Chapter 49: A Useful Death
Chapter 49: A Useful Death
Jin didn’t rage-quit.
He wasn’t twelve.
Instead, he sat in the darkness and did the math.
Two hours per death.
Fourteen days contained three hundred and thirty-six hours. Every careless death consumed two of them—not through injury, blood or permanent damage, but through a respawn timer that continued ticking while the deadline for his examination results drew closer.
Death wasn’t free.
It was cheap.
Those weren’t the same thing.
Confusing them would be how Jin reached the end of the two weeks having farmed nothing except a respawn screen.
But Glitch’s death hadn’t been completely wasted.
Jin knew the large slime’s splitting mechanic now.
He hadn’t known it five minutes ago, and he wouldn’t have discovered it by remaining perfectly safe. Some mechanics couldn’t be understood from a status screen. Someone had to be standing inside the trap when it activated.
Two hours had purchased information that might have cost an ordinary Tamer their beast’s life.
That was a bargain.
So the goal isn’t to avoid dying.
It’s to make every death worth something.
A useless death wasted two hours.
A useful death purchased information.
Jin opened the newly unlocked Auto-Battle settings and rebuilt the routine with the specific paranoia of someone who had just been betrayed by his own pet through a menu. The Archive could reproduce learned behavior, but it could not invent judgment Glitch had never acquired. Every instruction still needed boundaries.
Gather Beginner Herbs — Priority
2. Hunt Small Slimes Only
3. Practice Harden Against Manageable Attacks
4. Large Slime — Avoid Unless Manually Supervised
5. If Health Falls Below Safety Limit, Disengage and Return to Spawn Rock
Jin read the routine twice, hunting for weaknesses in his own instructions with an attention he had never once given his homework.
Then he remained awake for the entire respawn timer.
There was no version of Jin Astor that could sleep while a deployment timer had less than two hours remaining.
At 03:41, the digital avatar reassembled on the spawn rock, completely healthy and—Jin felt this very clearly—deeply embarrassed.
We don’t talk about it, Jin sent.
Glitch responded with injured dignity.
Jin activated the improved routine, placed the phone beside his pillow and lost consciousness in under a minute.
The Outer Ring night continued around them.
Under a worn blanket, the real Glitch slept with his injured leg stretched out and still. His body healed slowly, following rules that didn’t care about Jin’s ambition.
Under Mossy Hollow’s false green sky, his digital counterpart hunted.
The real leg rested.
The digital legs ran, dodged and braced. The avatar absorbed manageable blows against its hardened shoulder, turned and struck back.
The real chest rose and fell in the darkness of a cramped apartment buried beneath the wasteland.
The avatar tracked another slime through the moss, killed it and moved onward while Jin slept and the pipes overhead ticked with the endless rhythm of Shelter 7’s life-support systems.
One of them slept and recovered.
The other worked and improved.
Somewhere inside the machinery of a hostile world, a small black lizard was quietly cheating the rule that had controlled every Tamer since the first beast contract.
Jin woke at 10:12 with his cheek stuck to his phone and a headache sitting behind his eyes like a coin.
He peeled the device from his face and checked the results.
[AFK Session Complete]
[Small Slimes Defeated: 27]
[Beginner Herbs Obtained: 9]
[Coins Obtained: 36]
[Combat Instinct Increased]
[Agility Development Recorded]
[Harden Proficiency Increased]
[Avatar Deaths: 2]
Two deaths.
Almost four hours spent in the respawn queue.
Jin checked the activity log. Both deaths had occurred near the same slime pack in the same narrow corner, even after the disengagement condition activated.
The routine had worked.
It simply wasn’t intelligent enough to understand that one corner yet.
Record it. Correct it. Move on.
Twenty-seven slimes. Nine herbs. Thirty-six coins.
It wasn’t an enormous haul, even by the Engine’s standards.
Jin didn’t care.
He had acquired it while unconscious.
No bruises. No blood. No danger to Glitch’s real body. Jin had been drooling into his pillow while his beast became more experienced.
No other Tamer in Terra-Nova, regardless of their rank or wealth, could honestly say the same.
Then the next notification appeared.
[Unsynchronized Growth Available]
[Estimated Synchronization Load: Moderate]
There it was.
The button.
Jin’s thumb moved toward [Sync] on reflex.
Moderate meant real progress. It meant the accumulated experience of the night flowing through the soul-link into Glitch’s physical body.
Faster.
Tougher.
Better.
Now.
Jin stopped.
He looked toward the blanket.
Glitch’s injured leg remained swollen. It was better than yesterday, but still warm and far from properly healed.
Jin remembered what Sync did.
The terrible hunger afterward. The shaking. The exhaustion. The way Glitch had eaten an absurd amount and then slept for eleven hours after their previous transfer.
Sync forced a real body to change, and that change consumed energy.
Jin didn’t know how it would interact with a healing wound.
Perhaps it would help.
Perhaps it would redirect Glitch’s reserves into muscle and hide while depriving the injured tissue of what it needed.
There was only one way to discover the answer.
Experiment on Glitch.
No.
Not for a statistic.
Jin closed the panel.
[Growth Stored]
[Expiry: None]
"It’ll keep," Jin muttered. "You rest."
The great thing about a bank was that nobody forced you to withdraw.
Jin was about to put the phone down when it chimed.
Ding!
[Regional Condition Satisfied]
[Mossy Hollow Boss Encounter Available]
[First-Clear Reward Detected]
[Encounter Window: 06:00:00]
Jin stopped breathing.
The Mossy Hollow map redrew itself.
The familiar slime fields remained. The spawn rock. The gathering pocket where Glitch had recently suffered a deeply embarrassing death.
Then a section beyond the known dungeon unfolded like a door Jin had walked past dozens of times without noticing.
Something waited at its center.
The silhouette was enormous.
It was a slime in the same way a landslide was dirt—a towering mound crowned with moss and slabs of stone. Blue mana pulsed inside its body like the slow heartbeat of something sleeping.
The boss didn’t move.
It simply waited at the bottom of the beginner dungeon, apparently having been there the entire time.
[First-Clear Reward Detected]
Jin’s pulse accelerated.
On the screen, the healthy digital Glitch had already turned toward the newly revealed region. His body lowered. His tail became flat and still.
Every part of him said yes.
Beside Jin, the real Glitch woke.
He yawned, stretched, then remembered his injury and carefully lifted the bandaged leg from the floor.
Jin looked at him.
Then at the digital avatar.
The national examination had given every candidate fourteen days of pacing and nail-chewing before their results arrived.
The Game Engine had taken less than one night to give Jin a boss.
He examined the six-hour timer.
Then Glitch.
"Breakfast first," Jin decided. "Then we go die professionally."