Chapter 1

"Sorry. I blocked that attack for you earlier only because I wanted to die. You don't owe me anything." The girl slowly shook her head. "To save up enough money to buy a Pandora's Box and enter the game, I did a lot of shameful things. Even if I got out, the Judicator would rule that I'd committed Heinous Crimes."

Ning Buwen froze for a moment.

"Look. The sky in this game is blue, the water is clear, and even the air smells wonderful. Everything is exactly as I remember it." The girl even hummed a couple of cheerful notes. "This is the ideal graveyard I've always wanted. I couldn't choose how I was born, but I can choose how I die. Goodbye. You're a good person. I wish I could have met you in the real world."

With that, the girl leaped, smiling as she plunged straight down.

A flower of blood blossomed on the ground.

"Let's go." Ning Buwen patted his beloved dog's head. "I can't stop someone who wants to die. We don't even know her name. Maybe this is what she wanted most."

For some people, living was harder than dying.

The year was 2222.

Pandora's Box was opened.

Despair instantly swallowed the Earth.

Sunlight, air, water, soil, climate, energy, and the magnetic field were almost completely warped.

The only way to set it all right again was to close Pandora's Box.

The scientific system had developed at breakneck speed over centuries, only to collapse across the board in three short years and regress by several centuries.

And nearly all the resources and environmental conditions people needed to live came from "Pandora's Box rewards."

It was laughable, but nobody could laugh.

Ning Buwen least of all.

He went downstairs and found that the girl's body had vanished. Only the blood remained, yet the people on the athletic field seemed not to see it at all, chatting and laughing as they stepped right through the stains.

That was how this school worked.

Every student who died—whether they were an NPC in the school's original plot or an outside player like them—left no trace of their corpse behind.

Only certain traces remained.

And the only ones who could see those traces were participants in this Box Game.

Leading his dog around several pools of blood, Ning Buwen finally found an unstained spot to settle down and feed it.

The little Shiba Inu was useless, but it was still his only source of happiness here.

This school looked bright and polished, but in the mere three days since he arrived, at least a hundred students had died.

"Woof, woof, woof." The puppy eagerly licked its owner's hand, its tail wagging furiously.

"Eat up. You'll probably outlive me." Ning Buwen rubbed his dog's head. "Let's hope your Luck stat keeps you from ever becoming my emergency rations."

The dog understood none of it and simply worked hard at eating what its owner gave it.

"You really do love small animals." A bespectacled female classmate came up behind him. "If you acted like that in class, nobody would hate you."

"I have no intention of associating with those murderers." The moment Ning Buwen heard her voice, his expression changed, and his tone turned vicious.

"Don't say that. If you do, everyone will..."

"You going to rat me out?"

"How could I? You know we grew up together. I..."

"Then, since you're not going to rat me out, I'll be going." Ning Buwen patted his dog twice in quick succession. Once he was sure it understood his command, he left without another glance at this so-called childhood friend.

"Damn it!" Why would he rather be nice to a dog than say one word to her? The girl was about to kick the dog to vent her frustration when she discovered it had vanished at some point.

Ning Buwen returned to the classroom.

The next class was an exam.

He had known the answers long ago, but he still turned in a blank paper.

Because his assigned role was "poor student."

The most basic survival rule for Box Games was to follow your assigned persona. Following it would not necessarily let you survive to clear the instance, but at least it kept you from becoming an early target.

This was Ning Buwen's first Box Game.

He had suddenly acquired a Pandora's Box while wandering the streets.

During the three years of the world's collapse, everyone learned everything they could about Pandora's Box. Once it was opened, its owner would be pulled into the world inside the Box anywhere from one second to twenty-four hours later.

So everyone had to learn about it in advance. Even children who had only just learned to speak were no exception.

For instance, Pandora's Box had always chosen its owners at random.

Men, women, young, old, even cancer patients—apart from children under ten, nearly everyone could be selected.

It plainly had weight and color, yet no matter what machine was used to measure it, it registered as nothing.

It was something wholly beyond imagination.

Once it appeared in someone's hand, that person was its owner. A Box seized by someone else did not count; only a willing exchange was permitted.

Everyone who received a Box got one random item from it—anything at all—jokingly called a "Newcomer Starter Pack."

A person could open only one Pandora's Box.

Before it was opened, no one knew what was inside.

Once opened, ownership of Pandora's Box could no longer be transferred, and the person who opened it had to take part in a Box Game. The item received upon opening it, however, could be traded.

That made "box gambling" the most common and profitable business in the world.

You bought someone's Pandora's Box, then opened it.

If it yielded something especially powerful, you could sell it directly to a merchant guild and pocket the difference. If it yielded something useless, you could only count yourself unlucky.

Thus, this world also had the profession of box opener.

They could only open one Box, but the pay for that one opening could be considerable, since a box opener's earnings were often tied to what came out.

"Sell it to me, sell it to me!"

"Please, I'll pay three million for that Pandora's Box! Let me open it!"

"Give it to me!"

"God, someone else got a magic box!"

...

"Sorry, I'm in debt, so I can't sell you my Pandora's Box." Ning Buwen said it casually. "I'm hoping it'll give me something good enough to pay this year's interest."

"Young man, think this through." A hook-nosed middle-aged man cut him off. "If you open something useless, it won't be worth a cent. Sell it to me and you'll get three million! Three million is enough to pay off your debt."

Three million was indeed a high offer.

Ordinarily, an unopened magic box was worth only around two million. After all, a person could only receive one, and it might arrive at any point in their life.

But hardly anyone had received a Pandora's Box that day, and there were too many competitors nearby fighting for business, so the price had shot up.

When many people received Pandora's Boxes at once, the price could even fall to one and a half million.

"Ha, sorry." Ning Buwen rolled the Box in his hand, his eyes curving faintly. "The interest on my debt alone is a hundred million a year."

"What?" The middle-aged man seemed unsure whether Ning Buwen was talking nonsense or telling the truth.

But Ning Buwen gave him no time to think. The moment he finished speaking, he opened the Box.

Light sprang from inside and gradually descended to the ground.

"What's that?"

"Looks like some kind of animal."

"Could it be like that person the Ninth Legion recruited last time? Did he get a legendary magical beast?"

"A magical beast is worth ten million!"

The light gradually took shape.

Ning Buwen watched it quietly too.

He had always had excellent luck at gambling. Except for that one loss, he had won every bet before this.

So this time could not be an exception either.

"Woof, woof."

The formed animal barked twice, then darted toward its owner—Ning Buwen—and rubbed affectionately against his leg.

Ning Buwen and the onlookers all looked down at the animal by his feet.

A little black dog.

A Shiba Inu?

"Hello, the assessment is complete." A sweet-smiling young woman looked at Ning Buwen with faint sympathy in her eyes. "Your Newcomer Starter Pack is an ordinary Shiba Inu, two years and three months old. With proper training, it might become a decent hunting dog. Animals granted by the system have an innate rapport with their owners, so it may be useful in games that involve scouting. We also found that its Luck stat is above average."

What use was a dog's Luck stat, exactly?

Did she think he didn't know that some newcomers who got useless animals like this simply ate them as rare meat?

Its Luck stat must have gone entirely into not getting eaten by me yet!

Ning Buwen looked down at his dog and made one last desperate attempt. "Is there..."

"Impossible." The girl at the counter was used to questions from newcomers like Ning Buwen. "There are no creatures with some supposed hidden bloodline grade that our system cannot detect. Our assessment system comes from Pandora. Pandora would not contradict itself."

Being good-looking did have some advantages.

The counter girl saw the aggrieved expression on the sunny, handsome young man's face, then noticed that he was only nineteen according to the age he had entered. Her voice softened. "In fact, there's only a thirty percent chance that a Newcomer Starter Pack contains anything useful. D-rank packs account for twenty percent, C-rank packs eight percent, and everything from B-rank upward combined is only two percent."

"Then my Shiba Inu..."

"I'm sorry, but it cannot be assigned a rank." The counter girl spoke softly. "Generally, you will be pulled into a Box Game within twenty-four hours. Please make the necessary prepara—"

Before she could finish, Ning Buwen and his dog vanished from the spot.

"What bad luck." Another counter girl spoke up. "It looks like he got pulled into a Box Game without preparing anything. Newcomers pulled in within three hours have only a fifteen percent survival rate."

"If only he'd sold it before opening it. Such a handsome guy..."

Ning Buwen and his Shiba Inu entered a strange space.

"Welcome to Pandora's Box."

Ning Buwen did not want to think anymore.

Once inside Pandora's Box, the knowledge he had learned ran out. The information Legions gave ordinary people was only basic common knowledge. There were tens of thousands of Box Games, and no one could predict which one a newcomer would be assigned. Every game also differed in subtle ways; even if you happened upon a world you knew, you absolutely could not clear it using the same routine.

Since that information was useless, the Legions simply did not release it. Only people who successfully survived their first newcomer game were qualified to learn it.

When Ning Buwen was pulled into this instance, he was told only his "identity" and the conditions for clearing it. Nothing else.

"Survive ten days in the 'Spirit Summoning' campus to clear the instance. Scions must seek out side quests on their own. A friendly newcomer reminder: the more developed the side quests, the greater the rewards."

Heh heh.

The instance for this Box Game was called "Spirit Summoning." Just hearing the name told him it would be a world where the protagonist did something stupid and summoned something bad. The Legion-issued handbook Pandora Game Essentials also stated that survival rates for supernatural newcomer instances like this were the lowest—apparently only eight percent.

And he had not seen a single fellow newcomer, either.

In a supernatural instance dubbed a newcomer killer, he had not even had time to enjoy his newcomer benefits or take out a loan from the First Legion merchant guild at rock-bottom rates to buy items before being brought here.

This was bad enough to make him cry.

Strange. My luck used to be great.

Ever since I started paying a hundred million in interest every year, I seem to have become unlucky all at once.

Sigh.

Ning Buwen was overcome with sorrow.

Starting with nothing but a dog. And the dog could not even be brought into the classroom; he had to let it pose as a stray at school. Every meeting looked like something out of a spy movie.

That was far too unfriendly to newcomers.

Ning Buwen's classroom was utterly ordinary.

Second Year, Class Three.

The bulletin board at the back had a "National Day Special Theme." What was on it was useless, and the four famous quotations hanging in the classroom were equally commonplace.

The only unusual thing was a surveillance camera above the classroom door.

But the camera was broken. Ning Buwen had tried to take it down and found that someone seemed to have damaged its insides. It had not been repaired since.

If only he could get what was inside the camera.

"Everyone get ready. Class is starting." A female teacher walked in from outside with her lesson plans. "Good morning, class."

"Stand!"

The class monitor—Ning Buwen's "childhood friend"—called out, and the whole class rose.

Ning Buwen also drew out the greeting listlessly. As he did, he counted the people who had come to class. "Good morning, teacherrr—"

He had been in this class for three days.

Only thirty students had come to class today.

On his first day, there had been a full forty.

The class's original number must have been higher still.

The scariest part was that no one in the class besides him thought anything was wrong.

Three days ago, Ning Buwen had sat in the middle of the classroom. Now he was in the last row.

Behind him were more than twenty empty desks.

Now, Ning Buwen was the last person in the back row.

Something... was killing people according to their seating order!