Chapter 6 - Half Human, Half Character

At first, the existence of martial arts and other things had misled him. He had wondered whether a bug was causing strange phenomena in MURIM ONLINE.

But after observing things for several weeks, Dong Bongsu became certain that was not the case.

This place was real. He was certain. There was no longer any room for doubt.

He had no idea how he had come here, or what mechanism had brought him, but the reality of this place was an undeniable fact. He felt pain. He was vividly alive, moving and brimming with savage instinct. So much so that whenever he faced Machil, he could barely suppress the urge to kill him.

Was Machil a player? Or an NPC—a non-player character?

Neither, of course.

He had encountered a number of people here. Machil had been the first, and occasionally Machil brought others along. They would mount horses with lightning-fast movements and disappear from the stable.

Each time, Dong Bongsu examined their eyes to see whether they had emotions. Every one of them moved as a living being, with feelings of their own. People with eyes like those could not possibly be NPCs.

Then what about him? What was he?

A human? A player? Was he even alive?

Dong Bongsu did not really know either. All he knew for certain was that he was different from the other people here. They all moved like human beings, himself included, but there was one decisive difference.

Those holographic letters reading “MURIM ONLINE.”

In other words, he—Dong Bongsu—was half human, half character.

He could open every window available in MURIM ONLINE: the Status window, the Skill window, the Inventory, the Map, and so on. Not every function worked properly, however. Most windows displayed “?” because of errors. The Inventory window alone worked exactly as it should.

He still did not know how to use anything except the Inventory. He intended to figure the rest out little by little. After all, as the “Lv.1” in his Status window indicated, he was still only a level-one novice—a beginner.

Dong Bongsu quietly eased his upper body upright. The wound in his chest throbbed, but not enough to keep him from moving. Slowly, he untied the straw rope constricting his chest, then scraped the gruel off it and back into the bowl. It was still hot enough to hurt his hands and chest, but he paid that no mind. Once most of the gruel was back in the bowl, he lifted it and poured the contents into his mouth in one go.

It was worse than the food fed to dogs on modern Earth, but Dong Bongsu did not particularly care. To him, food had always been something to eat to stay alive, not something to savor.

The best food was a nutritionally balanced diet. By that measure, this thin gruel was the worst possible meal. It contained almost no calories. Recovering his full strength on food like this would take quite a long time. That was why he had prepared something else to speed his recovery.

“Inventory.”

A translucent Inventory hologram appeared before his eyes. In fact, this Inventory differed considerably from the one in the original MURIM ONLINE. The original Inventory window had held one item per slot.

Here, however, it had changed from a slot-based system to a space-based one. Moving his hand now allowed Dong Bongsu to inspect every corner of its interior.

The space inside was enormous. He could not know its exact size until he filled it completely, but he estimated it covered at least a hundred pyeong.

This was the first rule he had discovered about this new “game.”

The Inventory contained hundreds of ants, dozens of fly larvae—maggots, in other words—and hundreds of unidentified bugs.

Yes. The food he had prepared to help restore his strength quickly was insects. Insects took up very little space yet were extremely high in protein. Was that not why even modern Earth hailed them as the food of the future?

With the same amount of feed, one could raise several times as much in insects as in cattle or pigs, and their nutritional content far surpassed that of an equal volume of beef or pork. Naturally, to Dong Bongsu, insects were excellent food. Low volume, high protein. That description said it all.

Without hesitation, he took every insect out of the Inventory. He grabbed a handful without bothering to sort them and tossed them into his mouth.

CRUNCH.

The unpleasant sound echoed through the stable—though it was unpleasant only by ordinary people's standards. To Dong Bongsu, it was nothing at all.

For a while, Dong Bongsu switched off his thoughts and concentrated on eating. All of this, too, was evidence that the world he now inhabited was a game, yet also not a game. In the game, one could neither eat nor relieve oneself, and genitals did not exist.

But in the two weeks since awakening here, he had eaten gruel and insects every single day, and he had pissed and shit. He had woken with an erection every morning, too.

“New Murim Online.”

That was the name Dong Bongsu had given this “game.” As mentioned earlier, he did not know where he was. But he clearly remembered the MURIM ONLINE administrator's final words.

[“Then we hope you enjoy your time in MURIM ONLINE...”]

They wanted him to enjoy himself? Then he would.

Dong Bongsu had no attachment whatsoever to the real world. The comforts of mechanized civilization, the splendor of material civilization, forests of gray buildings, a world of ultrafast fiber-optic internet—all that crap was meaningless to him. As long as he could continue his own particular hobby, it made no difference what world he lived in.

Above all, he liked this world.

Despite its clear air, this seemed to be a heartless place. Machil, the handful of other people, and the movements of the martial artists he occasionally saw—all of them offered glimpses of this world's ruthlessness and its law that only the strong survived.

Here, might he not indulge his hobby to his heart's content? No, he would not even need to conceal his true nature in the first place. Carnivores like him would be roaming freely out there in the jungle called Murim.

And so he had named this place “New Murim Online.”

New Murim Online—a game for true predators.

Dong Bongsu slowly raised himself. He could feel his ribs shifting and clunking, but he got to his feet as carefully as possible.

There would still be plenty of insects hiding in the stable. Every last one would help him recover. Perhaps he would not stop eating them until he had wiped out every insect in the place.

SQUEAK, SQUEAK.

As he caught insects with slow movements, he spotted rats. If he could catch them, he might recover his strength a little faster. But his body still would not move as he wished, and he could not catch the nimble rats as they fled.

If he could catch a rat, he might even discover a new rule of New Murim Online. His experiments had shown that killing insects never increased his experience, no matter how many he killed. A rat-sized rodent, however, might have an effect.

For now, though, that was beyond him.

The moment he recognized that he could not yet catch the rats, he stopped trying. Dong Bongsu was not foolish enough to waste his strength on something impossible.

There was nothing more for him to do in this filthy stable now. Once again, he let go of every thread of thought and fell asleep. With enough food and sleep, he would probably recover his full strength within a few weeks. Then he could begin investigating New Murim Online in earnest.

Before long, only the quiet snorting of horses filled the stable once more.

● ● ●

Several weeks later, Dong Bongsu had nearly recovered his strength. He could now move around without much difficulty. His chest still ached a little whenever he moved, but he was perfectly capable of going about daily life. Even so, whenever it was time for Machil to arrive, he invariably lay down with the straw rope wrapped around his chest. He was not yet ready to venture outside.

There was far too much to learn: the language, everyday customs, geography, culture, and more. The biggest problem was that this body was still weak.

On modern Earth, Dong Bongsu had been one of the strong, armed with all manner of combat skills and knowledge.

But this body?

Sosam, its previous owner, had belonged to the very lowest stratum of Murim's society and possessed nothing. His physique was unimpressive as well. One might expect all his hard labor to have toughened him, but instead, the hardship had left much of his body damaged.

He had no intention of leaving this place—the Danri Family—until he resolved those problems. If he ventured out into Murim in his current state, his survival would be far from guaranteed. Dong Bongsu was not reckless enough to entrust himself to uncertainty.

Even so, he could not simply lie here indefinitely. If he continued to be of no use to the family, they would eventually throw him out. He had to hold on, but only up to that point. He needed to buy time without getting himself expelled.

During that time, he also needed to gradually work out how the New Murim Online system functioned. So far, he had discovered only a few things, all of them related to the Inventory. The other windows still concealed themselves behind armor made of question marks. Perhaps they would shed those coverings one by one as he leveled up.

But he could not guarantee that would happen.

In the worst case, everything except the Inventory might prove useless. If so, he would have to find another way to become stronger.

● ● ●

New Murim Online, Rule 1: The Inventory is space-based, not slot-based. The space is a cube with equal width, length, and height, covering a hundred pyeong.