2026-08-08 00:35:57The 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, Glen mentally summoned the soul-bound Upgrade Chest. The archaic wooden box materialized in the air before him. Without hesitating, he carefully placed the massive glass bottle of blood into one of the empty, square slots on the top lid.
Instantly, a blinding, ethereal light erupted from the chest, completely enveloping the slot. When the harsh light faded a split second later, the massive bottle of blood was entirely gone. Sitting perfectly in its place was a single, blood-red pill roughly the size of a raw egg yolk.
I knew it..
Breathing heavy, Glen reached out and snatched the crimson pill. The icy prompt immediately fired in his brain.
"Blood Essence Pill (Low-tier, Subpar). Consumption will instantly multiply the user's Vitality by five times for a duration of five minutes. Note: This item is restricted to users under Level 3.".
Glen frowned. He vividly remembered the original mission parameters explicitly stating the pill could multiply his Vitality by five to ten times. The fact that he was stuck with the absolute bare minimum meant this particular pill was essentially bottom-of-the-barrel garbage in the Alchemist world.
He couldn't exactly blame the system, though. He had butchered ten scrawny chickens. He figured if he had dragged ten massive bulls or workhorses into an alley and fused their blood, he would have easily hit that ten-times multiplier. But realistically, where the hell was he going to find ten horses to casually slaughter in the middle of the city?.
Curious, Glen glanced at the Upgrade Chest's glowing LCD panel. The interface still displayed: Uses Remaining: (0/10). The counter hadn't moved. Synthesizing the pill clearly didn't consume the chest's standard uses.
With his mission officially cleared, Glen decided to test a theory and slaughtered one final, eleventh chicken for the stall owner. Nothing happened. There was no system chime, and his EXP to Next Level remained stagnant at (20/100).
Grinding mobs for infinite experience was completely off the table. Realizing there was no point wasting any more time in a bloody alley, he wiped his hands clean and checked the sky. Night had fallen hard over the city, and he still didn't have a place to sleep, and sleeping on the streets wasn't an option.
Glen quickly bid farewell to the bewildered poultry lady, hoisted his travel bag over his shoulder, and checked into a cheap, rundown motel a few blocks away.
After dumping his meager belongings on the floor, he hit up the Shuangqing Noodle Shop down the street and inhaled a massive bowl of noodles. With his stomach finally full, the dread of the other looming deadline crashed over him.
The Slaughter mission had saved him from the monthly bleeding curse, but if he failed the Potion Crafting mission, he was going to permanently lose five centimeters of height. That was a punishment he absolutely refused to endure.
He wasn't a doctor, and he had literally zero knowledge of herbal medicine or chemistry. But watching that glass bottle of blood transform into a Blood Essence Pill inside the Upgrade Chest had given him a desperate sliver of hope.
Maybe the system didn't require him to brew it manually. Maybe he could just force the Upgrade Chest to synthesize it for him.
Driven by this theory, Glen sprinted to a local traditional pharmacy and aggressively bought out small samples of over a hundred different raw herbs. He was banking entirely on blind luck, hoping to randomly stumble onto a valid low-level potion recipe by brute-forcing combinations.
His cash was bleeding out fast, so he avoided the premium medicinal ingredients, buying only a few grams of each cheap herb. Even then, the haul cost him over six hundred bucks. Staring at his wallet, which now held barely a thousand dollars, Glen felt a physical ache in his chest.
He had thought acquiring a magical system would make him instantly rich, but so far, he was just hemorrhaging his life savings.
But compared to permanently shrinking, six hundred bucks was a hit he had to take.
Back in the suffocating quiet of his motel room, Glen ripped open the paper packages and began systematically feeding the herbs into the five slots of the Upgrade Chest.
He loaded five herbs. No reaction.
He swapped one out. Still nothing.
He swapped them all. Dead silence.
With over a hundred distinct herbs and five available slots, the sheer mathematical number of possible combinations was astronomical. He didn't even try to calculate it; he just kept ruthlessly swapping ingredients, hoping for a spark.
He ground away at the agonizing process until past ten o'clock at night, but the Upgrade Chest remained completely, stubbornly inert.
It was a total failure. Without a foundational understanding of an Alchemist's actual recipes, blindly guessing a potion formula in under twenty-four hours was mathematically impossible.
Whatever... guess I'm losing five centimeters, he thought bitterly, trying to cope with the inevitable. Maybe being a little shorter will make me look cuter..
He forcibly swallowed his frustration as his stomach violently rumbled again. Deciding to abandon the hopeless potion task for the night, he grabbed his wallet and stepped back out into the city to find real food.
Glen had spent his college years in the nearby university district, so the local layout was burned into his memory. Moving with practiced ease, he navigated past two dark blocks and emerged onto a blindingly bright, deafeningly loud street completely packed with street food vendors.
He was practically broke, completely unemployed, and on the verge of physically shrinking, but Glen refused to let the system entirely break his spirit. Tonight, he felt it was only right to treat himself to a massive plate of meat skewers.
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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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