Saving up points

March 27.

Yan Si had saved up 306 points.

It wasn't a large number. A few pages into the System Shop, and he could spend it all, but earning it hadn't been easy.

Every point had been bought with real pain.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

That bastard of a system. In the novels he read, other hosts earned points by doing missions, killing enemies, and completing achievements.

For him, they had become vouchers redeemed through suffering.

Hurt once, earn a little. The worse it hurt, the more he earned. Clearly marked prices, fair deals for all.

So he had to stab himself whenever he got the chance.

The logic was actually simple. The boning knife required a blood sacrifice to use, and each use had a sixty percent chance of inflicting the attack on its wielder as well.

In other words, whenever he stabbed himself, he had a better-than-even chance of triggering double pain.

One stab, the effect of two, and twice the points.

Stabbing cursed spirits was work. Stabbing himself was financial planning.

High risk, high return. The rougher the waters, the more valuable the catch.

That was how Yan Si understood it.

So he began stabbing himself on a very regular schedule. It wasn't self-abuse. He drew a clear distinction.

Self-abuse served a psychological need. His served an economic one. Clear objectives, direct methods, steady returns. Apart from the pain, there were no drawbacks.

What was that called? Investing.

After finishing a mission, he would find somewhere deserted. Sometimes it was the rooftop of an abandoned building, sometimes a blind corner at the end of an alley, and sometimes he simply leaned beside a vending machine. Ordinary people couldn't see cursed tools or the wounds anyway.

He would take out the boning knife. Its black blade felt cold in his palm, much like a piece of ice. He would look down at its edge, smile, then neatly drive it through his arm and pull it out.

The movement was practiced and wretched, like an office worker pressing an employee badge to a reader for the daily clock-in. One beep, the points arrived, and today's performance target was met.

After stabbing himself, he wasn't in a hurry to leave. He leaned against the wall for a while, waiting for the pain to recede from the cracks between his bones. His eyes were half-lidded, traces of tears still wet on his lashes, but his expression had already returned to its lazy, utterly indifferent look.

From a distance, he looked as though he had just woken up and was spacing out.

While showering, with hot water flushing his skin red, he looked down at his chest through the billowing steam.

Water trickled down his collarbones and slid over several healing red marks, their color looking a little darker in the mist. He thought it over and decided he probably hadn't earned enough today.

That cursed spirit earlier had given him a little too few points.

There wasn't any particular reason. He had nothing else to do anyway.

So he took out the boning knife again.

Stab.

The blade passed through skin soaked in hot water, meeting less resistance than when it was dry. It went in faster, and the pain came more sharply.

The blood was washed away by the hot water as soon as it emerged, swept toward the drain, leaving a pale red streak on the white floor tiles that vanished in an instant.

The points notification chimed in his head. With his shoulder against the cold tiles, he exhaled a white breath and closed his eyes, waiting for the pain to pass while calculating how much more he needed.

Before bed, he turned off the light and lay there, tossing and turning as he did the math. Three hundred and six points. The thing he wanted cost fifty, leaving him with 256 afterward and putting his next goal farther away again.

But if he didn't buy it, he would be missing out on some fun.

He rolled over, buried his face in the pillow, then rolled back and stared at the unlit ceiling lamp, two little figures working abacuses in his head.

He couldn't sleep.

He had nothing else to do anyway.

So he stabbed himself again in the dark.

He couldn't make out the boning knife's color in the darkness, but it still felt just as cold in his hand.

He stabbed his thigh. There was plenty of flesh there, making for a broad area of pain without much risk of hitting bone. It was a cost-effective spot.

The moment the tip sank into his flesh, the hundredfold pain kicked in. His foot abruptly pointed straight, his toes curled into the bedsheet, and a muffled groan stayed trapped in his throat.

Then he pulled the blanket over his head and curled into a ball, eyes open in the darkness, waiting for the pain to pass while thinking about what to do tomorrow.

He didn't waste the waiting time, either. He worked out the figures with the system in his head: three stabs a day, the minimum points that would earn, how many he could get if he was lucky and triggered doubles, and what that added up to over a month.

After doing the math, he decided it still wasn't quite enough and considered raising his daily quota from three stabs to four.

With four, he would have to put the last stab somewhere else, alternating between his arms and legs. Otherwise, repeatedly stabbing the same spot would leave a lingering ache no matter how quickly Reverse Cursed Technique healed it, affecting how his knife felt in his hand the following day.

Normal people wouldn't have that problem, but with his senses amplified a hundredfold, the lingering sensation lasted especially long.

Of course, apart from hurting a little, there were no other drawbacks.

Those were his exact words to the system. His tone was level, as though he were reporting an objective fact, with even a hint of seeking praise: See how little trouble I give you?

The system's response at the time had been a full three seconds of silence.

For an artificial intelligence, three seconds was the equivalent of an ordinary person staying silent through an entire meal.

That silence contained far too many emotions to express through an electronic voice.

If it had any, they were probably a complicated emotional cocktail, mixed with a little something difficult to describe that resembled helpless resignation.

But Yan Si hadn't actually been lying.

The wounds themselves weren't a problem.

Once he activated Reverse Cursed Technique, his flesh healed within seconds, without even leaving a scar.

He looked down at a healing red mark on his arm, watching it turn from dark red to pale pink, then from pale pink to the color of his skin.

Petals closing, withdrawing into a bud, shrinking back into stem and leaves, retreating into the earth. There was something strangely captivating about it. Sometimes he deliberately took a few extra looks before it healed, finding the sight rather beautiful.

A red split, pink new flesh, white skin. Three colors layered together. Beautiful.

The real problem was the pain.

A hundredfold pain feedback.

Every time the blade entered his body, it wasn't merely the sensation of being stabbed. It was being stabbed a hundred times over, an agonizing pain exploding from the wound and racing wildly along his nerve endings. That agony pierced every inch of his blood vessels at once, then burned along them to his heart, his brain, his fingertips, and his toes.

Liars had to swallow a thousand needles. He hadn't lied, yet he had to experience something much the same. What did that make him? A glutton?

The pain didn't come just once. It came in waves.

Just when he thought it had receded and breathed a sigh of relief, it surged back the next second, fiercer, more violent, and more unreasonable than the last wave.

Every time the knife entered his body, a thin sheen of moisture veiled those beautiful purple eyes.

It wasn't that he wanted to cry.

He didn't want to cry. He thought crying was a hassle.

It left his eyes swollen and his voice hoarse, and then he had to wash the tear tracks off his face. That didn't suit his elegant, composed persona.

But it was a purely physiological reaction, his body's instinctive response to a hundredfold pain. His eyes stung, his tear glands secreted fluid uncontrollably, his vision blurred, and unshed droplets clung to his lashes, sparkling beneath the light.

The droplets trembled at the tips of his lashes, poised to fall but never quite falling. He looked rather heartbreakingly pitiful.

If one ignored the knife still in his hand.

It hurt so fucking much.

But he didn't mind. In fact, even amid pain that reached into his marrow, he could spare a thought to admire his own face.

There was a small mirror in his dorm room, standing beside his desk. Several times, just after stabbing himself, his eyes had still been veiled in mist.

His lips were a little pale from the pain, and he was still trembling, yet he insisted on propping himself up on his arms, tilting his head, and taking a look in the mirror.

The person in the mirror had slightly reddened eyes, his purple irises looking especially clear after being washed with tears.

His lashes were wet, a few strands of hair stuck to his temples with cold sweat, and his lips were an unnaturally vivid red from having bitten them earlier.

Yan Si stared at that face in the mirror for a few seconds, then smiled.

Beautiful, wasn't it?

What a lovely face.

He leaned against the head of his dorm bed, toying with the black boning knife. The blade spun once between his fingertips, reflecting eyes that hadn't quite lost their tears.

The eyes reflected in the blade still shimmered with moisture, a faint flush lingering at their outer corners. Together with the cinnabar mole between his brows, they truly made a fine picture. He stared at his reflection in the blade for a while, then suddenly decided the image looked fantastic.

He really was beautiful.

There was no narcissism in that assessment.

All right, perhaps a little, but it was mostly the way one looked at a work of art.

Beautiful was beautiful. He had known he was good-looking since childhood. That was an objective fact.

He even felt that looking this good while in so much pain proved his natural beauty could withstand the test of extreme conditions.

Speaking of points.

There were never enough points. Having saved up 306 sounded like a lot, but anything halfway decent in the System Shop started in the triple digits.

Recently, he had taken a liking to an ability listed in the shop. It wasn't cheap. After running the numbers, he found that earning points solely by fighting cursed spirits was far too inefficient.

There were cursed spirits every day, but higher-grade ones were rarer. Even a Grade 1 Cursed Spirit only gave so many points, barely enough to make a dent.

Stabbing himself hurt, but it was efficient, reliable, and unaffected by the weather. No need to go out, no need to hunt monsters. He could do it anytime, anywhere.

Couldn't go out to fight cursed spirits on a rainy day? No problem. He could still earn points curled up in his dorm.

The only problem was that a hundredfold pain really wasn't something a human could bear.

Every time he stabbed himself, he needed several minutes to recover, leaning against a wall or curled up in bed, waiting for the waves of pain to slowly recede.

During those minutes, he couldn't do anything. His mind was blank, with nothing but the word pain echoing over and over.

After the pain passed, a period of exhaustion followed. His fingers went numb, his back was covered in cold sweat, and his clothes clung wet and cold to his skin. It was terribly uncomfortable.

Was there some way to make this less unpleasant?

Or rather, to find a little fun in it?