Chapter 1 (1/2)

Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations

It was a ceiling that he had never seen before.

After Roland opened his eyes, he saw an enormous statue of a woman above his head. The statue was made of black rock, with vague greenness flowing on the surface. But when he observed it more carefully, the greenness was gone.

Roland sat up and found himself on a blue stone platform that seemed like a ritual table for sacrifices in the medieval age. It was cold and rough.

There was a unique fragrance in the air. He looked around and saw strange gra.s.ses burning below the statue of the G.o.ddess not far away behind him. The gra.s.ses seemed to be wormwood, albeit with more teeth at the edge.

Wait… fragrance?

He could smell and even feel? Roland touched the ritual table again, sensing its roughness and coldness. He then sniffed hard. This time, he smelled both the strange fragrance of the gra.s.ses and the bitter scent of the stone building itself.

Am I really not hypnotized, but in an immersive game? It feels so real… Roland looked at his hands. They were fair and slim, as expected of the hands of a spellcaster.

He pinched his arm. There was pain… but not too obvious. It came as no surprise. After all, before he entered the game, he had read the official announcement which stated that the pain in the game was only one-tenth of that in reality.

Roland rose from the platform. He looked around and realized that he was in a building made of rocks. There was a G.o.ddess statue, a ritual table, and several rows of chairs up ahead. Judging from the arrangement, it was likely to be a chapel.

Jumping from the ritual table, Roland observed his body. He was wearing gray and brown clothes made of linen, which was not exactly comfortable. His shoes were ugly and thin. He could feel the cold stone below his feet as he stepped on the ground.

It’s very real… Roland sighed and touched the ritual table. The stones felt so real. The granules on their surface were identical to reality. He did not expect the game to be a legitimate immersive game exactly as Penguin Corporation claimed, not a VR counterfeit that intended to fool people’s money.

When was such great technology developed? And how could it have been developed by Penguin Corporation? Roland sighed with mixed feelings. The immersive cabin that he bought with fifty thousand bucks was definitely worth it.

He was about to observe the environment some more and adapt himself to his new body, when the ragged door of the chapel opened.

While the door was still creaking, a hunched old man walked in. His eyebrows were long and white and dangled to his slender cheeks. His eyelids were so loose that they almost covered his eyes. He was wearing a long white robe that had a symbol of a tree at the center.

Before he joined the game, Roland had studied the basics of this game world from its official website. If he recalled correctly, the clothes were the standard uniform of the Church of Life. Only the reverends of the Church of Life wore them.

The old man was surprised to see Roland at first, but then he relaxed.

The change in his expression, both the movement of his facial muscles and his eyes, was exactly like that of a real person, instead of an NPC in the game.

In the VR games that Roland had played, facial changes had always been a flaw in NPC behavior no matter how real the NPCs seemed to be. Even though NPCs’ expressions were abundant thanks to motion capture, one would inevitably feel horrible when they changed their expressions.

But right now, Roland felt that he had met a real person… Was the newcomer another player?

He dropped the idea very soon. He was among the first batch to join the game. It was impossible for a player to become a reverend so quickly. Also, more importantly, players all appeared as young human beings in the game, and what Roland saw was a withering old man.

However, the old man was too real. Roland felt that he was a real person even though he did not talk and was only staring at Roland.