Chapter 9: Frost Forest — Part 2
Phase 3 of the Ice Golem was supposed to be straightforward.
Burn phase. All DPS, minimal mechanics. The boss enters a frenzy state, attacks faster, but can't regenerate HP. A race against the clock—either you kill it before the accumulated damage overwhelms your healer, or you wipe.
Simple math. Simple execution.
Except my hands had already failed once, and the PRD's timer showed nine seconds of buffer against a record that required perfection.
"All DPS," I typed. "Burn everything. Don't hold cooldowns."
The party obeyed. MissileMike's Launcher opened with a missile barrage that chunked the boss's HP by eight percent. ShadowKnife's Assassin backstabbed from the shadow phase. ColdSteel's Berserker raged through his damage rotation. HolyHands kept everyone alive through the frenzy damage.
I joined the burn.
Lord Grim's DPS output was lower than a specialized character—the Unspecialized class traded raw damage for versatility. But the trade-off meant I could chain skills from multiple class trees, building combo sequences that no single-class player could replicate.
Falling Flower Palm into Sky Strike into Dragon Breaks the Ranks.
Battle Mage opener into Blade Master follow-up into Launcher finisher.
The weapon forms flowing into each other like water.
The combo chain started clean. First input. Second input. Third—
The Desync manifested.
Not a full drop this time—just a stutter, a sixteen-millisecond delay that threw off the timing of the fourth input. The combo didn't break entirely, but the damage window narrowed, the multiplier dropping from optimal to acceptable.
[Combo degradation. Execution: 91%. Damage output: -7%.]
Seven percent.
On a burn phase, seven percent is life or death.
I abandoned the complex combo and switched to a simpler rotation—less damage per second, but more reliable. The kind of safe play that would have disgusted the real Ye Xiu.
He would have landed every input.
He would have pushed the combo to the limit.
I'm not him.
The Ice Golem's HP dropped: 50%. 40%. 30%.
[Time: 10:02. Record pace: +5 seconds.]
Five seconds. The margin was razor-thin now.
"Final push," I typed. "Everything you have."
The party complied. Cooldowns fired. Resources burned. The Ice Golem's HP plummeted through the final percentages, its frenzy attacks becoming more desperate, more dangerous, each hit threatening to overwhelm the healer's output.
20%. 15%. 10%.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, executing the simplified rotation with mechanical precision. No flourishes. No style. Just damage, input after input, each one a calculated risk against the twelve percent failure rate that lurked in every keystroke.
5%. 3%. 1%.
The Ice Golem fell.
[Ice Golem Defeated]
[Frost Forest cleared. Time: 10:44.]
[NEW SERVER RECORD — Previous: 10:52 — Improvement: 8 seconds]
The notification expanded into a server-wide announcement, the text scrolling across the screens of every player logged into the 10th Server:
[CONGRATULATIONS: Lord Grim and party have set a new Frost Forest record (10:44)!]
I sat back from the keyboard and let out a breath that had been building since corridor 3.
Eight seconds.
Should have been forty.
The Desync and the aggro timer ate the rest.
The party chat exploded with congratulations. ColdSteel was already asking if we could run again tomorrow. MissileMike wanted to know my secrets. HolyHands offered a friend request. ShadowKnife just typed "nice."
I accepted none of them.
"Good run," I replied. "Party's dissolving. See you around."
The group disbanded before anyone could object.
The inbox notifications started within sixty seconds.
Guild recruitment whispers. Congratulations from strangers. Accusations of hacking from players whose records we'd just broken. Questions about my build, my strategy, my real identity.
[PRD Update: 47 new contact attempts logged. Guild leader profiles: 12. Player profiles: 35.]
I closed every whisper without responding and opened the PRD's database instead. The Frost Forest run had generated comprehensive data: party member performance metrics, boss mechanic confirmations, the corrected aggro timer now permanently logged in the Archive Layer.
Twelve seconds. Not fourteen.
The first crack in my meta-knowledge.
The first time the source material was wrong.
The discrepancy had cost fourteen seconds—the difference between a forty-second improvement and an eight-second one. Minor in the grand scheme, but a warning nonetheless. The Glory of this world wasn't identical to the Glory I'd watched animated on my laptop. Small differences existed. Small differences could cascade.
How many more are waiting?
A message notification blinked in my peripheral—not a guild whisper or a stranger's congratulation, but a direct message from someone on my friend list.
[Soft Mist: How?]
Tang Rou. One word. No punctuation except the question mark. The kind of terse communication that said everything about the sender's priorities.
She saw the record.
She wants to know how I did it.
And she's going to keep watching until she figures it out.
I flagged the message for later and continued scrolling through the inbox.
Guild leaders I recognized from the source material had already reached out. Herb Garden's representative. Tyrannical Ambition's recruiter. Excellent Dynasty—
Excellent Dynasty.
The guild that would eventually become Excellent Era's shadow organization in the 10th Server. The guild that Chen Yehui would use to hunt Lord Grim across every zone, every dungeon, every piece of content worth controlling.
They're not enemies yet.
But they will be.
I closed the inbox without responding to any of them and opened the PRD's record analysis.
[Frost Forest Record — Post-Mortem]
[Optimal time (theoretical): 10:14]
[Actual time: 10:44]
[Time lost to execution errors: 6 seconds (corridor 3 combo drop)]
[Time lost to aggro discrepancy: 14 seconds (Phase 2 improvisation)]
[Time lost to simplified rotation: 12 seconds (Phase 3 safe play)]
[Total deficit: 32 seconds]
Thirty-two seconds left on the table. The PRD had calculated it with clinical precision, breaking down every moment where my hands—or my meta-knowledge—had failed to deliver.
Sixty-one Mechanical Proficiency.
That's what a sixty-one looks like.
The real Ye Xiu would have hit 10:14.
The real Ye Xiu could have pushed it below ten minutes.
I closed the analysis and pulled up the server rankings. Frost Forest record: Lord Grim. Eight seconds ahead of the previous best. First place on a leaderboard that would eventually matter.
It's a start.
It's not enough.
The inbox notification blinked again—another message, this one from a sender I didn't recognize:
[Cleansing Mist: Is this you?]
My hand froze on the keyboard.
Cleansing Mist.
Su Mucheng's character. The account she'd created on the 10th Server after her Excellent Era contract expired. The one she used to reunite with Ye Xiu in the source material, to follow him from anonymous internet café to professional championship.
She's not supposed to contact Lord Grim yet.
In the novel, this happens later—after the guild war, after the record runs, after Lord Grim's identity becomes impossible to hide.
Why is she reaching out now?
The message sat in my inbox, three words that carried the weight of everything I'd been avoiding since waking up in this body. The phone in my pocket—Ye Xiu's phone, with Su Mucheng's number saved in the contacts. The photo of two teenagers at an internet café. The obligation I'd inherited along with the face.
She thinks I'm him.
She's hoping I'm him.
And I have to decide how much truth to tell her.
I typed a response: Who?
Three seconds passed. Then:
[Cleansing Mist: Ye Qiu. That routing in corridor 5—nobody else would think of it.]
She recognized the shortcut.
Of course she did.
She played with the real Ye Xiu for ten years. She knows his style better than anyone.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, the cursor blinking in the reply field. The café was empty around me—3:47 AM, no customers, no witnesses. Just me and a decision that would shape everything that came after.
Tell her the truth.
Tell her Ye Xiu signed away his account and walked out of Excellent Era with nothing but a cardboard box.
Tell her he's working the night shift at an internet café, trying to rebuild from scratch.
Don't tell her the rest.
Don't tell her about the transmigration, the system, the stranger wearing her friend's face.
I typed: The night shift pays poorly. Had to find other entertainment.
The reply came faster this time:
[Cleansing Mist: You're really here. On the 10th Server.]
[Cleansing Mist: I was starting to think you'd actually retired.]
I stared at the message for a long moment. Su Mucheng's hope, crystallized in text. The friend she'd lost to corporate politics, suddenly alive again on a new server, breaking records like nothing had changed.
Except everything has changed.
I'm not the person she remembers.
I'm not the person anyone remembers.
The PRD pulsed in my peripheral, logging the conversation automatically. Su Mucheng's profile populated with basic data: character class, current level, online status. The system didn't know who she was to the real Ye Xiu. It just saw another player to catalog.
That's all anyone is to the system.
Data points.
Profiles.
I'm the one who decides what the data means.
I typed: Not retired. Just regrouping. How's Excellent Era treating you?
The pause before her response was longer this time.
[Cleansing Mist: Three months left on my contract. Then I'm free.]
[Cleansing Mist: Where are you? Physically, I mean.]
She wants to see him.
She wants to see me.
And I have no idea how to explain the gap between who I am and who she expects.
I typed: Happy Internet Café. Night shift manager. It's not glamorous, but the coffee's free.
[Cleansing Mist: I'll find a way to visit. Soon.]
[Cleansing Mist: Don't do anything stupid before I get there, okay?]
The message carried an undercurrent of worry that made my chest tighten. Su Mucheng had spent a decade watching out for Ye Xiu—managing his public image, shielding him from the corporate politics he refused to engage with, being the partner who made his genius sustainable.
She's still doing it.
She doesn't know I'm not the person who deserves that loyalty.
I typed: No promises.
[Cleansing Mist: Same as always.]
[Cleansing Mist: Good night, Ye Qiu. And... nice record.]
The conversation ended. Her status shifted to offline.
I sat in the empty café, the PRD's database open, the inbox full of unread messages, and the weight of Su Mucheng's hope pressing down on shoulders that hadn't earned it.
Three months.
Three months until she's free of Excellent Era.
Three months to figure out how to be someone I'm not.
The record announcement still scrolled across the server's public channel. Lord Grim. Frost Forest. 10:44. First place.
It's a start.
But it's not enough.
I closed the inbox, flagged Tang Rou's message for morning, and opened the PRD's corrected Frost Forest profile. The aggro timer sat at twelve seconds now, the discrepancy resolved. One crack in the meta-knowledge, patched over with real data.
How many more cracks are waiting?
How long until Su Mucheng notices the gap between Ye Xiu's memories and mine?
How long until the lie collapses?
The questions had no answers. I saved the data and pushed back from the keyboard.
Outside the café windows, the first hint of dawn colored the eastern sky. December 8th. Five days since the 10th Server launched. Five days since Lord Grim was born.
And somewhere in this city, Su Mucheng was already planning to find him.
To supporting Me in Pateron.
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!