Three infusions a day means that there is one in the morning, one at midday, and one in the evening just before Greg leaves. As painful as being pumped full of mana is, that isn't where his day ends. Leaving the infirmary just as the sun is setting, Greg would usually head straight home and give his mother the piece of meat he'd bought from the system that day. Greg knew that his mother was confused and wondering how he usually got the meat seeing as he rarely went hunting anymore. The woman, however, seemed prudent enough not to ask unnecessary questions. She'd only sought reassurance from him that he wasn't placing himself in undue trouble to get the meat. After Greg had reassured her that he wasn't doing anything that would land him in trouble to get the meat, she hadn't questioned him any further.
After having dinner with his family, Greg would head to his room for his willpower training with Olivia. Over the past month that Greg had been subject to these training sessions, Greg had had his eyes opened to all the ways that a man can be both tortured and tempted. Olivia was yet to have Greg do the same training activity twice. The familiar seemed to have an almost endless number of ways to torment Greg in the pursuit of forging his will such that it wouldn't be broken by anything. One night, Greg would have to ignore an almost mind-breaking itching sensation all over his body. In the next, Olivia would have him fight the urge to grope her. Only for the next day to have him fight his urge to attack her despite turning his violent urges all the way to eleven. In short, Greg never knew what he would be facing whenever he walked into his room for a willpower training session.
And despite being at it for about a month now, Greg was yet to make it through all the hundred breaths that Olivia had set as the duration of the training sessions. The closest that Greg had gotten to this goal was eighty breaths of time. This was during the session where Olivia had instructed him to resist the urge to attack her despite being artificially flooded with violent impulses by the familiar. Greg made it to the eighty-third breath before he cocked back and threw the hardest punch of his life aimed at the familiar's face. Of course, Olivia caught his hand in midair with almost humiliating ease. And despite all the force Greg had put in the punch, her hand barely even moved back an inch. As she always did, as soon as Greg failed to resist the particular test of the day, she withdrew her influence immediately. Greg was in the awkward position of not knowing whether to be proud of how long he'd managed to last or to be ashamed of how weak his attack seemed to be in the eyes of the familiar.
Despite how hard each of the willpower training sessions was, they weren't the end of Greg's day. After each session, Greg would next delve into the only dungeon he now had access to, A DINNER PARTY. And of all his daily activities, this was the most frustrating one. Over the several attempts that followed his first foray into the dungeons, Greg had come to discover just how lucky he'd been on his first run.
The first challenge had come in finding his way back to the merchant's house in the noble district. The first time Greg had gotten there it had been after being chased all over town by the spider gang. The dungeon shop allowed Greg the option of buying a map of the town. This however was one of the perks that would affect the assessment of his performance in the end. They placed restrictions on his ability to gain good results, or performance modifiers as the system called them. For example, buying a map would immediately place a twenty percent penalty on the assessment of one's exploration within the dungeon. The more detailed the map, the more expensive and, even worse, the higher the penalty placed on Greg's exploration assessment. In fact, if the map covered more than seventy-five percent of the terrain, then he wouldn't earn any exploration points. And there was no way of tricking the system. Greg had bought a detailed map on one run thinking that he could memorize it and use the memory on the next run to avoid the exploration penalty on the next run. Unfortunately for Greg, on his next run, the system had completely changed the layout of the city. The map he'd bought before became completely useless.
The next challenge after finding the merchant's house was timing. If Greg came too early to the merchant's house, he would find that the merchant was still home. Greg only needed to die once at the hands of his bodyguard to know that the man didn't appreciate strange men walking into his house asking to be employed as his wife's manservant. Arriving too late, however, also didn't work as Greg would find that the husband had already employed a servant for his wife, making it impossible for him to be hired. After repeatedly observing them, Greg had figured out that there was only a thirty-minute window of time in which he could make a move. Miss it and the chance of interacting with Zarra for that dungeon run is completely gone. Greg's troubles, however, didn't end there.
After figuring out where the merchant lived and what time to approach the merchant's wife, the next hurdle in Greg's path was gaining Zarra's trust. On his first run, the merchant's wife had been willing to recruit him because she saw that he was on the run from thugs and didn't think that he was in any way related to her husband. With him walking into her house looking for a job, however, the dynamic completely changed. First, Greg had to convince her that he wasn't some spy sent by her husband pretending to be unrelated to him in order to deceive her. As soon as that had been established, Greg would then have to explain why he wasn't dressed suitably for the position he was seeking. Greg hadn't even known that what he was wearing would matter. Although when he thought about it, the first place the woman had sent him the first time around, was to the tailor. Walking in while wearing 'commoner clothes', as the woman had called it, hadn't won him any points with the woman.
After another round of convincing the woman, Greg came up against another problem that rendered all his previous efforts pointless. The contract that he was offered by the merchant's wife was just as lopsided as the one he got on his first run. The only problem was that this time, all the positives were on the employer's end and he as the servant would be little more than a slave to serve at his mistress's pleasure. Now that he was the one asking for a job, she saw no need to give him a good contract. The thing wasn't even one percent as good as the contract that he got the first time around. There were no protections for him either from being randomly fired or from being put in harm's way by his employer or her family. After reading the thing, Greg threw it back in her face before turning around and walking out of the mansion.
On subsequent runs, Greg had tried to recreate the events of the first dungeon dive. He, however, had come to find out why the system considered the blonde girl he'd bumped into to be an elite thief. Repeatedly, Greg had tried to pretend to be a hapless bystander just walking by. She, however, seemed to be able to sniff out his pretense, no matter how convincing Greg tried to be. She'd always just run past him or cross to the other side of the road if she could. All this led Greg to believe that she hadn't really run into him by accident the first time it happened. Instead, she'd probably marked him as her target and used his inattention against him.
At one point, Greg had grown frustrated and desperate enough that he made the mistake of physically trying to stop her. Greg didn't see how she did it. All he caught was the glint of a blade in the morning sun. Next thing he knew, he was on the ground clutching at his slit throat, trying to keep from bleeding out... he didn't succeed.
This was the other part of the dungeons that made each run such an ordeal, the deaths. While the system wouldn't allow Greg to cause serious harm to his soul, it didn't spare him from experiencing each of the deaths. Bleeding out on the sidewalk was actually among the more tame deaths he'd experienced. The time the merchant had his bodyguard kill him for trying to become his wife's servant was among the most gruesome of deaths he'd experienced. It turns out that the muscle-bound freak that the man keeps at his side is a sadist. Greg shuddered every time he remembered the slow death that the man had subjected him to. Knowing that this was an imaginary world and that as soon as he died he would be back in his bedroom, was the only reason he managed to keep his reason despite the excruciating pain.
After that particular dungeon dive, Greg had come to thank his stars that his soul bow had become somehow corrupted. It had become his get-out-of-jail-free card. Whenever things started going in a direction that he didn't want, he would just summon it, and pull on the string for roughly three minutes before trying to let go. He would immediately find himself on the clouds above the city of Torrin with the message that he had died.
