Prologue

For factory workers at small and medium-sized companies, gaming was a basic life skill.

Of course, some people refused to acknowledge them as games. To them, mobile apps that consisted of nothing but auto-hunting, in-app purchases, and gacha pulls could hardly be called real games.

However, for factory workers, those games were more than just games.

After all, what other hobby could quietly keep making progress for you while your phone sat hidden away in a locker during work?

Even if your salary did not go up, there was still the pleasure of watching your level rise.

More than anything, since these games made up over 70% of the conversations between team members, they could be seen less as mere games and more as a part of modern social life.

However, gaming was a fairly uncommon hobby among factory workers when it came to PC or console games. Their usual pastimes were drinking with meals, drinking at company dinners, drinking while chasing women, or, failing all that, fishing. Those were the mainstream choices.

In that sense, his hobby was unusual.

He was a serious gamer.

Because of the nature of factory work, his job followed a basic two-shift system, rotating between day and night shifts in short cycles. As a result, he would occasionally get brief stretches of time off, usually two nights and two days, or one night and two days.

Whenever those breaks came around, he would first sleep as if he were dead. Then he would sit down in front of his monitor with a cold beer in a tumbler and slowly sip it while spending the rest of his time off gaming.

He was not especially picky about what he played.

Through games, he enjoyed living as all kinds of characters. Sometimes he wandered the western wastelands as an outlaw. Other times, he became a commander with superhuman abilities, repelling alien invasions, destroying several planets along the way, and somehow saving one in the end.

He also found it surprisingly entertaining to play as the rebellious Son of God who, in the end, had slain God himself.

Still, most of his gaming life had been spent in worlds based on a vaguely medieval Western setting, where he played as knights, mages, and the like.

Then, while he was enjoying himself as usual, someone left a comment on one of his posts asking for game recommendations.

ㄴ Try Murim Chronicles: A Tale of Life and Death. It’s seriously fun.

ㄴ Get lost with that shitty chinese game.

ㄴ No, listen. It’s actually really fun. There’s even a Korean patch. Come on, just try it. Try it.

Murim, huh…

His understanding of Murim came mostly from a handful of Stephen Chow movies, like Shaolin Soccer.

Wasn’t the ultimate move in Kung Fu Hustle called something like the Buddha’s Palm?

Thinking about it now, he found himself getting curious.

He bought the game without much hesitation.

After all, a factory worker who lived alone usually had a fairly comfortable amount of disposable income. What reason did he have to hold back?

While the game was downloading, he looked up some information about it.

It was a Chinese open-world RPG that gave players a lot of freedom, and fans had made an unofficial Korean translation that was almost complete.

The fact that a user-made Korean patch had been released already guaranteed a certain level of fun. After all, who would bother translating a game that was not even fun?

Players could freely grind, farm, and strengthen their characters until their Fame reached a certain level. After that, large-scale events known as the Early-Game Crisis, Midgame Crisis, and Endgame Crisis would begin at random.

Clearing those crises would lead to an ending. Even then, the player could continue playing afterward, or end the run and begin a new one as their character’s descendant. Depending on the route and content chosen, the game offered several different endings.

He was not familiar with the martial arts game genre, but after looking it up, he found that it seemed to be fairly popular.

As a player, he preferred overpowered playstyles. Rather than struggling through harsh challenges, he enjoyed crushing enemies without holding back. He liked following proven strongest builds and playing comfortably.

So, while reading character creation guides and recommended build posts, he began thinking about how he should develop his character.

He already had a feeling that the game would be fun, and a satisfied smile appeared on his face as his anticipation grew.

Before long, the installation finished, and he applied the Korean patch file over the game.

Then came the long-awaited game start.

Since he had just read several guides, he moved through character creation without delay.

The difficulty was set to Traveler of Tasteful Leisure, the easy mode.

Since the game apparently allowed multiple playthroughs, he could raise the difficulty on his second run if he enjoyed it.

For Constitution, he chose Blood Poison, which was known for making the game much easier to play.

For Star of Destiny, he selected Heavenly Slaughtering Star.

And as for gender, he chose female without the slightest hesitation.

He firmly believed that in any game where female characters were an option, choosing one was the obvious choice.

Sadly, the game did not support character customization.

That left him with no choice but to pick one of the preset portraits, naturally choosing the one with a large chest.

After all, if he was going to look at his character in-game, shouldn’t she at least have a nice figure?

Whenever he took a break, smoking a cigarette and drinking beer, admiring a busty female character was one of his guilty pleasures.

It was, in a way, one of the privileges of being a single man.

And for the character’s name…

Ctrl+V.

阿靑 (A-Qing)

The Hanja characters he had copied beforehand appeared in the name field.

He could not understand how anyone’s name was supposed to be “A-Qing.”

But that was what the recommendation post had told him to enter.

Apparently, using that name allowed the player to start with the true form of one of the game’s most broken martial arts: the Sword Art of the Moonlight Maiden.

With that, character creation was complete.

Before pressing the Start Murim Journey button, he opened a guide post on his phone. It laid out the route he needed to follow in order to farm efficiently before moving into the early-game story.

After all, in an open-world game, wasn’t it common sense to farm as much as possible right from the start before getting serious?

In the end, however, all that preparation proved meaningless.

The moment he pressed Start Murim Journey—

He found himself standing inside a cold cave…

Along with a heavy weight that had suddenly settled on his upper body.

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