Chapter 32

As Lich went back to eating, the person who was at the front of the line began to talk with him.

"Enjoy the grapefruits while you can. I heard from a friend that one of the paths gives you a hunger meter or something. Once you fill it, you begin to feel extremely sick if you try to eat more. Oh, and my name is Delphine."

Swallowing the mouthful of grapefruit and wiping his face, Lich thanked Delphine for the information. "Thank you for the warning. The only path that would make sense with is the Devourer Path. Though it feels weird that it would limit, when it should help you eat more."

Lich continued to eat while they brought more baskets that were overfilled with grapefruits. It seemed the woman wanted to talk more, but Lich gave her the new basket of seeds and started on the next one.

Walking away dejected, she was replaced with a man that had a monkey tail. He looked at Lich and then towards the grapefruits. "With how you are eating those it makes me want to eat some as well."

Lich patted the ground beside him and tossed the man a grapefruit. "Sure, it will be faster that way. Pull up your system screen while you tossed the seeds into the basket. It lets you know how many of each G level you need to put into the basket."

As they ate together, it became obvious that Lich was eating at an abnormal rate. The money man ate around 100 grapefruits before giving up. However it still brought up the timeline of getting his seeds for the mission. The monkey man told Lich his name was Mal before he went on his way.

The next person to come up gave Lich a bit of surprise. Seeing this, she sat down and introduced herself. "Hello I am Lizzy the Lizardman Champion. I probably look more human than you expected. However I will show you my appetite is like a monster's."

She proved her words as she ate ten times what the monkey man did. However that was only a tenth of what is needed in total, she was still lacking behind Lich.

Looking at the collected amount of grapefruits increase instead of decreased caught Lich by surprise. However the next person explained why it was like that.

"The grapefruits were already collected. We really just had to convince the idiot in the back to give up what she already picked. She is the Champion of Greed, so she already had a few hundred baskets full."

Seeing the new guy not join in at eating the grapefruits Lich asked him why.

"Do you not want any? I guess not everyone likes grapefruits so I understand if you hate them."

The man sighed. "It isn't like I hate them. My name is Rudy, and I am the Champion of Grapefruits. So you could say I love them. It is just I like growing them more than eating them."

...

The next few people Lich didn't really pay much attention to.

'A girl who was way to wine drunk. Some guy who kept talking about swimming. A women bragging about bathhouses. Then some tan guy who said he preferred coconuts over grapefruits.'

The last person in line was looking at the empty baskets like they were pieces of her soul that were ripped away from her.

"I heard you were the Champion of Greed. But I don't remember seeing that path. Can you explain?"

The girl not wanting to look at the person who stole all the fruit she picked so her friends and her could pass to the next path, talked quickly.

"It is a rare path you will only see if we were friends."

Hearing that Lich reached his hand out. "Well let's see if we can be friends then."

However the girl slapped his hand away as she was still mad. However she felt dumbstruck when they both heard a notification.

[Friend Added: Mieko]

...

After finishing the Grapefruit Path, Lich selected a random flyer he hasn't been to again and was sent to the ramen shop.

However the shop was pretty dead. After working for a bit with no one showing up, Lich felt a bit weird. He was used to there being groups of people in every shop. But this shop only had the one person sitting by a counter area in the shop.

When Lich went to him to get his coupon and pay he heard the guy complaining.

"How was I supposed to know nato ramen taste bad. It is called taste tasting cause I want to know. Oh, a customer wearing the employee outfit? Do you want to try my nato ramen? I had to work hard to find someone with nato. However cause my Chef path skill is still to low, even though the dish didn't fail it is still bad."

Looking at the ramen bowl the guy was offering Lich, almost made Lich smack the guy in the head. As it seemed the guy took out everything but the ramen noodles and dumped enough nato in to make you question if it was nato with noodles or ramen with nato.

Lich chose to rush out of the ramen shop before the guy force fed him his creation.

...

Lich was in the tent place. He was wishing the day he had to come here was further away, but he wanted to get it over with. When he got to the tent shop he was surprised how the shop looked.

The shop looked shabby now. As the walls in the old shop looked like gold was used, now it was bare bones store. The ceiling wasn't covered up, so one could see all the ventilation pipes and other things.

'Wow, I guess he wasn't kidding about dropping the meteor on the shop. I guess the shop owner didn't have enough money or time to get everything fixed before all the Champions came in.'

Lich didn't want the shop owner to see him, so he quickly got to work. Luckily this time no one was staring him down. So he was quickly setting up the stacks of tents. However good things are often short. As he got to the last one hundred he needed to put on display, someone walked up to him.

The guy who came up looked like a younger version of the shop owner.

'Damn did this guy hate me so much that he reverted his paths to fight me!'

The guy though, gave him a thumbs up. "Thank you for sicking that sociopath on my uncle. Now that he ended costing the family so much money, he ended up in the.. You probably don't need to know where."

Knowing he hated his uncle as much as Lich did, helped Lich with his anxiety of being in this place. After talking for a bit, Lich learned his name was Henry and he was obviously the Champion of Tents.

"Oh and watch out for the shop owners of the building paths. They are all like my uncle. Just some of them have sway in the server. Either from connections or they own important buildings. All of them act like whiny landlords."

...

Collecting the 9th coupon and pay, Lich went to the last place left to get a coupon back. The Cursed Item shop.

Entering the shop he saw a woman with a tattoo over her face. He couldn't quite tell what the tattoo meant or was. Their eyes met, and she nodded towards him.

'That was anti climatic, I thought I would have to deal with something big to get the coupon. But it seems like it is just a normal day. I am probably the only person who gets any use out of the coupon. I was worried I was going to get robbed for the coupons right before getting the last one.'

Putting the identification tags on the cursed items, Lich felt today was going to be pretty good. That was until he finished the quests. As he went to collect the pay and coupon he saw a group of people at the register.

They all looked at Lich and parted the way to the woman working the counter.

'Okay, maybe they are her friends waiting for her to get off work. She is probably free once she gives me the pay and coupon. But it still feels like a trap.'

As Lich pretended to go back to work one of the guys got angry and yelled at him.

"The land owners sent us here to kick your ass and rob you! Get the hell over here and die so I can get back to watching tv."

One of the other group members, who might of been the one in charge, slapped him.

"Dammit! Covert! Repeat after me! Covertly rob him! That doesn't mean tell everyone in the store!"

Feeling wronged the guy stupidly argued back. "It is only us, him, and the girl running the shop. No one will know if we just kill them both."