Chapter 6. Half-Human, Half-Character
At first, because things like the existence of martial arts, he even mistook it. He thought maybe, due to a game bug, some strange phenomenon had occurred in murim online.
However.
After observing for several weeks, Dong Bong-su became certain that wasn't the case.
This place was reality. For sure. There was no longer any room for doubt.
He couldn't understand the principle of exactly how he had come here, but the fact that this place was reality was something he absolutely could not deny. He could feel pain, and he was vividly alive—moving, breathing out a rough wildness. To the point that every time he faced Machil, it was hard to suppress the urge to kill.
Is Machil a player? Or an NPC (Non Player Character)?
Of course, he was neither.
There were many people he had met here. The first was Machil, and sometimes Machil brought other people with him. They would mount their horses with lightning-like agility and vanish from the stable.
Each time, Dong Bong-su checked people's eyes. It was work to confirm whether they had emotions or not. Everyone was moving "alive," each with their own emotions. There was no way those with eyes like that could be NPCs.
Then what about himself? What was he?
Was he human? A player? Was he even alive?
Dong Bong-su didn't really know either. Only that he was different from the others here—at least that much was certain. He moved like a human just the same, but there was a decisive difference.
That was the hologram letters, "murim online."
In other words, he—Dong Bong-su—was "half-human, half-character."
He had the ability to open every window that had been possible in murim online: a status window, a skill window, inventory, map, and so on. However, not every function worked normally. Most windows were displayed as "?" due to errors, and the only window that worked 100% properly was the inventory window.
He still didn't know how to use anything except the inventory window. He planned to figure that out little by little from now on. As the status window said "Lv.1," after all, he was still only a level 1 novice.
Swoosh.
Dong Bong-su quietly raised his upper body. The wound on his chest throbbed, but it wasn't so bad he couldn't move. He slowly loosened the rope that was pressing down on his chest. Then he wiped off the thin gruel stuck to the rope and put it back into the bowl. It was still hot, hurting his hand and chest, but he didn't care. Once most of the gruel was back in the bowl, he lifted it and poured it into his mouth in one go.
It was food worse than what dogs ate on modern Earth, but Dong Bong-su didn't mind much. To begin with, for him food was something you ate to live, not something to enjoy for taste.
For him, the best food was a nutritionally balanced diet. From that perspective, this gruel was the absolute worst food. Gruel had almost no calories. To fully recover stamina by eating this would take quite a long time. So, for fast recovery, he had food prepared separately.
"Inventory."
A translucent inventory hologram floated before his eyes. In fact, even this inventory was very different from the original one in murim online. In the original inventory window, it was a format where one item went into one slot.
But.
Here, it had changed from a slot system to a spatial system. The current inventory let him examine every corner inside, following the movement of Dong Bong-su's hand.
The inside of the inventory was extremely wide. He couldn't know exactly how big it was until he tried filling it completely, but he thought it was at least about a hundred square meters.
This was the first rule of this new "game" he had discovered.
Inside the inventory were hundreds of ants and fly larvae—maggots by the dozens—and hundreds of unknown insects.
That's right.
The food he had prepared for quick stamina recovery was insects. Insects take up little volume while being very high in protein. That's why, even on modern Earth, they're in the spotlight as a future food source, aren't they?
Given the same feed, you can raise several times more insects than cows or pigs, and their nutrients are far superior to cows or pigs of the same volume. Naturally, to Dong Bong-su, insects were excellent food. Low volume, high protein. That was enough of an explanation about insects.
Without hesitation, he pulled out all the insects in the inventory. Without caring about the type, he grabbed a handful and dumped them into his mouth.
Crunch.
A disgusting sound echoed through the stable, but that was by ordinary people's standards— to Dong Bong-su, it was nothing.
For a while, Dong Bong-su stopped his brain activity and focused on eating. All of this, too, was proof that this world he was in was a game, but also not a game. In a game, you couldn't eat food, you couldn't defecate, and genitals didn't exist.
But ever since he awoke here, for the past two weeks, not a single day had passed without him eating gruel and insects, and pissing and shitting. In the morning, he also never failed to get an erection.
"New murim online."
That was the name Dong Bong-su had given this "game." As mentioned earlier, he didn't know where this place was. But he clearly remembered the last thing the operator of murim online had said.
– Then, we hope you have a pleasant time with murim online ....
They told him to enjoy it, so he'd enjoy it.
Dong Bong-su had no lingering attachment to the real world at all. Comfortable mechanized civilization, flashy material civilization, forests of gray buildings, an ultra-speed broadband internet world—things like that were all meaningless to him. As long as he could maintain his own unique hobby, he didn't care where in the world he was.
More than anything, he liked this world.
Even though it didn't suit the clear air, this place seemed like it would be a heartless world. The movements of Machil and a few people, and the movements of the murim people he occasionally saw—through all of it, he could glimpse this world's "ruthlessness" and the law of "the survival of the strong."
If it were here, wouldn't he be able to fully pursue his hobby? No—there was no need to hide his nature in the first place. Because carnivores like him would be roaming freely through the jungle outside, called the Martial World.
And so he named this place "new murim online."
A game for true predators—new murim online.
Dong Bong-su slowly raised his body. He felt his ribs clatter, but he stood up from where he was as carefully as possible.
In the stable, there were surely still many insects hiding. Each and every one would be used to help his recovery. Maybe Dong Bong-su's insect-eating wouldn't stop until every last insect in this place had its lineage wiped out.
Squeak, squeak.
As he caught insects with slow movements, rats came into his sight. If he could catch rats, he could recover stamina even faster. But with a body that still wouldn't move the way he wanted, he couldn't catch rats that darted away so quickly.
If he could catch a rat, maybe he could learn a new rule of new murim online. As a result of his experiments, no matter how many insects he killed, his experience didn't go up. But if it were a rodent about the size of a rat, it might affect experience.
But for now, it was too much.
The moment he realized he still couldn't catch rats, he stopped all movement. Dong Bong-su wasn't foolish enough to waste strength on something that wouldn't work.
Now, there was nothing more for him to do in this filthy stable. He let go of every thread of thought again and sank into sleep. If he ate well and slept well, he could probably recover his stamina perfectly within a few weeks. From then on, he could set out in earnest to investigate new murim online.
Before long, the stable once again became quietly filled with only the soft sounds of horses snorting.
***
A few weeks later, Dong Bong-su had almost recovered his stamina. Now it was to the point where there was no major problem in moving around. His chest still throbbed a little whenever he moved, but he could manage daily life well enough. Even so, when it was time for Machil to come, he still, without fail, wrapped the rope around his chest and lay down. That was because he still wasn't ready to go outside.
There was too much to learn: this place's language, living habits, geography, culture, and more. The biggest problem was that "this body" was still weak.
The Dong Bong-su of modern Earth had been a strong man in that world, armed with all kinds of martial arts and all kinds of knowledge.
Then this body?
Sosam—meaning the previous owner of this body—was the lowest of the low in this world called murim, possessing nothing at all, and the body itself was insignificant. It might have been honed through all sorts of hard labor, but due to suffering, the body was instead damaged in many places.
Until he solved these problems, he had no intention of leaving this place, Danri Family. If he went out there now, into the world called the Martial World, it would be hard to guarantee survival. Dong Bong-su wasn't reckless enough to entrust his body to uncertain circumstances.
Even so, he couldn't just lie here endlessly like this. If he continued in this way and didn't help the sega, in the end he would be thrown out. He had to endure only up to the point where that wouldn't happen. Stall for time, but don't get kicked out.
During that time, he also had to gradually grasp the new murim online system. For now, he hadn't found out many things yet. The things he had found out were all related to the inventory. The other windows were still hiding themselves behind armor called "?". Perhaps, as he leveled up, they would take off those clothes one by one.
But he couldn't guarantee that would definitely be the case.
In the worst case, everything except the inventory could be useless. In that case, he would have to find another way to become strong.
***
New murim online Rule #1: The inventory is not a slot system, but a spatial system. The space is a cube of a hundred meters, with equal width, length, and height.