The Tower's Golden Secret
I thought about loudly announcing that I’d definitely earned five hundred million won, but I figured that would only invite a mountain of annoying problems, so I decided to give a suitably vague excuse instead.
“Oh… one thousand won.”
“Pffft… Ahahaha…”
“……”
“What the hell did you sell to get that kind of money?”
“Just a tiny little mushroom the size of a rat’s tail. I’m hanging up now.”
I ended the call, pretending to be in a bad mood, and kept feeding items into the appraiser.
But the real jackpot of the day still wasn’t over.
Beep—
This item cannot be processed at the self-disposal station.
I pulled the item back out of the appraiser and examined it from every angle.
It was none other than Mr. Byeon’s prosthetic leg.
Damn. A piece of equipment with no options still wasn’t considered junk?
It wasn’t until I visited the prosthetic limb department on the twelfth floor that I learned prosthetic arms and legs were insanely expensive regardless of options.
“This particular model is a Flex prosthetic leg specialized for physical labor like digging. It’s quite pricey. Not something you can easily obtain even on the Tower’s upper floors.”
“So how much is it?”
“Our appraised value is eighty-three million won. However, to be completely honest, these rare specialty items fluctuate wildly depending on supply and demand at any given time. Please consider that carefully before deciding.”
“How much can the price swing?”
“A similar item was recently auctioned at Hunter Auction for over a hundred million won. Of course, there are cases where it sells below our appraised value as well.”
I thanked the conscientious employee and decided to list Mr. Byeon’s prosthetic leg on Hunter Auction.
With that, my business at K-Item Bank was finished.
Exhausted, I returned home, took a thorough shower, filled my stomach with two packs of ramen plus rice, and finally sat down at my desk.
I checked my phone balance.
₩508,120,000
Insane.
Just this morning my account had barely a million won in it. Now it held over five hundred million.
Of course I felt some guilt about killing a person.
I kept myself frantically busy all day so I wouldn’t have time to dwell on it.
But if living twenty-two years had taught me one single lesson about life…
Sorry. I really did try to spare your life, but it looks like that’s not happening. Guess you’ll have to hand over that Rune Stone today.
It was a hundred times better to kill first than to die to someone who could spit out garbage like that.
Next up, it was time to examine today’s haul in detail.
I calmly scrolled through the 4×4 Belt’s item display.
Killing someone with similar traits and farming their gear had netted me a bunch of genuinely useful, high-quality items.
On top of that, the hundred-million-won prosthetic leg was already listed on the auction.
I lay on my bed, searching for prices on Flex prosthetic legs and search dogs, and before I knew it I had passed out.
It was the sweetest sleep I’d had in a long time.
* * *
The next day, I deliberately slept in.
I spent the entire day sitting in front of my computer, searching for information.
My eyes only regained their sparkle once the sky had turned completely dark.
First, I needed to decide how to spend the four ability points I’d earned yesterday.
I’d agonized over it all day, but the answer was obvious.
For digging, strength was king.
Strength has reached 14.
The work clothes I’d washed and hung up were completely dry thanks to the fan. I put them on, tightly fastened the 4×4 Belt, and left the house.
My destination was obviously the Tower.
Since I could store my phone and wallet in my inventory now, there was no need to visit the paid lockers.
I headed straight for the zero floor without hesitation.
The reason I’d deliberately come at night was simple.
Just as I expected.
After midnight the already quiet lobby was completely empty. The only living soul was a Tower Scavenger who looked like a vagrant, passed out drunk in the corner.
It wasn’t that the Tower itself was deserted at night. Plenty of raid parties and high-level solo hunters ran nighttime clears on the upper floors.
But the lobby was a completely different story.
As I mentioned before, only three kinds of people came here.
Newbies.
Tower Scavengers who gathered resources near the first-floor entrance.
And tourists.
All three groups avoided visiting the Tower at night.
For newbies, clearing the first floor when almost no one else was around was extremely dangerous.
There were almost no useful resources near the first-floor entrance anyway, so Scavengers usually took the warp gate and started working from there.
Tourists were even less likely to come at night.
I took Beodori out of my belt, set him down, and began strolling slowly through the enormous lobby.
Beodori could locate four hundred different resources. Still, I doubted he’d find anything noteworthy here.
The Hunter Association had already conducted a thorough investigation and concluded that the zero floor contained no useful resources of any kind.
When you thought about it, it made sense.
No monsters spawned on the zero floor.
If something valuable appeared in a place like that, who would bother taking the risk to climb higher?
Even so, I had high hopes that Beodori would find something.
And after about five minutes of walking, he lived up to my expectations.
“Woof woof~ Woof woof~”
Beodori stopped in front of a particular stone slab and started barking furiously.
I crouched down and examined the slab carefully.
Just as I thought.
It had clearly been flipped over and put back.
I wedged my crowbar under it and lifted the slab.
Bingo!
Below was a pit roughly thirty centimeters in diameter—the exact kind the Association had dug during their zero-floor survey.
There were twenty-three more of these pits scattered across the zero floor.
I knew that because I had spent the entire day reading the Hunter Association’s zero-floor survey reports online.
Using these pits, the Association had conducted geological surveys all the way down to the “bedrock” several meters underground.
“Bedrock” meant they had dug until they hit an “indestructible rock layer” that could not be dug through any further.
According to the report, this rock was an absolute material that could not be damaged by any physical or magical force.
It was the same substance that made up the Tower’s outer and inner walls.
After digging multiple pits down to this “absolute bedrock” and finding nothing, the Hunter Association had reached its conclusion.
The zero floor has nothing worth digging up!
This was a universally accepted theory, confirmed across every nation’s Tower with no exceptions.
But my stance was different.
Even if there was nothing to eat, every meter I dug would still grant “digging experience,” and that would raise my level.
Because the formula was floor number × 1 gold, 0 × 1 = 0. So I couldn’t expect any gold coins, but the other reward—the “random luck item”—might still appear.
In that case, rather than risking the first floor, it was safer to stay here on the zero floor and at least push my level to 3.
Now that I had a lot of money, I could afford to take it easy.
I immediately pulled out the 63% shovel and started digging.
The work went incredibly smoothly.
My digging speed was three times faster than an ordinary person’s.
On top of that, I had raised my strength to 14.
Anyone who has ever dug before knows this: excavating a spot where the center has already been cleared is incomparably easier than breaking new ground.
Whoooosh—
Thud thud thud—
In just a few minutes I had reached one meter deep.
You have dug down 1 m.
Experience has been acquired.
The trait Digging Luck has paid you gold.
1 m × 0 floor × 1 = 0 gold
No gold acquired.
That was exactly as expected, but…
The next moment—
The trait Digging Luck has paid you a random luck item.
You have obtained Safety Helmet.
Oh ho.
So it does give random luck items.
When I checked my inventory, a safety helmet I had never seen before was now inside.
Last time when Mr. Byeon dug, we were in a party so the item dropped on the ground. This time there was no party and I had an inventory, so the reward went straight inside.
I took it out and put it on immediately.
It was an ordinary plastic safety helmet with no special features.
I quickly covered the pit, poured the excavated dirt back in, and tamped it down firmly with my feet.
Then I dug to the one-meter mark again.
Nothing happened this time.
I had expected that.
The system didn’t recognize refilling a hole and digging it again.
I released Beodori and moved on to the next pit.
Digging from the surface to one meter was easy, but digging from one meter to two meters required a cramped workspace and hauling dirt out of the hole, so it took four to five times more effort and time.
Therefore, the most efficient method was to go from pit to pit, digging only one meter at each.
Three hours later…
“Huff, huff, huff.”
I was racing around the zero floor like a madman, clearing one pit after another.
The gold kept staying at zero, but my inventory kept receiving what appeared to be climbing equipment.
What? Why climbing gear?
Did it mean something?
Anyway, I kept digging.
And when I had dug one meter into roughly eighteen or nineteen pits, the happy news I had been waiting for finally arrived.
As expected, levels came quickly at the low end.
Especially since I specialized in digging, I leveled even faster when I dug, right?
I immediately checked the Digging Passion side first.
Allows you to use a hoe or flower shovel at double speed.
That seemed decent enough.
What about Digging Luck?
2 gold per 1 m × floor / Random luck item
Ooooooh!
It had finally gone up to two gold.
Did it increase by one gold every two levels?
1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4…
Was it following that pattern?
At that moment, one thought flashed through my mind.
The Fibonacci sequence.
That sequence definitely started with 1, 1, 2.
Because each number was the sum of the two preceding ones.
If you listed the sequence it went: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…
Could it be?
If the rewards for my trait were determined by the Fibonacci sequence…
At level 10, the base reward would be 55 gold.
That was 66,000 won in real money.
Even if I only had to watch out for Tower Zombies on the first floor, digging could earn me hundreds of thousands of won per day.
But…
What about level 20?
89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1,597, 2,584, 4,181, 6,765…
What the hell.
Holy crap.
8.118 million won?
Digging one meter of ground for 8.18 million won?
At level 20 my base reward would be 6,765 gold.
Digging one meter on the first floor would earn me 8,118,000 won in real money.
Oh my god!
W-what if I dug a total of ten meters, one meter at a time?
Shiver.
Eighty million won.
A daily income of eighty million won!
It would go straight into my inventory.
Then if I worked only twenty days a month, skipping weekends and holidays, my monthly income would be 1.6 billion.
Annual income…
19.2 billion!