Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day

Chapter 367: To Run... Or To Bring Out Hot/Crazy Scale?! [I]

From the inside, the cabin was really simple.

It was just one big platform with several partitioning walls dividing the space into separate rooms.

It was barely functional, it was cramped, and it smelled heavily of brine and damp wood... but compared to the idea of shivering in the freezing winds outside on the beach, it felt like a five-star resort.

I walked toward the center room, my toga rustling softly against the floor. Lying on the rough bed frame inside, I found the featureless white mask and picked it up to inspect its smooth surface.

Earlier, I had borrowed an Appraisal Card from Alexia, so I used it on the Mask.

====

[Name]: —

[Rank]: —

[Type]: —

[Item]: —

[Description]: —

————

[Enchantment]: —

————

[Maker’s Inscription]: —

====

”Agh, just as I thought.”

I dismissed the Appraisal Card with a frustrated sigh.

The damn thing was blank. Not a single line of text.

You see, when an Artificer forges an item, they enchant their creation by engraving runes onto it.

Aside from granting enchantments, runes can also be used to properly label the item — basically a way to tell its name, rank, type, abilities, and description.

An Appraisal Card simply reads those description runes and translates the information into a simple language that the rest of us can understand.

But if the maker never bothered to label their work, then even Appraisal wouldn’t find any data to relay.

Origin Cards and most non-man-made Acquire Cards had such sophisticated rune patterns that most Appraisal Cards could read them naturally.

Man-made items, however, required proper labeling because the quality of a human’s work would obviously be inferior to nature.

Now, just to be clear, I’m not calling Vahn’s work shabby compared to natural Cards. The guy was a God of Craftsmanship, after all.

Yet when he created this item, and many others, he clearly wasn’t in the best state of mind. So he probably didn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, invest the time needed to refine every unimportant detail.

You could also argue that he probably just didn’t want the world to know what he had made. A mask designed to hide from the heavens shouldn’t exactly come with a convenient instruction manual for any random appraiser to stumble upon.

But it was the same case with every other Divine Artifact we recovered from his corpse. Even my Vajra showed nothing.

So, yes. My guess was that Vahn didn’t label the items because he made them strictly for his own personal use.

”Well, it’s not like I need the instruction manual anyway.”

I knew precisely what enchantment each artifact had. I had thoroughly tested them all out in the game.

So I sent a pulse of Essence into the unnervingly light Mask held between my fingers, and it rippled in response like it was made of liquid metal.

Then, right before my very eyes, its shape began to change. The flat, featureless white surface began to fold and elongate to wrap around my wrist. Its color bled away from stark white, darkening into a deep black.

Soon enough, the Mask wasn’t a mask anymore. It was now an obsidian band of polished glass, circling my left wrist like a minimalist cuff.

Good.

Carrying a mask around everywhere would have been troublesome, especially with one hand. And for the journey ahead, I wanted to keep it on me at all times.

It was a powerful artifact.

Depending on the user’s rank, the mask’s power ranged from simple invisibility to putting the wearer onto the fringes of reality itself, where they could neither be seen nor remembered as long as it covered their face.

Right now, at my B-rank, I could only use it to slip past most sensory perceptions like sound, smell, and sight for a limited time. Ten minutes, if I remembered correctly.

But that was more than enough.

Because its strongest enchantment was its passive one — a telepathic shield that protected my mind from external probes and would flag the location of anyone trying to divine my presence.

Between that, and the Vajra that allowed me to unleash around ten to twenty million volts of raw lightning, I was pretty satisfied with my share of loot.

Was it worth dying over?

I looked down at the black cuff on my wrist. Then I glanced at the empty space where my right arm used to be.

”Oh yeah. Totally worth it.”

Totally worth it!

•••

After retrieving the Mask of Nobody and lamenting the tragic loss of my Acquire Cards some more, I decided it was probably time to stop wasting time and go check on Michael... and maybe help them with the mast.

But just as I was about to leave the cabin, something on the side of the bed caught my eye. It was a bracelet.

A bracelet that looked like a loop of fingernails threaded together by a strand of silver elastic.

I raised an eyebrow.

Oh, wait. I had seen it before. It was Juliana’s. She had been wearing it as an anklet the last time I noticed it.

I vaguely remembered being curious about it back then. And seeing it again now, that curiosity came right back.

So I picked it up and began examining the fake human nails with mild interest.

”Why would any girl even want something this... bizarre?” I muttered with an amused smile. ”God, she really does have weird tastes.”

Scoffing, I was about to toss it back onto the bed... when something about the bracelet caught my attention again.

The quality...

More specifically, the quality of the fake nails.

Up close, they didn’t resemble cheap plastic or hardened gel. I remembered noticing that detail before as well.

They had a translucent, pearlescent sheen, almost like the inner lining of a seashell, but underneath that was a texture that felt... strangely familiar.

I ran my thumb along the edge of one of the nails. It was sharp. Properly sharp, like something it had been carefully trimmed and filed.

”...Oh— Oh fuck!”

My heart suddenly dropped into my stomach.

Hastily, I summoned my Origin Card and used my power on one of the nails, trying to mold the acrylic into a different shape.

I waited for a second, then a second more.

...But nothing happened.

My ability refused to work on it.

I felt my hand starting to shake. A sense of lightheadedness crept in and I felt short of breath.

...Keratin.

These fake nails weren’t fake at all! They weren’t plastic, or gel, or some exotic resin! They were organic, made from fibrous protein! They were real!