couldn't go back, and he had to hope that the Desert worm would get bored of chasing him. Unfortunately, the worm looked pretty hungry.

Being the dungeon's apex predators, desert worms were F+ rank monsters, and they posed a considerable threat to Finn, who was already thirty years old.

Fortunately, the Desert worms were known to be active at night, so digging through the hot sand slowed down their speed significantly.

Unluckily for Finn, he was still too slow as he kept fast-walking with his heavy backpack. He didn't stop moving, but the further he went, the closer he heard the tunneling sound creep up to him.

Finn could have thrown away his backpack to run faster, but camping equipment cost money, which he didn't have, so he would rather hope for a miracle than throw money away.

Luckily for Finn, this miracle came when he spotted an oasis. He exerted all of his remaining strength to get to it.

Finding an oasis in an F-rank dungeon was very rare, but as the tier of the dungeons went up, more and more monuments like oases or pyramids started to appear all around.

Fortunately for him, it looked like today was Finn's lucky day.

Finn could hear the crawling getting louder as he neared the oasis.

First, he thought it was just the worm almost touching his ass, but when he looked behind him, he saw that the sand mound had tripled, and now there were three Desert worms pursuing him.

"OH, HELL NO! This was supposed to be an easy mission!"

Just when the Desert worms wanted to attack Finn, he unwillingly threw his backpack away, hoping that he would have a chance to retrieve it later, and dove straight into the water of the oasis, which was surprisingly pretty deep.

The worms knew that if they tried to dig into water, they would fail horribly. They were called Desert worms and not Water worms for a reason.

So, once they saw that Finn had no way of escaping anywhere but up, they decided to wait.

Meanwhile, Finn dove deeper into the water and held his breath, knowing that the Desert worms would probably not be that kind to let free food (him) run away.

Suddenly, he saw something shimmer at the bottom of the lake and tried to get a little closer to get a better look at what it was.

As he got closer, the water current started pulling him towards the bottom.

He started to panic, thinking that after miraculously escaping the Desert worms, he would just drown in some random oasis in an F-rank dungeon.

F-rank dungeons were usually taken as a joke since they were the easiest and mostly used for training new players.

Finn didn't finish high school, so he couldn't find an office job in a safe building. Having no other choice, he had to try his luck by treading on the thin line between life and death known as working as a player.

"MMMMMMMMMmmm!!!"

Thinking that he would drown, Finn tried to scream and use all his strength to swim upward. Of course, as the current was too strong, it didn't work, so he just helplessly sank deeper and deeper.

While panicking, he forgot to regulate his oxygen, and he started to black out.

He broke the surface of the water just as he was about to lose consciousness, waking him quickly, and he began to hungrily swallow the air around him.

Finn took big gulps of air to get more oxygen, and after five minutes, he looked around himself.

He was in a crystal-filled grotto, and the crystals shimmered with white light.

'So that's what I saw.'

The color of the sparkling crystals was the same as what he had seen at the bottom of the lake.

It looked like the crystals' light went through the water tunnel that led from the grotto to the oasis lake.

He started walking deeper into the grotto, as that was the only way he could go. Soon he came face to face with a fifteen-meter door made from granite.

When Finn pushed it open, a bright light burst forth.

His eyes weren't meant to take in that much brightness, and as Finn's brain wasn't prepared, he immediately fainted.

Suddenly, an aged voice sounded from deep within the cave.

"A mere mortal dares to stand before me? Name yourself immediately... Oh, he fainted… Well, that's awkward, but it looks like he can still hear me. Hmmm? What's this?"

The voice paused for a few seconds, then continued.

"What an unfortunate life you have been living so far. It's almost as if someone wanted to cut your wings off before you even had a chance to fly. Looks like we have some things in common then. Very well, I have decided. My name is ####, and I will help you by giving you another chance. In return, once you are strong enough, you must help me cut these chains that bind me."

Finn heard a plucking sound and felt something enter his forehead.

"Now I need to send you back, as I don't have much longer. They might have noticed something wrong already and will surely patch that hole you came from. We will meet again, now that you carry my black feather... Even sooner than you might think…"

Finn couldn't hear the last part, and as the voice drifted off, he felt like he was being carried away by flowing water.