i awoke suddenly at 6pm. it’s time to play arcane odyssey.
i booted up the game and decided to start a new run to get the any% world record. all 6 of my slots were used, so i had to delete one i didn’t care about with only 537.2 hours on it.
i went through all of the typical customizations and chose a magic at random (i think it was fire). strangely, though, my name was automatically set to “arcania odysseus” and i couldn’t change it before the menu automatically passed. i brushed it off as some sort of bug that’ll get patched soon enough.
i started the game and quickly ran to click through all of the dialogue and get my rowboat down and set off, but as soon as i docked i got struck by lightning and died instantly. lost time but whatever. when i respawned, lightning was striking every half second all around the island, so i rushed back to row away. one bolt hit tucker’s grave, breaking the ground and revealing something that looked almost like my character, but i didn’t want to lose anymore time.
i reached redwake, dealt with the typical pirates, and kept moving. what was strange was the chef quest had a red exclamation point above his head that kept flickering. ‘this might help with my run’, i thought to myself. all of his dialogue was normal and i got to the cooking pot. at least this’ll quickly level me up.
oddly, as i put in the ingredients, all that came out was “meat”. it healed 2 hunger and cost 6 galleons. the icon for the popup loaded only as it was going away, so i could only make out a lot of red and brown but no discernible shape. the quest completed and i talked back with the chef. instead of giving me the typical rewards, though, all he said was “110 more” as he handed me the exact same set of ingredients and part 2 of the quest revealed.
i tried throwing in a different set of ingredients but it still yielded “meat”, though from what i could catch of the late-loading icon, it had a different shape from the first. part 2 of the quest completed and i talked to the chef again, only to be met with “109 more” as the exact same thing would loop. i was way off of world record but curiosity gnawed at me.
it took around 20 minutes but i finally had 111 meats. i went back to him and he said something like “4phdw =1vxs huvnl elgls lccd” which took me completely aback. i suddenly leveled up to level 111. maybe this was useful after all. i wanted to do a mage run, so i quickly went to allocate my stat points. however, i was met with a big lock icon over the typical stats. i noticed my title had changed to “level 111 meat”. i wasn’t able to access the magic or strength tabs.
i tried to leave in order to start with shura again but noticed the chef started floating. his eyes were red. a huge health bar appeared over the screen, dubbing him “chef meat”. he had only one health, but i was curious what his attacks did, so i left him alone for a second. he kept rising into the air until reaching an apex point higher than even the stepstones. luckily, i had a super awesome 960000x540000 resolution monitor, so i could make out he was raising his arms in the air. i was completely bewildered, but realized too late what he was trying to do.
“ULTIMATE ART: MEAT EXPLOSION!” was the last thing i saw before redwake was a smoldering hole and everything went white.
part 54 coming someday and i don’t feel like proofreading right now i’ll do it later