2026-08-08 00:33:26By 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 to death, but they smashed half the rigs in my studio to pieces! Who the hell did I offend to deserve this kind of nightmare?".
Before Glen could even force his dry throat to croak out a single word of explanation, Ryan shoved his hand into his pocket, pulled out a crumpled wad of cash, and slapped it hard onto the thin mattress.
"Look, man... my studio is an absolute wreck, and I’ve got to spend all of tomorrow cleaning up your mess," Ryan said rapidly, his eyes darting nervously toward the clinic's exit. "So, when that IV finishes, don't bother coming back. Go wherever you want. I packed your bags—they're shoved right under the bed here. That’s your salary for the month, and I threw in an extra two hundred bucks for the medical bills. From this second on... we don't know each other. Got it?".
Not giving Glen a single second to argue or negotiate, Ryan spun on his heel and bolted out of the clinic like a man fleeing a burning building.
Glen stared at the empty doorway, the cold, heavy reality settling over his throbbing head. He was unemployed. Again.
Part of him thought Ryan was a pathetic coward—they were just a bunch of petty street thugs. Instead of calling the cops or suing for property damage, his boss's first instinct was to completely sever ties with the victim. But as the painkillers slowly kicked in, Glen couldn't entirely blame him. The studio had been running fine, churning out a steady profit, until Glen brought a literal gang war to their doorstep. Ryan wasn't demanding compensation for the smashed computers; he just wanted a walking disaster out of his life. Fair enough.
Glen rubbed his heavily bandaged temples, wincing at the sharp spike of pain. Going back to the studio was completely out of the question, but that left a glaring, immediate problem... where the hell was he supposed to sleep tonight?.
Suddenly, a freezing, synthetic voice—devoid of any human emotion—echoed directly within the confines of his skull.
"Data modeling complete. Upgrade Chest soul-binding successful...".
Glen froze, his breath catching in his throat. Wait... what soul-binding?.
His concussed mind raced backward, fighting through the fog. Right before the wooden bat had connected with his head, he had heard a similar robotic voice. Between the blood, the shock, and the adrenaline, he hadn't processed it. But now... the implications were terrifying. He had looted a bizarre, rainbow-tier Upgrade Chest in a virtual reality game, and somehow, defying all laws of physics, it had bound itself to his actual soul.
The exact moment the thought of the 'Upgrade Chest' crossed his mind, the air in front of him rippled and flared.
A strange, archaic wooden box materialized out of thin air, hovering silently in the dead space directly above his lap. It possessed five distinct slots carved into its ancient surface, looking identical in every single physical detail to the digital asset he had just looted in Realm Conquest.
Glen’s jaw dropped, his eyes widening in absolute shock. He quickly glanced around the small clinic ward, half-expecting someone to scream. But a nurse walking past the open door didn't even blink. She couldn't see it. The soul-bound chest was visible only to him.
How could a virtual gaming tool exist in the real world?. Was his brain bleeding? Was he trapped in a coma?. He reached over with his free hand and pinched his own arm, twisting the skin hard. The sharp, grounding sting of pain confirmed it—this impossible phenomenon was really happening.
His heart hammered relentlessly against his ribs. Looking closer at the floating artifact, he noticed a sleek, LCD-like panel seamlessly embedded into the top of the wooden lid. Glowing text hovered clearly on the screen:
Upgrade Chest: (Level 1)
Uses Remaining: (0/10)
Host Level: (Level 1)
Equipped Gear: (None)
Host Honor Points: (1 Point)
EXP to Next Level: (0/100)
Directly below the glowing screen were four distinct, grayed-out buttons, deeply engraved with ancient-looking characters: Material Synthesis, Gear Fusion, Star Enhancement, and Auto-Craft.
Did this mean the chest actually retained its reality-bending crafting functions here in the real world?.
Adrenaline surged through his veins, temporarily masking the pain in his head. He was itching to test it out, to press a button and see what happened, when the icy system voice chimed in his head once more.
"Upgrade Chest subsidiary Omni-Leveling System activated. Please select a Crafting Class. Selection is permanent and cannot be altered. The selected Crafting Class must reach Level 5 to unlock the Host's Main Class!".
Glen blinked, utterly stunned. What the hell?.
A subsidiary system? And an 'Omni-Leveling System' at that? It sounded incredibly overpowered, the kind of mechanic that broke games.
But there was one massive, glaring problem. The prompt had completely ended. The system hadn't bothered to list what Crafting Classes were actually available for him to choose from!.
"Are you kidding me?" Glen muttered to the empty air, throwing his hands up in frustration. "That is way too irresponsible!".
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Chapter 012
The collective sound of sharp, horrified gasps rippled through the dense circle of onlookers as Glen Johnson ruthlessly continued the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Watching his relentless, desperate effort to force air into the dying woman's lungs, the bystanders couldn't help but exchange guilty glances, a profound sense of genuine admiration slowly washing over them.It was a harsh, undeniable truth of the modern world: most people considered themselves inherently decent, and the vast majority of the crowd forming the barricade genuinely wanted to help someone in a sudden, life-threatening crisis. But faced with the visceral, stomach-churning reality of a dying, seventy-something-year-old woman violently foaming at the mouth, almost no one possessed the iron stomach or the raw nerve required to actually lock lips with her. Human nature was predictably shallow; if the victim crumpled on the concrete had been a beautiful, eighteen-year-old girl in distress, half the men currently stan
Chapter 011
Refusing to let his rapidly depleting funds go to waste, Glen Johnson forced himself to systematically chug every single remaining cup of the rejected, processed fruit juice.He had originally paid the dessert shop girl to squeeze fourteen distinct cups of fresh juice, but the system had only accepted three of them to synthesize the Health Potion. That left eleven full cups of assorted, sugary liquid sitting on the edge of the stone planter.Fortunately, the shop hadn't filled every single cup to the absolute brim, otherwise, he genuinely wouldn't have been able to force it all down. But even with the slightly reduced volume, downing eleven cups of thick, pulpy liquid in rapid succession left him feeling bloated, his stomach stretching uncomfortably like an overfilled water balloon.With the suffocating pressure of the twenty-four-hour mission timer finally lifted from his shoulders, Glen decided to immediately tackle his housing crisis. If he couldn't secure a cheap apartment by sund
Chapter 010
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
Chapter 009
Tomatoes technically weren't even fruits... they were generally classified as vegetables, right?But Glen didn't have the luxury to care about botanical definitions. Tomatoes were dirt cheap and incredibly easy to juice by hand, so testing one wouldn't waste much of his dwindling cash.He quickly flagged down the old man on the tricycle and handed over five bucks for six or seven massive, perfectly ripe red tomatoes.Needing an empty container, Glen grabbed a cup of sweet melon juice that the system had already rejected and chugged it in one go. He wiped his mouth, picked up a tomato, and squeezed it hard over the empty plastic cup.Fortunately, tomatoes were bursting with liquid. He didn't even need a mechanical juicer; just by crushing it slowly with his bare hands, he quickly filled more than half the cup with thick, pulp-filled tomato juice. If he had tried this with a hard apple, he would have exhausted himself for a few pathetic drops.Taking a deep breath to steady his nerves,
Chapter 008
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
Chapter 007
The icy prompt left Glen Johnson entirely stunned. He had just spent hours systematically feeding over a hundred different raw medicinal herbs into the Upgrade Chest, and the system had remained completely dead. But the moment he dropped in a half-drunk cup of cheap orange juice, it immediately triggered a reaction. It was absolute madness.Could it really be that traditional medicinal herbs were completely useless for potion crafting, but processed fruit juice was the key?Before he could process the absurdity of it, the wail of police sirens reached the exact entrance of the crowded night market. Knowing he was out of time, Glen ducked his head, merged into the panicked crowd, and darted down a dark side street, rapidly putting distance between himself and the flashing lights.After sprinting through two consecutive alleyways, Glen finally flagged down a cruising taxi. Slumping into the backseat for the ride back to his cheap motel, a sudden, blinding epiphany hit him.He had been a
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