Isekai Speedrun

Cold morning at the western edge of the Winter Forest.

A few stone throws away from the area called Mordant Dells where Caliph Tze’s troops used to train in the past, a group of five associate members of Revolution Movement in heavy fur coats were patrolling the treeline.

They were remnants of an old cave-dweller gang called Hereticals. Their routine patrol route took them over the shrub-steppe of southern Rukhkh to check the situation at the Rukhkh Mountain from afar with a telescope. After that, they usually traveled back to their base over the snow dunes, skirting the edge of the Winter Forest.

The routine was suddenly interrupted when they spotted a man emerging from the forest over a high snowbank. The lone man wore nothing but a torn jacket and light underclothing – no hat, no mask, no gloves. His appearance was completely unsuited for the environs. On his left hand, he held a long staff. Under his right arm, he carried a shoulder bag.

The Hereticals readied their revolver rifles and took aim, but when the leader of the group focused his telescope, he recognized the man who was approaching them without fear or hesitation.

“...Mad Seer? It’s Mad Se– Seer Speedrun! Fools, lower your weapons, it’s Seer Speedrun!” (Heretic)

Shocked and surprised, the group hurried to greet one of the founders of the Revolution Movement.

---

“Oh, Heretics! Just the gang I was looking for. Nice weather we’re having today, eh?”
“Weather…? Seer Speedrun, why… How are you here...?” (Heretic)
“You look like you just saw a ghost. Is there something on my face?”
“Seer, y-your clothes…” (Heretic)
“Aa, hai hai, my clothes. A pack of snow wolves kept harassing me on the way, so I had to unalive them one by one, but they managed to bite most of my clothes off. It's not that thing, you know... Do you know? It’s this thing when you get hypothermia, and suddenly feel really hot and take off your clothes, which is why frozen corpses of lost people are often found naked. I’m not saying this thing happened to me, just explaining in general. Don’t ask details about what actually happened. Let’s just say I partied hard and woke up half-naked in a ditch with this flagstaff tied to my hand.”
“Ah, y-yes...As expected of... Seer Speedrun, are you wounded? Are you not cold? Take my coat, I would be honored if you wore my coat!” (Heretic)
“Nah, no need, this is just a flesh wound. I leveled up and got high resistance against cold. By the way, shouldn’t you guys be asking the passphrase first? Don’t drop your guard so easily when something unexpected jumps out of the forest, that kind of attitude gets you killed. I could have been Thiefmaster in disguise and you’d be all dead now, you know. Like, what is this, an amateur hour?”
“Apologies, Seer! This one will take responsibility and cut his fingers!” (Heretic)
“Don’t cut yourself, that’s just dumb. Just ask the latest passphrase, ‘Snake around the star’, got it? Thiefmaster is on the move, everyone needs to keep their trigger fingers unmutilated and stay on their toes... You got any jerky or cookies? I’ve been eating nothing but snow lately.”

After correct passphrases, the patrol escorted me back to their hideout in a karst cave. A horse messenger was sent to a nearby town to arrange transport to Löonois.

While waiting for my ride in the cave camp, I had time to collect my thoughts and plan my next move.

This glitch will wear out eventually. I need to exploit it while I can.

---

In the world or Mu-Ur Quincunx, there were four canonical ways to gain immortality, or to be more exact, there were approximately four ways to make dangerous mummified monkey’s paw wishes to gain pseudo-immortality/invulnerability with various negative side effects.

The first and arguably the strongest method was Rukhkh’s Egg – the one Caliph Tze tried to get. Once in a generation, a giant magical bird that never touches the ground drops a magical egg in a nest of crystals at the top of a mountain. If you bathe in the egg white, it turns your body into non-aging, indestructible chastity cage. The obvious drawback is that you’ll go insane after a while because (without going into obscene details) you keep all your human wants and needs, but cannot drink, eat, or feel anything. For a normal, sane person this method is out of the question.

The second very questionable method was the Wishing Well Coins of Alphons. These cursed djinn coins can be obtained from a cursed treasure chest in a wishing well in Alphons’ roomworld – that is, if you’re crazy enough to open the door and navigate the harsh runkiller RNG traps.

Alphons' roomworld is basically an overpowered wish-fulfillment trap. In principle, you can kickstart some type of immortality (or to cast any other item, stat, or skin alteration within the limits of the game engine) using the poisonous currency, but there's a Bad Ending -level drawback: your brain slowly decays into soft mush and then your body follows by turning into a clay golem.

The alleged explanation for this transformation is a strange djinn-type apparition behind the coins. The apparition seems to eat imagination as a compensation for granting wishes (which is why the character Alphons himself is such a simpleton), but since the apparition has never been seen or encountered in the game or anime (and the coin effects got nerfed in the game compared to how strong they were in the anime episode 'Alphons'), there’s not much more info to go with... Well, except some hints in the game files suggesting a hidden timed mission to destroy the apparition before the ticking clay-ification strikes golem o’clock.

From a game design POV, it would make perfect sense to include a mission like this; destroying the apparition reverses the ceramization and makes the coins safe to use, or undo's the wish effect, or at least stops the effect on its tracks (knowing Mu-Ur, it would probably be one of the latter two options). But since no one has found a mission trigger in-world, it's just a theoretical possibility, or something that was left out of the shipped game on purpose or by accident. There’s also the possibility that Alphons himself is the apparition or it's permanent host because he’s under the coin effect from the start, but keeps on living as a human without turning into a clay doll. Perhaps Alphons doesn’t have much imagination and intelligence in the first place, or maybe all other living beings in the roomworld have been already eaten by the apparition, so the now-starving apparition lives by desperately nibbling Alphons’ mind in smaller and smaller bites, while patiently waiting for new imagination-producing brains to appear.

Well, Alphons’ coins are a trap, plain and simple. Use them and lose your mind; turn yourself into an eternal Alzheimers patient with lead legs and eternally stiff shoulders. Practically speaking, it's the opposite of Rukhkh-immortality: your body doesn't turn into a prison, but your mind regresses into nothing.

In the anime episode, Kimono used Alphons' coins and wish-created the dream she had kept from her childhood, the Inn of Secrets as it was called in fanon, and then she died a week later by turning into a squishy clay zombie. The last scene of the episode was Crys on his knees next to a garden pond, holding fistfuls of clay with tears in his eyes, telling Rainwoman to never mention Kimono’s name again. A tragic ending for a tragic episode.

I was quite curious about the alleged apparition that wasn’t seen in the original, but Alphons’ alluring trick coins and the whole room was just too much horror-melodrama for my taste. Better leave that trapdoor sealed… But then again, I do wonder how efficient this glitched body of mine would be in tanking the clay transformation damage? Does my imagination being eaten count as damage that can be distributed? Probably not?

Speaking of damage types, I definitely received some internal injuries at Winter Forest, but they do not bother me. So maybe even exotic-type magical damage is distributed, and I might be able to tank the clay golem effect at least, if not the brainrot effect?

No, Qwerty, no! Forget Alphon’s room. Don’t start taking bigger risks now. Alphons room cannot be opened. Only in the most extreme emergency you are allowed to break that seal.

And even if I do open the door in an extreme emergency, I still need to check if the coins are anime-only or game-nerfed. And I need to test them without using them on myself. I have to force some enemy NPC to use a coin for some small wish (under hypnosis poison) and watch what happens.

...Somebody stop me, I’m going too deep into Alphons room lore!

By the way, Kimono hasn’t mentioned her secret wish since our little chat at Crumbling Shores. I told her back then that I would help her wish come true after Tze’s death, but that was obviously an empty promise. At this point, she might have already abandoned the original wish – I mean, since everything’s pretty fine in the mansion in this timeline, there’s no need to aim for silly childhood fantasies in hopes of peaceful life. She’s happy with how things are, hopefully. And even if she's not, I’m not going to make the first move and bring it up.

The third method of pseudo-immortality… is something else entirely.

Reload Platform aka Petrification Platform in the Sun Palace throne room.

I know what you’re asking: how is getting petrified going to help you to live longer? Well, allow me explain. It’s not really an actual petrification device; it’s a time-slowing device. In the fandom, it’s also known as Save & Reload Platform. In other contexts, it’s called Aestivation Platform, or Stopping Disc as a nod to ‘stepping discs’ of a certain classic scifi novel.

During the final battle arc, Caliph Tze trapped Sorry Man by petrifying him on the platform. He was basically turned into a slow-moving statue for thousands of years – an immortal, invulnerable creature trapped inside a semi-immortality machine.

But wait: it wasn’t a simple time-slowing device either. The hidden mechanism behind the slow-time effect was that it actually worked like a super-save point. In the game, you were able to save your progress in the device and then deathskip back to your earlier form. But as you would expect, there was a dangerous trade-off for using it. Every supernatural advantage or ultratech device in Mu-Ur just had to have some built-in game-balancing disadvantage.

The risks and problems with Reload Platform were threefold: first, the horrible usability was similar to Caliph Tze’s Star Cutter. Simply preparing the device to create a save point instead of the default slowness/petrification effect was a long, complicated process that took several in-game days. And if you failed midway, you had to start the prep from the beginning. It’s like Strangers used humankind’s lack of dexterity and limited motor skills as a natural safety feature in their high-level magitech devices: “Here, punch in this 100-word passphrase in 9 seconds, puny human! Then repeat the same in exactly 15 hours! And then do it backwards after 28 hours!”

The second problem was that the save point wasn’t physically lossless: some random number generator decided what was left out and skipped depending on unknown circumstances and hidden functions. You were always in danger of losing body parts – sometimes you just lost a patch of skin, sometimes you lost all your hair, sometimes fingernails, sometimes all your fingers or both arms. Most of the time your torso came out fine, but the outer boundaries of your body were in danger of getting cut, like the device couldn’t differentiate the edges of your character model from the background. There was a small but significant chance of losing your heart or brains during the save process and permadying immediately.

There were some wild speculations about why Strangers would build and use a lossy save point system like this. Maybe Strangers were not too particular about their body parts and simply didn’t care about losing a limb or two as long as most of their body survived. Maybe they could quickly grow lost body parts like lizards. Maybe Strangers had such well-defined bodies that the device didn’t confuse them to their surroundings in the same way it did with humans. Maybe humans were in a wrong file format. Maybe humans just weren’t dexterous enough to use the device properly.

And then there was the third drawback: it was one load per save. You had to repeat the whole save process after deathskip. And even if you survived the save process in good condition, there was a small possibility of dying when loading back to the platform.

That is to say: if you wanted to use the Reload Platform 100% safely, you needed some type of cheat that prevented you from randomly losing your limbs in the process; something like being indestructible like Sorry Man, or being Caliph Tze in his egg-man form, or… Hit-S glitch that cancels missing body parts by distributing the damage. It's a viable combo, Hit-S and Reload. Still risky, but compared to the reward of being able to load back to a save point, even if only once in a lifetime and partially mutilated, the risk-reward ratio is acceptable.

In conclusion:
- Rukhkh’s Egg: nope.
- Alphons Coins: absolute emergency use only.
- Reload Platform (raw): if seriously sick and dying, worth a shot.
- Reload Platform (with Hit-S glitch): worth trying, probably.

I mean, taking a calculated risk with futuristic ultratech device sounds intrinsically safer than unknown risk with some ill-defined magic coins, but maybe that’s just me. You only live once, which is why you take your chances with cryptobiosis.

...But before all that, the burning question now is: who do I tell about this glitch? Should I keep it as a secret? I haven’t put enough thought into how this sudden god-mode might change our group dynamics. If I don’t break the news carefully, there’s a real possibility that this splits the Revolution Movement into factions like in the original timeline.

They will find out eventually if I keep holding the flagstaff 24/7. And keeping big secrets in general would make things awkward, especially with Crys. Despite the fact that we have lived under the same roof for two years and become best buddies (from my perspective), Crys can throw me under the bus on a drop of a hat. That’s just the kind of character he is. Also, Crys will definitely want to try this glitch on himself as soon as possible. He’s not a fan of personal death either.

But what kind of flagstaff do we need to glitch Crys? What exact conditions are necessary? Is it even possible for the natives of this world to trigger the glitch or is it just me? Even if I explain all the mechanisms in detail, can they imitate them? Can Rain or Mirim replicate the glitch even if all conditions are the same and Source still works life before?

Too many unknown unknowns. Maybe glitching is a special otherworldly skill only I have.

On the other hand, if everyone has the ability to trigger this glitch under the same conditions, can we get all the core members under the Sparkling Source, one at a time, with some long metal stick and random shoulder bag, and then travel all the way to Sun City to quicksave everyone using the Reload Platform? That kind of back-and-forth campaign would going take painful amounts of time and effort to plan and execute.

Hmm. Hmm. Emphasizing the painful amount of time and effort is the angle I should take when I explain things to Crys. Stick to the truth and make it as detailed as possible. Communication is the key. It’s a long-term research project, not a cakewalk.

...Oh, right. The fourth type of immortality.

Don’t get your hopes up. That’s just Sorry Man’s hitbox displacement.

Sorry Man’s hitbox transplant indestructibility is obviously out of the question for me and others. Practically in the same “absolutely not” category with Rukhkh’s Egg. The side effect of hitboxless life is a forced hyper-accelerated time perception. Even if I knew in theory how to trigger it using Raft Island’s portal paintings, I wouldn’t want to turn myself into a sad existence like Sorry Man. Living eternal subjective life inside your head on permanent fast forward. Years fly by and feel like nothing; people’s lives are like flashes of transient shadows projected on a wall from the floodlights of a passing car. If that’s life, what’s even the point of living?

It’s not even sure that destroying or altering the Dorian Gray paintings at Raft Island would help in any way. Destroying Sorry Man’s painting might simply destroy his hitboxes for good without affecting his condition at all. He might be eternally cursed and continue his pseudo-life forever even if Raft Island disappears by natural erosion and the portal paintings turn to dust.

Eat that imagined scenario, djinn: living billions of years on fast forward, you could see the planet burn under a star that turns into a giant red ball of death, and it might only take a few minutes in your eyes. And when the red giant turns into white dwarf and eventually fades away completely, there’s just vast nothingness of empty space, maybe with some spinning galaxies and distant hypergiants sparkling on top of layers of darkness.

I don’t envy Sorry Man. If I were some reckless hero who tries to straighten every wrinkle in the world, I would travel to Raft Island and try to push Sorry Man’s essences back together by painting something new on top of the portal painting, or perhaps erasing something, or altering the frames – anything that might have an effect. I would try my best to bring his mind back to normal speed and save him from that dark, dark future.

But I don’t do that. I’m not that kind of superhero. I care about my personal safety in this momentary slice of life more than I care about Sorry Man’s undying eternity in an expired universe.

Still, don’t fall to despair, Sorry Man. As long as there is immortal pseudo-life, there is hope. A brand new universe might glitch into existence.

Anyway, four different ways to cheat biological death #4: Hitbox displacement – no thanks.

However, if I put on my most optimistic propeller hat, this Hit-S glitch could include a fifth way to cheat death. Maybe the damage of cellular junk accumulating in your body over time counts as damage that can be tanked by the glitch (and if I can keep this glitch going for the foreseeable future). This glitch itself could work as a type of longer life cheat on its own. All I need to do is avoid all other types of damage and keep my pebbles in a tight row.

Keeping this body from receiving as little damage as possible as long as possible is the basic strat. I’m an experimental prototype. Watch me survive by living a boring life like watching paint drying.

---

I returned to the moorlands in a luxurious horse carriage. A messenger delivered news about my return in advance, so Mirim was already waiting for me in a Hathicar at the main moor road.

I promised to send a special reward for the Heretics posse who escorted me back and climbed on the back seat of the car. Mirim’s backpack and two vampire rifles were on the other front seat.

“Yo, Mirim, when did you get a driver’s license? Kids grow up so fast nowadays.”
“Brother, are you alright?” (Mirim)
“No worries, I feel much better than I look, this is mostly cosmetic damage and dirt and soot. Had a bit of a rough weekend. Got some mindbreak and jumpscares from minor apparitions. And then this one dopey snow wolf kept hanging onto my arm for several kilometers and biting my clothes off... Anyway, I'll explain later. What are the latest Thiefmaster sightings? Latest reports? Did he exit Winter Forest?”
“I don’t know, I came here from the orphanage.” (Mirim)
“Have the twins returned?”
“I don’t know about that either. Sorry, I should know...” (Mirim)
“It’s fine, it’s fine. Let’s just return to Starfish Mansion first.”
“What happened? Did Test Subject go with the twins? Brother, is that flagstaff tied to your hand?” (Mirim)
“It's... It’s a long story. I’ll tell everyone later. I’ll report to Crys first. Okay?”
“Sera was worried about you.” (Mirim)
“Yeah, probably. This business trip turned into crunch overtime.”
“I was also afraid you wouldn’t return.” (Mirim)
“Well, thanks for worrying. I returned. In some form or another.”

Thanks to the glitch, I wasn’t in pain, but my mind was tired. Was this tiredness a side effect of the glitch? In the game, there were no stamina penalties associated with glitched states. It’s probably different here.

I can’t fall asleep yet. Thiefmaster is out there and he has too much info in his head. We need to retake the high ground and keep our position as hunters instead of prey waiting for attack.

I’ve taken Wintersmith’s place as the questionable guide fairy. Do I have to use Sorry Man to close the story arc consistently?

Then again, Thiefmaster is unpredictable with a capital M.

“Kimono left this for you.” (Mirim)

Mirim handed me the one-meter part of the flagstaff that was cut off by the teleportation ring.

“Ah, the missing piece returns. Two for the price of one, I knew I could trust Crys to pick it up. My precious, you have returned home, the whole stick family is together again… Why are you looking me like that?”
“What?” (Mirim)
“Sorry, I was just talking to my magic wand. You know, I once tried to do a 48-hour marathon stream and started hallucinating by the end of it. That didn’t go well. The clips got clicks, though… Sleep deprivation is no joke.”

I held the one-meter staff in my right hand and looked at the two-meter staff tied to my left hand. What exactly I should do with this?

Then I made the mistake of smelling my sleeve. I smelled like wet dog rolled in oil and grime. Eww. Disgusting.

“Taking a bath in this glitched get-up is going to be a challenge...”
“Are you talking to yourself?” (Mirim)
“Just talking to myself again. Pay no attention to the backseating madman.”