Chapter 21: Accused of Microtransactions
The five ragtag thugs lay unconscious outside in the narrow alley, left to soak in the cold, silent drizzle.
Even Ji-Hong’s two elite bodyguards—trained martial artists—had been rendered completely helpless and hospitalized for a month after tasting the System’s electrocution. Naturally, five average street hooligans didn’t stand a chance.
Even though Irene had seen Divine Lightning hit Donape before, she still stood frozen, staring at the charred, twitching figures outside the door.
The scale of power was completely different. When Donape was struck, he had walked away totally fine and unscathed, but these five men had been instantly paralyzed and laid out cold.
Ga-Eun and Mira were in total shock, their eyes wide and their mouths hanging open in utter disbelief.
"W-What just happened?!" Mira finally blurted out, breaking the stunned silence.
Irene snapped back to reality and immediately turned toward the VR capsule behind the counter. "Shopkeeper! You know what just happened, don’t you?!"
"Um... let’s call an ambulance first so those guys aren’t blocking the sidewalk," Donape’s voice drifted out casually from inside his capsule.
"Can you please step out and deal with this mess?!" Irene yelled, gritting her teeth at his unbelievable lack of urgency.
"Yeah! Get out here already!" Ga-Eun chimed in with a huff.
Sighing, Donape rolled his eyes inside the capsule and stepped out without pausing his game.
It wasn’t that he was being reckless—VR games simply didn’t work like traditional console or PC games where you could hit a pause button mid-match. It needed certain conditions so the feature could be available.
Luckily, he wasn’t in the middle of a high-stakes quest; otherwise, leaving his character idle would have tanked his reward efficiency.
Donape casually pulled out his phone and dialed for an ambulance, making Irene frown in disbelief.
"An ambulance?!" she blurted out. "Why not the police?! They literally just tried to assault us!"
"Police are too much paperwork," Donape replied, not even looking up as he gave the paramedics the address. "Besides, do you really think those guys are coming back?"
He shoved his phone back in his pocket and gestured toward the fried thugs outside.
"They’re permanently blacklisted. If they step foot within this shop again, that same lightning will hit them twice as hard. Frankly, I’d be surprised if they survive a second round."
Silence fell over the shop.
Ga-Eun and Mira swallowed hard. Suddenly, all those absurdly strict shop rules—and the way Ji-Hong’s terrifying bodyguards behaved like polite schoolboys inside—made total, terrifying sense.
Irene stared at him, the pieces finally clicking together in her mind. His total lack of concern, his complete indifference to danger... and that viral video of him taking down five guys last night. It wasn’t fake at all.
"So... that’s why the front door doesn’t have a lock?" Irene asked, her voice dropping.
"It doesn’t have one while we’re open," Donape shrugged. "When the shop closes up, the System—er, the security automatically seals it tight. Nobody gets in unless I want them to."
Mira gulped, exchanging a wide-eyed glance with Ga-Eun. "So... in other words, inside this shop... is basically the safest place in the entire city?"
"More or less," Donape answered, shrugging nonchalantly.
Coincidentally, the nine VR Capsules hissed open simultaneously, signaling that their playtime was over.
Irene, Ga-Eun, and Mira flinched instinctively, still shaken by the terrifying ordeal with those five scum just moments ago.
Meanwhile, Donape turned back toward his personal VR Capsule, reassuring them over his shoulder, "If anything else happens, just call as you did earlier."
Although he hated dealing with trivial, real-world nonsense, he was the shopkeeper. Whether he liked it or not, maintaining the shop was part of the job.
[Hey, mortal. Do not display such gross negligence toward paying customers. They are infinitely more valuable to the business than a slave like you.]
Donape’s eye twitched.
’This bitch disappears for days and only pops back up to talk trash? And since when did this Tyrannical System care about customer service?!’
"Do you have a glitch or something?!" Donape snapped under his breath. "Since when are you so warm and gentle with the patrons?!"
[Initiating: Divine Lightning!]
ZAP!
A blinding arc of divine electricity materialized out of thin air, blasting Donape dead center and dropping him to the floor.
’This motherf*cker is utterly broken at its core...,’ Donape groaned internally, smoke practically wafting off his shoulders.
The sudden blast made Irene, her friends, and all nine bodyguards jump in surprise.
"W-What was that?!" Mira gasped, looking around frantically. "Is there another intruder?!"
A-Ji and Ji-Ga swallowed hard. Even though they had witnessed the System’s lightning before, seeing it strike out of nowhere still made their skin crawl. The other seven guards exchanged bewildered glances, completely lost.
"Shopkeeper, are you alright?!" Irene asked, rubbing her chest to calm her racing heart.
"Yeah... totally fine," Donape grunted, picking himself up off the floor with a groan. His muscles ached, and his energy felt completely drained.
To make matters worse, he couldn’t even chug a glass of Origins Fountain Water to recover—he’d already hit his daily quota hours ago.
Meanwhile, A-Ji and Ji-Ga instructed the other seven bodyguards to grab a bite outside and take a break, while the two of them stayed behind at the Origins VR Cafe to wait for their young master.
Irene, Ga-Eun, and Mira settled into their VR capsules, diving back into their game to wash away the lingering trauma from those five scum.
However, a photo Irene had casually uploaded to her social media earlier was rapidly causing a massive stir online.
The post ignited a fierce debate. Netizens were utterly baffled—what kind of shop prioritized full-dive VR capsules over standard gaming PCs? Why were the prices higher than luxury lounges? What was with the absurdly strict rules, and why did the menu sell items with strange names that defied all common sense?
The comment section was an absolute battleground:
User_Troll99: 15 BC for something called "Origins Fountain Water"?! Is this owner selling holy water from a fantasy novel? What a total scam shop lol.
Seoul_Gourmet: You have to pay 20 BC an hour AND an extra 120 BC just to "activate" a game called Counter-Injustice?! The microtransactions in this place are insane! He attached a skull icon to the end of his comment, as if the sheer absurdity of the pricing had actually killed him.
Keyboard_Warrior: "No bartering, no discounts, immediate forceful eviction..." Who wrote these rules, a dark lord? The owner must have severe main-character syndrome.
VR_Nerd_2026: Wait, real full-dive VR capsules? Look at those game titles—The Path of the Heavenly Martial Arts and Counter-Injustice?! Where is this place located? I need to test those machines!
College_Girl_Fan: Look at the background of her photo though... that menu interface looks ridiculously futuristic. Definitely not cheap props or a standard PC café setup.
As the post gained traction, the debate shifted toward the shopkeeper himself—specifically whether he was the same guy from the viral five-on-one alley fight video from last night.
Night_Owl_Witness: I literally witnessed the shopkeeper beat up five guys live last night! It wasn’t staged—he’s a monster. I had no idea he owned a shop. I’m going there to buy that 75 BC "Spirit-Clearing Dew" thing to see what it does.
└ Skeptical_Panda: You must be colluding with the shopkeeper to promote this place, right? Paid actor detected! A clown icon sat at the end of the reply, dripping with heavy sarcasm.
└ Gamer_X: Right, just admit it’s a staged ad! Who caps water purchases at "1 per day"? That’s obviously a fake hype marketing trick!
Curious_Cat: A café charging 75 BC for "Spirit-Clearing Dew", charging 120 BC game activation fees, and having a kung-fu owner sounds hilarious. Drop the address! I want to see this place in person.
Meanwhile, far from the online noise, inside a grand mansion at the heart of S City, a frail-looking old man with hair as white as snow sat in a leisurely posture—yet his eyes burned with a surprisingly youthful vigor.
He was watching his granddaughter practice her martial arts with diligent focus.
"Si-Yeon-ah, Grandpa is certain you’ll thrash your cousins at the Patriarch’s birthday banquet again this year. Hehe," chuckled Baek Si-Jin, an elder of the prestigious Baek Family.
"Of course, Grandpa," Baek Si-Yeon replied cheerfully, wiping the sweat from her brow as she finished her form. "I will continue to prove that our branch is superior to the rest."
"Hahaha! Indeed. Your only real competition comes from the other branch lines. After all, your main-branch cousin, Baek Ji-Hong, has been completely out of the picture for a long time."
"That’s what frustrates me, Grandpa," Si-Yeon said, her brow furrowing slightly. "Every time the banquet is held, the Patriarch refuses to appoint a generation leader just because Ji-Hong is useless and can’t compete. It makes securing our family’s resource distribution unnecessarily difficult."
"Don’t worry too much. This year’s banquet will be different from the last," Si-Jin assured her, a sharp glint flashing in his eyes. "The pressure on the Patriarch to formally establish the main successor of your generation has reached its boiling point. The elders—including myself—will be confronting him openly and formally this time."
"That’s fantastic news! While the previous generation belonged to Ji-Hong’s father and grandfather, this generation ought to belong to us!" Si-Yeon declared firmly, her eyes burning with ambition.
Suddenly, a recent report from her intelligence network crossed her mind.
"Ah, right... Grandpa. I received a report about Ji-Hong recently. Word was going around that he’s been attending college diligently, but my agents checked into it. It turns out he’s been skipping class every day to spend hours tucked away in a shabby, dilapidated shop called Origins VR Cafe."
"What?!" Si-Jin’s eyes snapped wide, his posture instantly straightening as a heavy pressure filled the room. "Origins?! How dare a mere shop take on a name so divine?!"
His grip tightened, causing the thick wooden armrest to groan and creak violently under the sheer, disciplined force of his hands.