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Imitate Condition

Time limit: 120 hours

Completely protect an object without having any visible signs that the object is protected. Let 3 people try to reach or destroy the object to fulfill the condition.

Progress:

Object not protected or is visibly protected.

0/3 People unable to reach the object

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These conditions are always so shortly worded. Would it kill you to add more detail? My life is on the line here! 

Well, it looks like I have to somehow protect an object. 

Putting the pieces together, I analyzed the different parts of the condition. It seemed like the book defined “protection” as “safe from being reached or destroyed.” It also let me pick who I test the protection on, which is a pretty nice benefit for me. If it wanted me to make an invincible protection system, I’d probably be as good as dead.

The book also didn’t specify an object. In the past, it’s provided me things to work with. Does it want me to just choose this time? Or maybe it can’t summon larger objects?

Most confusing to me was the word “invisibly”. Of course, it most likely meant that whatever protection I end up making must not be visible. But it was so vaguely worded that I wasn’t sure of anything. I could end up trying just to realize I had the wrong idea from the outset. 

Overall, the condition was a headache. It seemed doable, but tedious.

Well, it’ll probably work out. I have 5 whole days to work on a solution. Well, less if you count the time until the next raid…

Either way, I had plenty of time to work through this, and it didn’t seem impossible.

I had a couple ideas, but they were all basically worthless. 

Making some kind of laser detection system - Pointless, since I don’t know the first thing about lasers. 

Setting up a tripwire - Doesn’t actually protect the object at all. And once they trip, they can get back up and try again.

Protect the object in a glass case - Unless the glass is purer than the heavens, they could probably see it. And also, they could just break the glass. 

If I’m right about how the condition works, it’s really goddamn difficult to fulfill.

Well, I should probably start testing what works and doesn’t. But how do I get test subjects?

How exactly do I get people to actively help me get this skill?

I guess I could go ahead and do the whole ‘monetary incentive’ tactic again. As they say, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”.

Thus, I decided I’d make some kind of contraption to protect the object, then pay anyone who can pass through the protection. Then there’ll be no shortage of test subjects. Nobody can pass up money.

The main issue is, where do I set up the protection? If I made it in my apartment, nobody would trust me enough to go in.

Since I had a shoddy fold-out table at home, I set up a stand on the street with it. Then I went to a print shop and made an eye-catching poster so people would come look at it. It wasn’t particularly necessary, but I didn’t want to spend ages getting test subjects just to find out my newest idea didn’t work.

For my object, I selected a brick, as it was the least suspicious seeming and sturdiest thing I had. I also had the largest abundance of them, since I just stole them from my kitchen wall. To fit this choice, I had marketed the stand as a promotion for a construction company.

I wasn’t sure what plan to go with, so I tried out various ideas as people came over. I spent a while seeing what counted for “visibly protected” but I couldn’t find any loopholes. This information cost me multiple 5,000 won notes. I hated that it had to be this way, but it was the only plan I had to work with.

Eventually, I came up with a good idea. The poster that I had made already included a picture of the brick - the key detail here is that my test subjects will already know what object they will be breaking. So, if I hid the brick and wrapped it in the [Illusion Paper], then the paper would probably just show them the brick and they wouldn’t even notice the Illusion Paper. Therefore, they technically wouldn’t be able to touch the brick itself and they wouldn’t visibly know why.

I tried this, and it worked… Kind of. 

If the only condition was to make it visibly untouchable, then I’d have scored. They couldn’t touch the brick through the paper and they basically couldn’t see the paper either. The second half of the condition was the problem - “destruction”. People could still just throw the brick, with the paper around it, onto the ground and effortlessly break it. I thought I’d finally found my win condition, but it was defeated just as easily.

I tried other things, too, like wrapping a different brick than the one I wanted to protect, but that didn’t work either. My book would just automatically change the object I was protecting to whatever object I presented before the test subjects. 

I spent the whole day racking my brain. It was like a complex engineering problem, and I hadn’t even gone to high school. But if the ordinary can’t solve something, just manipulate the superordinary - And with that, I came up with a clever idea. And in fact, based on what I’d tried so far, I was relatively sure it’d work. But I really didn’t want to do it. I spent ages trying to think of any other solution, but this was the only one that came to mind. It involved renting an apartment for me to host the experiment in. 

Apartments these days are expensive, you know? If I did such a thing it would drain… No, it would completely kill my wallet. I’d hardly have any money left, even pulling from my bank account. If I could have afforded a better place normally, I would’ve done it in a heartbeat. Doing it with my financial situation would take all I have left. Damnit, why did all these skills have to be so heavily taxing on my hard-earned savings?

And in the event that my idea wouldn’t work… Well, I’d rather die a poor man than a broke man.

But I wasn’t hoping to die at all, in fact, so my only choice was to risk it. 

I looked online for any and all apartments or properties that would fit the bill. I needed to find one with a well-positioned hallway for my idea - anything else simply wouldn’t work.

The search was long and difficult, but I found a place that met my conditions by the end of the evening. It was a shitty, dark-colored place that was hardly better than my apartment. The front door was just a large shutter, and the inside was completely empty. In fact, the only good thing about it was the square footage. It had a short hallway with two additional rooms coming from it, each of which was relatively large, at least compared to my apartment. My assumption was that this was originally some kind of storage garage or something, but was repurposed as cheap housing for desperate losers like me.

Well, it’d work and that’s all that matters. My wallet was up at the heavenly gates, but it was an honorable sacrifice in order to get an S-Tier skill.

I took out everything I needed and set it up.

I centered my folding table in the middle of the room and lined it up with the hallway. I put the brick on a stool at the end of the hallway, and then took a picture of it. 

With my limited editing tools, I cropped and polished the photo and made it into another poster. I ran to the print shop and got a couple copies of it. I put the poster up on a stand on the folded table and drew an arrow on it pointing into the hallway.

And for the final piece of the puzzle, I removed the object and stool and placed them in the other room. I plastered the [Illusion Paper] on the wall at the end of the hallway and with that, my plan was ready. 

Once it all came together, the idea was pretty simple. People would walk in, see the poster, and turn towards the hallway while expecting to see the brick on the stool, as depicted in the poster. And that’s exactly what they’d see, due to the Illusion Paper. If they tried to reach out and touch it, they would just hit the wall and not know what happened. It was a pretty good plan, if I do say so myself. I mean, it was certainly less trustworthy looking than my other setup, but I could only hope I’d find test subjects anyway.

Part of me worried that the illusion they saw would just look like a flat painting, but I reassured myself that that made no sense. If the Illusion Paper shows them exactly what they expect to see on it, then they would see the end of the hallway getting close just like they’d expect it to. I could only hope that my set-up worked - and that it fulfilled the condition correctly.

I waited nervously for a while until my first test subject came. 

…And what followed was absolutely hilarious. As people came, they would run into the wall and act bewildered. I had to stifle laughter as they ran up to me with wide, enthusiastic eyes and begged me to tell them how the trick worked - Directly after I  had watched them idiotically ramming their heads into the end of a concrete hallway. 

More important, however, was the fact that I did just as the book asked - Each person gave up on reaching the object despite nothing visibly stopping them. In a sense, the book was protected from them. Of course, all they had to do was go in the other room - But why would I tell them that?

When I saw the progress bar go up for the first time, my heart rose all the way to the ceiling. It meant that the book considered my idea to be a perfectly valid solution. Thank god. If it wasn’t, then I’d have 3 days left to enjoy the rest of my life in a dusty, dark, concrete box.

But luckily, I had no such fate in store. In fact, I had instead gotten a god-tier skill. It was an engineering feat, and took me hours of thinking and planning - and it was all in part due to the skill [Illusion Paper], which I had originally underestimated - but for me, it was all an easy price to pay. Because now, I had gotten all the insurance I’d need to comfortably get [Warden].

Skills stolen (3)

 [Radar] [Illusion Paper]

[Barrier]