I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 55: The Artifact That Shouldn’t Exist ?

Revan stared at the floating gauntlet for a long time.

The black metal rotated in the still air, the grooves along its surface catching faint light with each lazy turn.

He knew what this was.

In Legends of Valtheris, the garbage-tier game that had somehow become his entire life, Territorial Phenomena weren’t just environmental hazards. They were dungeons.

Each one followed the same fundamental structure as any instanced content in a role-playing game: enter, survive, defeat the guardian, claim the reward.

The reward was always an artifact. Always. Without exception.

The game’s internal logic was rigid about this. A Territorial Phenomenon was, at its core, a test. The fossilized leyline network that formed the labyrinth wasn’t just leftover geography. It was a system.

A mechanism that filtered, challenged, and judged anyone who entered its boundaries. Those who passed received something from the land itself, a crystallization of the residual mana shaped into a physical object that carried properties unique to the Phenomenon that created it.

Every artifact was different because every Phenomenon was different.

A thermal loop in the fire-scarred wastelands would produce something attuned to heat manipulation. A tidal distortion on the coast would yield an object resonant with compression and expansion.

The artifact was always a reflection of the environment that birthed it.

And in a Dead Zone, where mana had been annihilated and the fossilized leylines ran dry through dead earth...

’An artifact from a place that has no mana. That shouldn’t be possible.’

He frowned. Something didn’t add up.

’In the game, every Territorial Phenomenon had a guardian. A boss. Something tied to the land that served as the final filter before the reward. You couldn’t just walk in and take the artifact. You had to earn it.’

He glanced back over his shoulder, toward the corridor he’d followed the boy through.

’Was THAT the boss?’

He thought about it. Replayed the fight in his head.

’For a Dead Zone guardian? That was too weak.’

The creatures the game placed as Phenomenon guardians were always proportional to the value of the artifact they protected.

A low-tier artifact in a minor Phenomenon might be guarded by something that a competent squad could handle. A high-tier artifact in a major Phenomenon would be protected by something that required a full battalion.

This was a Dead Zone. The most hostile, mana-starved environment in the known world.

Any artifact that survived in a place like this, that managed to crystallize from fossilized leylines that had been dead for centuries, would be extraordinarily rare by definition. The guardian protecting it should have been proportionally terrifying.

And the fog creature, for all its tricks, was something Revan had killed alone. In terrible condition. With a non-magical sword. While bleeding from twenty cuts and running on fumes.

’That doesn’t match. Either this artifact is weaker than it looks, or that creature wasn’t the real guardian.’

His eyes drifted back to the gauntlet. It continued its patient rotation, indifferent to his analysis.

’Or... option three. The Dead Zone doesn’t follow the same rules as the game.’

That thought landed heavier than the others.

He’d been operating on game knowledge since the moment he reincarnated into this world. Every decision, every strategy, every long-term plan was built on the foundation of what he’d learned from playing Legends of Valtheris.

And for the most part, the game’s logic held. The world followed the same general rules, the same power systems, the same political structures.

But the game had never included Dead Zones as explorable content.

The Dead Zones in the game were background lore. Flavor text. Colored patches on a map that the developers had labeled "inaccessible" and populated with exactly zero gameplay mechanics.

No quests, no dungeons, no loot tables. Just a wall of suppression that prevented the player from entering, and a paragraph of text explaining that these regions had been destroyed during the Unification War.

Which meant everything Revan knew about Dead Zones came from the world itself.

From textbooks. From Academy lectures. From Mirael’s research notes and Cassian’s political briefings and Dain’s soldier stories.

Not from the game.

’I’m flying blind. My cheat sheet doesn’t have answers for this one.’

He looked at the boy. The boy was still standing at the edge of the clearing, hands clasped, watching Revan with that same nervous, expectant expression.

Revan let out a heavy sigh.

’Come on, Revan. Let’s not take a risk that’ll send your blood pressure through the roof again.’

The boy shifted his weight. One foot to the other.

Revan rubbed the back of his neck. Winced when his fingers found a cut he’d forgotten about.

’Alright. Let’s think about this differently. Forget the game. Forget the rules I think I know. Look at what’s actually in front of me.’

A gauntlet with Aura channels, designed for a left hand, floating in a sealed chamber at the heart of a Territorial Phenomenon.

His left arm’s channels had burned out less than an hour ago.

The boy, the original soul of this body, had led him directly here.

Coincidence didn’t stack that neatly.

’Either this place read my condition and generated a response, or this artifact has been sitting here for centuries and I just happen to be the first person with a dead left arm and enough stubbornness to reach it.’

Neither option was comforting. The first implied the Dead Zone was watching him. The second implied luck so absurd it bordered on divine intervention.

’And knowing my luck, it’s probably both.’

Revan stepped into the clearing.

The air thickened around him instantly. Warmer. Denser. Charged with something that pressed against his skin like the moment before lightning struck.

The gauntlet’s rotation slowed as he approached, the lazy spin tightening into smaller and smaller circles until, by the time he was within arm’s reach, it had stopped completely.

Revan looked at his dead left arm.

At the fingers that hadn’t moved in an hour. At the forearm where the Aura channels had collapsed into dead static, leaving the limb as useful as a piece of wet rope.

’If I put this on and it kills me, I want it noted that I had serious reservations. Multiple reservations. I voiced them clearly and at length. And then I did it anyway because a mute ten-year-old ghost gave me a look.’

He glanced at the boy one last time.

Through the curtain of black hair, the boy’s eyes were steady. No fidgeting. No flinching.

Revan reached out with his right hand and lifted the gauntlet from the air.

It was heavier than it looked.

He slid his dead left hand into it.

The metal closed around his fingers with a precision that made his stomach flip.

Every groove aligned perfectly with the dead channels underneath, as if the gauntlet had been cast from a mold of his own forearm.

For one heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then the gauntlet pulsed.

A single beat. Deep. Resonant.

It traveled through the metal and into his flesh and through the channels that hadn’t carried energy in an hour.

The dead pathways lit up, not with his own Aura but with something else entirely.

Something that had been sleeping inside the metal for longer than Revan could comprehend, patient and ancient and cold, now pouring into the empty riverbed of his burned-out channels like floodwater filling cracks in dry earth.

The sensation hit his brain like a hammer wrapped in ice.

His vision whited out.

And the Dead Zone lit up.