Living Life As A Game: Through And Through 52 And So We Begin Again...

A postman from Amazon said, "Sign here..." as he extended Elizabeth a clipboard. Elizabeth did the usual signing before she took out a couple thousand dollars and completed the exchange. Up until now, she had been buying with cash so as to not alert her parents about the unorthodox products she required. It would be quite difficult to explain why a fifteen-year-old boy was out and about, buying girl's clothes and enough food to supply a restaurant, so the name of the game lay in buying with cash.

After taking care of business with the postman, Elizabeth now stood pondering how she would transport the five or so storage products that held all her recently purchased ingredients. She had four refrigerators, all lined up with different types of meat, with as little processing as she could request. The last storage product she ordered held various herbs and vegetables; the likes of which were either sparse in the dojo's kitchen or unavailable altogether.

Elizabeth went up to the first refrigerator, but even with a decent application of Inner Strength to boost her physical prowess, it was quite the chore to move around so much weight. Unfortunately, Elizabeth was independent to a fault and the thought of asking for help never crossed her mind. To her, asking for favors was like giving up a ticket to her time in the future, and given her general dislike for just existing alongside others people, the act of helping others was asinine in itself.

Of course… helping others was more than tolerable in some circumstances. Just yesterday, Elizabeth chose to heal Atid while brazenly displaying her Accupoint Skill. Yet the reason she healed him had little to do with care or loyalty and more with the experience she would be gaining through practicing. Elizabeth would, for just about any occasion, show off that crazy healing power she possessed as she didn't know when she'd get another chance. She wasn't the kind of saint that would roll up to a hospital and start treating everyone, but by the same token, she wasn't a devil that chose to repeatedly wound and heal something or someone to train up her skill in the shortest amount of time possible.

In the end, however, Elizabeth chose to carry the storage units one by one to her room as she needed to train her Strength stat anyway. Strength being a physical stat, Elizabeth experimented in lowering the amount of Inner Strength she used to carry the first refrigerator, opting to barely persist in holding the storage unit over the ground. But through the pain and exhaustion such an act brought with it, the results were proportional and highly rewarding. As she slowly made her way up to the elevator with a full-sized one-door refrigerator, she might have looked extremely silly and pitiful, especially since she was shaking quite violently throughout the entire ordeal. But, by the time she got her final storage unit from the lot to her room, she had gained the equivalent of 3 and three-quarters hours-worth of regular strength training; all in just 45 minutes!

Additionally, as Elizabeth was resting from that back-breaking work, a soft tapping noise from her room's window caught her attention. She got up from her resting spot, a chair she had stationed next to the table which previously held her room's TV, and after walking over to the window, a helplessly grim smile dawned on her face.

"This over-the-top father of mine and his silly gadgets..." What had it been, three? Maybe four hours? Yet in this short span of time, somehow and through some mysterious way, her coveted camping gear had arrived! Elizabeth knew her parents were pretty smart as they weren't just run-of-the-mill business magnates, rather, they'd built their company from the ground up, and even now led the way in Research and Development; all while acting as high ranking executives!

But even then, all her dad had to go by were two pictures and an address. Yet with just those two pieces of information, he had accurately sent a drone to deliver off her camping gear. Elizabeth opened her windows and let the drone in only to recall a terrible miscalculation on her part. Obviously, without her parent present, she would need some sort of identification to access the drones contents. Otherwise, any random scalper crook could snatch the drone and pocket its contents and potentially trouble Quantum Inc.

"Mhmm..." Elizabeth's only form of physical identification lay in her various debit cards. However, the cautious department of security managing Quantum Inc wanted something a bit more… accurate. She would need to provide genetic proof in the form of spit, hair, a fingerprint… basically, anything that would concretely identify her from a genetic standpoint.

Therein laid the problem as Elizabeth wasn't at all confident that her DNA had remained the same after her "transformation." She hadn't exactly gone through actual genital reconstruction surgery or hormone therapy, after all. Literal gods had magically changed her body's fundamental phenotype to the point where it was more than likely that her sex chromosomes had changed throughout every single cell in her body!

How exactly could she prove that she was "Adrian" when a whole chromosome pair came up erroneously at the moment of validation? Elizabeth guessed she might even have a higher shot of passing the identification required if she pulled any random guy to the test for her. At least then, the errors picked up would at least reveal a bit of effort…

Elizabeth stared at the drone in contemplation as she asked P what she should do. P of course, back in a sarcastic persona said, "Well, you're definitely right about having your body's fundamental constitution completely remodeled. An act, mind you, that I took great care and energy in completing… What should you do? I don't know maybe search for some of that precious DNA you're looking for."

"Look for… DNA?" Elizabeth was beginning to think P had no idea how DNA worked, which wasn't a good thing considering P's apparent mind-reading abilities.

Of course, P knew what DNA was and to a degree, she was annoyed with Elizabeth's stupid thoughts. P said, "Mhmm? If only there was a place where you could journey towards. A place where maybe you spent a long time and perhaps left some DNA behind. Gee, if only there was a place where you previously wasted decades worth of time at. Where you would do nothing outside of your routine day in, day out. IF such a place existed, then I don't know, maybe some of your previously untidy hair would be left behind. Maybe an old toothbrush would contain some saliva or..."

P continued escalating the blatentness of her suggestion that Elizabeth should go back to her house, when the tormented lass said, "OK. I get it… To my house it is." But… it's not like she was in a hurry at the moment, with regards to needing the camping gear. Furthermore, the drone was not on a time limit. It wouldn't self-destruct if she didn't identify herself for now, or anything similar in nature. Instead, the moment she let the drone enter her room it landed before shutting down completely, waiting for her to open its contents after verification of identity.

Elizabeth set aside the matter of cracking the drone and chose to focus instead on completing what she set out to do back in her cave; upgrading her armor. Yet the first matter of business lay in spiritual cooking, as it would be a waste to not stock up on potions before she began another crazed refining session.

Elizabeth opened up the first of her refrigerators and cooked up several Pork-based meals. Naturally, the results were underwhelming when compared to what could be if Elizabeth had spiritual ingredients from the Shadow Realm on hand. But, because she wasn't limited to just bare-bones meat as ingredients to her magical meals this time around and the fact that she could utilize Combination principles when cooking, led to decently charged meals nonetheless.

[+600 Cooking Exp

Cooking Level 4 (2,955/3,750) → (3,555/3,750)

Name: Amalgamation Of Pork Dishes

Grade: Low-tier Mortal Grade Meals

Description: Crafted by the user, these are a series of magical meals imbued with Inner Strength and some Basic level principles of the path of cooking. Included in the bunch there are Pork and Vegetable Spring Rolls, Paprika Pork Noodles, and Bahn Mi Sandwiches to name a few...

Effects: For Level 10 or below: + 8 Strength + 8 Speed + 8 Endurance + 8 Defense + 8 Intelligence for 3 hours, and + 7,100 Inner Strength recovered.

NOTE! Since the "meal" is an amalgamation of various dishes, the effects are represented cumulatively. Each individual dish does not yield the effects of the amalgamation!]

It took Elizabeth about an hour to get through cooking up everything that came from the pork section of what she ordered, and with over seven thousand points of Inner Strength kept away in reserves, she felt like she had done more than enough cooking for now. Elizabeth ate one of the Spring Rolls she cooked up to fill in the Inner Strength she expended when cooking, and began gathering her tools and materials to continue the forging process. With a stack of food behind her and a pile of rocks and crystals before her, the next couple hours would be nothing but endless work…

Chapter end