novelStore 72 Visit, Part I
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"This is the end, I tell you."
"The world is actually going to end!"
"Shouldn't we be fleeing to a different planet or something? Is staying on Earth really a good idea?"
"This has to be a giant hidden camera prank, right?"
"If it was a prank, how do you explain the token of knowledge on your left wrist?"
"Someone must have drawn it on as a joke."
"Someone pranked every single human being on Earth? That thing won't even come off!"
"Shit! What kind of crap is this? What the hell is Genenian or a token of knowledge or a Don Gate?"
The response in Nigeria and Germany was about the same, but at Incheon, it seemed especially chaotic.
Everyone was busy arguing about their tokens or about devas.
I didn't have time to argue with the rest and quickly made my back to base; the rooftop room at Insu-dong of Gangbuk-gu.
"Phew...it's only been one day but I'm already mentally exhausted. Stat check!"
[Name: Lee Jiwon
Level: 0 Death count: 0
Title: Earth's First Deva
HP: 110000/110000 MP: 22000/22000
Strength: 220 Agility: 220 Vitality: 220
Willpower: 220 Intelligence: 220
Residual stat points: 0
Fatigue: 7
Special Effects: Luck Boost (X+ 1)
Physical attack: 660 Physical Defense: 220
Magical attack: 660 Magical Defense: 220]
My body was feeling light, but there was no helping the mental exhaustion I felt now. The stat menu showed that my fatigue had risen to 7.
"My fatigue is 7...I should learn the berserker skill as well."
Fatigue was another important element.
If you allowed your fatigue to accumulate past 70 points, your attack, defense, and other general abilities would begin to decay. If you let it go past 90, your abilities would decay to the point that it was obvious.
But if you had the berserker skill, your attack, defense, and other abilities actually increased as your fatigue went up, with a cooldown time of seven days.
Even with a seven-day cooldown, this skill was seen as essential. It wasn't like you could hunt or fight at all the times you wanted to!
"Still, it gets better the more I look at it."
Just looking at it was enough to make my mental exhaustion fly away. A small smile kept forming at the corners of my lips.
"Let's just wash up and get plenty of rest today. Tomorrow, I'll go to the store first thing. It should still be at the same spot, right?" I asked myself.
NPC stores had suddenly formed in all the world's biggest cities.
Simply called Stores, they looked like Mongolian yurts or circus tents from the outside. About thrice the size of yurts and slightly smaller than a circus tent, these stores didn't actually carry any wares.
The twist was that while it looked like not even a hundred people could fit in there from the outside, the inside was different. These dull-looking stores were bigger than most apartment buildings!
From the outside, the store looked to be just below stories tall, but when you entered, the store also reached two stories underground, and four stories above!
I once heard from a manager of one of these stores that the stores were magically built to fit in any city and to have more room on the inside than it seemed from the outside.
At the second basement floor, there was a public marketplace where people could buy and sell rare items from one another. As for the first basement level, there was an exchange store.
At the exchange store, you could sell whatever item you wanted without having to look for a buyer. The exchange store would instead take a small fee and pay you the rest of the funds.
The fee was three percent of the selling price, but it was tough to find buyers or sellers in a timely manner, and so the exchange store was usually packed.
On the first floor, there was a bank where you could store your golden rings and items. Of course, there was a fee you had to pay to use those services.
On the second floor were shops selling potions, weapons, armor, and accessories. The third floor had a store selling skills, and the fourth floor served as a traveler's inn.
——————-
The next morning, I washed up and had breakfast in front of the TV.
I may have become a deva, but I still had to eat to keep living.
Not eating or resting sharply increased fatigue, causing abilities to decay.
I had to make sure I ate and rested properly. My current abilities as a deva were actually easy for a normal person to spot.
"There still isn't any news about devas?"
It took a whole day to travel across Nigeria and Germany, so it had been two days since.
Someone should have found a new Don Gate and become a deva by now. But there was only a panel of astronomers discussing the voice in the sky on news.
"Well, it doesn't matter. Even if another deva appeared, monsters won't spawn yet so leveling is out of the question for now. Let's just go to the store as planned."
If I recalled correctly, the store was right next to the Gangnam Severance Hospital.
I left my rooftop room and took a taxi to the hospital. It was quite a distance, but I had no need to pinch pennies. Soon, all currency would lose its value anyway.
Golden rings would become the new currency used all around.
—
I got off in front of the hospital and leisurely walked down the street.
After about ten minutes, I came across an opening and in the middle of that opening was a flabby, yurt-like tent that looked like it absolutely did not belong there.
"I think I'm an idiot, " I said to myself as I stared at the store.
I didn't think about it before I got in the taxi. I realized that I had not a single golden ring on me.
The only type of currency the store received was golden rings.
Obviously, I wasn't going to be able to buy anything with the won and dollars I had left from my trip to Africa.
The thought finally came to me as I laid eyes on the store.
"Whew. Still, since I came all the way here, why don't I take a look around?"
It felt like a waste to just turn my feet around after making my way all the way here.
Back then, I had come and gone into stores frequently that I didn't really feel inspired to go in. Still, this was the first Store I'd seen since my return, and so I began to walk towards the front entrance.
"Not being able to get a tracking skill is going to suck. I really could have used it..."
The difference of having and not having a tracking skill when it came to dungeon seeking was like heaven and earth. There was no way to get a golden ring in a world without monsters.
I lifted the unnaturally large flap of the tent and went inside.
As I stepped inside, I was greeted with a view so large; it couldn't make sense from the outside.
From the outside, it looked to be about three hundred square meters, but the inside was unbelievably wide.
There were seven sets of stairs that went up to the second floor. This place would be filled with people in the near future.
There was a gasp from nearby.
"What?" I flinched as the voice invaded my recollection of the past.
"I wonder who this is! You must be a deva! But isn't that weird? There hasn't been news that a deva entered a store yet. No...no way! Are you the first?!"
In my past life, I had spent most of my time in Seoul and used this store quite often. But the manager standing before me was not the manager from back then.
Back then, the manager was a three meter tall fat man in his fifties named Igor. Now, the manager was a young man not even a meter tall.
I would have had no idea this guy that barely reached my chest was the manager were it not for his name tag that read Anton.
"No way...for me to be this lucky! Marie! Marie! Come quickly! There's a deva here. He came to my store first!"
Seemingly very elated about something, Anton shouted in a high pitched voice and began to dance on the spot.
Nearby, a teenage girl with a name tag reading Marie, dressed in a chambermaid's outfit, came gliding towards us. Anton produced a square object from his body and started fiddling with it.
"Manager Ji. Please calm yourself. You aren't being dignified."
"Do you think I care about dignity right now? Look at this."
Beaming, he passed on his iPad-looking device over to Marie, as if he were a schoolboy boasting to his older sister.
"I really am the first. In all of Earth, a deva entered my store first! This is the best! Ahahaha. I wonder how many points this is! A few more and even the head clan will have to acknowledge me! Hehehe! Oh, what a lucky charm!"
Anton left the iPad-looking device to Marie and started hugging me, calling me his lucky charm. I grew increasingly confused at this unexpected reaction."Oi! Get off! Get off of me!"
"Hehehe! Nope! Never! You're my lucky charm!... Huh?"
In the middle of laughing and clinging to my thigh, Anton suddenly grew solemn and looked up at me.
"You! You!! You!!!" The sudden change in Anton's demeanor stiffened me up."There's no way...you! Are you Earth's first deva?!"
"Well, yeah..."
He was just an NPC. There was no need to lie to him.
"Gasp! I thought you were just a golden egg...It turns out you're a goose. A golden goose! Puhaha! It was already great that a deva came to my store first! But you're the first deva! How many points...how many more points do this mean? Ahahahaha!"
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