Sam stood completely alone in the middle of the room after Clara left him to attend her Academy classes early.
But now, he seemed to be suffering from an unusual ordeal.
163....
163 cm...
'Was I actually just a Goblin without even realizing it?'
In truth, Sam hadn't measured his height all this time, as the last thing one thinks about amidst all these troubles is height.
He kept telling himself that the mana must have changed people's height, making them taller and stronger, and that there was no other explanation.
But the strange thing was that even those without mana were taller than him.
In fact, everything was taller than him.
In his previous body, he was 180 cm... but this catastrophic drop was unexpected and caused him internal agony.
Though that was sad, what was even more depressing than the 163 cm was the Strength stat of 2.
'By what metric, for God's sake, do you assign stats?'
[The maximum weight the Host can lift is 2 kilograms.]
Following that revelation, you can find him curled up on himself in the corner there...
But there was a bright side... 155
Intelligence... This was a high rate; it seemed to be 155 IQ.
This gave him optimism... At least he wasn't useless.
In this sad corner, and in a situation that hadn't lasted ten minutes, Sam recalled his sad memories related to this world's novel.
Sam was an orphan from his tender age.
The orphanage they were in closed due to high costs.
Because of this, the child Sam was forced to search for other shelters, hoping to find a simple refuge.
Even something simple would be better than a street where danger surrounded you everywhere.
But he faced the world's cruelty from his tender age. Every time he went to a shelter, he was either kicked out with a smile, or with cold indifference, or given some food and wished good luck.
He was shunned even by street dogs. Not humans, but street dogs felt he was lesser than them.
Even when someone decided to help him, they would be reprimanded for it, in several ways. They didn't differ, and the reasons didn't matter in the end.
The result was that you were unwelcome.
Hungry... in danger....
When he found a safe place, he would be thrown out of it and forcefully taken by other vagrants.
When someone tried to help him...
he would find that he was the one who needed help.
When Sam finally found a family to care for him... he lived with them for five years—the worst of his life—because of a despicable brother who beat him severely, and weak-willed adoptive parents.
To vent his anger... Sam decided to steal the most expensive thing his brother owned...
His bank account.
He noticed that his brother was stealing money from their parents and emptying it into a special wallet or a very strange account.
Sam decided to spy every day and wait every moment...
To finally take his passwords and destroy his phone with a hammer and his laptop, after changing all his passwords.
It turned out that this account was a private account for a website Sam did not know.
When he finally escaped from that house...
and managed to open the account on the strange website in an internet café...
It turned out to be a web novel site...
and his brother was wasting all the money he spent on this account, which was filled with the sexual novels he bought from there.
But amidst all these novels...
An Exceptional Experience in the Heroes' Academy was the only completely non-sexual novel, which he was able to read and enjoy the Hero's story until the end, crying over all his wasted effort.
That is why he remembered this novel...
not because it was extremely good... but because it was worth five years of effort and its results
In the end, Sam no longer cared.
In a month, Sam managed to sell the account for two thousand dollars to another person online...
and this person praised his formidable taste and said they would buy another account if he had one.
With this money, he was able to buy temporary housing... and clothes, and was able to work a grueling 12-hour job when he was sixteen years old.
And he managed to become more and more independent.
But he did not forget the novel, and its letters circled in his throat like scorpions.
He read it dozens of times... just to feel some morbid comfort... that he wasn't that bad.
An Exceptional Experience in the Heroes' Academy is a Harem novel about Edmund Lazard... the marginal Fifth Prince who dies and is resurrected ten years before his death, with all knowledge of the future, and seeks to fix the future and save everyone.
In the novel... Edmund almost didn't truly save anyone. People died for the same reasons. But he managed to save some girls... and live happily.
Even though he got a chance to return in time again... Edmund felt that he was better off than the previous time.
In the end, Edmund became king and had dozens of women... and people considered him the savior. He had everything; his name would even be mentioned in history.
Edmund felt that now that he had shed the title of trash he once held, this was the best ending for him...
that he was the one who retreated in time to change his fate, not others... and that his life was his choice...
At the expense of others, of course.
Sam felt that Edmund resembled him.
They were both failures, and they failed in the end.
And they will fail anyway.
But Edmund failed happily. Sam felt that if Edmund's chance was given to him, he would be the same.
Someone who hadn't changed in the end...
but chose an ending that satisfied his heart.
Transmigrating to this world was, for Sam, nothing more than a single sentence from fate:
Live as you wish, even if you know the ending hasn't changed much.
But because of what he did... the System decided that he must rebuild what he had destroyed... and that he must fix the novel's ending.
And he absolutely did not want that.
"Well, the past remains the past, and there's no point in dwelling on it. We are children of our present."
Now there was a chance to upgrade his stats.
Sam decided to consider carefully where to allocate his remaining points and which aspect needed improvement most urgently given this major problem.
"First... Strength. This isn't the strength of an ordinary human... it's the strength of a skeleton. Even the anatomical diagrams that display skeletons..."
...could probably lift more than him.
2—»10
In a fraction of a second, he felt as if his body was boiling from the inside, and smoke completely filled the room.
Unfortunately, after emerging from the smoke cloud and making his way to the bedroom...
He smelled absolutely foul.
"I need to take a shower..."
It was impurities and toxins leaving his body as his strength increased.
As he submerged himself in the water, he finally felt some hint of muscle definition.
Well, in truth, no obvious definition... he just felt an internal change.
He now had 12 more Free Points. He decided to save them for a time of need, which was the most logical choice so far.
While he was underwater, the suite's doorbell suddenly rang.
Sam assumed Clara had returned quickly, having forgotten something.
He rushed out from the water, sensing that if he didn't hurry, he would be penalized, so he quickly wrapped himself in a towel.
He rushed out to answer the door.
On the other side of the door stood a delivery clerk, who had been informed that she needed to collect an order from an important client and deliver it to the room of an important student.
When she rang the bell and waited for a few seconds...
The door opened quickly, and extremely thick smoke poured out of the suite, making her cough as she peered at the indistinct figure standing there—clearly naked and wearing a towel.
"Mistress... I apologize for the delay in opening the door. I was waiting for you eagerly... You are lucky because you..."
The delivery girl suddenly found a strange, obscured man uttering these words, which instantly sparked the terror within her that she was about to be kidnapped.
She threw the parcel in her hand directly at his face and fled in a panic.
The package was sent flying toward Sam's face. Sam was struck by the box and watched the girl run away.
He felt utterly embarrassed by the situation, but the box that hit his face dropped a phone onto the floor.
A note was stuck on it, which read:
(I kept my word... Signature 'Monret')
The phone Sam had requested, he had officially received.