WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

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◈ Regression is Too Much

Chapter 160

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The regressor grows stronger (5)

It would be wrong to call the [40] difficulty mannequin weak. Its techniques were more than good enough; they simply couldn't measure up to my swordsmanship, which I had honed alongside my doppelganger and had Choi Ji-won put through its paces. If I didn’t have cold mana, I would have needed several regressions just to win. After all, simply winning and winning without a scratch were two very different things.

But I won easily. How? Because cold mana was broken. No further explanation needed.

"H-he came out."

"Are you alright?"

"..."

I cleanly ignored the people trying to talk to me and settled back into the iron chair, slipping back into character. Honestly, I hadn't expected it to be this easy. I had braced myself for at least a [60] difficulty opponent. What made all the difference was that, thanks to my cold mana, the bespectacled woman and the other players had been thoroughly rattled.

"W-we should clear it too, right?"

"How are we splitting the points...?"

Since I ignored them to the very end, the other players figured out the point distribution among themselves and boarded the elevator on their own. I just sat quietly in my chair, letting cold mana drift off me in waves as I waited.

Naturally, with me having cleared out the [40], the other players managed to get through the floor without taking much damage.

-All tests have been passed. Rewards will be given the moment you return to floor 1.

-You have cleared floor 12.

The moment a blue portal appeared at the center of the space, I stepped through it without hesitation. The thought of finally returning to the real world after so long made my chest flutter with anticipation.

"Oh, so these are the rewards."

When I returned to floor 1, I found three neatly wrapped boxes sitting in the corner of the room.

-Custom Item Box (B~D)

-Elixir of Experience (Medium)

-Book of Possibilities (Unique)

The Elixir of Experience was completely useless to me, and from the Custom Item Box came a D-grade item called the Recovery Talisman.

-Recovery Talisman (D)

-A talisman once gifted by shamans of a now-vanished tribe to their warriors. Effective at restoring depleted vitality.

"...This is supposed to be useful to me?"

It was the first test reward, and a [5] difficulty one at that, so I hadn't expected much, but I hadn't expected something entirely useless, either. In the end, it seemed the only thing worth keeping was the Book of Possibilities.

With only the Book of Possibilities in hand, I returned to my studio apartment. Ji-won, who had been sitting in a chair reading, lifted her head at the sound of my arrival.

"Jun-ho, you're ba... are you okay?"

But the moment Ji-won saw me, she was startled. She crossed the room in an instant, pressed a hand to my forehead, then hurried to pull an elixir from the drawer and thrust it at me.

"Drink this."

"...Out of nowhere? I'm fine."

"Just drink it."

"Alright, alright..."

Pushed along by her insistence, I had no choice but to drink the elixir. It was hard to describe, whether my head felt clearer or my body lighter. Either way, a wonderfully refreshing sensation spread quietly through every inch of me.

"Feeling better now?"

"...Was I really in that bad a shape?"

"Yeah. Pretty bad. Your lips were blue, your face was pale. I could barely feel any body heat from you."

She pressed her hand to my forehead once more and let out a long, relieved sigh. According to her, I had looked like something not far off from a walking corpse.

"...It was really that bad?"

Ji-won wasn't the type to exaggerate, so my condition must have genuinely been that serious. It seemed like it was no coincidence that the Recovery Talisman had turned up from the Custom Item Box.

"What happened to you to end up in that state?"

"Well..."

And so I walked Ji-won through everything that had happened on floor 12, taking my time. Her memory had only been updated once since we had agreed to funnel all the rewards to me, since she didn't want frequent memory updates.

"Turns out, the bespectacled woman saw my cold mana and got so spooked that she stopped lying."

"Hmph, I told you, didn't I? You don't have to kill anyone or threaten them. If things can be resolved peacefully, why bother fighting?"

"You're right. Everything you said was right, Ji-won."

Once the long explanation was done, covering everything from training with mana to how I had cleared floor 12, Ji-won nodded.

"So... you can now properly control that 'cold mana' of yours?"

"Exactly."

"What did I tell you, Jun-ho? I said you could do it, didn't I?"

Ji-won shrugged with a smile, but then abruptly she looked away.

"By the way... isn't 'cold mana' kind of a bad name?"

"..."

"I mean, if you're okay with it, it doesn't really matter to me... but wouldn't something like 'chill' or be better?"

Cold mana, or rather the power now rechristened as "chill" by Ji-won, was something that had genuinely impressed her. Not only could it affect living things, but inanimate objects as well, and it had been confirmed to work even on fairly strong players.

"But no matter how I look at it, the reason you ended up half-dead is probably because of that chill, too..."

The problem, if there was one, was probably that I had used the chill for a long time, slowly, and continuously. Even with cold resistance and the elixir I had consumed... it was a power capable of inflicting a fairly serious debuff on upper-tier players. When you thought about it, having no recoil at all would have been stranger.

"For now... if you're not planning to regress, let's aim to use that power as little as possible. We have elixirs, but we should save them as much as we can."

"Understood."

It was surprising that I hadn't regressed despite looking like a walking corpse, but in truth, the phrase "if you take damage, you regress" had always been rather vague. Depending on how you interpreted it, the scope of "damage" was practically limitless.

Still, there was something I had learned from this. Back when I had been so cautious about even catching a cold, afraid it might trigger a regression, I had been overreacting.

This regression of mine seemed quite generous in how it defined "damage," at least as long as there was no direct external trauma like bleeding. The worry that I might someday endlessly regress after growing old and falling ill was one I could probably set aside.

Thinking about it from the other side, though, this could also be a weakness. It meant I was fully exposed to things like paralysis poison or sleep drugs. It seemed I wouldn't regress unless there was direct physical trauma.

Anyway, once I had finished sorting through everything that had happened on floor 12, Ji-won and I agreed to run some experiments later to measure the full extent of the chill's power.

-Book of Possibilities (Unique)

-Quantifies and displays the user's potential.

At last, I took out the Book of Possibilities I had received as a reward. This book would show me my potential, whether continuing to train the sword was the right call, what I needed to do to properly master the chill, what my level of talent actually was.

I didn't know exactly how the Book of Possibilities would quantify things, but it would certainly be useful. An inexplicable sense of anticipation welled up inside me.

"Here goes."

And so, with trembling hands, I carefully opened the Book of Possibilities.

-This item cannot be used by a human whose Status Window has not been activated.

-This book is an item for climbers. Please use it for its intended purpose.

"...You've got to be kidding me."

The result was... a complete bust.

Several regressions had passed since I had awakened to the way of handling the chill. I still hadn't figured out how to use the power without side effects, but I had become far more stable and skilled at it.

-All tests have been passed. Rewards will be given the moment you return to floor 1.

-You have cleared floor 12.

Now that the bespectacled woman had stopped lying, clearing floor 12 was no longer any kind of challenge for me. Even the hardest [40] difficulty mannequin could be knocked down easily with the chill, so there was nothing to worry about. I repeated the regressions and collected every reward I had been eyeing all this time.

[10] Custom Item Box (A- ~ C+)

[15] Teleportation Scroll

[25] Scroll of Appraisal

[30] Elixir of Choice (Unique)

After collecting every reward I had been missing, I found myself thinking it wasn't quite as useful as I had imagined.

The Teleportation Scroll was fairly useful, but it was only single-use, and I consumed the Elixir of Choice after selecting the Strength stat. (I had wanted to choose Mana, but I was afraid my heart might just stop on the spot.) And the Custom Item Box surprisingly yielded a consumable.

-Woohwang Cheongsimhwan[1] (C+)

-A medicinal pill that clears and sharpens the mind. It contains various herbal remedies and is traded at high prices.

It was deeply irritating that a so-called Custom Item Box kept producing only the minimum listed grade, like pulling from a mobile game's gacha. But there was no denying that something useful had come out of it. My concerns tended to lean more toward the mental side of things than the physical, and this pill would clearly be a great help.

As for the Scroll of Appraisal... I still hadn't used it. I was sure there was somewhere useful it could go, but I couldn't find the right occasion for it, whether I had simply forgotten the intended use or one had never existed in the first place. Either way, I'd hold onto it for now and it would find a use eventually.

In any case, now that I had collected and considered every reward, there was nothing left to do but wrap up floor 12. Practicing with mana had reached the point where further regressions yielded no progress, and every experiment worth running had already been run. It was time to move up to floor 13.

Since traits would persist through regression and items were what I needed to carry forward in the end, I decided to finish floor 12 by following the [5], [10], and [25] route in that order, to secure the widest variety of items.

To put it in terms of names rather than numbers, my plan was to carry over the Recovery Talisman, the Woohwang Cheongsimhwan, and the Scroll of Appraisal. That was the best I could do.

But before wrapping up floor 12 entirely, there was one thing I had to do first.

"You're saying you want to challenge [70] difficulty?"

"Yeah."

Testing the limits of what I was capable of.

[1] 우황청심환 (牛黃淸心丸, Woohwang Cheongsimhwan is a traditional East Asian herbal remedy with a history stretching back over a thousand years in both Korean and Chinese medicine. The name translates as "cattle-bezoar heart-clearing pill," with 우황 (牛黃) referring to gallstones extracted from cattle, long considered a powerful medicinal substance in Sino-Korean pharmacology, and 청심 (淸心) meaning "to clear the heart and mind." In modern South Korea, the commercially produced version is widely recognized and frequently consumed before high-stress situations such as university entrance examinations.

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