Chapter 391: An Ill-Advised Idea
Once he'd finished all the setup, the virtual panel in front of Ryū vanished, along with a helpful note that summoning it again just required a thought.
Glancing around at his surroundings, Ryū found himself standing in a narrow, out-of-the-way alley.
Dark and dead quiet, thin patches of moss clinging to the exterior walls of the buildings around him.
Judging by the sky overhead, scattered with countless stars, this had to be nighttime.
He reached out and touched the moss on the nearest wall — the faint dampness felt utterly real, indistinguishable from the world constructed inside Solo Mode. Genuinely convincing, no shortcuts taken.
Almost on instinct, Ryū tried activating Observation Haki to scope out his surroundings — only to find, with some alarm, that he couldn't use it at all!
He didn't panic, though. He'd already remembered: Dungeon Mode was essentially a full VR game. Rolling a fresh character inevitably meant starting from Level 0 or 1, so of course his abilities would be locked out under those conditions.
He suspected it wasn't just Observation Haki, either — probably Armament Haki, Life Return, Kamehameha, mirror-space magic, all of it, entirely off the table.
Sure enough, testing each one in turn confirmed it: he'd been reduced to a genuine blank-slate starter character.
With a resigned shake of his head, Ryū made his way to the end of the alley and soon emerged from its dim, cramped confines.
Under the moonlight, he noticed his clothes had changed, though his body and face seemed untouched — makes sense, since he hadn't changed race or customized his appearance.
Scanning the area, he realized he was standing inside some kind of walled city.
The architectural style was nothing he recognized, nothing he'd ever seen before, anywhere.
Barely anyone was out on the nighttime streets — just a scattered handful of people hurrying along, each carrying some strange glowing device.
They moved like people desperate to get home in the next second flat, as though something lethal lurked in the darkness itself.
The streets were unusually wide — wider than Konoha's own — and the surrounding buildings were dense enough to suggest a comparable population.
Ryū saw nothing resembling modern technology anywhere. Not a modern world, then, and not some futuristic sci-fi setting either. But the architecture didn't match Eastern xianxia fantasy or Western high fantasy either. A genuinely strange world — impressive, honestly, that the Dimensional Chat Group had cooked up something this original.
Just as Ryū sank into thought, a hushed, urgent voice suddenly cut in from beside him. "Hey! You're out at night without a saint-stone lantern? You trying to get yourself killed?"
Ryū turned, surprised, to find a middle-aged man in rough linen clothes, clutching one of those glowing devices, his expression a mix of tension and curiosity.
"What's a saint-stone lantern?" Ryū asked, genuinely puzzled — he had no idea what this vaguely dramatic-sounding item actually was.
"...Good grief, ran into a lunatic in the dead of night. Forget it, it's almost dawn, I need to get home. Free advice — don't wander around out here after dark. People die."
"..."
Watching the man hurry off, Ryū rubbed his chin, muttering to himself. "Pretty sophisticated system, actually."
From that brief exchange alone, he'd picked up several useful pieces of information: "saint-stone lantern," "the night hides unknown danger," "danger spikes closer to dawn," and "a saint-stone lantern might ward some of it off."
No tutorial, no lore dump, no background exposition of any kind whatsoever. Everything here would have to be pieced together through his own exploration — gathering intel firsthand.
As the minutes ticked by, Ryū wandered the city aimlessly, unconcerned with whatever "danger" supposedly lurked out there.
Since this was his first run in Dungeon Mode, he'd decided to burn through all five of his available lives just scoping out this world — his own life, functionally, wasn't something he particularly valued in here.
Probably only someone from the Dimensional Chat Group would treat their own lives with this little regard. Anyone else would be clutching theirs like it was the most precious thing they had.
The quiet night seemed to hide something unspoken beneath its surface — not especially dark, and yet it still carried an unmistakable, unnerving weight.
Ryū walked on, expressionless, staring down the long stretch of road ahead of him, that darkness looking almost ready to swallow a person's soul whole.
He didn't hesitate for a second, pressing forward, entirely ignoring whatever hidden threats might be lurking around him.
He'd been exploring the city for nearly half an hour by this point, and had a fairly complete mental map of its layout and roads, all filed away in his memory.
Then, walking through an empty, deserted stretch of street, Ryū suddenly felt something strike at his very soul.
A dizzying, world-spinning sensation followed immediately after, and the next instant, a pop-up appeared before his eyes.
[You have died. Admin "RawrSoFierce," would you like to spend 20 Points to revive? Yes/No]
"Huh? Dead already? I didn't even get a look at whatever hit me. Is this difficulty a bit much? Maybe I should've gone with Easy?"
Ryū blinked at the notification, mildly surprised, and ultimately opted to revive — 20 Points wasn't much of a loss, after all.
Once revived, he was startled to find himself somewhere entirely different from where he'd died — a completely different, unfamiliar alley.
"Some kind of revival safeguard, I'm guessing? Makes sense — reviving on the exact spot I died would just get me killed all over again instantly."
Ryū nodded thoughtfully. Nighttime in Dungeon Mode clearly wasn't safe, though he had no immediate way to find anywhere to actually hide from whatever danger was out there.
That thing that had just killed him — presumably some kind of "wild monster," if this really was structured like a game?
If it counted as a wild monster, then killing it should net him experience, maybe even loot?
A rather ill-advised idea began forming in his head.
And on the heels of that ill-advised idea, an equally ill-advised plan followed close behind.
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