My life was decent...enough.
Smart enough to get through school and college without much effort, but not quite so to become valedictorian.
Good enough to reach diamond on league of legends, but not enough to get past reckless, toxic teammates.
Social enough to get friends, yet not enough to get true brothers.
Kind enough to get admired by family, yet not enough to be truly acknowledged.
However, there was one area where he was excellent.
Not just good, but excellent.
[Tower of Abyss]
It was a pure RPG indie game, with ugly 2D pixels. In this game, you could incarnate a character from any race in the game. Elves, humans, dwarves, barbarians, beastmen...Anything that existed in the game could be played. The same went for the classes.
There were a lot of hidden stats, but your status page only gave you information about [Physique], [Mentality] and [Level]. The rest was completely hidden from the player.
As for the difficulty, only the [Easy] version was available...yet no one in the world community had finished the game.
I missed parties to play the game.
As I grew up, I missed networking events to play the game.
The reason why no player had finished the game was quite simple.
When you die in the game, your character dies permanently. Meaning the thousands of hours you spent farming for items, training specific skills, training adventurer companions...All of it would disappear overnight.
Each new gaming session was different too. Unlike regular scenario where everything was written in advance, the game was in an ever-moving timeline. Events were generated as the game went by, the dialogues and opportunities changing day after day, making tutorials obsolete quickly.
The only thing that did not change was the core of the game: [Tower of Abyss].
The monsters remained the same and their drop rate too.
Well, if you excluded the ever-changing layout of the floors and mutant monsters, that is. But overall, it was the only thing that did not change much.
One day, an opportunity arose.
A player had conquered the game.
And it was not me.
[A player has conquered the 100th floor]
[The difficulty mode [Normal] has been unlocked. Do you want to be part of this adventure? This is a one-time opportunity.]
[Yes / No]
My life was not bad. I could not dare to say it was. I had an abundance of food.
I had an internship offer laying on the table in a prestigious company.
I had family and friends.
But...
I could not accept that someone was better than me on this game.
I wanted to meet him.
I wanted to beat him.
And the floor had just opened.
I knew that I had begun the game with a disadvantage. I had begun playing it 15 years after it was first released.
Over the years, I had caught up with the elite players, and contributed my fair share, bringing my scientific rigor in studying the game mechanics and uncovering certain hidden stats' effects and ranking them.
I had been beaten, fair and square.
I was not a genius. But I was known for my grit, and I felt like refusing this opportunity to enter the [Normal] stage would be akin to abandoning core principles that had forged who I really was.
God.
If I could, I would stop myself this day from clicking on the yes button.
My whole life feels like a dream, paradise, one that I had come to despise wrongfully.
These are the kind of things you only realise when you fall in the pits of hell, unfortunately.