Problem solving and a little preparation

John immediately collapsed onto the floor of his room with a thud as nausea overcame his senses. Any attempt at moving felt terrible and spurred even greater pain. After approximately fifteen minutes, he finally felt good enough to even stand up.

Upon staggering to his feet, he maneuvered himself into his computer chair so he could wait it out. After all, he didn’t have anything to fix this and didn’t want to experience the pain of breaking something.

In all fairness, how was I supposed to know that shifting your body imperfectly into a spacial rift would do harm? …After thinking that, I realize once more that I truly am a dumbass.

Thankfully the status effect slowly dwindled in both intensity and duration, eventually becoming little more than a slight headache over the course of half an hour.

After everything was said and done, John felt much dumber than he had before. He was hit with a pressing concern to prevent debuffs like that in the future. If avoiding them entirely wasn't an option, he could at least try to shorten their lengthy duration. Stuff like that could undoubtedly get him killed in any scenario. And to put it lightly, dying was not something John wished to do just yet in the slightest.

So he did what anyone would do, and searched for something that would help fix this for him when the time came. John wanted something reasonably cheap and also potentially consumable, as it wouldn’t matter if he hoarded or stockpiled them. While he did find a few potential candidates for something that could work, they were mostly just too goddamn expensive for his liking.

So John just mentally filed this for later and moved onto the next issue. His almost complete lack of anything resembling defense. After a few moments, he resolved that he could fix this issue, quite easily in fact now that he had the materials from the freaky rat barrier to work with.

John took out the 2 rat pelts and 2 of the 3 reinforced bones that he had gotten earlier along with a few chunks of copper and tin before activating Craft, envisioning a pair of armored pants as detailed as he could. Which wasn’t very, considering his lack of experience with sewing in general.

The magic quickly got to work after only a moment of hesitation, quickly slicing apart unneeded sections of the hide and setting them aside as presumably unneeded scrap. The chunks of tin and copper gradually began to glow white hot before liquifying entirely. The two liquids were stripped of unneeded impurities as specks of material were drawn out before being discarded and suspended in the air and gradually introduced to one another, combining the elements to create a crude bronze alloy in the shape of two knee guards.

The bone was sliced into small strips, which were added throughout the entire structure by being heated to the point of being bent, particularly to the knee to eliminate structural weaknesses. Bands of this organometallic substance were added to the back of each pant leg, which John assumed was for protection.

Finally, after being suspended for about a minute more for cooling and minor adjustments, the completed product slowly floated down onto John’s desk.

Needless to say, the first thing John did was to immediately Observe it.

Well, it’s not the best, but it really is the best I’ve got. So John took it into his inventory and equipped it, intending to find out how comfortable and potentially restrictive it was.

The pants appeared replacing part of his uniform, and John took a few practice steps around to test them out, immediately revealing their downside. They were just really heavy for him to walk around with. While they were comfortable and all, that combined with the slight restriction of his range of motion imparted by the metal reinforcements.

All in all, it wasn’t terrible. So John put them back into his inventory only to be confronted by yet another problem. His inventory slots were rapidly dwindling in availability. He needed somewhere to store the stuff he didn’t need on him.

However, as John realized, he might have already solved half of the problem. He opened his closet before rummaging inside of it in search of something. After a minute or so, he found what he was looking for. A custom made chest that his Uncle had bought for him to store all of the physical copies of his games. It was a nice, high quality chest with a design inspired from The Legend of Zelda, along with a triforce symbol on top.

However, he found that moving it anywhere would require some significant effort due to the combined weight of the metal container and its contents. So he just didn’t try to. He had to test if his guess was correct.

John reached for the latch before unhooking it and opening the lid. An inventory panel immediately popped up in response. Huh. I half expected that not to work.

So he ended up offloading most of his crafting materials, potentially useful loot, and trinkets into the box, finding that his inventory was much more spacious at the end, with a whopping 17 slots more by the end.

In fact, he even spotted something he had all but forgotten about by now. The Ring of the Swarm. So he checked the stats of it.

Well damn, that’ll come in handy when Faith is around. Kinda a waste of a slot otherwise though.

And with that, he was left without any problems to use as an excuse to procrastinate on reading the books any longer. So he pulled one out and began to read.

Half an Hour Later

John had hit a wall in his studies. He had eventually deduced that reading textbooks was goddamn boring.

It reminded him too much of being back in school, having to teach himself a lot of the material because his teacher was too busy reading Faceledger on her computer to actually teach.

Trying to find any distraction from the very informative brick of paper in front of him that he could, John realized that he could thankfully actually be doing something else with his time.

He pulled up the Abyss Auction once more, before searching for Health and Mana Potions. Thankfully that netted an incredible list of results, albeit ones beyond what he could really handle physically, let alone economically.

So he specified what he wanted by putting “Lesser” as a descriptor. This yielded a much shorter list, but of things that were actually affordable for John.

A couple immediately caught his eye, specifying that they tasted like blueberries, for whatever reason. They were sold by ‘Ales and Ailments’, whose real identity John had no clue of.

So he opened them in separate tabs before taking a look. The Mana Potion guaranteed the restoration of at least 20 Maybel. A unit of measurement that John had absolutely no idea had existed until he read that. I really hope that translates one-to-one with mana points…

It also came with a short warning on the listing, specifying that the ingestion of too many within 24 hours could have detrimental effects including, but not limited to, ****, Nausea, Mana Rejection, and many other things that John didn’t bother to read because he got the jist of it.

The Health Potion didn’t indicate specific numbers for obvious reasons, but it seemed to be much of the same, specifying a taste and with a very similar warning label.

After looking at a few other varieties, he felt as if it was a good deal in terms of what he was getting, at least comparatively.

So he ordered 3 of each, much to his wallet’s disapproval. They cost him a total of $3960, only taking out a small chunk of his complimentary funds.

And then he sat, wondering how long this would take. Thankfully, it wasn’t a long wait, only about ten minutes or so.

As John was scrolling through the collection of memes that was the internet, a knocking sound came from his window, which was surprising to say the least, considering it was on the second floor.

He opened the curtains, revealing a small drone carrying a comparatively massive box along with it. It was repeatedly ramming itself into the window, hence the knocking noise.

So John unlatched the window and opened it to allow the drone access. It stopped for a moment, as if processing the change to its surroundings, before floating through the open window with a barely audible whir.

Within a moment the drone landed, carefully depositing its cargo on the floor of John’s room. It took off as soon as it was done, flying off into the distance outside. He then closed and latched the window with a dull thud.

He opened the package using a pair of scissors from his desk, revealing exactly 6 potions, 3 blue and 3 red. John cast Observe on them to see if he had truly gotten what he had bought.

Thankfully, the seller was truthful and he had indeed gotten what he had paid for. So he took both of them into his inventory.

John immediately pulled up his Barrier Dive menu, selecting Crude Golems once more. But this time, he was more interested in discovering something. Levels in games always had easter eggs or secret content, after all. Why would this be any exception?

Initiate Barrier Dive?
Enemy: Crude Golem
Cost: 13 MP
Yes/No

Initiating Barrier Dive...
Populating Barrier…
Wiping Memories...
Dive in Progress…

Wait, what was that last bit? was John’s last thought as he was pulled into the infinite blackness once more.