Mithril
"Thank you. Truly."
The woman kept bowing, her tightly bound brown hair swaying with every dip of her head.
"I—I'm... my name is Yu Seo-ha."
She was painfully proper. Blood was pattering off her left arm, and still she put gratitude ahead of treatment. Watching her left me honestly at a loss.
My mind went blank. What was I supposed to say? Nothing came.
Lines from the television and Lee Hee-ja's filthy cursing circled through my head. For eight straight years, that was all I had heard. When was the last time I had actually held a conversation? I couldn't even remember.
"...Let's see to that wound first."
That was all I managed in the end. Once it was out, it didn't sound half bad. Only then did Yu Seo-ha look down at her own injury.
"...Mm."
She drew her shoulder in to inspect the wound. It was a small movement, and still blood welled out in a rush. Looking closer, it wasn't coming from her arm at all. It was running down from her torso. Yu Seo-ha's face went stiff.
"I'll help."
The wound was anything but clean. It hadn't been cut. The skin was torn open, as if something had taken a saw to her.
I took the potion from her and poured it, without hesitation, over the deepest part of the gash. It seethed the instant it met the wound—blub, blub, blub—throwing off bubbles like boiling water. Exactly as I had seen on TV.
"Ngh—!!"
Yu Seo-ha squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth. They said a potion hurt in proportion to how well it healed. Apparently that was true.
Fortunately, the deepest of the wounds closed to some degree. Her arm, though, was still torn, and the potion had run out.
"I came prepared for nothing worse than goblins. Careless of me. I'll have to go back and get proper treatment."
Yu Seo-ha drew a business card from inside her coat. On the white card, a name was printed cleanly in formal black type.
A simple card. Nothing on it but a name, a phone number, and an address.
Even so, I was quietly stunned. If this was the office I thought it was, the name carried real weight.
"It's the office my older brother runs. I work there with him."
Yu Seo-ha held the card out with a weak smile.
"You saved my life today, and I mean to repay that. If you contact us here, I'll see to whatever you want. I promise."
I considered what to say, then simply gave a small nod. Yu Seo-ha studied me with a faintly odd look, then bowed, low and polite.
"Please do call."
The world never stopped changing. I had spent my days lying in a bed, but I had been forced to watch television from morning to night, so I knew the broad shape of things well enough.
After the Black Tower revealed itself, the state had held considerable sway in the early days, taking public safety as its pretext for control. Control, though, could not last.
It had never made sense to begin with.
Climbing the Tower and exploring the Labyrinth meant staking your life. It was nothing like managing an ordinary office worker. Naturally, the hunters refused to be controlled. For them, it was a kind of right to live.
When a few nations—China and Russia among them—insisted on keeping their grip, the hunters chose exodus. Dozens of high-ranking hunters crossed a border in a single day. There was no stopping people who had already surpassed the limits of the human body, and the flow of points began to fall short of what anyone had expected. Only then did everyone understand. Hunters were not something to control. They were something to manage—and the management had to be very, very loose.
"Yu Ji-seong Office..."
In the end, most countries gave up on control. They loosened the reins they had drawn tight and handed freedom back. Deal with the worst of the criminals, and manage the points that kept the nation from collapse. That became the state's real work.
And into the slack that opened, corporations and offices pushed. Corporations lured hunters with money. Offices, by contrast, drew their strength from the very looseness of their networks. They took commissions from clients and passed them on to hunters, with no coercion anywhere in the process. Hunters liked that freedom for its own sake.
"Maybe I really should give them a call."
I muttered it and stared at the panel. The gray dot and the red dot were gone. The brown one was still there.
I turned my head.
A small boulder, about two meters tall, was lodged in the ground. It looked like ordinary rock. It wasn't.
That was what Yu Seo-ha had said before she left. I had ended up with a pickaxe as well, without meaning to. It looked to be decent quality.
Clang! Clang!
Whether it was thanks to reaching level 60, the swings felt startlingly clean. A few strikes, and a faint silver light began to seep through. I cleared away all the rock. What came free was a lump of mithril just barely small enough to wrap both arms around.
I didn't know the exact market price. All I vaguely remembered was that it was supposed to be a fairly expensive mineral.
I slipped the mithril into my inventory and kept moving.
I recalled why I had come to the Labyrinth. One reason was to get used to Flame Burst. The other was to make money.
Flame Burst, at least, was going extremely well. At LV 1, gathering the heat into the fireball had taken a long time. Now that it was LV 20, it was different.
Fwoooosh!
The mass of flame that surged up over my palm was already packed with heat, terrible destructive power riding on it the moment it was summoned. Mana drained away just as fast, but that didn't matter. My max-level Meditation filled it right back up.
KRA-BOOOOOOM!!!!
Every time Flame Burst came down, a massive explosion followed, and hunting became absurdly simple. Read the enemy with Detection, throw the skill, and that was that. The efficiency only improved. A handful of goblins got a fireball. Four or more got Flame Burst, and it was over. The pace of the hunt kept climbing.
"Hmm."
Not everything was going that well. Perhaps because this was the outer edge of the Labyrinth, resources weren't exactly plentiful. Magic iron and a few odds and ends of ore. Spirit grass and other small herbs. That was all.
Even so, all of it was worth money, so I gathered it carefully—ore into the inventory, herbs into my pocket. Moving on like that, I came to an exit.
Vmmm.
Before I knew it, the dark had grown markedly thicker. There was only one reason it felt that way. I was drawing closer to the heart of the Labyrinth.
A level-60 body couldn't handle the darkness here. My field of vision narrowed, and my shoulders drew in. Still, I was curious. Was there really something out there that LV 20 Flame Burst couldn't kill?
I shook my head.
"This is far enough."
I thought of Yu Seo-ha, bleeding. This was a place where a single mistake led to death. The Tower and the Labyrinth were not a world inside a game. And I had only just awakened. This was no stage for greed.
With that, I headed for the exit.
"Thank you for your work, Transcendent Awakened."
The person managing the entrance had changed at some point. A woman with a short bob—Administrative Officer Lee Hee-yeon. A blue light flickered across her eyes, and a mechanical tone sounded.
170 points will be deducted.
"Ahem. Ahem."
Lee Hee-yeon cleared her throat lightly and bowed her head.
"It's been processed."
I arrived in the lobby and went straight for the blacksmith.
Clang! Clang!
The place sat a fair distance from the ordinary shop district. With the sound of hammers came a wave of stifling heat. The forge, so-called. Its master was no human. He was a dwarf.
You couldn't go inside. Outside the building, a few hunters waited with bored faces. As I approached, a small, shaggy dwarf stepped into my path.
"What do you want?"
"Looking to sell a few things."
Thinking of him as something other than a person actually made it easier to talk. He swaggered up to me.
"One look and I can tell you ain't got much. Junk like magic iron, you can sell to me."
"I've got magic iron. And something else."
I pulled the magic iron out of my inventory. Hunting it down with Detection had left me with a fair amount, and as I kept setting it down, his face went blank with surprise. He dragged over a cart.
"What the—you're packing a lot more than you look like."
He muttered it as if he hadn't expected this, and loaded the magic iron onto the cart. Only after one large cart was packed full did my inventory finally empty.
"That all?"
"One more."
I gripped the mithril with both hands and hauled it out. The magic iron I had broken into chunks with the pickaxe, but the mithril hadn't taken the blade at all, so I had stored it whole. The hefty silver ore hit the ground with a thud.
"...Huh?"
The dwarf's mouth fell open, slack. Drool ran down and beaded in his beard. Then he turned to me with a stiff face and held out a thick hand.
"Hans. Name's Hans."
"......"
"Good to meet you."
...And what am I supposed to do with that?
I had never seen a reaction like this on TV, or on the forums.
While I stood frozen, Hans flipped the cart.
Crash—clatter!
Magic iron poured onto the ground in a heap. Hans threw both arms wide and heaved at the mithril, trying to hoist it onto the cart—
"Hrgh—!!"
—and couldn't lift it at all. His arms were simply too short for his build. I picked the mithril up and loaded it for him. Hans seized the handles.
"Wait a minute."
Then he hauled the cart at a run into the building. A few hunters made impressed noises.
"Hey, newbie. You hit the jackpot, huh?"
"Where the hell did you dig up mithril?"
"Weird. You look like you're barely running the goblin zone. How'd you find mithril? And a chunk that big."
"That's one hell of a score."
In the meantime Hans went back and forth several times. Only after he had finally cleared out the magic iron as well did he come over to me. Panting, he met my eyes.
A message rose up.
Points currently held: 1,870
Points from disposing of magic iron: 242
...Huh?
Something was off at the bottom. Points upon disposal... a hundred and ten thousand?
Hans grinned.
"Mithril, you can sell it off, or you can have gear made from it. But once you sell it, you can't buy it back, and if you go looking for a finished piece, the price'll be insane. Think it over and choose."
...This is absurd.
I had hunted in the Labyrinth until my head spun and earned 1,700 points. A hundred and ten thousand points from a single ore.
The verified posts on the forums had been telling the truth. Detection. This thing was a gold mine for points.
"What do you recommend?"
"Crafting, obviously."
The corner of Hans's mouth lifted. At the same time, a message rose before my eyes.
"Normally I wouldn't make an offer like this. But if you want, I can take part of the mithril's value off the top and set mana stones or jewels into the rest. Build you whatever performance you're after."
Hans came in close. Glancing sidelong at the hunters behind him, he dropped his voice to a whisper.
"You want something?"
© DomHwangcha #1ylk2