Stone

(Graphics Warning)

After leaving the room, Jack was brought to a room with no windows, just a white floor, wall, and ceiling with built-in lights as well as countless cameras. Yes, a square room which at most would require 2 cameras, actually had 12 cameras at different angles, making Jack feel slightly unsettled at what actually went on in here.

He was then handed a document written on really old paper, as well as a pair of gloves to prevent him from depositing his dead skin and natural body oil on it.

Jack opened the paper and read the title.

==========

Ki sensing-gathering technique

Clear your mind,

Calm your heart,

Ignore your senses,

…

==========

Jack immediately closed this ancient scripture as his eyes contracted. Why was that? Because he had heard this somewhere. In his previous life. Jack had just entered the game, and after dying to the newbie's surprise, he was sent to a random forest in the Jerome kingdom, where, while he was running from a few baby dragons, he fell into a hole which allowed him to escape his pursuers. However, he too was unable to escape.

After waiting for about an hour and not noticing the creatures leave, Jack decided to explore the rest of the cave, perhaps a way to escape without having to die.

Soon, however, he stumbled across what seemed like a ruin, with weathered bricks and partially crumbling walls all along the tunnel. As he walked forward, the walls, floor and ceiling began to become increasingly intact; clearly, the erosion had not reached this point. Soon, he was confronted with a horrid stench which seemed like someone had taken all the waste from the universe and compressed it into a single room, and then upped its stench by a factor of infinity.

However, since this would not be able to affect his real life in any way, Jack closed his nose with his hand and approached the source of the stench. Soon, he found out the reason for the stench. There were 5 tables on the ground, each with a different alien creature, neither of them being human. Their bodies were torn open with guts and flesh scattered across the ground around them. However, what made the scene worse was the fact that everything was half rotten, with all the blood having solidified and water evaporated, while the colour of the flesh had turned a horrid greenish yellow and various types of fungi growing on the dead bodies.

After throwing up a few times, Jack looked away from the dead bodies, only to see another dead body at the centre of the room, a human dead body. Only, this dead body had a spear impaling it into the ground, and the one who had used the spear was a human. The one with the spear had his neck cracked by the human who had the spear impaled into her body, and the two of them died just like that, rotting away with the sands of time.

The human lady who was impaled by the spear had been trying to reach for something before breathing her last, and Jack walked around her and found an odd-looking stone embedded into the ground. Around it, were countless words seemingly written randomly. Of course, Jack would not possibly be able to remember all those words, however, out of curiosity he reached out for the multicoloured stone and picked it up.

Immediately, all the writings on the ground vanished, and appeared inside his mind and were something Jack simply could not forget even in real life. However, Jack had decided to ignore it because it was still a hot jumbled mess of random words without any meaning. Instead, he had focussed on the x20 Experience, +1 to all stats for every level up, +1 to all stats for every 1000 enemies killed

Such insanely broken stats had caused him to nearly go crazy with joy, and like a fool he posted it online and then created a guild with it as an advertisement, causing the future events to transpire as they had.

Even now, those random words still occupied a small portion of his mind, not wanting to leave despite the stone having sacrificed itself to bring Jack back to the past. However, as soon as Jack began reading the scripture, the words that matched what he read immediately separated themselves from the mess of words and letters, and arranged themselves in the same way as to what was written in the scripture.

After taking a few moments to collect himself, Jack got back to reading the document, as more and more of the sentences in his mind arranged themselves.

However, as he went further and further, he was getting this feeling that he was getting closer and closer to something. As if, once he finished, something would happen. He was just not sure if that something would be like the stone, bringing him both opportunity and crisis, or just straight-up crisis.

Time passed and Jack finally reached the end of the document. There was nothing else remaining. However, there were still a few letters and words remaining in his mind, scrambled completely.

Jack frowned slightly before returning to normal and closing the documents. It was only so many combinations he could make with those few words and letters. He could just slowly go through every possible sentence with those letters and words until one that made sense came out. Or he could just use one of those free-to-use online decoders to form coherent sentences for him, and then when he found the correct one, the last sentence in his mind should just fix itself. Although he could ask Kenny for the last sentence, he did not wish to. Jack had already revealed far too much about him. Not only his level in-game but also the fact that he knew about his wife's disease, as well as when in the future would it be cured. Although he did trust Kenny a lot more now, considering he was Ava's father, and the fact that he had let Jack see the secret to his powers, he still did not want to leave everything up to him. After all, everyone had their secrets, and it was the basis of having negotiations with others.

A wise man named Tsun Zu once said, "Never put all your eggs in one basket. All it takes is one slip to cause you to lose everything".