CH 1

Prologue

It all started with a mobile game.

I don’t remember the exact genre, but it must have been introduced as an Idle game.

The game itself wasn’t that great.

Little human figures would walk by and all I had to do was watch them move.

The AI was delicately constructed. Each character was diligent, and did what it was supposed to do.

Sometimes they even deviated from the rules and behaved in peculiar ways.

I felt like I was raising ants in a transparent gel.

I think of the little sea monkeys raised in the fishing tanks.

Sometimes I would touch people with my fingers and their strength would decrease and the words ‘1’ would float above their heads.

The characters could disappear if I tapped them more than a few dozen times, but my fingers hurt too much to do so unnecessarily, so I quit.

The role was also impossible to beat the people passing by endlessly, as the resource of magic power, which was at the bottom of the screen, kept decreasing.

Besides, just staring at the characters was sometimes a soothing feeling.

I would sometimes spend two or three hours a day in this way, watching over the characters.

That is, until something annoying happened and I came home after a heavy drinking session.

“No, really, why are you saying that to me?”

One day I came home drunk from a relationship problem.

I got drunk and let my usual mobile game run.

At first, I was thinking about looking at the screen with no thoughts.

As I did so, I suddenly became frustrated and found a target in the game to be annoyed and angry with.

What I found was one of the villages in the middle of nowhere.

I pressed the screen until the characters in the village disappeared, ignoring the fact that my fingers hurt.

I moved my fingers in a hurry until all the magic power I had was depleted.

When the magic power that had been drained that way recovered, and all the magic power that had risen again was drained.

Having completely annihilated one village, I was able to discover a single message floating on my smartphone.

>>>Your karma has increased by 10.

>>>You are now at level 2.

It was the moment I discovered a new feature in the game that I didn’t even know existed.