WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Became a Genius Engineer That Mega Corporations Are Obsessed With ◈

Chapter 002

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Every Perk Has a Price

Fusion Punk 2333 Apocalypse runs on a perk and flaw system.

You get 30 points by default to spend on whatever perks you want, and if you want more points, you have to take flaws. That's the game's system.

The so-called law of equivalent exchange.

Carving out a build in this game was the most agonizing part, since some of the perks available early on were seriously broken.

But just because you need points doesn't mean you can pile on flaws without limit. Your character will most likely fall apart before it can survive the early game.

Why am I suddenly thinking about this, you ask?

"Fuck..."

Passing through a back alley off the main drag, I happened to catch my reflection in a shop window. The moment the state of the guy in that mirror registered, a chime sounded in front of my eyes and a window popped up.

[ User Seol Gye-hyeon: Perk and Flaw Status ]

Points Held: 30 Pt (Base) + 70 Pt (Flaws) = 100 Pt Total

『Total Adopted Flaws +70 Pt』

[Extreme Muscle Atrophy] +15 Pt

[Heart Mana Deficiency] +15 Pt

[Dantian Mana Rejection] +20 Pt

[Starvation Constitution] +20 Pt

『Total Adopted Perks -100 Pt』

<Psionics> [Precision Telekinesis] (-25 Pt)

<Emission Magic> [Mana Thread Control] (-25 Pt)

<Detection Magic> [Spellbreaker's Magic Eye] (-15 Pt)

<Recovery Magic> [Suture Heal] (-15 Pt)

<Precept Magic> [Prohibition Command] (-20 Pt)

"Haah. This is so pointless."

After the breakup, all my spare time and stress had gone into pumping iron at the gym. Every muscle I'd built up so stubbornly was gone without a trace. No, it was worse than gone. I was so skinny I was practically skin and bones.

The flaw, [Extreme Muscle Atrophy].

It permanently locked the efficiency of my strength stat at the lowest value. Heavy weapons were obviously out, and if I fired a gun with strong recoil, I might even injure my shoulder.

That horrible flaw had been applied to my actual body.

The one good thing was that, for a scrawny guy, my face wasn't ugly. I looked a bit like a pretty boy, though.

"Yeah~ I'm never lifting again~ The efficiency sucks anyway~"

Muttering like a madman, I slowly went over the other perks and flaws. In this world, the basics were that you stored mana for magic in your heart and the energy for body arts in your dantian.

[Heart Mana Deficiency] made the mana in my heart keep leaking out, so no matter how hard I pushed, I'd never get past tier 1, and [Dantian Mana Rejection] meant my dantian couldn't hold energy at all, shutting off the path of body arts completely.

Well, I was fine up to there.

In Fupunkalypse, magic and body arts cost a lot of money and were hard to learn anyway. Those flaws wouldn't get in the way of living an ordinary life.

And if I did grow stronger someday, it wasn't as if there was no way to remove a flaw.

But the last flaw I'd taken, [Starvation Constitution], was different.

In the game, it was just the satiety gauge in the corner of the screen draining three times faster than everyone else's. A pointless nuisance of a penalty, where you just clicked a can or a nutrient tube in your inventory to eat it and that was that. My character holed up and only crafted, so food was a resource I had in surplus anyway.

But if it became reality, that was a different story.

Grrrowl!

"Ugh..."

Before I could even finish the thought, a sharp pain twisted my stomach and the world spun in front of my eyes.

Unlike the other flaws, [Starvation Constitution] could threaten my life right now.

'This is bad...'

The pressure started to build, the sense that I'd only survive if I put something in my mouth right now. I had to find a way to eat.

Then my nose caught a scent. The strong smell of meat grilling, slathered in seasoning.

My body reacted before my brain did. Putting strength into my wobbling legs, I walked toward the source of the smell.

It was coming from a street stall set up on one side of the main drag.

A gruff-looking vendor with a cheap plastic prosthetic on his forearm was sizzling mystery-meat skewers on a mana-stone grill.

The stall had a simple sign: [Grilled Synthetic Meat, 1 Skewer - 500 Credits].

Ding.

At the sight of the words, as if it had been waiting for this, the way to check an account balance in this world popped into my head. It felt like a tutorial in a game.

Tapping the spot behind my ear twice with my wrist.

[Gaon Mega City Integrated Electronic Citizen ID]

Name : Seol Gye-hyeon (SEOL GYE-HYEON)

Date of Birth : 2013.03.03 (Age 20)

Citizen Grade : Grade E

Residence : Gaon Mega City, Ground Zero

[ Financial Account Balance ] > 5,000 credit

A citizen ID floated up in front of my eyes as a hologram. The name written on it was Seol Gye-hyeon. The moment my eyes landed on that name, the life of a person named Seol Gye-hyeon came pouring into my head.

Abandoned by his parents as a child, he'd drifted from one lower-class shelter to another, and not long ago he'd turned twenty and been forced out of the shelter to fend for himself.

'Ha. This kid was a total beggar.'

He seemed to have received around 100,000 credits as settlement money when he left, but with his naive personality, he'd been scammed and bounced around instead of settling down. A memory even flashed by of his bag, with his clothes and all his possessions, being stolen just a few days ago.

A skewer cost about 500 credits, and my entire fortune was 5,000 credits.

Enough money for about ten skewers.

But what else could I do? I was so hungry my head was spinning and I was about to collapse... If I tried to save money, I'd starve to death before the night was over.

"Mister. One skewer!"

The vendor sized up my wretched look and answered gruffly.

"500 credits. Up front. If you're not eating, get lost."

I was a customer, and he was this rude? Didn't he want to sell?

Still, the smell of meat right in front of me was fogging my reason, so I got ready to pay right away.

[Send 500 credits?]

Two fingers swiped across my wrist, and my blood-and-sweat 500 credits slipped away.

[Account Balance : 4,500 credit]

"Here."

I took the skewer he handed over with his plastic prosthetic, carelessly. Then chewed and swallowed it in a flash, without even a chance to taste it.

But [Starvation Constitution] wasn't satisfied with a mere skewer. No, if anything, the moment something hit my stomach, my patience broke completely.

I needed more calories.

"Mister. Quick. One more."

"Huh? Oh, sure."

Startled by how frantically I thrust my hand out, the vendor flinched and put a fresh skewer on.

Two, three, five...

Only after I'd shoved nine more skewers in a row into my mouth did I finally come to my senses.

"Wow, customer! You eat like a champ. So, want me to grill you another one?"

Where was the guy who'd told me to get lost a moment ago? Now the vendor had completely changed his attitude and was rubbing his palms together at me.

Honestly, my stomach didn't feel completely full yet, but there was a reason I couldn't buy any more.

[Account Balance : 0 credit]

My entire fortune, cleanly blown.

"Mister. I ate ten of them. Can't you throw in one as a freebie?"

"What? A freebie? Don't bring me bad luck while I'm working. Get lost, will you?"

The vendor glared at me with bulging eyes and flicked his gaze to the side.

Spotting a gun lying there, I carefully backed away from the stall.

Seriously. Wasn't ten skewers enough for one freebie? Stingy. This world.

With that thought, I stepped out onto the roadside and gradually realized that this whole area was a street of stalls. Countless stalls stood everywhere, calling in customers.

"Ah. I should've tried something other than skewers instead of buying ten."

Regretting it now wouldn't change anything. Five thousand credits' worth of skewers was already in my stomach.

What's eaten is eaten, and the bigger problem was where and how I was going to sleep tonight. Walking the street, I thought about what to do next.

Now that I looked, the stalls didn't only sell food. There were stalls selling clothes, junk like records, and even weapons, lined up here and there.

'It's not a well-off neighborhood, so the goods aren't in great shape.'

Ground Zero, where Seol Gye-hyeon lived, was closer to a slum on the outskirts of the city, where the lower classes gathered. That was probably why everything on sale was secondhand and flawed.

Junk of the sort you'd be forced to scavenge and use in Fupunkalypse.

Then an idea flashed into my head.

If this was a street of stalls, I could set up a makeshift stall of my own.

If all the flaws I'd chosen had been applied to my body, didn't that mean the broken perks I'd picked had been applied too? Then I could pass myself off as an engineer, just like my game character.

Ding.

At the very moment I became sure of it, knowledge tingled into my head again. It was the manual for activating abilities. Following the guide, I thought about pulling something up from deep inside my head and slowly raised my right hand into the air.

Then came a hard stare at a piece of trash, a cigarette butt rolling around on the ground.

Hmmmm......

Amazingly, following the motion of my hand, the cigarette butt began to float up slowly into the air, defying gravity.

<Psionics> Precision Telekinesis (-25 Pt)

It actually works?

It was one of the psionic perks in my build.

Picked to make up for the strength efficiency penalty from Extreme Muscle Atrophy, it was weak early on but got better the further you went, a late bloomer of a perk.

Engineer or not, I couldn't do the work on strength that never grew. The higher the tech, the more often you had to use heavy equipment.

And unlike body arts, which needed mana stored in the dantian, or magic, which needed mana stored in the heart, psionics ran on energy from mutant cells rather than mana, so my flaws didn't affect it.

Still, energy from cells meant I'd get hungry if I used it a lot. With a body under [Starvation Constitution], I still had to be careful with it.

Having confirmed the ability worked, my eyes darted around busily.

If I had the perks I'd chosen, I could stop worrying about sleeping on the street tonight. Looking around a little, I spotted a garbage collection site where the stalls' discarded thick cardboard boxes were piled up like a mountain.

<Emission Magic> Mana Thread Control (-25 Pt)

Mana Thread Control had actually been the main spell of my old combat mage build. It was so versatile even in the mage build that I'd brought it over to the engineer tree, and it turned out to be an absurdly good multi-purpose tool.

Having [Heart Mana Deficiency] didn't mean I couldn't use magic at all. I just couldn't grow into a high-tier mage. Using Mana Thread Control weakly as a substitute for tools was no problem at all.

And even the mana shortage from Heart Mana Deficiency left plenty of room to overcome, as long as I could build auxiliary tools with my own skills.

Mana Thread Control was a utility spell I'd taken for working with just my hands early on, when I wouldn't have any decent tools, and it let me draw thin mana threads out of my fingers.

These threads could be given three properties, cutting, rotation, and high heat, and those were a perfect fit as an engineer's tools.

This time, drawing energy from the area around my heart, I started releasing it through my hands. A mana thread about the length of a finger joint streamed out of my fingertips.

When I touched the thread to a cardboard box, it cut through easily and punched holes in it.

"Great, let's give it a go."

Gathering up boxes, I started building a stall in a corner. The boxes were cut and fitted together with the threads of mana drawn from my fingertips.

Maybe because my dexterity stat was high, I managed to build a decent-looking stall out of nothing but cardboard boxes in no time.

This was good enough to start doing business, wasn't it?

Letters began to take shape on the signboard, carved with the mana thread.

[Anything repaired or upgraded.]

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