The Difficult First Step

I was delighted to see Hua Fei Ye Luo's two 10-point rating tickets.

I'd add another chapter when I got back tonight. If time allowed, I'd add two!

"Ptooey!"

Wang Yang spat the bread out of his mouth and onto the Azure Stone Pavement in a most uncouth manner. His vulgar behavior didn't draw a single glance from the passing NPCs, but in the real world, it would have earned him plenty of disapproving stares.

The bread, mottled with black, hit the Azure Stone Pavement and immediately turned into a flurry of angular glass shards. They glittered in the sunlight before vanishing into thin air a moment later.

Wang Yang wiped his damp lips and stared at the glass shards that had disappeared in the blink of an eye. He couldn't help but freeze.

The only explanation his memories offered for such a sight was death—the phenomenon of death in SAO. But here, all that had vanished was a piece of Black Bread.

This place wasn't the real world, after all...

Wang Yang lowered his head slightly and looked at the Black Bread with a huge bite taken out of it. He wondered if he should just throw it away, but then he remembered he still had nineteen pieces of Black Bread in his item inventory, and his face immediately fell.

He'd been too damn impatient! He should've tasted it first.

"Forget it. I'll just pretend it's bitter melon. It'll detox and cool me down, so it's not a loss!" He paused, then grimaced and took another big bite of the Black Bread. Before its bitter taste could spread through his mouth, he gulped it down, swallowing the palm-sized piece in just a few breaths.

After he finished the Black Bread, the protests from his stomach gradually quieted, which offered Wang Yang some comfort.

Still, he wished he had some water...

Poor Wang Yang had no idea that Clear Water was readily available on the streets. He could get it straight from things like fountains.

Having just eaten the bread, he understood a little better why the players who chose to wait for rescue would be in such a miserable state a month later. They'd probably been driven to it.

If he didn't still have nineteen pieces of Black Bread in his item inventory, Wang Yang would've wanted to try what the other kinds of bread tasted like—and what the pastries in the glass case on the left tasted like, too.

Shaking off those pointless thoughts, Wang Yang looked at the upper-left corner of his vision. A Green Bar was displayed there, with the value 126/126 shown beneath it and lv:1 to the right.

The first thing Wang Yang had figured out about the System Settings last night was how to turn down the tactile sensation. Unfortunately, the Tactile Sensation setting had disappeared, so he'd had no choice but to give up. The second thing he'd done was make the Simplified Status Bar visible.

When your HP hit zero here, you really died. That meant the Simplified Status Bar, which displayed his HP, had to stay somewhere he could see it at all times.

After filling his stomach, Wang Yang opened the map and looked for the Equipment Shop and Weapon Shop icons. Next, he wanted to check the prices of the starting gear. If he could afford them, he'd buy a set and then experience the strength of the Newbie Monster, the Frenzied Boar, for himself.

He found the locations quickly, got to his feet, and blended into the crowd, heading toward the nearby Equipment Shop.

Like equipment shops in countless other games, the SAO shops were much the same: the buildings had prominent signs of armor or shields on their exteriors. Inside, racks displayed various pieces of gear for customers to examine. The walls were put to good use, too, covered with equipment for every part of the body and with shields. A mirror taller than a person stood among them.

When Wang Yang walked into the Equipment Shop, he was stunned. The gear hanging on the racks and walls was all real Copper Equipment. It was his first time seeing anything like it, so his reaction was only natural.

Suppressing his excitement, Wang Yang went straight to the counter. He assumed that the equipment in the shop was just for display, and that an NPC at the counter would bring up a list of items for him to choose from. That was how games usually worked.

There were three counters in the shop, each staffed by a pretty young woman with delicate features and a perpetually warm smile. The emptiness in their eyes, however, made them seem like little more than bundles of data.

Wang Yang wasn't surprised. When he reached the counter and looked at the woman, she spoke in a flat, cold voice. "How may I help you?"

At the same time, a dialogue box appeared in front of him, listing the names of the different equipment slots.

Helmet, chest armor, belt, gauntlets, trousers, shoes.

The moment Wang Yang heard her voice, his opinion of the woman plummeted. The reason was simple: the cold voice made her warm smile look unbearably jarring.

She was just an NPC...

He didn't dwell on it. He reached out and tapped the helmet slot at the top of the list. The dialogue box immediately changed to a list, but the virtual menu, which was half a person tall, only showed two pieces of equipment.

Cloth Headband: Defense +19 / 150 Kael.

Bronze Forehead Guard: Defense +26 / 300 Kael.

There weren't even any descriptions, just names and defense bonuses. They were obviously newbie gear.

A Bronze Forehead Guard cost 300 Kael, but it only gave seven more defense than a Cloth Headband, which cost 150 Kael. At a glance, the Cloth Headband was cheaper, but there was a fundamental difference in how useful the two were.

It wasn't hard to guess that the gear for the other slots worked the same way. Wang Yang opened the virtual menu for each of them, and just as he'd expected, each slot offered only two options. The defense bonuses varied by slot, as did the prices, but every piece of Bronze Type gear gave seven more defense than its Cloth Type counterpart. A full set would give him an extra forty-two defense.

But every player started with only 1,000 Kael, so he couldn't afford every piece of equipment.

Looking at the virtual menu in front of him, Wang Yang pondered the choice, unsure what to do. Based on his past experience with games, he should spend all his money at once to boost his defense. But this was SAO, so he couldn't make up his mind. After buying the gear, he'd have very little Kael left, and even then, he couldn't be sure whether the rewards from hunting monsters would be enough to support him.

The risk was simply too high. That was the main reason he couldn't decide.

"Hey, buddy, having trouble deciding what equipment to buy?" The counter was long enough to serve several players at once. A short-haired young man standing beside Wang Yang seemed to notice his dilemma and struck up a conversation.

Wang Yang came out of his reverie and turned to look. A short-haired player with a bronze complexion and an easygoing smile was watching him.

He gave the man an awkward smile and nodded in reply.

"I'd recommend buying a piece of light armor with the highest defense bonus," the short-haired player said helpfully when he saw Wang Yang look his way.

"Why?" Wang Yang asked almost instinctively.

The short-haired player chuckled. "A piece of light armor only costs 500 Kael, and its defense bonus is high. Once you put it on, you'll be in basically no danger fighting a lv. 1 Frenzied Boar."

"No danger? Are Frenzied Boars easy to fight?" Wang Yang immediately pressed him.

"Pretty easy," the short-haired player said casually. "They die in just a few sword strikes."

Huh...

Wang Yang was astonished. They died in just a few sword strikes? And he said it so casually?