VIP Special Auction Invitation! (1)
“Uhaak! Haaack!”
And just like that, I landed right on the ground of the 2nd Basement Level.
“Ssangdu-palbi unit! Toss those stones in right now!”
I’d already seen this mess coming the second I got the antidote shot for the luck item.
So I’d set up this simple plan—park the Ssangdu-palbi soldiers near the tunnel entrance and just toss in all the stones we’d dug so far.
Before the interpreters could even translate, the pregnant women read my silent command and started rolling.
I began throwing the adamantium fragments I’d found into the tunnel—more like sweeping them in with long arms.
I grabbed the biggest rocks I could and hurled them inside without thinking.
BOOM~ BOOM~ KWAANG~ BOOM~
Zziik— Zziik— Plunk— Zziik—
===
[Devil-Bee killed.]
[Experience gained.]
[Devil-Bee killed.]
[Experience gained.]
[Devil-Bee killed.]
[Experience gained.]
[Devil-Bee killed.]
[Experience gained.]
...
===
Hundreds of bugs dropping in a single blink—visible on the status window and heard through the screams.
All because of my soldiers’ effort. By the law of “earned experience,” it all poured into me.
The Ssangdu-palbi kept at it for a few more minutes, tossing rocks like they were on a roll.
Just as I was about to give up, I lifted the massive 180cm by 180cm iron plate I’d laid out right beside the tunnel entrance.
I’d sprinted to the 1st Basement Level in a panic during the trial and dragged it back.
“Move! Get out of the way!”
This was the iron plate we’d used as a bunker lid when drilling the 1st Basement Level rotter sewer.
In this situation, though, it was a godsend.
KWAANG—
I hurled it over the tunnel entrance. Moments later, the sound of something pounding the plate echoed from below.
The attack power of those crazy bugs was insane.
But in the end, bugs are bugs…
I’d hoped they’d be able to burrow through or pry it up, but they couldn’t.
“Huuu~”
I let out a long sigh and sprawled out on top of the plate.
Then.
Cooouung~
Something massive hammered the plate from underneath.
My body on top shook like crazy.
It had to be a truck-sized thing slamming the plate.
Cooouung~
The hammering came again.
This wasn’t some tiny bug.
This was a big one.
A ridiculously big one.
So…
It was the queen?
“Kkungcha~”
I shot up, picked the largest adamantium fragment nearby, and started hurling it onto the plate.
My sharp-eyed Ssangdu-palbi joined right in.
A little later.
The top of the plate was now piled high with tens of tons of massive rock debris.
Even if a queen Devil-Bee came, it wouldn’t be able to break through this, right?
I lay flat on my back in the 2nd Basement Level, completely soaked in sweat.
Damn it.
My pride was at stake.
I ordered anyone through the interpreter not to touch the rock pile, then left the 2nd Basement Level.
Today I just wanted to do nothing.
* * *
“You… aren’t a Devil-Bee, are you?”
“How could I not know? In the 30th to 50th floor sections, the percentage of hunters dying to them is probably over a tenth of all deaths.”
“They’re that strong?”
“That’s just how the tower is. Hunters die way more from those suddenly appearing trash mobs than from the scary-named monsters. But why the Devil-Bee all of a sudden? Did you eat Tower Royal Jelly because you wanted to?”
“Tower Royal Jelly? What’s that?”
“The mysterious yolk liquid that the larvae of the future Devil-Bee queen will eat. It’s incredibly rare to find Devil-Bee nests in the tower—once you do, you can harvest a tiny bit.”
“What happens if you eat it?”
“It’s amazing. It boosts your stamina.”
“Stamina? Dude, don’t joke around.”
“It’s real. There’s an ultimate stat called stamina. Even F-rank like me can raise it—it’s an open stat.”
“What’s the point of eating it? Can I sleep with women?”
“That’s possible too. Raising it turns you into the embodiment of sex for both men and women… but the best part is that you can freely allocate points from stamina to strength, agility, vitality, life force, charisma, and various resistances.”
“Freely allocate?”
“For example, if your stamina is 100, you can lend +30 to strength, +45 to life force, +25 to charisma, and so on. Once you decide, you can’t change it.”
“Insane?”
“Of course. Raising stamina is incredibly hard. While 100 is the target, the best stamina I’ve seen is only around 33 to 34. Royal Jelly comes in proportion to the queen’s size and the nest’s scale, so male hunters who go crazy for it eat the larvae before they grow, making it almost impossible to find a big queen or nest—lottery in the sky.”
I instantly pictured the vast space of the 3rd Basement Level.
And the ridiculous force hammering the plate beneath me.
“So how do you kill a Devil-Bee?”
“Wake up. Like you, an F-rank hunter with no poison resistance dies the second it even grazes you. The nerve toxin paralyzes you for a few minutes.”
“…But then I can move again after a few minutes, right?”
“While they swarm in droves and pile on dozens of hits? Don’t you think? Once the nerve toxin ‘Mandala Toxin’ builds up, you’re turned into a kind of ‘awake under anesthesia.’ Then they pile on, still chewing your conscious flesh, and grind the rest into paste for the larvae?”
“…No way out?”
“If you have poison resistance plus a wide-area fire skill, even dozens of them are nothing. Their wings catch fire with just a little contact.”
“What about this idea? Like medieval knights, if I wear perfect heavy armor?”
“That won’t work against normal bugs. But for Devil-Bee, it might. Because they melt and pierce almost any armor with their poison acid.”
I’d already experienced that firsthand.
I’d watched holes being drilled straight through the Safety Work Tent.
I finished my talk with my sister Hwang Eunpa and turned around, heart still racing.
If I could only conquer the 3rd Basement Level…
The huge amount of Royal Jelly would all be mine.
And…
I could become the best stamina guy in Korea… or maybe just a vitality guy… hehe.
Fast, I need to raise my poison resistance!
Poison resistance!
* * *
There were three ways for an F-rank hunter without poison resistance to become an E-rank hunter with it.
The first was to level up through the tower’s official promotion quests.
Every 25 floors, there was a notorious promotion quest room.
25th floor for F to E… 50th for E to D… and so on.
If you cleared the 25th floor F-to-E quest room bare-handed without items, you could choose one of life force, mana, or resistance for your promotion.
The problem? The survival rate was less than 20 percent—brutal difficulty.
Even hunters with decent specs and confidence gave up. At my agility now, I’d be diced before I could even make a sound.
The second method was to formally improve your body by training life force, mana, and resistance.
“…F-rank, I see.”
The young reform master at the K-Citadel Constitution Improvement Center confirmed my reality and started the consultation.
“Yes.”
“…What kind of help can I provide?”
“It’s embarrassing, but I want a body where I can have poison resistance.”
“Um… you know radical reform for hunters is very difficult, right?”
“I do.”
“We have three programs: short-term, mid-term, and long-term.”
“Start with the short-term course?”
“Yes. Short-term is about 9 to 12 months of adaptation training, meditation, and appropriate potion prescriptions against external threats like fire, ice, electricity, physical, poison, and so on.”
“…”
“You’ll also need to follow a diet plan. You must survive on only 250ml mandrake soup, boiled beans, wormwood, and digitalis leaves a day. Even one bite of salt, sugar, or flour resets everything…”
Damn it. Not even a shaman myth…
“…Even doing that will I gain resistance?”
“Unfortunately, even if you stick to it, short-term has about a 20 percent success rate. So normally mid-term or long-term…”
“I heard there’s a better way.”
The master smiled and said, “We’re actively promoting a new special mid-term program. It’s a four-year course at the citadel. The success rate is over 40 percent—excellent. But the total cost for enrollment, lodging, tuition, and prescriptions is around 620 million won…”
“No, not that method…”
Right. I still had the third method left.
The last option for an F-rank cursed slave to become an E-rank that at least gets treated like a commoner…
The hardest, and the easiest…
The reason the hunter world even has the term “silver spoon”…
The name that refuses to disappear no matter how dirty it is in a capitalist society…
“…Paying money!”
“What? Paying for a custom reform elixir? The cost would be hard to handle…”
“How much is the production fee?”
“At least around 30 billion won. Expensive materials and top-tier staff…
Whoa. Way more than I’d guessed from the search.
I’d expected it because of the insane inflation.
Logically, no one except a chaebol would choose this. Even for hunters, an entry-level E-rank makes only a few hundred million a year.
Given that, who would pay 300 billion for a lawyer or doctor license? This money would be wasted just to become E-rank.
But…
I’m different.
Since I’ve hidden the key to the monopolized world of the underground, there’s something more important than money.
That something is…
Time.
“Then if… the goal is only to develop poison resistance, what would it cost?”
“It would be cheaper. Around 10 billion won should work. But it won’t count as official E-rank. You’d only get a formal promotion after paying another 20 billion later.”
* * *
I recalculated my remaining assets.
42 billion won left after buying the intelligence booster for 4.3 million and gilding for 6 billion—about 32 billion left.
Excluding that, the big assets I still owned:
A 9 billion won worth frozen tower truck full of 2,200kg of underground worms.
Next, 24 billion won worth of 200g liquid adamantium.
Finally, 2 billion won worth of gold I’d earned while digging the way to the 3rd Basement Level.
Total: around 67 billion won.
So I still needed another 33 billion…
At that moment, my phone rang.
It was Ji Yosin of Red Tower.
I answered.
“Ah, Representative Lee!”
- Ah, Deputy Choi! I hope you’ve been well?
“Yeah, I’ve been watching the news too. I forgot to call to congratulate you.”
- No, no, no. We were actually about to call to thank you. You saw the article, right? Thanks to you, we won the bid for Chairman Han Won-tae’s birthday dinner. We’re truly grateful!
I exchanged some routine words with him for a few more minutes before I realized what he actually wanted.
He said he wanted to meet me directly to talk.
Of course, to raise 100 billion I’d have to sell all the 2,200kg of worms to him at a discount. So this meeting request was basically a plea.
I quickly set a time and hung up.
* * *
“The reason I invited you to dinner today, Deputy Choi, is to ask for a favor from the guild.”
“What kind of favor?”
“A few days from now, at Chairman Han Won-tae’s birthday dinner party, there will be a special auction for VIPs…”
Special auction for VIPs?
“…Since your guild is so skilled and has wide connections, if there’s anything rare or hard-to-find in what your guild has obtained… I’d like you to consider participating once with us in cooperation.”
I immediately pictured a double-paired Ssangdu-palbi corpse.
After a quick search, I knew Ssangdu-palbi leather, bones, horns, teeth, and organs were all high-value materials with proper market prices.
But my Ssangdu-palbi weren’t normal. They were double-paired!
The first Ssangdu-palbi ever discovered by humanity.
So I’d kept them in the frozen truck because selling them at market price felt wrong.
I decided to tell him.
“As a matter of fact… our guild recently imported a large number of Ssangdu-palbi organs from Shandong, China…”
“Hoho, so you brought Ssangdu-palbi organs from China? Impressive. Those are a delicacy that drives Chinese people crazy… How many heads and arms does the Ssangdu-palbi have?”
I told him honestly.
“Double heads and double arms, apparently.”
“Double arms? Haha, sorry, but I think your guild was a little fooled by the Chinese.”
“Fooled?”
“There are smugglers who sew two extra arms onto Ssangdu-palbi corpses to trick people, but normal Ssangdu-palbi have six arms at most.”
Hoho.
“Even if it’s six arms, that’s impressive. Ssangdu-palbi organs grow in proportion to the number of arms and are highly nutritious. In Korea they’re not common, but in the Sinosphere and Southeast Asia they’re a delicacy, and to hunters they’re famous for boosting resistances.”
“So… can you roughly tell how many arms based on the size of the organs?”
“Not always accurate, but you can probably figure it out.”
“Good. Then first, let me show you the actual goods.”
* * *
A little later, when I pulled out all the Ssangdu-palbi organs from Red Tower’s food warehouse…
“…”
I should have seen the look of shock on Ji Yosin’s face.