WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: DereKimchi

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ The Protagonist Doesn't Want to Leave the First Floor ◈

Chapter 53: 053

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“I was actually on my way north. Funny running into you here.”

He spoke as if they had met on the road.

It hardly seemed like a conversation to have in the sky, but there was no real difference.

“I’m on a test flight.”

“Nice saddle. It looks sturdy.”

“Yes. I managed to finish it, but as you can see, my legs feel like they’re about to burst.”

“Still, I don’t think that’s entirely a posture issue. I think your lower body is just too thick...”

“That’s true too.”

He had not been this bulky at first, but after eating well and fighting constantly, his body had filled out considerably.

“It’s a little awkward to trade up here. Should we go down?”

“Mm... Let’s head over there.”

They found a suitable spot and landed. As they had discussed before, they traded for additional Eagles.

“I’m later than expected. Sorry about that.”

“Taming them must not be easy.”

“That too, but there are competitors now, so there are fewer good spots.”

“Ah.”

Apparently, location mattered for Eagle taming too.

Seo Hajin nodded and gave him a saddle like his own, which he had promised last time.

“It’s nothing special, but I included the blueprint. If you have a processing skill, you should be able to make the same thing.”

“Ah... Thank you. I do have some leatherworking ability, but it doesn’t turn out the way I want.”

“You’ll improve with practice.”

“I guess so. I should keep trying.”

They did not arrange another trade.

Five Eagles were enough for now, and each one was expensive enough that making an advance reservation felt burdensome.

Still, TrueFinal said he would keep trying to tame them, so Seo Hajin could likely buy more later if needed.

“So where are you going now? Another tour of the other fields?”

“Ah. I’ll do that later. For now, I’m planning to look around the parts of the Northern Forest I haven’t visited.”

“There are still places you haven’t been?”

“There are a few corners. Especially the far northern end...”

“Ah. You mean the End of the World.”

The End of the World.

That was what users called the outermost edges of each Area. Some said that if you actually went there, there was nothing beyond it.

“Have you been there?”

“Not north... I suppose it would be east. I’ve been to the outskirts of the Logging Forest over there.”

“Will it be similar?”

“I’m not sure. Probably not. You know how each field feels like a separate world, even within the same Area.”

“It does feel that way.”

“What I saw at the eastern edge was a similar forest continuing beyond an impassable wall in empty space.”

“A similar forest...”

“Yes. It seemed like it was originally part of the same forest, but the mountain range at the edge drew a clear line between them and blocked it off.”

It looked artificial.

At first, he had only thought there was a very high mountain range in the distance. But as time passed, he realized it shimmered like a mirage.

“That makes me even more curious.”

“Yes. It’ll be much better to see it yourself than hear about it. Anyway, I’ll make good use of this saddle.”

TrueFinal had already switched to the saddle Seo Hajin gave him and settled into position without difficulty. His thighs were not as thick, so he looked considerably more stable.

“Isn’t it uncomfortable?”

“No, it’s fine. Maybe it would be different after a long time... but that’s less the saddle’s fault and more because this guy is built this way.”

TrueFinal said there were probably two options. He seemed to have reached much the same conclusion after giving it considerable thought himself.

“One is to position the saddle farther forward like this. Raise your legs higher so they don’t catch on the wing joints... The other is what I did, pulling it farther back and stretching your legs forward. But that has pretty obvious drawbacks too.”

“It looked less stable during high-speed flight.”

“Exactly. If I make a sharp turn... Whew. There were several times I nearly got flung sideways.”

There was another option.

Change the saddle’s shape and install a raised seat, more like a proper riding seat.

Then the legs would not have to hang down, and the rider’s body could sit higher. But protruding that much would create air resistance during flight.

“When I kept thinking about it, I realized I’d eventually have to put an enclosure around it like a cockpit. But I don’t think this guy could handle that much.”

“Right. At least not yet.”

“Yes. It needs to evolve.”

As Monsters leveled up, their strength and various other stats increased.

Evolution was the same.

They started from Level 1 again, but they became stronger, never weaker.

“But Keys are rare.”

“They are.”

“Then again, Juggernaut, you aren’t alone... Thinking about it, you must be even more short on them.”

It was a slight misunderstanding.

Seo Hajin did not bother correcting him.

Juggernaut was not alone, after all.

“Then I should head back.”

“Okay. It was nice seeing you.”

“Ah, and one more thing.”

Unlike Juggernaut, TrueFinal was also attaching reins to his Eagle when he remembered something else.

“A phone?”

“They occasionally come out of Item Boxes. Phones and tablets.”

“They do.”

By now, most users probably had at least one. Since the Field Level had risen, even ordinary Mobs dropped boxes.

But aside from being able to use them in Korean thanks to the system, there had not been much they could do with them. Apparently, that was no longer the case.

“I heard you can link them directly to the system. You can probably find the method on the board.”

“What changes when you link one?”

“For starters, you can display or use the phone through the system window without holding it. You can use the apps on it through the system too.”

“There weren’t many apps.”

Apparently, that varied from person to person. TrueFinal nodded.

“You can share apps through the system too. One of them is a messenger.”

“A messenger?”

Was there something like that?

No. Even after thinking about it, Seo Hajin did not remember seeing one among the phones or tablets he owned.

“So if I link a phone to the system, I can receive shared apps from others?”

“Yes. After linking your phone to the system, you access it like the internet, and there’s a separate board apart from the existing community.”

TrueFinal said he was telling Juggernaut this because he could not find him on that board or messenger.

He wondered whether Juggernaut simply did not know about it. Apparently, that was exactly the case.

“I’ll check when I get back.”

“Okay. My ID there is the same as it is now, so if you don’t mind, please add me as a friend later.”

If there was a messenger, there was no longer any need to call someone out or talk to them on a completely public board that did not even guarantee anonymity.

“So that’s why the board has been overflowing with trash trolls lately.”

“Ha ha. It does feel that way.”

Since most serious conversations happened in the phone-linked community, the old board was becoming a literal trash can.

There were still posts that were not shitposts if one looked carefully, but they had become far less frequent than before.

‘I thought people were just getting more stressed out.’

Board shitposts were common back home too, so they were not strange. The problem was that here, even actual pictures of shit would not be deleted, nor would the poster be banned.

“Poop pictures? Of course they get blocked. Each board has moderators, and since people make individual IDs to use them, you can block people yourself too.”

“It’s exactly like real-world communities.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“Thanks for telling me. This will be useful.”

“Ha ha. See you later.”

“Okay.”

After their casual farewell, the two Eagles carrying them turned in different directions.

Seo Hajin thought of the various terminals piled in one corner of his Subspace, then began the training he had planned while he was at it.

It was closer to practice than training, but since a mistake could kill him, he needed to take it seriously.

He would open the Subspace in midair and enter and exit with the Eagle, or alone.

‘I did it while falling last time.’

It had been from roughly fifty meters up.

Naturally, that could kill him instantly. Still, if he was lucky, a Level 50 Avatar could suffer only minor injuries from a fall at that height.

‘Though I’m not sure a broken ankle counts as a minor injury. It does heal quickly if I eat well and recover.’

Either way, he needed to do it during flight this time.

Opening the Subspace and entering it while moving at high speed was not easy. If he did it clumsily, his movements would not match the Eagle’s.

So this time, he made proper use of Hive Command, adjusting his intentions and the Eagle’s movements almost in real time.

The Subspace opened almost as fast as light, so there was no chance of delay there.

‘It’s fortunate I don’t get caught or blocked even if it isn’t fully open.’

After several attempts, he successfully entered the Subspace while riding the Eagle.

He also managed to fly out of the Subspace into the sky as though launching from it.

“So I just need to stay alert.”

What remained was entering and exiting alone, leaving the Eagle behind. That was genuinely dangerous, so he took out and put on the unfinished parachute.

‘It doesn’t open properly, but it does slow my fall a little.’

Practice followed practice.

He nearly died about five times on the way to the end of the Northern Forest, but he eventually got the hang of it without any real problem.

While inside the Subspace, he found a suitable terminal to bring along. After finishing his practice and returning to ordinary flight, he linked it to the system as TrueFinal had explained.

“This is pretty complicated.”

Who had figured this out?

Had they been that bored over winter?

“Internet connection... The name is different, but this must be the internet?”

Like someone using a smartphone for the first time, he carefully poked at various settings and added apps.

As TrueFinal had said, there was a board for sharing apps. But there were also plenty of fake bait posts, so it took some time.

‘What kind of app is this?’

There were all sorts of apps.

There were ones similar to those he had seen back home, of course, but also apps that made him wonder why anyone had made such a thing.

‘Camera linking... Ah. Right, some of these had cameras.’

Some phones from this other world had cameras, while others did not. The ones without them seemed like budget models, but they operated so quickly when he tried them that they did not seem entirely low-end either.

‘Then since I linked this phone to the system, can I take pictures and upload them now too?’

He thought only people with related system functions could do that, but it seemed this would let him use photo functions without one.

When he tried it, it worked.

He could use the linked phone’s functions through the system. He could even set an angle and take a picture without taking out the phone.

There was a limitation that he could not produce results beyond the linked phone’s specifications, but that was not much of a problem.

‘This is the messenger app with the most comments.’

It looked more like a social network than a messenger.

Still, it seemed to allow private messages like DMs, adding friends, and making separate chatrooms with certain users.

‘So it’s enough for messaging too. I should download it for now.’

He had never used social media back home either. Even with internet communities, he had only searched them when there was a specific issue and never had a regular ID.

‘Is this how I sign up?’

The process was not complicated.

He chose an ID and entered a personal profile.

Then he took a suitable photo and uploaded it.

It was a real-time selfie of him flying on the Eagle. It was not particularly cool.

‘It looks more like I’m hanging on for dear life.’

The unusual thing was that he did not need to set a password.

There was a notice explaining that since it was linked to each person’s system, there was no need to worry about separate security.

‘Does that mean nobody else can log in anyway, so there’s no risk of hacking?’

Could the system itself be hacked?

After thinking about it briefly, he shook his head.

‘If that happened, SNS security would be the least of anyone’s problems.’

He found TrueFinal through the ID search function and sent a friend request. Whether TrueFinal had been waiting or received a notification, it was accepted almost immediately.

[TrueFinal: Nice profile picture.]

[TrueFinal: I should change mine too.]

This was nice?

Probably just being polite.

Seo Hajin shook his head, then realized he had reached an outer area of the Northern Forest where he had never set foot.

‘It was difficult to approach from the ground.’

The slopes were rough.

There did not seem to be many Wolf monsters, nor any valuable herbs, so he had never bothered coming here.

But looking down from the sky, he felt that not coming had been the right decision.

“There’s nothing here.”

Unlike the eastern forest edge TrueFinal had seen, this forest did not continue endlessly. At a certain point, it stopped.

Beyond it lay foothills covered in rocks of various sizes, and beyond those stood a high mountain range like a folding screen.

It was high, but not so impossibly high that he could not see its peaks while riding the Eagle.

So after gaining even more altitude, he could eventually see the scenery beyond the mountain range.

“Mm.”

It was not as though he had glimpsed some shocking secret or encountered cosmic horror.

He could simply see that there was something there. And among that scenery were some artificial things.

‘Stone buildings?’

Several buildings that looked quite old.

Most were worn down or collapsed, and it did not appear that people still lived around them.

‘They might not have been people.’

That thought occurred to him. Soon after, he confirmed that although he could see beyond the massive mountain range before him, he could not cross it.

[You have approached an Area boundary.]

[Be careful. You may collide with the Boundary Wall.]

Boundary Wall.

Boundary. And wall.

Seo Hajin considered the words for a moment. Then he noticed the word “collide” and changed direction.

The Eagle could not hover in place. At this rate, they could truly crash into the wall in question.

‘It probably doesn’t mean the mountain range. It must mean that transparent, shimmering thing.’

A transparent wall rose high above the mountain range, likely the Area boundary. One would not even know it existed without getting close.

It rippled finely as if swaying in the wind, resembling a transparent curtain. But it might be harder than it looked.

‘Let’s go back.’

He had seen what he was curious about. That was enough.

Since he had already turned, he changed direction completely and flew west along the northern outer boundary, observing more places he had not personally visited before.

At the same time, he browsed SNS.

The system-linking function was useful because he could use it without an Avatar like Juggernaut directly operating it.

Perhaps that was because he could open and use the system even through his aerial viewpoint, which could be considered Seo Hajin’s main body and had no hands or feet.

He could even type on a virtual keyboard with his thoughts. He wondered whether this was what it felt like to put a chip in one’s head and operate a computer with brainwaves.

‘It’s noisy here too.’

TrueFinal had said people could block others, not that there were no troll posts.

He casually scrolled through nonsense on the public pages, then stopped at a post with photos of what was happening in the Giant Lake field.

He had vaguely imagined the situation there as bloodshed caused by fighting over territory. But seeing actual photos and videos made it far more serious.

‘It really looks like a war.’

The fact that people did not stay dead when they died.

The fact that they restarted naked.

That diluted the guilt of killing someone, even if only a little.

Was that why?

As time passed, people became more heated.

Things that should have ended as arguments drew blood. When they escalated beyond that, it had begun to feel natural for someone to die.

‘This could become a problem if we return home.’

He did not know.

Part of him thought a game was just a game and people would not act like that in reality. But was it really possible to dismiss this world as just a game?

‘Am I okay?’

Seo Hajin asked himself that question and shook his head.

The answer came immediately.

‘I was strange to begin with.’

He did not know.

If he returned home, would it still be the same as before? That seemed like the first thing he needed to consider.

‘Somehow, I don’t think it will be.’

Outside the boundary.

Buildings that seemed to have been built in the Middle Ages, or perhaps even earlier.

He did not know much about architectural styles, but he had an instinctive sense that they were not from Earth.

‘I don’t know whether they’re simply traces of an old settlement or remnants of a world that has fallen.’

Perhaps Earth could become like that too.

He could not easily shake off the thought that followed.

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