Chapter 1

　　I used to play this game called Arcadia religiously for about a year. I dumped $1,000 a month into it, basically pouring my entire salary down the drain, and even hired an account pilot to push my character all the way to fifth in the server rankings.

　　I founded a clan, led siege wars, and was lucky enough to claim a castle. In real life, I was a hopeless cyber-YOLO loser, but inside the game, I was an absolute monarch with a castle of my own.

　　A Master Mage every player dreamed of adding to their friends list—that was me. Sure, my real-life apartment was a tiny studio with a $2,000 deposit and $200 in monthly rent, but the moment I logged in, a majestic lord’s office lined with a plush red carpet welcomed me home.

　　Naturally, I forgot about my dirt-poor reality and got hooked on the game like a drug. Just when I thought I’d live happily ever after in my digital paradise… a nightmare named Shin Heejae crashed into my life.

　　[Heejae]: lol did you buy ur account? u f**king suck

　　My initial run-in with Shin Heejae started over a petty fight. In Arcadia, whichever clan controlled a territory usually monopolized the best dungeon nearby.

　　It wasn’t because our clan was unusually evil or greedy; it was just what pretty much any clan did once they claimed a castle. But then some lunatic showed up and decided to buck that tradition.

　　That lunatic was Shin Heejae.

　　Heejae insisted there was an item he needed inside our clan-exclusive dungeon and tried to barge right in. And when twenty of our clan members—including our vice clan master—tried to block him, he literally butchered them all.

　　Shin Heejae played a Night Walker. It was a class most players considered useless outside of its fast attack speed, but that bastard toyed with and massacred our max-level clan members, including Elementalists and Hunters, who dominated the PvP meta at the time.

　　Then he uploaded the footage to his YouTube channel, where it racked up more than a million views. Thanks to that stunt, Shin Heejae shot to instant fame and became a massive star, while our clan went into free fall.

　　And the bastard didn’t stop there. He waltzed into our territory every single day just to mock us until I had no choice but to step up as Clan Master and confront him. But in the showdown that decided our clan’s fate, I got absolutely stomped.

　　To make matters worse—fuck! Of ALL fucking things!—I ended up dropping my absolute best weapon: Azure Signiel. It was the most expensive item I’d ever looted and the single biggest reason I became a castle lord in the first place… but that bastard snatched it right off my corpse.

　　Then Shin Heejae put it up for auction and sold it off.

　　The winning bid? $11,000.

　　For a guy barely making $1,400 a month in real life, my blood practically boiled in my veins. Yet absolutely nobody gave a damn that I’d been screwed over, because public opinion was totally stacked against us.

　　Turns out low-level players had been pretty fed up with the “tradition” of sucking up to major clans or paying entry fees to enter dungeons. Before I knew it, I was the greedy villain leeching off lowbies, only to get humbled by Heejae.

　　After getting owned by a single player, our clan became a server-wide joke. Unable to take the constant public pile-ons, clan members started jumping ship one after another. Eventually, we lost our castle in the very next siege war due to a lack of headcount.

　　And the guy who took our castle? Heejae. After founding a clan called Malice and claiming it, he cranked the tax rate up by 1,000 percent, ruined the territory I’d worked so hard to build up, and then sold it off without a second thought.

　　That fucking bastard had dragged our clan through the mud like he was some hero of justice, only to max out the tax rate the second he became lord! He bled the players dry and tossed the whole territory aside in just one month.

　　Yet nobody flamed Shin Heejae. They were too busy worshiping him, saying the whole shitshow was insanely satisfying.

　　As for me…

　　“Die, Shin Heejae… Die, die, die!”

　　I spent every single day grinding my teeth, reliving that PvP duel against him in my head.

　　But my chance at revenge never came. Shin Heejae had already become the leader of a massive clan, while I had lost my weapon to him, suffered consecutive nerfs that turned my class into garbage, and tumbled down the rankings.

　　And even if I wanted to join a clan big enough to rival Shin Heejae’s Malice, my reputation was so thoroughly tarnished that no one would take me in.

　　In the end, I rage-sold my entire account. Naturally, I took a massive loss. After pouring tens of thousands of dollars into the game, all I managed to salvage was a pitiful $3,500.

　　And so, I quit Arcadia for a whole year.

* * *

　　—Hyejin: Dude so I

　　—Hyejin: Started playing Arca again lol

　　It was around then that I got a text from Hyejin, who had been my vice clan master and account pilot back when I ran the clan. Hyejin and I stayed in touch every now and then even after quitting, so hearing from her wasn’t weird. What she had to say, though, caught me off guard.

　　—Me: Are you insane?

　　—Hyejin: Lmaooo

　　—Hyejin: It’s actually fun playing again after so long

　　—Me: Lol

　　—Hyejin: Starting over from level 1 feels surprisingly fresh

　　—Hyejin: There’s an XP boost event going on right now so you should start too clan master

　　—Me: Whatever have fun

　　Both Hyejin and I had gone through every flavor of miserable bullshit when we quit Arcadia, swearing we’d never so much as look at the game again. Yet here she was, rambling about getting hit by some newly released class or whatever and sending over a bunch of screenshots.

　　And…

　　[Set Sesam as your username?]

　　Embarrassing as it was, with nothing to do over the long holiday, I ended up creating a new character in Arcadia. Since I’d just mocked Hyejin for being crazy a few days ago, I couldn’t tell a soul about my secret comeback. This time, however, I swore to myself that I would never foolishly dump a thousand dollars a month into the game like before.

　　“Battle Mages were total money pits… What’s a good class to play without spending cash?”

　　Starting out free-to-play felt pretty daunting, so I rejoined the official Arcadia forum I’d left in the past and dug into the latest meta posts. According to my research, the most popular F2P^[1] option these days was a heal-spec Elementalist that could offer buff services for gold.

　　My old main had been a Battle Mage, another mage-class character, so the skill setups were similar, and most of their abilities were ranged.

　　I chose Elementalist without thinking twice.

　　And…

　　“Mages gotta be female characters, obviously.”

　　Just like my previous main, I customized a female avatar with long, silky blonde hair.

Translator’s Note

[1] F2P: Free-to-Play.