WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

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◈ Regression is Too Much

Chapter 198

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The regressor runs into trouble (1)

"Hey."

That claim about being used to blacking out and coming back—I take it back.

Caught off guard like that, all that accumulated experience fell right out of my head. I just sat there, frozen stiff, blank. What was that puppet just now?

"Hey. Get up."

What little sensation was reaching me said I was face-down on rough ground somewhere. Water nearby. A stream, maybe.

Body heavy. Head pounding. The feeling of being buried under wet sand, of dumbbells strapped to every limb, of standing up from your chair after an all-nighter and immediately swaying. A feeling I hadn't known in a long, long time.

"Ugh..."

Above all else, the wrongness radiating through my whole body had gone well past the point of ignoring. Like this wasn't really my body at all...

"Ugh, seriously. Get up already, will ya?"

Thwack!

"Ggh!"

A dull impact at the back of my head. My vision flared white, and my body was rolling across the gravel, one, two full rotations, and then,

[You have taken damage.]

I regressed.

[Returning to the moment of first entry on Floor 18-2.]

"Hey."

This time, the moment the voice reached me, I shot up from where I was lying. My body was still a wreck, so I wobbled, but at least I wasn't just lying there helplessly. Head foggy, dizzy, but I did my best to focus.

"Whoa, scared me."

First thing I saw was a stream, clear and fast. I'd apparently been lying on the gravel bank beside it. Beyond the water, a green mountain. Above it, a crisp, open sky.

"What are you looking at?"

Right in my face was a shaggy-looking bandit. I called him a bandit because he had a huge dao strapped across his back and looked like he hadn't bathed in months. Hair everywhere, too.

"...Where is this?"

"Where? Hwangbing Mountain, obviously. What's wrong with you? You don't even know where you are?"

I gripped my aching head and tried to pull my thoughts together. Right, it had said Floor 18-2. Something like Floor 3's mechanism, maybe. A sub-floor hiding inside the floor, blocking regression. That part I got easily enough.

Then there was Hwangbing Mountain. Never heard of it. Definitely not Korea, and not any of the named peaks from wuxia novels, not Mount Hua or Wudang, or any of the Ten Thousand Mountains.

"The puppet..."

The image of the angel pressing a talisman against a puppet flashed through my mind. That was right when I'd blacked out. Putting the sequence together, this floor was probably...

"Oh, for fuck's sake."

My train of thought didn't get to finish. The shaggy man in front of me had suddenly grabbed his dao.

"You ignoring me? Huh? Think I'm nothing? That what this is?"

One hand on the hilt, blade leveled at me. A normal person might have trembled at the sight, or worse. But.

"...Ha."

A hollow laugh escaped before I could help it. His stance was just so...

"What are you laughing at?"

Terrible.

I didn't even know how to compare it. The scrubs from Floor 12? Comparing him to those guys would be an insult to them. Floor 3... no. Floor 2. About on par with the thug players I'd run into back on Floor 2.

In other words, basically a civilian who'd just picked up a weapon. Holding a dao that size with one hand was a mistake to begin with. Look at him, arm trembling faintly from the weight.

"What am I laughing at? Ha. You're insane."

He'd noticed me staring and quickly grabbed the dao with both hands. Too late. The damage was done.

"Come at me."

Normally I would've just put him down fast and moved on. Wasting time on someone like this had always felt pointless.

But I still remembered that dull crack at the back of my head. The bastard had kicked me just for not answering. Still dizzy, still heavy, but I wasn't going to lose to someone like this. He deserved at least a taste.

"Die!!!"

He swung the dao exactly where I expected, not an inch of deviation. No real force behind it, the path telegraphed as wide as a road. No better than I'd been, swinging a sword through bushes back in the Tutorial.

No weapon in hand, but I'd reached a level beyond ordinary humans. My body itself was already a weapon.

"Hey. You're hopeless."

I reached out with my left hand and caught his dao mid-swing. And with my right,

Crack!!!

"Huh?"

Flesh splitting. Bone snapping. Pain deep enough to send a spasm through my whole hand, past sharp and into something else entirely. Blood spraying in all directions like a firecracker had gone off.

"Wh... what..."

The shaggy man stumbled backward and sat down hard. His dao dangled from my left hand, buried halfway in, starting from where I'd grabbed it and running nearly to my wrist.

"...?"

No time to even scream.

[You have taken damage.]

I regressed.

[Returning to the moment of first entry on Floor 18-2.]

"Hey."

Only now did I understand what that wrongness had been.

Not just a heavy body. Not just mana refusing to move. Simply put... my body had become something genuinely pathetic.

-On Floor 18, all climbers' physical abilities are equalized and fixed.

-Submit a reward that exceeds the Overseer's standard.

The Floor 18 mission message flickered through my memory.

Right. Physical abilities get fixed. The bad kind of fixed. No wonder the enemy had felt so low-level.

If anyone's asking why it took so long to notice, my head was spinning too badly. And since my height and build were exactly the same, it hadn't occurred to me that my physical specs might have changed. I leaned over the stream and checked my reflection. Same face.

Thinking back to the angel pressing that talisman against the puppet... this wasn't reincarnation or possession. More like I'd been placed inside a doppelganger of myself, identical in every way, just stripped of everything that mattered.

"Tch..."

And it wasn't only that. The dwarven armor was gone. The Transparent Gloves I'd been wearing were gone. The scabbard that had sat reassuringly at my hip, gone. Completely empty-handed. Nothing but an eastern-style cloth robe on my back.

"Hey. You ignoring—"

"Shut up."

Not that I was going to lose to an idiot like this. Worth repeating.

One step forward, and I drove a fist into his solar plexus. Even a normal person would instinctively twist away or throw up a hand, but he had his face shoved in mine trying to look threatening. No chance he'd see the punch from that angle.

Thud!

"Ugh!"

A solid hit to the solar plexus locks up the muscles and kills the air. While he doubled over and wheezed, I slipped behind him, yanked the dao free, and threw it far into the brush. He was mine now.

"Hey."

"Khhh..."

"Hey. Not answering?"

Before the regression, he'd smacked the back of my head just for not responding. That told me everything I needed to know. Someone who coasted on raw intimidation, a thug with a scary face and nothing else to back it up. The dao I'd just thrown confirmed it, beaten to hell, barely maintained. This man had never trained a day in his life.

Right now, though, he was the only source of information I had. What kind of world this was. Where the "Overseers" from the mission message were. Getting answers meant keeping him cooperative.

So why had I regressed the first time, you ask? Because I tried to catch a falling blade with my bare hand. Turns out there's always a reason people tell you not to do certain things.

"I'm going to ask you a few questions—"

"This son of a..."

Still hadn't come to his senses. He was trying to grab my ankle. I sighed and pulled my foot back, but.

Scrape.

His long, unkempt, filthy nails raked across the skin of my ankle.

A bead of blood welled up.

"...Ah."

[You have taken damage.]

[Returning to the moment of first entry on Floor 18-2.]

One thing was now absolutely clear. This world was massively against me.

Couldn't overpower anyone with stats. Total mana was nowhere near what my real body had. Not just chill, even Flash Step, which I hadn't used a single time since earning it, wouldn't activate. Nothing overwhelming to back me up, and the Awe trait had gone quiet too.

Worst of all, dropping someone in a single clean blow was brutally hard now. No formal combat training, not to the point of putting someone down with one punch to the jaw, and if I threw a fist or a kick wrong and broke my own bones, I'd end up regressing again.

"You're sorry?"

"I'm sorry!"

Not that I was going to lose to this man again. Years of real combat behind me, and he barely knew which end of a weapon to hold. Careful and methodical, and I could take him down clean. The question was whether that held when the numbers went up. They say even professional boxers run when they're about to get surrounded in a street fight.

But that wasn't what mattered. What I got out of him after the interrogation was shocking enough to make the rest irrelevant.

"There's internal energy and martial artists, but... no sects? No Mount Hua Sect, no Wudang, no Shaolin, no Demonic Cult, nothing like that?"

"...Yes."

"And these martial artists can't do things like treading on air? They're just... unusually healthy, tough civilians?"

"...Yes."

So if you put this world in modern terms.

"Low-power wuxia" was the most fitting description.

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