Half a Month Surpasses a Year's Effort

[Talent: Ouroboros Ring (Red)]

Description: Ouroboros, the legendary giant serpent that bit its own tail, symbolized the eternal cycle and immortality.

Effect: You would have one chance at a perfect resurrection every day. No matter how thoroughly your body was destroyed, even if it was completely gone, you would rebuild your body and resurrect perfectly after death.

Additional: After resurrection, all negative conditions would be automatically removed from your body, and all abilities currently on cooldown would be reset.

Lance, who had been lying in bed preparing to sleep, suddenly widened his eyes.

He stared fixedly at the translucent panel glowing pale blue before him, while ten thousand alpacas stampeded through his heart.

That damned eroge was still chasing after him?!

Endless stamina, coupled with the ability to resurrect at full health on the spot even when trapped in a harem battlefield.

Together, those two talents perfectly formed the basic template of an eroge protagonist.

Lance could clearly feel that the short-circuit-like sensation on the panel, as though its circuitry had a bad connection, had completely vanished.

This meant the system had stabilized.

His cheat had finally finished loading completely.

Yet as he looked at that luxurious setup, there was little joy on Lance's face. Instead, it carried a trace of conflict.

This talent was like a seductive demon, frantically tempting him into that unknown and dangerous world.

Lance sighed, got out of bed, took out paper and pen from a drawer, and began doing the math.

According to his original plan, as a senior copyist, his daily wage was fifty copper coins.

After subtracting eight copper coins in carefully calculated daily living expenses, he could save forty-two copper coins per day.

On top of that, Nia had introduced him to some side work: writing five family letters a week for others, earning five copper coins per letter.

At that rate...

He only needed to endure another six years to save up the enormous sum of ten gold coins needed to travel to Ostella.

By then, he would only be twenty-four.

In the continent's most commercially prosperous city, with a mind ahead of his time, he would surely establish himself quickly, then marry a gentle young lady from another race.

But that was how ordinary people lived.

What if he became an adventurer instead?

Even as the lowest-ranked adventurer, he would only need to kill eight goblins a day.

At market price, one goblin ear could be exchanged for twenty copper coins. If he accepted a clearing mission and turned in ten at once, the guild would even award an additional silver coin.

After deducting food costs, routine weapon maintenance, and logistics, he would still have nearly forty copper coins left.

He would only need a little over two years to save ten gold coins.

And that was only an ordinary adventurer's efficiency.

Lance's gaze fell on the red entry labeled [Hvergelmir's Boiling Surge].

Ordinary people would collapse from exhaustion after killing eight. But what about him?

Thirty a day? Fifty?

As long as his mind could hold out, even killing a hundred would not be difficult.

Lance vigorously shook his head, trying to throw those lunatic thoughts out of his mind.

He could not be too greedy.

Even if he played it safe and killed only eighteen a day.

He would still need only one year to achieve the first small goal of his life.

And by then, he would have only just turned nineteen.

There was a full five years of youth between those options, and Lance simply could not refuse.

"System! This is all your fault!"

Lance covered his face in anguish and let out a mournful sigh.

"Nothing in life is harder than breaking out of your comfort zone!"

Though he complained with his mouth, Lance did not hesitate in his actions.

Early the next morning, he submitted a leave request to his immediate superior, Grayson.

The Adventurers' Guild was a massive organization. The clerical records team Lance belonged to fell under the administrative department, and he was far from the only copyist.

Grayson had also been a veteran. Out of consideration for Lance's late father, and because copyists did have vacation days anyway—though Lance, that workaholic, had never used them before—he approved the leave without a word.

Since he had decided to take this path, he had to do things properly.

There was one hard requirement for registering as an adventurer: he had to possess at least one combat skill at the "Proficient" level.

Lance could only turn his attention to the Veterans' Guild.

As the saying went, money made the world go round.

After spending a little money, he finally dug up a retired veteran who stayed drunk all day in a corner of the guild.

This unremarkable-looking middle-aged man was an elite who had survived the famous Blood Iris Battle, and his Castro Swordsmanship had reached the master level.

Sure enough, the Veterans' Guild was full of hidden talent. Any old man basking in the sun by a wall might be a retired professional.

For the sake of Lance's deceased father, the man gave him a heavily discounted price.

He charged only thirty silver coins.

Watching the forty-five silver coins he had painstakingly saved over three months shrink in an instant made Lance's heart ache terribly.

With the instructor settled, he still needed a training venue.

Through Nia's connections, Lance quietly found a young woman in the logistics department and obtained access to one of the guild's private training rooms.

However, there were many restrictions. He could only use it for three hours after sunset each day, and he had to pay ten copper coins per hour as an equipment wear fee.

That was already the internal cost price.

"Praise Nia."

Lance silently made the sign of the cross in his heart.

The guild actually had free open training grounds, but he did not dare go there.

Lance, who deeply understood the principles of staying alive, knew all too well that the outstanding were bound to draw envy.

If others saw him swing a sword continuously for hours without even gasping for breath, some female spellcaster would probably drag him into a basement for research the next day.

There was no need to attract that kind of attention.

Thus, over the following half month, Lance began a hellish special training regimen.

Every day after work, he would plunge straight into that enclosed private training room.

If an ordinary person underwent swordsmanship training at such intensity, they would be exhausted after at most an hour.

In actual combat, stamina was consumed by the minute.

But Lance was a complete anomaly.

Relying on his talent's effects, whenever his stamina bottomed out, he only needed to stop and take a few deep breaths. His depleted strength would instantly refill like a rising tide.

What delighted him even more was that the "reduced sensitivity to abnormal conditions" listed in the talent description actually worked on mental fatigue as well.

That meant his mental resilience was extremely strong, fully capable of keeping pace with his body's recovery speed.

This directly left the logistics department baffled as to why the wooden swords and training dummies in that room had suddenly begun wearing out at a staggering rate.

There were even rumors that some professional was secretly undergoing special training there late every night.

Besides the equipment wear, his appetite also increased dramatically.

Fortunately, the tavern where Amber worked was right next to the guild.

After finishing his training each day, Lance would drag his ravenous body there to report for duty.

His manner of eating, as if he were the reincarnation of a starving ghost, did not frighten Amber, but the massive expense made Lance's wallet tremble.

Fortunately, Amber was a kind-hearted girl.

She would always bring over a huge platter of meat piled like a small mountain, casually saying it was leftovers from the evening that had to be dealt with. She had originally intended to feed them to the stray dogs in the back alley, but since he was there, she would give them to him instead.

"Praise Amber."

Lance gave muffled thanks as he wolfed down the delicious roasted meat.

With this nearly cheating-level high-intensity training.

On the fifth day, the system panel displayed a notification.

[Castro Swordsmanship Proficiency LV1 → 2]

[Stamina +1]

And late on the sixteenth night.

The swordsmanship threshold that others needed a year of training to cross was surpassed by him in half a month.

The panel flashed again.

Name: Lance

Class: None

Strength: 5

Agility: 6

Constitution: 5

Spirit: 7

Perception: 6

Talents: Hvergelmir's Boiling Surge (Red), Ouroboros Ring (Red)

Skills: Castro Swordsmanship LV3 (Proficient), Common Language Reading and Writing LV3 (Proficient), Arithmetic LV4 (Mastered)

This mad period of special training could finally come to an end.

Tomorrow, when he went to work, would be the day he officially registered as an adventurer!