The World I've Found Myself In

Record of a Life of Pain and Triumph.

The game opened in a grimy, iron-gutted city stuck halfway between a fortress and a coffin. This place—the Resplendent City, Bastion Reach—was your home during the prologue.

Bastion Reach was a walled, fortress-like city built into the bones of a grand hill, vaguely tiered like a rotten wedding cake. The further down the layers you went, the darker, grittier, and grimier the place got.

The city was divided into three sections: The Upper Layers, the Middle Layers, and the Lower Layers. These layers were then divided into three sub-layers.

At the top of the stack sat the man in charge—the City Lord, Reinhold, barely seen by anyone below the upper strata, but always felt. The Upper Layers were the nicest place, aesthetically.

Below him and the Upper Layers, the city spiraled downward into choking smog, rusted pipes, broken cobblestones, and alleys that stank of synthetic compounds, metal, and other people’s miseries and all the byproducts it produced.

The buildings were a fusion of gothic architecture and industrial salvage—arched towers with collapsed scaffolding, balconies supported by rusted girders, entire homes built into the shells of broken engines of ancient machines. Steam hissed from valves that hadn’t been maintained in decades. Lanterns sputtered against the wet fog-smog mixture that always lingered, barely illuminating the cracks in the walls or the fruit juice graffiti.

Even the nicer areas of the Middle Layers—the ones with market stalls and finer buildings—looked like they’d been dipped in liquid rust and were held together by hope and alchemy-grade glue.

And the people who wallowed in the misery day in and day out? Thin, suspicious, with real restless eyes.

The further up you went in the layers, the healthier people looked, however.

The NPCs I was familiar with—the alchemist, Meredi, and Ravela—were all from the lower middle layer—the Saint Giselle layer—where the fog and pollution were less than in the Lower Layers.

The majority of the Prologue took place in this lower middle layer, so it was the one I was the most familiar with, which wasn’t saying much. Thank god for this inheritance of memory mechanic.

Below the city, in the underground of the hill it sat on, there was an ancient scrapyard full of all sorts of archaic, impossible-to-understand machinery, that sometimes suggested they were machines from the modern world. Meredi and Ravela both got their goods from this underground area, and it was where the majority of the poor worked like slaves to pull out anything they could.

The game world surrounding Bastion Reach was just the most miserable stretch of marshland that a mishandled budget could create. Dark swamps, rotted canals, half-sunken ruins, and forests ripped from dark fantasies that breathed madness-inducing spores into the air like sighs.

Out there roamed the Gloomspawn—twisted creatures that haunted the world that no one knew shit about.

If I recalled correctly… the original game suggested the Gloomspawn were the warped figures of the civilization that existed before the current game world. Spooky.

Anyway, these things generally looked like a failed abstract art piece. Usually dark monsters with rings or cables of glowing light riddling their bodies. Some wore armor fused to their bodies. Some had faces that glitched when they moved.

Originally, the Main Character was a new recruit to the ill-fated City Guard, tasked with taking out any Gloomspawn that came too close to the city.

According to the Prologue, Bastion Reach was the last stronghold of humanity.

After the city fell to the invasion, you’d wake up at a comparatively nicer-looking rustic village and learn that no, the city was not where the last of humanity was, but instead, there were pockets of civilization beyond the marshlands called Havens. Go figure.

So, what did all of this mean for me? A very slight advantage.

The year was X472.

After the Prologue, players would wake up in the new village on the 10th day of Spring, X473.

In the game’s world, a year had four months, one for each season, and each month had 28 days. So, Spring was the first month in-game.

In this more fleshed-out reality, a year had 13 months, and each month was 28 days long.

I was dropped into the fifth day of the first month—and I’ll just use Earth names for months for ease—so I essentially had the whole year to save the three women who deserved more than the brutal deaths they got.

Saving Elsbeth, Meredi, and Ravela would be the priority. If the city could be saved, too, then great, but I wasn’t aiming for that.

There were a total of six “Record of a Life of Pain and Triumph” games made. The first four games each featured a different village and a different survivor from Bastion Reach. I played the second, but didn’t play the third or fourth, nor the fifth or sixth, which I read were spin-off titles.

I did keep up with the lore, though, and it implied that a good chunk of the population survived the invasion. Made me hate the first game even more, though.

Anyway, my priority was ensuring the trio lived. If Bastion Reach was saved as a consequence of that, then great.

Regarding the trio, Elsbeth would be the hardest, according to my current understanding. She dies because of her proximity to Reinhold when the people come for his head and succeed in taking it. Her being a super upperclass lady would make it harder for me to see her, so I had to hope she would keep sneaking down to this layer.

Meredi could very well be the easiest to influence. According to the newly integrated memories, Timaeus was welcome at her workshop and home at any time. I could literally walk in there for a glass of water and leave without saying a word. Meredi, apparently, dies while trying to kill a Gloomspawn.

Ravela would be almost as easy to influence as she already has a working relationship with Timaeus. I couldn't see her as freely as I could see Meredi, but she would come to the workshop every two or three days. Ravela’s death wasn’t described in the first game, but the second game implied that she died impaled on a pile of scrap—cursed developers coming up with something so cruel. I hated them so much for that lore drop in the second game.

Of course, beyond just saving them, I wanted to experience what knowing them could be like, since yeah, that’d be pretty awesome.

If there was a shot for romance, then great. But as a fan of the characters, my priority was their continued life.

***

The trio didn’t linger for long when they visited me. Elsbeth was quick to leave, Meredi just came to check on me, and Ravela was just tagging along with Meredi. But that was fine.

I was too shocked to know what the best course of action was in that situation.

With them gone, I had no distractions.

I buckled down, cleaned the workshop, found a very well-kept journal, and read through it. As I read, I found myself saying “Oh yeah, I remember that,” to a lot of the events I was reading about. The memories seamlessly integrated with my current self.

After the journal, I read up on all the alchemy notes in the workshop and pretty much experienced the knowledge bleeding into my consciousness.

The original game was about maintaining your plot of land, managing the village, and protecting it from Gloomspawn. The alchemy system was integrated into the crafting system, which meant it was extremely simple. If my memories served me correctly, the spin-off titles developed the alchemy system further.

Didn’t matter. Right now, “Alchemy” in this version of the world seemed to be closer to chemistry than magic. The trick with it came in understanding the “magical traits” of some items. But really, when you looked at it, a “magical trait” was just another trait a compound could have. There was also this idea about compounds having boiling, breaking, resonating, and reactive temperature ranges.

All alchemical concoctions were the result of combining different ingredients while heating them to the correct temperatures. I was simplifying it, but that was pretty much what I would be doing if I were going to be an alchemist.

Find ingredients. Figure them out. Identify their traits. Then try mixing them to produce something greater than the sum of the parts.

Before my arrival, Timaeus seemed to be obsessed with discovering new potions, so, as a show of respect to him, I would follow-up on that when I had the chance.

So, keeping track of my goals so far, they were as follows:

Save the trio of goddesses who deserved better.

Follow the path of the alchemist.

Reading through all of the notes I could find took me two days of diligent study. Good thing that I was used to going hungry for days at a time. I was completely absorbed in the process, and learned everything Timaeus knew… Or I guess, I could say I “remembered” everything.

For my next move, I developed a workout routine. I needed to have a body that could rival Meredi’s.

Thanks to a certain character from the first game, I learned that Meredi lamented not being able to find another partner after her first husband—who I now knew was Timaeus’s father. The reason was that she was too intimidating. Thanks to my inherited memories, I now knew Timaeus’s father was a hardworking salvager too, and really buff, which completed the picture of Meredi’s type.

So, if I wanted to give myself the best shot at possible romance, having a strong body for Meredi would be good.

But again, romance wasn’t the priority…

But having a good, reliable body would be beneficial. I already lived with a body that was failing on me. I didn’t need to do it again.

I wanted a good body. It was another goal.

Changing destinies was probably going to be a monumental task. I needed to break the game and turn my slight advantage into an overwhelming advantage.

In the original game, the MC unlocked something unique. They had a stereotypical “blessed by the land” schtick, but they could also make use of a monster consumption system.

By eating monsters, the MC could unlock new powers. Not everyone could do it, however. The reason the MC could was because his mother had been attacked and scarred by a Gloomspawn while he was in the womb. That bit of lore came from the fourth game of the series.

Anyone else who tried to eat Gloombeasts would either almost die, or just straight up die.

So, that avenue was not accessible to me.

But there was a second one—getting my hands on an ancient weapon or something similar. Those relics were ridiculously powerful. Having high rank potions, too, would turn even the hardest encounters into an exercise in patience.

So, with exceptional gear and excellent potions, I would be as good as the late-game MC.

The potions would come… but if I wanted the gear… Well, I knew the best place to start.

And so, these were the official goals I had settled on:

Save the trio of goddesses who deserved better.

Follow the path of the alchemist.

Develop a killer bod.

Get my hands on legendary gear.