When Last Night Didn't End

2.2

But maybe the "poof" sound was a bland addition from me.

Anyway, swiping up summons the menu, and swiping down removes it. Got it. I brought the menu back, studying each of its sections and components. Back then, Hye-jin would reprimand me for taking too long reading everything when we could just forge ahead and understand the game on our own. But—I looked around me for a sliver of a woman with dark hair and a disapproving frown etched deep into her face—she's not here, was she?

So, relishing in my newfound freedom to read things, I skimmed through the menu. There were progress bars with symbols to their left. I had no inkling what those meant, but I could guess these were my stats? Most of them were green, barely past three-quarters of the length. Should be good.

My eyes wandered to the small pocket of space below the bars. It said Location. Curious. Let's see what it's going to tell me. The letters arranged to spell Mystriae greeted me. I raised my eyebrows. Why did that name sound familiar?

Of course. Duh. Solarlume. Ironically the last game I played with Hye-jin before I ended up in this forest. Was the light and me pressing the new button on the home screen connected to this? Maybe. Most likely.

Which meant only one thing—I was somehow inside Solarlume and was able to interact with everything just as I would in a real world. Totally the vibes of the animes I used to watch all throughout my highschool and university days. After all the insanity I've had to live through the past couple of months of paperwork, court appearances, and settlements, being stuck inside a video game suddenly seemed...refreshing.

Shoot. I spaced out. Wrenching my attention back to the menu, I spotted a field next to the bars which was labeled inventory. Couldn't be bad, right? I played this game for years and had gotten far with my recent restart for nostalgia's sake. How were my precious items? It's great to be able to use the special edition Merlaine Dagger, especially if I was in some sort of augmented reality version of it. That'd be so cool.

What stumbled into my view couldn't have been more traumatizing. Apart from the starting bag of money which was enough to get me out of Mystriae and sail towards a city where I would find my first quest, sitting in my inventory list were a spare starting sword with barely any damage inflicts, a pastry roll, and a shovel that couldn't be traded or stolen. It's like you could lose everything but still be left with something to hit the soil with. Great.

There's no Divine ores or any of the equipment I obtained from various quests and limited events. Certainly, there's no Merlaine Dagger.

I noticed the small triangle at the lower right part of the inventory list was muted ocher. This meant I was on the first page and there were no more pages after that. Which also meant that, right now, these were all I have.

"What nice scales you have there, lad," a voice grouched past my preoccupation and grieving for my lost items. "Is this for sale?"

My eyes followed the direction the newcomer's head was. With the menu in the way, it's impossible to tell what they looked like, only that he was a man and he was looking at the pile of metal I had dumped at my feet.

I glanced at the inventory field again, then back at the armor. These were what's left of me in this new world. There's no way I was going to sell my armor, despite how bulky it was. So, I decided to test my theory and focused on the armor pile. The equivalent of clicking buttons in this world should be...thinking about it. With that, I willed my armor to show up in my inventory. Come on.

The armor glowed a faint sheen of green before fading out of existence. The man in front of me made gurgling noises before stepping back, his hand resting somewhere in his side. I straightened and called off the menu, faintly seeing the armor's name being added in my inventory list. Something like Arianda Armor, perhaps?