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GOT Chapter 5: Reflections from the Saddle
🕑 Added 2025-07-11 04:09:34 +0000 UTCSince it was a military march, Kal—serving as the forward scout—naturally had to report his daily route back to the king.
That was, in fact, exactly what he was doing now.
On the way back, with the sun already more than halfway sunk toward the western horizon, Kal rode leisurely on horseback. He reached out and brushed the mane of Fawkes, and without meaning to, his thoughts drifted back to the days when he was still raising donkeys in the valley.
Fawkes seemed to sense that his rider’s mind was wandering. His gait slowed, snorting softly as he kicked up a bit of dust with each step, trotting steadily along the road.
When Kal first crossed into this world, he really was just an injured twelve-year-old boy.
But the reason he’d survived and grown into the man he was now wasn’t simply a matter of grit or going it alone. After all, judging by the countless novels he’d read in his previous life, it seemed like every transmigrated protagonist had some sort of 'cheat'.
Sometimes it was an old man living in a ring. Sometimes it was a magical bottle that grew herbs. Or maybe a cross-dimensional chat group where people summoned help to brawl. And eventually, it all got boiled down to some kind of built-in system.
As if writers of online fiction couldn’t tell a proper story unless they added one of those setups.
So it wasn’t all that surprising that Kal—somehow transported to this world himself—was no exception. After crossing over, he really did discover he had a cheat.
To be honest, Kal had no idea how he ended up in this world. Maybe it was a cosmic joke, or maybe it was something else entirely.
But after six years, he’d grown used to this new life. These days, he didn’t really care about the how or why anymore.
After all, thinking too much about it wouldn’t change a thing. Sometimes, going with the flow and making the best of it was a kind of wisdom in itself.
As for his so-called 'cheat', it was actually a small game he’d been playing before his transmigration.
For some reason—he had no clue why—that game had crossed over into this world along with him, and it had become the cornerstone of his survival and livelihood here.
The name of the game was ordinary, maybe even a little tacky: The Farmer’s Quest.
It was the kind of game that many people probably hadn’t even heard of—except maybe a few seasoned 'gentlemen', who might recognize it as that lighthearted and relaxing little title that could bring a certain… relief to men coming home late at night after a long day’s work.
Ahem…
The game itself was nothing fancy—just a simple RPG that mixed farming with monster-slaying and level grinding.
Unlike games like Stardew Valley, this one focused much more on storytelling. In fact, it even featured beautifully rendered CGs to enhance its playability and immersion.
As a result, the other gameplay elements only took up a small portion of the overall experience—so small, in fact, that calling them nonessential wouldn’t be wrong.
Mhm~ Kal didn’t think he was exaggerating. (If anyone else had played it, they’d probably agree with him too.)
After becoming his 'cheat', the game transformed into something akin to a personal dimension.
More precisely, it became an alternate space bound to Kal himself, with him at its core. And everything inside—once mere pixels and code—had turned into actual, physical reality.
So just like that, the once-simple RPG evolved into something grander: a portable space that sounded lofty just by description, a fragmented, incomplete little world built on broken rules.
And Kal could not only perceive this space—he could freely enter and exit it at will.
As for why Kal described it as a fragmented, rule-deficient world—
It was because, despite looking and feeling exactly like a real, functioning world, everything within it—people included—seemed to exist solely based on preset conditions.
They were like living versions of those hosts from Westworld.
To call them 'lifeforms' might even be too generous.
Creatures in the wild, or those found in forests, would respawn after being killed—right on schedule.
And as for the fixed characters—humans or other supposedly sentient beings who should’ve possessed independent thought—they simply repeated their prewritten lives, day after day, year after year.
Even if their role was literally just standing still without moving an inch, that was all they would ever do.
So, for Kal, this world—while convincingly real in appearance—was fundamentally false at every turn.
In here, he was the only one who was truly 'human'.
The world itself also mirrored a video game map: it was confined to a finite, defined region.
That said, because everything had become physically real, it wasn’t one of those tiny areas where you could cross from east to west in under a minute.
But even with the expanded scale, the layout hadn’t changed—still the same few zones as before.
Kal had tried exploring beyond those boundaries, of course, but every attempt had ended in failure.
At the edge of this world, just like in a video game, there was an invisible wall of air that blocked his path. And beyond that wall, all Kal could see was a dense, impenetrable fog.
This only further confirmed to him that this world had clear boundaries—it really was only this big.
Still, for all its inconsistencies and limitations, to Kal, this world was nothing short of an overpowered cheat.
Because he could enter and exit it freely—and more importantly, use it as nourishment and support for his own life.
The method for entering and exiting was almost identical to playing the actual game. All he had to do was tap 'Continue' on the interface, then select the save file he wanted to load.
And there was something even more bizarre: Kal discovered that time held almost no real meaning in this world.
Yes, the world had a concept of time. It flowed normally, and the crops and creatures within it would still respond and act according to their programmed schedules.
But aside from those preset routines, time had no effect on anything outside those parameters.
There was even a time dial in the top-right corner of Kal’s vision, showing day and night cycles, along with a counter of how many days he had lived in this world.
And that time dial was also synchronized with his reality—adjusting automatically to reflect changes in the game world.
But none of that was the truly insane part.
What really broke the rules was that the interface—the game menu that was supposed to exist only within the game—was fully usable in the real world as well.
And regardless of whether he was in the game world or in reality, Kal could access his inventory panel to store and retrieve items at will.
Which meant—yes, it meant he could bring items from the game world into the real one.
Though, admittedly, the reverse wasn’t quite as useful. Items taken from reality into the game could still be retrieved, but they seemed to lack functionality—probably because the game world wasn’t coded to support them.
Still, this minor flaw made little difference to Kal.
Even if only a few of the interface functions worked in the real world—specifically the Inventory, Skills, Equipment, and Status tabs—that alone was already overwhelming.
Everything else remained unusable outside the game world, as though reality itself couldn’t accommodate those functions.
But even so, it was more than enough.
Forget everything else—for Kal, just having access to the Inventory tab alone was already a game-changer. With that ability, he could easily get rich by simply shuttling goods back and forth between the two worlds like some interdimensional trader.
Not to mention, Kal could now use this ability in the real world to handle ventures that would normally require massive fleets, manpower, or even livestock to transport goods.
In short—two words: utterly broken.
That said, not everything about this real-world version of The Farmer’s Quest was perfect. For instance, the game’s currency couldn’t actually be brought out into reality. To Kal, it was nothing more than a string of numbers displayed on his menu.
Just one of the small flaws of this now-materialized game world.
Still, it wasn’t entirely useless. Those digits could be spent within the game world, and once he purchased resources with them, those could be brought back into reality. It was a bit more roundabout, but it worked.
And that was only one side of it.
After all, the items available for purchase weren’t just ordinary goods.
The game shop also carried strange little objects—magical potions, quirky tools, even mystical equipment of all kinds.
All in all, this fully-realized world tied to Kal was like a gold mine—limitless, bottomless, and impossible to exhaust.
That, among other things, was a major reason why Kal could now live with such carefree confidence.
But before all this, back when he first transmigrated into this world, Kal had been nothing more than a common child—an illegitimate son who’d gotten kicked in the head by a donkey.
Even after discovering that he had a “cheat,” and even after realizing he could physically enter The Farmer’s Quest, Kal had still been just a kid.
And in that game world, everything had reset. It was as if he were starting a new character from scratch—his save files wiped clean.
In other words, he had to play this now-real game all over again, rebuilding everything piece by piece.
After realizing that, Kal’s daily life settled into a routine: during the day, he continued raising donkeys for the Royce family, doing whatever chores were assigned to him.
Then at night, he would enter the game world and begin reclaiming it from the ground up.
But reality was still reality—even if it belonged to a game turned real.
At first, he didn’t even dare approach the Goblin Forest east of Mok Village. Every day, he stuck to odd jobs for Farmer Jacob, earning a handful of loose coins and scraps of food, just enough to survive—and to secure a spot in the barn to sleep each night.
Because truth be told, he wasn’t ready to gamble on what would happen if he died in this so-called 'real' game world.
What if that was it—game over, forever?
And in this reality-turned-world, there was no cheat mode to let him rise to the top overnight.
Even if he stripped the patch of grass and flowers bare next to the tree stump in the southwest corner of Mok Village, it wouldn’t make any difference.
So in the beginning, all Kal could do was work himself to the bone on Farmer Jacob’s farm. He labored a full eight hours a day for an entire month, just to scrape together 450 coins—barely enough to rent a room from the village chief and finally have a place of his own.
He didn’t dare treat this game world like a game. There was no 'whatever, I’ll just respawn' attitude—no reckless adventuring with nothing to lose.
