2026-08-08 00:35:09Panic spiked in Glen Johnson's chest. Forgetting he was still hooked up to medical equipment, he violently jerked upright on the narrow clinic bed. The explosive movement viciously ripped the IV needle straight out of the back of his hand. He winced, his teeth grinding together as he instinctively shook his stinging hand.
Drops of clear saline, mixed with a spray of his own fresh blood, flew from the torn puncture wound. The crimson-tinted droplets sailed through the air, splattering directly onto the ancient wood of the soul-bound Upgrade Chest hovering invisibly in front of him.
"Host successfully selected 'Alchemist' as the primary Crafting Class," the synthetic voice droned in his mind. "Omni-Leveling System officially activated. Publishing Beginner Mission.".
"Beginner Mission 1: Potion Crafting. Host must research a low-level potion recipe and successfully synthesize one low-level potion within 24 hours.".
"Reward: 5 Unallocated Stat Points. Note: Host may consume Honor Points to bind these stats permanently, or randomly allocate them to equipped gear at no Honor Point cost.".
"Failure Penalty: Host's physical height will permanently shrink by five centimeters.".
Glen almost lost his damn mind.
When did I choose to be an Alchemist?! he roared internally. He hadn't studied a single day of chemistry, let alone magical alchemy.
Wait... was it because I accidentally splashed medicine on the Upgrade Chest? The absurd realization hit him like a truck. If I had just splashed pure blood on it instead of saline, would it have defaulted my Crafting Class to a Butcher?!.
He tried to rationalize the nightmare. Fine, he could accept being an Alchemist. But how the hell was a total amateur supposed to research and synthesize a functional potion in under twenty-four hours?. And that penalty was absolutely merciless. He wasn't even pushing 170 centimeters to begin with; losing another five centimeters of height would literally ruin his life!.
Before he could finish his internal meltdown, the icy system voice chimed again.
"Host successfully triggered the hidden class protocol. Selected 'Butcher' as the primary hidden class. Publishing Beginner Mission.".
"Beginner Mission 2: Slaughter. Host must slaughter 10 livestock and collect at least one full bottle of livestock blood within 12 hours.".
"Reward: One Blood Essence Pill (Low-tier). Note: Consumption will instantly multiply the user's Vitality by five to ten times for five minutes. Restricted to users under Level 3.".
"Failure Penalty: Host will experience severe, unpreventable rectal bleeding for a minimum of three consecutive days at a fixed time every month.".
Holy shit!.
Glen felt a sudden, violent urge to smash the phantom Upgrade Chest into splinters. This system was absolutely ruthless.
Honestly, the second mission itself wasn't ridiculously hard. Killing ten animals in twelve hours just required the right location. But that failure penalty was purely demonic. It was basically forcing a grown man to experience a brutal menstrual cycle every single month!.
If he actually got stuck with a curse like that, he’d never be able to show his face in public again.
Glen instantly made up his mind. Even if he failed the first mission and lost five centimeters of height, he absolutely refused to deal with a monthly bleeding curse.
Time was running out. Without wasting a single second, he threw his legs off the bed, shoved his feet into his shoes, and grabbed the travel bag Ryan Sink had abandoned on the floor. He turned on his heel and marched toward the door.
"Hey! Your drip isn't finished yet!" the freckle-faced clinic nurse shouted, poking her head out of the dispensary as she saw him making a run for it.
Glen, assessing his physical state as decent enough, waved her off without stopping. "I'm done! Emergency!".
"But we already prepped three bags for you, and you haven't even finished the first one!" the nurse frowned, stepping out. "I can't refund you for the opened medicine!".
"Keep it!" Glen barked. As he passed the dispensary door, he spotted a medical waste bin full of clean, empty IV bottles. He reached in and snatched one out. "This bottle covers the difference! See you!".
Clutching the empty glass bottle to his chest like a brick of solid gold, Glen bolted out of the clinic. The young nurse stared after him, utterly dumbfounded. She checked the prescription sheet, thoroughly confused. She hadn't given him the wrong medicine, but the guy was acting like a total lunatic.
Cluck, cluck... SNAP..
That made ten. And the IV bottle was filled to the brim with fresh chicken blood.
Standing in the grimy back alley of a live poultry stall at the local morning market, Glen tossed a blood-drained, twitching rooster into the churning defeathering machine.
After fleeing the clinic, his sole focus had been figuring out how to finish the second mission quickly. Wandering into the morning market, he had spotted the stall owner preparing to slaughter a chicken for a customer. Driven by sheer desperation, Glen had lunged forward and insisted on doing the deed himself.
Naturally, the woman thought he was insane and refused. Left with no choice, Glen had slammed two hundred bucks onto the chopping block, declaring he wanted to buy the right to do all the stall's butchering for the day.
His excuse was that he was naturally cowardly and needed to slaughter a few chickens to "train his guts.".
The stall owner, not one to pass up a wildly profitable and lazy deal, happily pocketed the two hundred dollars and handed over the butcher knife.
It worked perfectly. The second Glen slaughtered the first chicken, the Omni-Leveling System chimed, logging the mission progress at 1/10. Furthermore, with every single chicken he killed, his experience bar ticked up by exactly 1 point.
A dark realization crossed his mind. If he stayed here and slaughtered a hundred chickens, he might just hit Level 2 right in the middle of a poultry stall.
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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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