Quest: Eradicate the Shattered Tooth Tribe and rescue the Lady Knight Ailei Difficulty: High Scale: City-state Basic Reward: 2 Intelligence points. Current Success Rate: 0% (Open the drop-down menu to view details) Tip: If the success rate exceeds 100%, you can receive additional rewards. The higher the success rate, the better the rewards.
"This must be my cheat," Marvin Rodhart muttered to himself.
He had been a lowly drafting grunt at a design institute. After ten straight days of overtime, he had finally gotten a day off and planned to sleep in.
Who could have guessed that when he woke up, the pressure-relieving mattress beneath him would have turned into a medieval-style straw mat?
Wait, wasn't transmigration supposed to come with some kind of ceremony?
At least let me stumble into some good luck.
According to the original host's memories, this world was called Toril, and the continent he lived on was called Faerûn.
There was magic, gods, fiends, and angels...
There were also Elves, Dwarves, and dragons...
And countless dangers and unexpected disasters.
The original owner of this body had been a wage slave just like Marvin.
Starting at fourteen, he had worked as an assistant to a senior Mage of the Scribes Guild.
He had no regular salary, only a monthly "apprentice stipend" of five gold pieces, barely enough to support himself. On top of that, he had to shoulder tedious, exhausting work and sometimes even risk his life.
After a full ten years, the original host could no longer endure the draining, oppressive life. He angrily quit and became an adventurer in pursuit of freedom.
"When a Chinese wage slave pursues freedom, the most he does is listen to Blue Lotus and cycle along Route 318. A wage slave from another world is much more hard-core—he calls a life spent fighting monsters every day 'freedom.'"
As Marvin absorbed the original host's memories, he couldn't help sighing.
Just like the opening of countless clichéd fantasy novels, the original host had met three other rookie adventurers and formed a party with a complete warrior, Mage, Cleric, and rogue lineup.
And shortly after setting out, they had come across an enormous opportunity.
Duchess Belynne Stelmane, one of the four rulers of the famous trading city of Baldur's Gate, had announced a quest to adventurers throughout the Southern Sword Coast:
Her daughter, Ailei, had been captured by the Shattered Tooth, a Goblin tribe in Cloakwood Forest.
The duchess had offered an extremely generous reward to any adventurer who could rescue her beloved daughter:
Ten thousand gold pieces, along with a rare-quality magic item.
If the circumstances were right, the rescuer could even marry Ailei and inherit the political connections of House Stelmane.
As soon as the quest was announced, the adventurer community in the Southern Sword Coast went wild.
After all, even the original host, who had spent years cooped up in a Mage's tower, knew the name Ailei Teshir Stelmane.
She came from one of the four ducal houses of Baldur's Gate and held a noble status.
An Eldritch Knight, she had been able to cast second-circle spells at just eighteen and had earned the favor of Lathander, the Morninglord.
She was a rising star in Baldur's Gate and the next heir to House Stelmane.
She was also the dream girl of countless young people in Baldur's Gate.
Who could turn down such a generous reward?
In Marvin's memories, the adventurers had been even more eager to take on the quest than people stampeding through a supermarket for free eggs.
The original host's party had also set out to attack the Goblin tribe, dreaming of "saving a beautiful knight, climbing the social ladder, and becoming one of Baldur's Gate's elite."
Unfortunately, they didn't have a protagonist's destiny.
On their first night in Cloakwood Forest, they were attacked by unknown enemies.
All three companions were killed on the spot.
The original host had barely escaped back to town with the spell Expeditious Retreat, but he was gravely wounded and had no money to pay a Cleric for treatment.
In the end, the combined torment of his injuries and regret stopped his heart, and the soul of a transmigrator took over his body.
"If the original host had had a cheat and known the quest had a zero percent success rate, maybe he wouldn't have acted so recklessly," Marvin mused.
Actually, he wouldn't have needed a cheat. With enough knowledge and a clear head in the face of a generous reward, he could have avoided this tragedy.
A lady knight captured by Goblins...
Before transmigrating, Marvin had seen plenty of plots like that.
And every time he finished one, his arms felt weak, his body felt drained, and he couldn't help pondering the meaning of the universe.
But the Goblins of Faerûn were very different from those sleazy monsters in Japanese fantasy, who were steeped in stereotypes and spent all their time trying to capture females as breeding tools.
Though stupid, greedy, and cowardly, they were still an intelligent species, with their own language, culture, and faith. They had even built a society with a system of division and cooperation.
Goblins also had both sexes, laid eggs, and were reproductively incompatible with humans.
Goblins did have a habit of enslaving other creatures, and they enjoyed tormenting their captives to satisfy their base instincts.
Usually, though, they stayed clear of the strong.
In Faerûn's system of power, those below legendary rank were divided into twenty levels.
Faerûn's natives didn't have panels like Marvin's, giving them clear numerical indicators of their progress.
But after more than a century of development and refinement, they had nonetheless established a way to judge a person's level and strength based on the skills they'd mastered in their profession.
Take the Warrior class, for example.
Once you learned the special ability Second Wind, you were no longer an apprentice. You had become a level-one Warrior and officially entered the world of professional adventurers.
If you took it a step further and mastered Action Surge, that meant you had become a level-two Warrior.
So how strong was Miss Ailei, the young lady of House Stelmane?
As an Eldritch Knight, she could cast second-circle spells and had mastered the War Magic technique, which meant she was at least level seven.
If the Goblin tribe wanted to kill such a formidable foe, they'd have to sacrifice at least forty Goblin warriors.
If they wanted to capture her, their losses would be twice that.
Goblins were naturally inclined to bully the weak and fear the strong. They were cruel and cocky when victorious, but craven and obsequious in defeat. Why would they suddenly go looking for trouble by paying a huge price to capture a woman knight with exceptional combat skills and fine equipment?
Just to provoke the duchess's wrath?
There was surely more to the quest to rescue the lady knight than met the eye.
The moment Marvin thought there might be more to the quest, his mind automatically leaped to things like "a schemer pulling the strings," "a mad Mage's deranged rampage," "a terrifying cult conspiracy," and "the gods' planar chess game"—the kind of dangerous, troublesome affairs no one wanted to get caught up in.
This was Faerûn, after all. All of the above were commonplace.
During his ten years working in a Mage's tower, the original host hadn't wasted his days away. He had studied in every spare moment. By reading an extraordinary book called Volo's Guide to Monsters, he had learned a great deal about monsters.
It could be said that no one in the entire Southern Sword Coast knew more about Goblins than he did.
However, the original host had lost his cool in the face of temptation. He had failed to apply his knowledge properly or make a rational judgment.
In the end, he hadn't escaped death.
"What's done is done. I should get out of bed first."
That was as far as Marvin's sympathy for the original host went.
He had more immediate problems to deal with: he was broke.
The quest on his panel to rescue the lady knight was clearly out of the question. He needed to find and complete another quest to fill his empty wallet.
Marvin was naturally cautious, the kind of person who wouldn't jaywalk even in the middle of the night.
A career as an adventurer—roaming the wilderness, exploring ruins, and fighting in dungeons—clearly wasn't for him.
Besides, Faerûn was an especially dangerous world.
From the original host's memories, Marvin learned that from 1358 Dalereckoning to the current year, 1490, Faerûn had suffered three great disasters in just over a century: the Time of Troubles, the Spellplague, and the Second Sundering.
Faerûn's population had actually declined over the course of that century.
Thinking about what lay behind those cold population figures sent a chill down his spine.
Fortunately, the cheat gave Marvin confidence.
Ordinary adventurers who chose high-paying quests usually had to take on high risks as well. One misstep, and they'd be gone to the gods' realms.
But Marvin was different.
So what if the quests were simple and the rewards meager?
As long as he pushed the success rate high enough, even a simple quest like gathering herbs could earn him generous system rewards and help him steadily grow stronger.
On his first day in this new world, Marvin Rodhart came up with the first law of adventuring:
An adventurer should never take risks.
Before you continue