A dark haired young man walked into the dilapidated classroom, greeted by more than a dozen glares. This was to be expected, he figured. From that teal haired man with narrow eyes and an arrogant sneer on his face to the nervous golden haired college student in a skirt constantly running her hand down her thigh in a self-soothing gesture, every single one of these people was a survivor, just like him. 

Welcome, examinees. 

A smiling man wearing white gloves clasped together spoke from the front of the classroom. 

You have passed the preliminary exam. Now, it is time for your tutelage to begin. You will be trained in martial arts, survival skills, and will gain exposure to the arcane, all experiences you will need to survive the new world ahead of you. If you fail, you will die. 

Good luck, examinees, and may the first examination begin. 

[You have five hours to reach the gymnasium.] 

—------

Zack’s second grade teacher once told him that life was like an ice cream dessert. Sweet and refreshing, a treat to look forward to grabbing from the bottom of the freezer at the end of the day, or to share on a date at the amusement park with a loved one. 

He was hatefully envious of anyone who lived such a luxuriously normal life that they could think such stupid thoughts. 

For someone with a bottomless pit of debt like him, life was like a room full of soot. A room full of the black cancer-causing stuff that stained the inside of his lungs with every breath he took during work. 

He cursed every day of his life working as a coal excavator, the drill numbing his hands and causing heavy bleeding even through his gloves. Despite feeling the onset of carpal tunnel, Zack slaved on. He was stubborn to a fault, and he needed money more than anything else in the world to support his only remaining family. 

Most of it went into paying off his debts, while the rest went to supporting his sister Shanna’s highschool tuition. She had gotten into an excellent all-girl’s highschool on a partial scholarship, but the other portion still needed to be covered by him. It wasn’t much, as the scholarship covered most of it, but Zack had nearly nothing to spare. 

“Zack… when I am gone, please take care of your sister. My dear…” his mother said to him. 

Supporting Shanna was one of the only reasons why he kept on this miserable existence. Zack promised his mother to take care of her on her hospital deathbed. 

“Brother, you don’t have to do this! I’ll go to school locally,” his sister told him. 

“It’s fine Shanna. It wasn’t easy for you to get into Faith Girl's Highschool. I promised mom to take care of you.” 

“Okay, if you say so. I miss mom…” 

He resolved to take care of her, but it was expensive. With his debt and his sister’s tuition paid off, he was left with nothing for food, and just enough to rent a room in the crummiest part of the slums. Zack ate the cheapest brands of instant noodles every day of the week, and it took a toll on his health. 

He took on two more part-time jobs, one as a garbage collector and the other as a cashier at the local Infinity-Up convenience store, where general manager Kim yelled at him constantly for slacking. He wasn’t slacking, he just had trouble standing up straight after all the backbreaking work from his drilling job. 

He never had a girlfriend throughout his entire life, so he could only watch in misery as attractive female university students in fashionable clothes stumbled into his convenience store clinging onto their well dressed and sophisticated looking boyfriends to buy booze. 

Compared to them, the nicest clothes that he wore was his convenience store uniform. At least those didn’t have holes in them. Outside of work, he wore ragged clothing that he hand patched several times over. Haircuts were too expensive, so he cut his own hair with a pair of rusty scissors, leaving him unkempt and unsightly. He was practically a beggar, and looked the part. 

Someone like him had no reason to even breathe the same air as these rich university girls. All he could do was waste away every day, barely subsisting. He couldn’t even drink his problems away, as beer was too expensive. 

With hardly any time for sleep and even less leg room in his cramped sharehouse bedroom, Zack felt his health deteriorate every day. His already piss-poor sleep was interrupted even further by the howlings of his drunken deadbeat sharehouse roommate. 

This terrible life of barely making ends meet went on for a year, until he broke his leg a week ago when he slipped while trying to haul a piece of discarded furniture, landing badly. He would have to have his leg amputated if he didn’t get sent to the hospital immediately. 

Even with a broken bone and heavy internal bleeding, Zack refused to go to the hospital, struggling with his three remaining limbs against the ambulance paramedics as they dragged him off. He was sent to the hospital immediately, despite his protests, adding new hospital bills to his already long list of bills. 

Life was just too cruel for the poor. Even under anesthesia, he stubbornly tried to break free of his hospital bed. 

As he had no money, he received the worst medical treatment available. The doctors said that it would take him a year to recover. 

Zack was fired from all three of his jobs that very day. He couldn’t work as a cripple, and that’s all they cared about. With nowhere left to turn, he made a phone call to the person he wanted to see least in this world. 

The meeting was arranged swiftly for the abandoned parking lot under the plaza complex at midnight. 

The dark haired young man in a cast limped his way there with crutches. When he arrived, he saw that a smartly dressed loan shark was waiting for him, standing in a striped suit with piercings and tattoos across his body. It was the person he least wanted to see in this entire world, and he was casually flipping a blade in his hand while dangling a lit cigarette in his mouth. 

“Where’s my payment, boy?” the loan shark said with a sadistic smile, his gold teeth showing. “Don’t tell me that you’re late again, are you?” 

Zack gulped. He wasn’t liking where this was going. 

“I need a favor,” he said, the words feeling like fire coming out of his mouth. 

He pointed downwards with his head at his broken leg. “I broke my leg and lost my job. Could you extend the payment time for just a little bit until I can find another job?” He paused for a moment. “Is that possible Bruce?” 

The loan shark threw his head back and laughed, as if he had just heard the world’s funniest joke, and Zack’s heart sank. 

“You think I run a charity case here? This is the second time you’re late on your payment, and you have the guts to call me over here to tell me that you want extra time?”

The smiling loan shark approached Zack and kicked his crutch, then pushed him to the ground. He felt a stiflingly heavy weight on top of him as Bruce kneeled on his chest, before flicking his switchblade open. Zack felt the cold steel of the blade trace his ribcage, all the way down to his stomach where Bruce traced the knife delicately around his navel. 

“Worthless slummer,” Bruce said, taking a long drag from the cigarette butt before putting it out on Zack’s sweatpants, causing him to yelp in pain. 

“Maybe it’ll be better to give a call to my boys, and cut you open for your organs, eh?” 

The sneering loan shark pointed at his stomach with his switchblade, tapping it gently.

“A healthy liver goes for seven thousand.” 

Zack felt his finger poke at his groin through his sweatpants. 

“And a nice pair of testicles goes for fifteen thousand to the right buyer.” 

The loan shark smiled, pulling a radio out from his back pocket. “And I hear that your little sister is at Faith Girl’s Highschool. How about we have her pay off your debt, huh? With her body.”

“No! Leave her out of this!” Zack shouted in a desperate plea, the back of his neck pressed against the cold hard pavement of the abandoned parking lot. “I-I can’t find a job like this! But I’ll pay you back once I recover, I promise! I’ll pay double!” 

Bruce laughed, elbowing Zack in the face. “And how do you plan to do that?”

“I-I don’t know, but I’ll think of something!” 

The loan shark was about to elbow Zack again, but refrained at the last moment, cracking his knuckles and smiling with a flash of his golden teeth once again. 

“Tell you what. There’s a certain job you can do, even as a cripple.” 

The hairs on Zack’s arms stood up on end, dreading what the loan shark’s next words would be. 

The loan shark licked some ashes from the side of his mouth, then spat onto the ground. “You’re pretty young. You ever play video games?” 

“Yes,” Zack replied without a single thought. 

The loan shark’s golden teeth smiled at Zack in a nauseating fashion. “Good, good,” he said, taking a business card which glinted with golden lettering out from within his suit. “You must have heard of the Royal Road, right?” 

Zack nodded. Someone had to be living under a rock not to have heard of the game. 

“What I need you to do is go on that game and farm currency. I don’t care how you do it. Fifty thousand coins per month is the bare minimum, otherwise I give my boys a call and have them cut your balls off, alright? Or if you’re not around, we’ll look for your sister.”

“I-I’ll do it!” Zack replied, feeling the cold of the blade against his navel. 

“If you have any questions, call the quest provider hotline on the card. She’ll give you some more information. And if you miss the quota…”

The loan shark jabbed Zack’s groin with his brass knuckles. “You know what’ll happen.” 

Zack nodded furiously, his shaking hands taking the card and staring at it while the loan shark laughed, leaving the young man in a bloodied mess in the abandoned parking lot as a black car pulled up in the parking lot and the door opened from within, allowing the loan shark to hop in.

“Fifty thousand coins per month, or don’t bother calling me. You call me before then, or ask for another favor, and I’ll have your testicles in a jar in no time.” 

Slam! 

The car’s door closed violently, and Zack recoiled as the unmarked black car skirted past him… too dangerously close. The tires were nearly in front of his face! 

Crunch!

The black car ran over his cast, causing Zack to howl in pain, his anguished voice the only thing ringing through the abandoned parking lot. Blood dripped down from his left leg, pooling on the floor. 

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhh!!!!!” Zack screamed, while in excruciating pain the likes of which he’d never wish upon even the meanest of beggars. But even as his ear piercing cry rang through the empty lot, there was no one around to hear, and nobody willing to help a penniless cripple. 

For some people, life was like an ice cream dessert indeed. But not for Zack. For him, life was like the exhaust of a car blowing into his face while he lay dying in the middle of an abandoned parking lot, bleeding out like a discarded piece of rancid beef. 

Zack woke up the next day shivering, his face pressed against the cold asphalt and his cast dyed an unpleasant color from all the dried blood. He hadn’t bled out, at least. 

He tried to move, and was relieved to find that the bloodied cast had held firm, despite being slightly cracked from the skid mark. Pained as he was, at least he wasn’t immobilized–not yet. 

Feverishly sitting up, Zack leaned to the right to grab his crutch, when he noticed a foreign object laying by his crutch– a burner phone left in a plastic bag. And left inside the bag was that business card yet again, with the golden glint of text. 

Grabbing the plastic bag with the burner phone with his trembling hand, Zack opened it and pulled out the old phone, which had crusted over buttons from some long forgotten era. He took the card and dialed the number on it quickly, while skimming the text on the other side. 

[Royal Road Currency Mining Services] 

[New Employee Hotline]

And so began his life as a currency mining slave.