ALL NOVEL 006
My face paled.
My hands shook unsteadily holding the piece of magical parchment, and I almost dropped it.
This wasn't any ordinary piece of paper, and a single one of these could cost a fortune on the black market. It was very difficult to acquire these rare items, and players murdered each other in order to obtain one. I hadn't even been aware that @Jasper owned one of these, and even then it wasn't something that people used trivially.
There was almost no sensible reason why @Jasper needed to use one with me.
That single sheet of paper was worth more than my entire value as a slave several hundred times over.
Furthermore, if @Jasper wanted me to do something, he only needed to ask me. I genuinely liked him enough to do virtually anything he asked, so it was completely unnecessary to bind me through magic. There were plenty of more primitive ways to force someone to abide by an agreement, and those other methods were already sufficient.
This piece of parchment represented something else.
It was symbolic and exorbitant by nature.
My owner's eyes were glazed over and vacant.
"I'm sick of everything," @Jasper said.
He was expressionless and unblinking.
"I can't do this anymore. I can't take it. It was all a mistake, and my real life is falling apart because of this place."
My owner had shown me a suicide contract.
@Jasper wanted to kill himself.
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A tight knot appeared in my stomach, and I suddenly found it difficult to breath through my lungs.
I didn't know what to say.
It hit me like a brick wall.
My owner was standing there with that usual blank look on his face, and the steady intonation of his voice barely fluctuated even as he said something so distressing and grim. He looked almost perfectly calm. @Jasper had always been a kuudere1Kuudere is a stock love interest who is calm and collected on the outside and never panics. (see Dere types wiki), so he ordinarily wasn't very expressive or emotional. Stoic men were so difficult to understand, and their true thoughts always seemed protected by a ten foot wall of solid concrete.
Why hadn't I seen this coming?
I was frozen in place like a statue.
This wasn't just an ordinary online acquaintance saying they were leaving. For the past eight months, I had spent literally every second of the waking day next to @Jasper, and I was sleeping at his feet every night. We even shared a telepathic connection. The two of us weren't in a "relationship" in a romantic or sexual sense, but our connection was also intimate in ways that were beyond a normal friendship.
I had never dated anyone back on Earth.
I had been single all of my life, but these intense feelings that I experienced in virtual reality...
I desperately wanted to believe that it was something more than just an illusion.
I was in love with @Jasper.
"I'm sorry @Fiie," he said.
There was an apologetic expression on his face.
"There's not much else I can give to you."
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@Jasper explained to me that he had been desynchronized from his IRL self for months. He stopped dreaming of his life on Earth when he was asleep, and slowly he started wondering whether he had been abandoned inside of the game. At first, he was still enjoying himself, but he slowly started aching for his former life back on Earth.
He missed his wife terribly.
And children.
I didn't even know that @Jasper was married in real life.
At some point the endless blood, gore, and violence just got sickening.
He only started playing in the beginning because he got laid off from his job, and he desperately needed to hurt something and break it. Vetita was a place where he could forget about the real world and vent his frustrations. It was a place for his worst impulses, and he indulged in those twisted vulgarities for many months until he plummeted far off of the deep end.
But his real life continued to deteriorate.
He was going through a divorce.
His wife filed a restraining order.
The courts ruled that he wasn't allowed to see his daughter, and @Jasper worked tirelessly to appeal the verdict. Even though he was unemployed and alcoholic, he became obsessed with proving that he was a successful and functional human being. He started a company, but in truth it was a shell company that provided cover for the slave-trading business he started in Vetita. In the past year, he made somewhere around $100,000 ransoming slaves who were willing to buy their freedom with real-world money.
At first, it was going well, and the courts revised their ruling.
But then the dreams from Earth stopped coming.
@Jasper assumed that his real-life self simply got tired of playing the game, but he justified everything by telling himself that it was all worth it. He was making himself richer by ransoming slaves online, so he continued to pursue this gruesome line of work. He considered it his main form of income in real life, and he treated it seriously like a real job.
But after many months of radio silence...
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@Jasper paused, and a long shadow formed over his eyes.
My stomach tightened in anxiety, and I frowned uneasily.
"What happened, Master?" I asked softly.
He didn't respond at first.
My heart was swirling with volumes of new information, and it throbbed with heavy pangs of emotion. I was incredibly grateful that my owner was being so honest with me, especially after so many months of total silence between the two of us, and it was an extremely bittersweet experience to get to know him in a different way.
I desperately swallowed every single one of his words like a dehydrated person starving for water.
I wanted to hear more.
But my heart still ached.
These were all things that he hadn't bothered to share with me before.
"I had another dream yesterday," @Jasper said quietly. "It was the first one in a long time."
He stared motionlessly at his calloused hands.
"It turns out I that I was arrested," he said. "I wasn't receiving synchronizing dreams because you can't use VR consoles in jail."
@Jasper suddenly laughed bitterly.
"Everything went to complete shit."
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