By the time Glen Johnson dragged himself out of the dark, the sun had already set, leaving the city steeped in shadows. He blinked, his vision swimming as the harsh, flickering fluorescent lights of the community clinic burned into his retinas. The sterile smell of rubbing alcohol and old linoleum hit him, a scent he knew intimately—he’d been lying in this exact same cot just a few days prior, sweating out a brutal fever. A cold IV drip was taped securely to the back of his hand, steadily pumping clear fluid into his veins."Oh, thank God. You're finally awake!" a strained voice rasped.Ryan Sink, who had been slumped in a cheap plastic chair at the foot of the bed, jolted upright. He looked like a man who had narrowly avoided a heart attack, letting out a massive, trembling sigh of relief. "I thought that bat caved your skull in for good. If you died on my watch, I’d be in deep shit, man! What the hell were you thinking, provoking those street thugs? Not only did they beat you half t

The morning market was a chaotic, high-traffic grinder of commerce. Within two brutal, blood-soaked hours, the poultry stall owner had successfully sold off ten freshly slaughtered chickens, and Glen Johnson had officially finished his grisly beginner mission.The second the final rooster stopped twitching, the freezing synthetic voice pierced his mind."Beginner Mission 2: Slaughter — Completed (10/10). Bonus reward: 10 EXP to Next Level.".Then, absolute silence. The promised Blood Essence Pill completely failed to materialize in his hands or his pockets.Glen froze, a sharp spike of paranoia hitting him. Don't tell me this damn system is going back on its word? he thought, grinding his teeth. He looked down at his hands, gripping the heavy medical IV bottle filled to the absolute brim with coagulating chicken blood. A sudden realization clicked in his head.The pill has to come from the blood itself..Checking over his shoulder to ensure the stall owner was distracted by a customer

Seeing their boss get slapped, Benny Gosling’s crew instantly saw red. Roaring in anger, the five or six guys rolled up their sleeves and lunged forward to swarm Glen.Glen had virtually zero actual street-fighting experience, but facing down half a dozen guys didn't scare him in the slightest. His personal philosophy was simple: disregard life and death; if someone pushes you, fight back until one of you drops. He'd much rather be beaten to death than scared to death. Plus, he had a trump card—a Blood Essence Pill capable of multiplying his strength by five times. What was there to fear?.Without a second of hesitation, Glen took a quick step back, fished the mission reward pill from his pocket, and swallowed it whole.Boom.The second the Blood Essence Pill hit his stomach, an explosive surge of raw, terrifying power flooded every single cell in his body, rushing through his veins like a flash flood."You're asking for it!" Glen roared. As Benny's lackeys closed the distance, Glen s

It became painfully obvious: he needed to process the fruit into pure juice before the system could even recognize it as a valid ingredient for a Health Potion.However, Glen wasn't about to just walk into a random beverage chain and buy pre-made drinks to test his theory. He knew how the commercial industry worked—even the so-called 'fresh-squeezed' juices were heavily diluted. Unless it was something naturally bursting with water, like an orange or a watermelon, the shops always padded the cups with water and cheap syrup. A cup of pure, undiluted pear juice, for instance, would be overwhelmingly tart and terrible for casual drinking.If he wanted pure, unadulterated juice to feed into the system, it had to be custom squeezed in front of him.Lugging his travel bag and the heavy thirty pounds of raw fruit, Glen roamed the morning streets until he spotted a small dessert shop with a "Fresh Squeezed Juice" sign plastered in the window. He pushed the door open and walked in.The early m

After pushing past the initial, suffocating panic regarding the Upgrade Chest's severely limited charges, Glen Johnson forced his racing mind back to the immediate problem: stat allocation. As a guy who had literally ground his life away in a professional gaming studio, he understood the absolute, critical importance of distributing attribute points correctly.In any standard MMO, building a character meant committing to a hardline strategy. You min-maxed. You dumped every single available point into one dominant attribute to create an unstoppable, specialized force. Sure, some amateur players tried to create perfectly balanced builds, spreading points evenly across the board, but in the brutal endgame, a balanced character was just another word for useless mediocrity. Only extreme specialization yielded true combat power.But the terrifying reality was that this wasn't a digital interface, and he wasn't modifying a disposable video game avatar. This was the real, unforgiving world, a