Chapter 232 (1/2)

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As expected, Su-hyeun ran into a troublesome situation upon stepping out of the dungeon.

The whole dungeon itself had vanished, after all.

The Ether stone mining should have commenced right away after all the monsters had been dealt with, but the dungeon itself had disappeared, so the resulting commotion was hardly surprising.

Su-hyeun made some lame excuse about also not knowing what happened and returned home to rest for half a day or so. By the time he woke up, Hak-joon had already made it back to South Korea.

“Just what happened?” Hak-joon asked while sounding incredulous after he heard about what went down earlier. For a greeting shared between friends who hadn’t seen each other for a long while, it sure didn’t sound right. But Su-hyeun was clearly the guilty party on this one, so it couldn’t be helped.

The middle of Yeoui Island was teeming with people again after the dungeon had been successfully raided. Su-hyeun’s favorite cafe also reopened its doors. The two men went there, ordered their drinks, and began chatting about what happened.

“…So, that’s what went down,” said Su-hyeun.

“Even if the dungeon’s scale wasn’t that big, the resulting losses are still too great, you know. Thankfully, the Sohwan Guild’s people haven’t made any demands for compensation yet…”

“I should compensate them regardless. It’s my fault, after all.”

“What do you mean, your fault? If it wasn’t for you, bro, monsters would’ve flooded out into the middle of Yeoui Island, you know.”

“There’s that, and this is something else. Well, it’s not like I don’t have the money to deal with the potential compensation demands, so…”

“But you haven’t made a lot of money lately, right? You had to repay Mister Gordon. Also, not too long ago, you spent a lot because of uncle Kim Dae-ho.”

Su-hyeun nodded at Hak-joon’s observation.

He certainly hadn’t managed to save much compared to the amount he earned recently. He figured that his bank account would end up nearly empty after paying out the compensation this time.

“Well, that means I gotta earn a lot more from now on.”

“Eh?”

Hak-joon was surprised to hear that unexpected reply.

He always believed that if he needed to point out a person in the whole world who treated money like rocks, then that guy would definitely be Su-hyeun.

But such a guy just said that he would focus on making money from now on. Although it would seem like a normal answer under any other circumstances, Hak-joon was still stunned to hear something like that come out of Su-hyeun’s mouth.

“Why are you so shocked?”

“Well, you know. Even I can’t figure out why you wanting to make some money sounds so weird to me.”

“It’s not exactly because of money, though.”

“It isn’t?”

Su-hyeun proceeded to explain his newly acquired skills to Hak-joon—from the Necromancer trait to the two skills of Soul Accumulation and Dead Summoning.

After listening to the explanations, Hak-joon’s jaw dropped to the floor. “What kind of powerful skills are those?!”

“But I’m not the only person with such a skillset, am I wrong? I mean, there’s an awakener who’s actually called the necromancer, after all.”

“You mean the German S-Rank awakener, Daian Gedeck?”

“Right, that person.”

Daian Gedeck.

A person who commanded hundreds of the undead and boasted the achievements of single-handedly clearing a green-colored dungeon and, after creating a guild, conquering a blue-colored dungeon that appeared in Germany.

“Even then, bro, your skill is on another level, isn’t it? For one thing, you can now order around the boss from a green-colored dungeon, maybe even bosses from blue-colored dungeons.”

“Of course. I got this skill after going through so much trouble, after all.”

He acquired the “Necromancer” trait and its associated skills after clearing the 50th floor’s trial. It was unknown what Daian Gedeck had to go through to acquire the ability to command the dead, but it would not be comparable to the difficulty of the trial Su-hyeun had experienced.

“Well, that’s my reason for focusing on raiding dungeons for the time being.”

“That means I can take a bit of a break now.”

Hak-joon grinned and drank his coffee.

Because of the Paragon Guild’s matters, he had been traveling nonstop everywhere to raid dungeons for a good while now.

Although he said he would take a break, it wouldn’t be a real break. Hak-joon had a side to him that was a lot similar to Su-hyeun in some ways.

“Which floor are you on now?” Su-hyeun asked.

“The 99th.”

It was Su-hyeun’s turn to be surprised by Hak-joon’s answer.

“Already?”

When Su-hyeun was on the 40th floor, he heard that Hak-joon was about to challenge the 70th. He thought that Hak-joon was already very fast, but as it turned out, he had exceeded Su-hyeun’s estimation by a lot.

“I’ve been basically living inside the tower full time until not too long ago, you see. And from a certain moment onward, it became harder to earn achievement points or other rewards by staying longer on a floor, so I changed my goal to just passing the trials as soon as possible without worrying about the achievement percentage.”

“Still, that’s really fast.”

“It got pretty easy to pass each of the floors recently. Not counting every tenth floors, of course.”

Su-hyeun extended his hand toward Hak-joon. The latter immediately understood what that gesture meant and held the offered hand.

Squeeze—

They both sent magical power to their hands and squeezed hard. Hak-joon’s hand began trembling. Veins popped up on his arm; seeing that, Su-hyeun’s eyes sparkled brightly.

“Hey, not bad.”

Su-hyeun let go of the younger man’s hand. Not only the physical strength but also the concentration of magical energy or its total reserve that he felt through the hand was outstanding.

On top of this, not a single trace of that huge magical energy was leaking out of Hak-joon’s figure. The coffee contained in the cup right below his hand not rippling at all was the evidence of that.

“Bro, you’re just as amazing as before. Ouch! I thought my hand was going to break just now.”

Su-hyeun watched Hak-joon shake numbness from his hand and spoke, “So, then. One more floor, and you’ll be on the 100th.”

Hak-joon nodded after hearing that.

“What will you do?”

That question contained a fair few different meanings.

The 100th floor.

Any serious rankers would have to pass this floor at some point. And the trial’s difficulty spiking greatly once more on the 100th floor was a fact that had already been proven many times through various other rankers.

The rise in difficulty here was, as a matter of fact, greater than any other tenth floors so far.

“I’ll have to keep going.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes. If I take a step back now, then it would become harder for me to start climbing again from the 101st floor, I think.”

This was the reason why many awakeners decided to lower the difficulty after reaching the 100th floor. The sudden spike in the difficulty could result in their lives being lost, and that would mean all the hard work and effort they had put in so far would be in vain.

Once one passed the 100th floor, the difficulty would settle back to normal from the 101st floor onward. As such, awakeners would lower the difficulty from, say, the fifth level to the fourth, or maybe even to the third.