GWTM 00

He had genius-level talent, but even running was difficult without medicine.

The game character he had created as his third sub-character.

He ended up entering that world.

Prologue

“Alright, so what kind of character should I make this time….”

He ran his fingers through his messy hair and sat down in front of the computer.

After tapping the keyboard a few times, a familiar interface appeared, illuminating his face.

After entering his ID and password to log in, the phrase WORLD ver.3.0 appeared and vanished, and two figures revealed themselves on the screen.

A young man who was nodding off while resting on a thick log, and a marksman holding a bright blue glowing rifle.

Near the young man, a slightly faded gauntlet lay on the ground, and a magic circle was slowly rotating above the muzzle of the marksman’s rifle.

He looked at the young man and the warrior, put down his mouse, and fell into thought for a moment.

The two men moving on the monitor were the game characters he had created and developed himself.

The game, WORLD, was famous for aiming for open-world single-player while continuously changing the world-view and timeline through steady updates.

He, too, had been creating and raising new characters every time an update occurred while playing the game.

Since he had fully enjoyed the game in ver 1.0 and 2.0, a new character would be necessary for 3.0.

After a moment of apparent consideration, he quickly picked up the mouse and clicked the character creation button.

In fact, he had already given some thought to what kind of character to create.

He was determined to create a character purely specialized in magic for his third character.

He intended to fully savor the thrill of magic he had experienced while playing the Magic Gunner he’d made as his second character.

The spectacular magic circles, powerful force, and versatility—unavailable in other classes or skills in WORLD—were clearly a highly appealing advantage even within the vast open world.

To the extent that, while raising his Magic Gunner, he had become so addicted to magic that his excessive investment in only magic-related abilities had caused him to become what is commonly called a failed character (or ‘trash build’).

Having learned through the game that omnipotence and incompetence are separated by a hair’s breadth, he intended to raise a character exclusively as a perfect mage this time.

If he poured all the talent into magic in the selection window that determined the starting character’s talents, at least he wouldn’t end up with an ambiguous (or mediocre) character.

“Shall we begin, then?”

Having made his decision, he quickly determined the character’s appearance and age, moved to the talent distribution screen, and poured all the given potential ability into the magic-related categories.

“Mana capacity, control ability, calculation ability… Can’t forget mana sensitivity and affinity either.”

After slamming the initial allocation into mana-related abilities, the completed character was truly a sight to behold (or a mess).

Out of a perfect score of 30, the mana-related stats hovered around 25 to 27, while the physical ability stats barely reached 3 or 4, completing a walking corpse.

The character on the screen, dressed in something resembling a hospital gown, looking pale, might not have been a mere illusion.

However, despite this result, he stared at the monitor with a dissatisfied expression for a long time before adjusting his grip on the mouse again.

Scrolling down the stat window and moving the cursor to the Trait section, he clicked the arrow to display the list of selectable traits.

The trait section was designed to bestow a character’s innate constitution, talent, or special abilities, but adding such traits also required a significant amount of ability points.

For this reason, it was common practice to simply add one or two generally useful traits and move on, but he didn’t even look at the other traits and started scrolling straight down the list.

After scrolling for a long time, useful traits like Innate Martial Body and Blue Blood disappeared, and traits written in bright red letters appeared.

All sorts of undesirable traits that seemed to impose penalties on the character, such as Chronic Headache, Mana Exhaustion, and Holy Power Repulsion.

Someone unfamiliar with the game might easily mistake these for useless features that only exist for pure concept play, but having played the game twice, he knew the real reason precisely.

With a cautious expression, he began selecting and adding various unhelpful traits to the character.

“Adding Scarecrow, Insomnia, Mana Addict, Too Much of a Good Thing as well, and Talented Yet Short-Lived… The lifespan shouldn’t matter.”

This was an incomprehensible action of adding demerits to the very character he would play, but astonishingly, every time he added a trait written in bright red to the character, the remaining allocation ability points, which he thought were completely exhausted, began to slightly increase.

The ‘Karma System’, which only activates during character creation in WORLD, was paying an additional price equivalent to the penalties imposed on the character.

Thanks to this Karma System, players enjoying WORLD could escape the limitations of simple stats and traits and create characters more freely.

By adding a few penalties, it became possible to additionally inscribe talents or traits onto the character that would not be permitted by the standard stat restrictions.

He had never actively utilized the Karma System before, but since he was determined to create this character, he planned to push the character’s concept as far as possible.

Only after filling all magic-related stats to the maximum 30 points with the residual ability points gained as compensation for the numerous penalties he’d hung on the character, did he press the Creation Completebutton with a satisfied look.

He might be a patient with an innately poor physique, suffering from insomnia, experiencing addiction symptoms from prolonged use of magic, having his lifespan halved due to excessive talent, and having his entire body creak every time he moved, but what did it matter?

It was only a game character. To have fun with magic, no more perfect character existed than this one.

“This will be fun.”

With this level of talent, he could surely extract performance beyond expectation no matter what magic he learned.

Just thinking about which magic to learn was already immensely enjoyable.

After roughly setting the character’s name and background to random and completing the edits, a black loading screen filled the monitor.

“………”

His eyes, idling while waiting for the loading to finish, suddenly moved towards the bottom of the screen.

This was because the game tip message, displayed in the corner of the loading screen to alleviate the gamer’s boredom, was particularly bothersome.

[The first is coincidence. The second is inevitability. The third is destiny.]

[All three updates were recorded for this very moment.]

[Accept your destiny]

“What the…”

The moment he muttered to himself about the rather forceful tone for a tip message,

A flash of black light appeared and swallowed everything in the room whole.

Only after devouring all traces of the person’s life without leaving anything behind, did it burp contentedly and vanish without a trace.

As if there had been nothing there from the start, a thick layer of dust had accumulated in the room.