12 End Of The Boring Days (1/2)

For 10 years past making Valerie my first follower, I had been preparing.

Everything I had been doing - one could summarize it all as preparing.

One of things I had been doing, as part of my preparations, was trying to understand the system, to best of my abilities. After all, in some ways, the system controlled my life.

Without the system, I would have had no way to advance in Dark Arts, since the Arts had perished. There was obviously a chance that knowledge about them would have been present in some corner of the world but considering how long it could have taken to find it, provided it was present in the first place, it would have been a major inconvenience.

So, I had tried my damned hardest trying to study the system.

I had come to realize that the system never gave me any quests that had a time-limit on it.

And, these were the only four kinds of quests that I had been given by the system by that point:-

[Kill X number of Monsters]

[Kill X number of Inhumans]

[Make/form X undead soldiers]

[Earn X Amount Of Gold]

As boring as it may seem, these were the only type of quests I had been given. I had completed all of them, of course; but the rewards weren't much to be proud of either.

Every single quest had granted me some gold, and something else.

Most of the times, this 'something else' had been a little boost. Sometimes my physical strength had been increased, sometimes my speed had been increased, sometimes it had been my charisma.

When I looked at the system showing me those messages,

[Quest Reward No. 2: Slight Strength Increase]

[Quest Reward No. 2: Slight Speed Increase]

[Quest Reward No. 2: Slight Charisma Increase]

What can I say? It truly felt jarring to look at them. It felt too much like a game.

But, in any case, out of all the quests given to me that far, none had offered more or less than two rewards.

Another REALLY annoying thing about it all was the time-interval between these quests.

For the first 5 quests, the time-interval had been 2 days. They had been there for as long as I didn't complete them, but after completing one, it took 2 days for the next quest to appear.

For the next 5 quests, the time-interval increased to 2 weeks.

Then, for the next 10, it increased to 2 months. And then, for the next 4, it increased to 2 years.

So, all in all, I had completed 24 quests in those 10 years.

But then, a surprise had come, a surprise that went against all these observations.

[The God Path - Quest 25: ”Kill a human” has arrived]

As soon as I had completed my 24th quest, that had appeared on the system's screen.

[This quest has one reward]

[This quest needs to be completed in the next 8 hours]

Unlike every quest before it, the 25th quest asked me to kill a human for the first time, appeared as soon as I finished the quest prior to it, offered only one reward and also had a time-limit.

As one would expect, I was intrigued.

And that's what was going on in my mind when I had come back to my house that day.

As soon as I came back, I entered my room, or tried to. The door was locked. I then heard from inside the room, the voice of a particular woman.

”V-Vilome?!”

It was Valerie. I wondered what she could be doing in my room. Knowing that woman, I didn't have very high expectations.

”Who else would it be? Now why are you in my room?”

”Oh, well, just wait a minute!” Instead of answering the question, she said so and soon came and opened the door.

”Shouldn't you be in the church?” I asked, suspicious that she might have snuck out. She had done that a few times in those years.

Although she had always been able to come up with some believable excuses, it was still something that could attract unprecedented attention from the Royal Church.

”W-well, it won't cause any problems, so don't worry!”

That's what she had always told me. And surprisingly, that was true. It had never caused us any trouble.

”S-so, how was the ceremony?!” She asked, looking pretty nervous and trying to change the subject.

Though, if that was the best subject change she could bring up, I was disappointed.

”Are you genuinely asking that or do you just want me to kick you in the face?” I asked with a deadpan look.

”I-I guess it wasn't very fun then, huh?”

'Fun' was the exact word I'd define it with, in an upside-down world that is. I mean, my coming of age ceremony was pretty boring in the first place. But still, Yasmine's ceremony easily topped the rankings of my 'most boring events I have ever witnessed' list.

I then realized that her subject change might not have been that bad considering how it had drowned me in thought for a moment, albeit those thoughts being filled with negativity.