As Jack finally reached his home, there was only an empty bottle in a paper bag on his doorstep. He stepped over it and went inside.
He took the rest of the of the snacks he got from the bag and looked at the paper slip with the phone number.
Jack looked at it for a while. There was a string of numbers followed by her name Sam which was short for Samantha. He was trying to decide if he would be calling her in the future.
»Did she just want a new customer for her weed or did she really want to hang out?«
Jack's low self-esteem was doing a dance routine in his head again. He would be 27 years old this year, and the number of times he felt a woman was interested in him could be counted on his two hands. That included the obese woman from the pancake shop also.
His lifestyle spending most of his time at the computer and never socializing in real life had much to do with it. His low stature and emaciated build even before he got the cube also played a big role.
For seven long years all he did was code trying to earn money to pay off the mortgage he inherited from his parents. It took a toll on him mentally as physically, and his human interactions in real life could be basically put into two categories. Paying the delivery guys and ordering at the Starbuck's counter.
He usually didn't even bother to go groceries shopping and just had them delivered to his home. The Japanese would describe his lifestyle as a neet. Neet is an acronym for a young person who is "Not in Education, Employment, or Training." Jack was of course not the typical definition of a neet since he worked from home, but most everything else fitted.
With the lack of interactions with actual human beings you gradually develop a detachment from society. You grow less trusting of other human beings and even don't really have the need to interact with them.
He pinned the phone number to his refrigerator door with a magnet and went to the bathroom. As he looked into the mirror, he was glad to see his sickly appearance had significantly diminished.
Now he understood why he was hungry all the time. His body needed a lot of energy to rebuild his cells after synchronization.
Well, Jack was a bit wrong since his cells never left. They got stronger and shrank, and all they needed was to rebuild the energy from the food to make him look healthy again and better than ever before.
He checked out his stats:
Name: Jack "Doggie" Russel
Strength: 10
Constitution:8
Endurance:10
Speed:9
Dexterity:8
Perception:8
Intelligence:10
Wisdom:9
Willpower:9
Charisma:4
Luck: ???
His charisma got a raise of 1 point, but everything else was the same. Jack figured it will get back to 8 in a couple of days and then he can revisit Sam. If she wanted to hang out with him now when he looked like a living corpse he imagined she would be jumping with joy then and even consider dating him.
From all that had happened to him in this week, Jack no longer had the notion he was mentally ill. Unless everything by now was just a dream, there was no reasonable explanation for a lot of things that happened.
How could he get information from strangers out of nowhere?
How could his height, strength and everything else increase so much in such a short while?
How come other people noticed it too?
There was only one logical explanation even though it was unbelievable. The cube and the space were real. The levels Jack passed made Jack stronger.
»Occam's razor,« Jack thought.
It is the problem-solving principle that the simplest solution tends to be the right one. When presented with competing hypotheses to solve a problem, one should select the answer with the fewest assumptions.
The simplest solution was that everything was real, but still, it had so many assumptions.
»Maybe the simplest solution is that I have gone crazy and this is all in my head.«, Jack was getting a headache just thinking about it.
He sighed changed his clothes into sportswear, went to his living room and laid down on his couch. It was almost time for level six.
The familiar light flashed soon, and Jack felt like he was back home. He spent so much time in this environment that it now became more familiar to him than his actual home. He quickly got back to the level 5 and brought all the stuff he thought he might need into this room.
Jack didn't equip anything but two daggers since he was pretty sure the challenge will be three orc warriors. The trials followed a preset pattern most of the time showing the lack of imagination from the author and even if he did die he would just reappear in the room. Jack was not worried at all as he went outside and as expected he was right.
The three orc warriors were spaced five meters apart as they came out of the bushes. Jack accelerated and went for the middle one's crotch. As the middle one swung his massive club, there was a whooshing sound from the wind as Jack passed underneath the swing and used his castrating move. The orc dropped the club and held his jewels howling from the pain as Jack turned around and jumped at his neck and plunged the two daggers inside. As he jumped backward, he again pulled a streak against the throat of the orc.
The other two orcs reacted and swung their clubs towards him but sadly for them Jack was already rolling on the ground by the time the clubs reached the back of the kneeling orc. Two massive clubs hit the backside of the orc's head; at the same time, and this alone would have been enough to finish him.
The orc's head popped open like a cantaloupe hit with two hammers from two sides as brain matter and bone pieces splattered in front of him.
Jack disappeared into the bushes and went around the arena and came back into the clearing from the same side. Now there were only two.
He repeated the same routine since the artificial intelligence of these orc's was worse than AI in games 20 years ago. They were completely unable to adapt. The second orc was hit in the head by the third one, and the last one was finished by Jack himself.
Jack almost yawned. This was not a challenge but a simple chore for him.
»Perhaps the creator of these trials didn't expect someone would be cruel enough to himself to get such a stat improvement and that is why the AI was at such a level.«, Jack thought.
»Whatever, it's done. Time for lunch.«