Possessing genius-level talent but unable to even run without medicine.
A game character created as my third alternate persona.
And now, I've ended up inside that world.
---
"Well then, what kind of character should I make this time…?"
Ruffling my messy hair, I sat down in front of the computer.
After tapping the keyboard a few times, a familiar interface popped up, reflecting my face on the screen.
Entering my ID and password to log in, the text "WORLD ver.3.0" flashed briefly before disappearing, revealing two figures on the screen.
A young man dozing off while chopping a thick log, and a sharpshooter holding a rifle glowing with a vivid blue light.
Near the young man lay a slightly faded gauntlet, while a magic circle slowly rotated above the muzzle of the sharpshooter's rifle.
Looking at the warrior and the marksman, I set the mouse down and fell into thought for a moment.
The two men moving within the monitor were characters I had personally created and raised in the game.
WORLD was a game renowned for its open-world single-player experience, consistently updating its world and timeline to keep things fresh.
I, too, had played the game, crafting and raising new characters with each update.
Having thoroughly enjoyed versions 1.0 and 2.0, I figured version 3.0 called for a brand-new character.
After a brief moment of deliberation, I grabbed the mouse and clicked the character creation button.
Truth be told, I'd already had a rough idea of what kind of character I wanted to make.
For my third character, I planned to create one entirely specialized in magic.
I wanted to fully savor the thrill of magic that I'd tasted while playing my second character, the magic gunslinger.
The dazzling magic circles, overwhelming power, and unparalleled versatility—qualities not found in other classes or skills in WORLD—were undeniably appealing in its vast open world.
So much so that, while raising the magic gunslinger, I'd become so enamored with magic that I over-invested in magical abilities, turning the character into what people commonly call a "trash-tier build."
Having learned through the game that the line between omnipotence and incompetence was razor-thin, this time I was determined to craft a character perfectly tailored to being a pure mage.
If I dumped all the initial talent points into magic during the character creation phase, I'd at least avoid ending up with an ambiguous mess of a character.
"Alright, let's get started."
With my decision made, I quickly set the character's appearance and age, then moved to the talent distribution window, pouring every available point into magic-related stats.
"Mana capacity, control ability, computation skills… and I can't forget mana affinity either."
After slamming all the initial allocation points into magic-related abilities, the resulting character was a sight to behold.
On a 30-point scale, the magic-related stats hovered between 25 and 27, while physical stats barely scraped 3 or 4—a walking corpse had been born.
It might not have been an illusion that the character on the screen, clad in something resembling a hospital gown, looked deathly pale.
But even then, I stared at the monitor with a dissatisfied expression for a while before readjusting my grip on the mouse.
Scrolling down the stat window to the traits section, I clicked the arrow to bring up the list of selectable traits.
The traits section allowed you to assign innate physical conditions, talents, or special abilities to your character, but adding them required a hefty investment of stat points.
Because of this, most players typically added just one or two universally useful traits and moved on. But I didn't even glance at the other options and began scrolling down the list.
After scrolling for a while, useful traits like "Swift Body" and "Blue Blood" disappeared, replaced by traits written in glaring red text.
Chronic Headaches, Mana Depletion, Holy Resistance—traits that seemed to impose penalties on the character.
To the uninitiated, these might look like useless features meant purely for role-playing, but having played the game twice already, I knew the real reason behind them.
With a serious expression, I began carefully selecting and adding various detrimental traits to my character.
"Scarecrow, Insomnia, Mana Addict, Excess Is Deficiency… and Cognizant Short Life. Lifespan doesn't matter, right?"
It was incomprehensible behavior—deliberately handicapping a character I'd be playing myself—but astonishingly, each time I added a red-text trait, the remaining stat points, which I thought I'd completely used up, began to trickle back up.
This was the "Karma System," a mechanic unique to character creation in WORLD, which rewarded you with additional points proportional to the penalties you imposed on your character.
Thanks to this system, WORLD players could break free from the rigid constraints of stats and traits, crafting characters with greater freedom.
Adding a few penalties allowed you to unlock talents or traits that would otherwise be impossible within the stat limits.
I'd never fully utilized the Karma System before, but this time, since I was dead-set on creating a character, I intended to push the concept to its absolute limit.
Using the extra points gained from piling on penalties, I maxed out every magic-related stat to the full 30 points, and only then did I press the "Create" button with a satisfied look.
Innate frailty, insomnia, addiction symptoms from prolonged mana use, a halved lifespan due to excessive talent, and a body that creaked with every movement—a total invalid. But what did it matter?
It was just a game character. For the sake of enjoying magic, no character could be more perfect than this.
"This is gonna be fun."
With talent like this, any spell I learned would surely perform beyond expectations.
Just thinking about which spells to pick up was already endlessly exciting.
After haphazardly setting the character's name and background to random and finishing the edits, a black loading screen filled the monitor.
"…"
As I idled, waiting for the loading to finish, my eyes drifted to the bottom corner of the screen.
A game tip, meant to entertain bored players during loading, caught my attention with its unusual tone.
[The first is chance. The second is inevitability. The third is fate.]
[All three updates have been recorded for this very moment.]
[Accept your destiny.]
"What the…"
Muttering to myself about the oddly coercive tone for a mere tip, the black light suddenly flared, swallowing everything in the room whole.
Only after devouring every trace of a person's life without leaving a scrap did it let out a satisfied belch and vanish.
As if nothing had ever been there, the room was soon covered in a thick layer of dust.