Treasure Hunt
A silence so heavy settled over the floor that even a dropped pin would have crashed like thunder.
The players could only tremble in fear, understanding nothing of what had just happened. Even Didascalia was too stunned to force out a single word.
Only one person remained unfazed.
Seong Yujin alone stared into empty air with a completely ordinary expression on his face.
Through the Akasha System, he was reading the description of the trait he had just received as an achievement reward.
The overall capabilities of the body are greatly enhanced.
Heh. This time it’s “greatly,” is it?
Even in the first timeline, he had never so much as glimpsed a modifier like that. Most of the time it was “slightly” or “somewhat.” Only when the reward was absurdly good did words like “considerably” or “quite” ever appear.
And now it was greatly…
The grade was S on top of that. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how powerful the trait’s effects would be.
Well. Good for me.
A smile tugged at Yujin’s lips. This was practically the same as starting from a point incomparably farther ahead than the first timeline.
When he finally reached the finish line of the hundredth floor… just how different would he be?
Strong enough that I won’t even need to raise any kids… No. That’s not right.
He shook his head mid-thought. If he kept monopolizing this much and growing stronger alone, he might truly be able to stop the world’s destruction by himself.
But.
It might not go that way.
What if things refused to unfold the way he expected? What if destruction came again?
That would be a problem.
Who could guarantee that the Akasha System would hand him another skill like Chronos’s Hourglass [EX] a second time? To avoid any unforeseen disaster, he had to proceed exactly as he had first planned.
Doesn’t look like there’s any talent worth picking up here anyway. I’ll have to scour the First Stratum from top to bottom.
Having settled his thoughts, Yujin dismissed the trait window. The moment he did, the players staring at him with the dead-eyed glare of rotten fish swam into view.
“What are you looking at?”
Scritch-scratch—
At that single short line, every head snapped away. They clearly thought that if they got tangled up with him by mistake, they might end up dead like Jin Taeho or Heukam.
Yujin frowned at their pathetic display, then lifted his gaze to Didascalia.
“Hey. Get down here. My neck’s killing me.”
“You—!”
The manager ground his teeth, but he couldn’t actually do anything. The Yujin who had crushed Heukam like stepping on an ant was, even to him, a frightening existence.
Still grinding his teeth, he flapped his wings and descended exactly as ordered.
“Good. You listen well.”
Yujin was thoroughly pleased. Watching that arrogantly high-and-mighty administrator brat obey him without a single complaint felt excellent.
“Player Seong Yujin. The power you are currently employing is highly abnormal.”
Correct. As if the person responsible wouldn’t know that. But so what? Flashback [S] was a skill the Akasha System itself had lawfully granted him as a reward through proper procedure.
“Once the full circumstances have been reviewed, if it is determined not to have been a lawful act, appropriate sanctions will follow.”
When an Administrator said “sanctions,” it meant death. In other words: if they could dig up even the smallest pretext, they would use it as an excuse to kill him on the spot.
“Do whatever the hell you feel like.”
Yujin answered with a completely uninterested face and took a step closer.
“That thing you summoned is dead. So is it over?”
Of course not. The Tutorial Floor finished only after two stages.
The first was the appearance of Heukam—or a boss of equivalent caliber. Its role was to brand into the players, in a very short time, exactly what kind of place the Tower was.
And next…
“Surely you don’t think so.”
Didascalia shook his head, smoothed out his stiff expression, and once again painted on that disgusting smile.
“There is still one more left.”
Yujin saw the corner of the manager’s mouth twitch. He was trying hard to look composed, but the shock clearly hadn’t worn off. Originally he should have progressed after roughly thirty people had died. Instead, only one had died—and even that one, Jin Taeho, who had been beaten into a pulp, had been killed by Yujin’s hand, not Heukam’s.
The players feared Yujin more than they feared their own Administrator. The manager’s pride had to be thoroughly wounded right about now.
“Now then—next up!”
As if refusing to acknowledge his own feelings, he shouted with forced energy.
“It’s a treasure hunt!”
Yes. That was it. Treasure hunt.
If this had been a school trip or a company workshop, cheers would have erupted. Unfortunately, not a single person looked happy. Well—Yujin himself was the exception.
“Throughout this Tutorial Floor, treasures prepared for all of you players have been hidden in abundance!”
Watching the manager talk like some recreation instructor, Yujin let out a quiet snort of laughter.
Still, he’s not wrong.
The Tutorial Floor really did contain quite a few decent things, exactly as Didascalia claimed. Skills, items—even rune fragments that granted traits. They were essentially rewards for those who had survived Heukam’s hands.
But of course—
“It wouldn’t be any fun if everything were good, now would it?”
The manager’s smile turned vicious.
“Unfortunately, some of the treasures are duds. So please be careful before you check them!”
A dud meant exactly that—a dud. There was no “better luck next time.” The moment you picked one up, it literally went bang and exploded. The blast was powerful enough that a Level 1 player’s body could never withstand it, and it always delivered death.
Last time about twenty people got blown up here, right?
In the first timeline, roughly fifty people had ultimately died on the Tutorial Floor alone. Between Heukam and the treasure hunt, half of those summoned had been wiped out.
“You have only thirty minutes! Thanks to a certain someone, the number of treasures has become insufficient, so you’d better move as fast as you can!”
Didascalia casually pinned the blame on Yujin. At the same time the people began eyeing one another and edging into motion. Having just witnessed something so unreal and absurd, they had decided they needed to do something.
Moving proactively isn’t a bad thing.
Better to move like that than to waste time dithering and let someone else snatch everything. Still, it was also genuinely dangerous. If Yujin simply stood by and watched, fireworks would start going off all over the place exactly like the first timeline.
Can’t have that.
Not because he felt sorry for those idiots dying. There was a far more important reason.
All the good stuff is mine.
Honestly, how good could anything obtainable on the Tutorial Floor possibly be? Even if you piled every last item together, none of it would reach the toes of the trait God-Infused Body [S] he had just obtained. But even mud could hide pearls. Most of it would be garbage—yet among it there were definitely things Yujin could put to good use.
About five minutes left?
Roughly ten minutes had passed since he activated Flashback [S]. Even after killing Heukam, checking the trait, and exchanging a short conversation with Didascalia, that was still the case.
This should be enough.
Someone had said the Tutorial Floor was about the size of a small-to-medium city, hadn’t they? An ordinary person would need at least several months to search that vast space thoroughly.
“But I’m not ordinary.”
Yujin kicked off the ground and shot upward.
“Detection [B].”
Detection [B]
At the same time he activated a skill he had learned in the first timeline. His senses expanded outward, and a flood of information crashed over him like a wave. The locations of every treasure Didascalia had hidden were engraved into his mind in real time.
Seventy-two in total?
Finding every single hidden treasure took exactly ten seconds.
“Good.”
At this rate he could bring them all back before the time limit.
“Swiftness [B].”
Swiftness [B]
He used another skill, and a speed incomparable to anything before now tore across the space. A single step carried him more than a kilometer in an instant. The players who had only just managed to cover about a hundred meters couldn’t even track him with their eyes.
Would’ve been nice if I had a little more time.
The treasures were scattered across a wider range than expected. Unfortunately, that left him no room right now to sort real prizes from duds.
“I’ll just grab everything first and sort out what I need later.”
Having decided, Yujin began the treasure hunt—or rather, the treasure collection—in earnest.
Oh, this one I absolutely take.
This one’s a dud.
Hmm. Kind of borderline.
KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-BOOM—!
A continuous chain of explosions erupted along the path he left behind. The duds hidden among the treasures were detonating one after another. Yet Yujin didn’t take so much as a hair’s worth of damage. In the same fractional instant the explosions bloomed, he was already gone from that spot.
Of course, even a direct hit wouldn’t have left a scratch on him in the first place.
Exactly five minutes later, the moment Flashback [S]’s time limit ended, Yujin stopped moving.
“Aigoo. I’m gonna die.”
The power that had been overflowing to the point of spilling away vanished, and his entire body suddenly felt as heavy as waterlogged cotton.
“Tsk.”
He clicked his tongue, dropped straight onto the ground where he stood, and immediately began checking what he had collected.
“This one, this one, and this one. That’s it.”
Out of the fifty-three non-dud treasures, exactly three. The remaining fifty were of no particular use to him.
“Let’s see…”
Once per day, a short-range movement becomes possible.
The first thing he examined was an E-grade skill book whose description made him tilt his head. But Yujin knew exactly what it really was.
“Teleportation.”
Of course, calling it teleportation right now was almost cruel given how pathetic the performance was. The range was a mere three meters at best, and it could only be used once a day.
Even so, he chose it because the skill’s growth potential was infinite. The higher the proficiency climbed, the greater the range and the more uses he would gain. If he completely mastered it, he would be able to slap Hong Gildong across the face—literally flashing east, flashing west.
“Man, I really wanted this one.”
It was a skill first-timeline Yujin had never learned. Instead he had once watched a Japanese player named Sasaki use it. That bastard had known how to exploit Instant [E] properly—he was the first person ever to shake Yujin’s pursuit.
Mastering it will take a fair amount of time, but it’s worth the effort.
He hadn’t even dreamed he would find this on the Tutorial Floor, so his mood improved a little.
“Next…”
A single-edged saber that holds a trace of a fire dragon’s power.
A single-edged blade with the faintest wash of red qi clinging to it. The first item he had touched since returning to the past. Being only E-grade, its performance wasn’t outstanding—but it would still be quite useful through the early floors up to the tenth.
“Plus, if I meet a few conditions, it can be enhanced.”
Even so, it was something he would use only in the lower floors and later replace with something better.
“And now, the grand finale.”
Aligns the body and the mind as one.
An E-grade rune fragment containing a trait.
“…Good to see you again.”
In the first timeline, this had been the only treasure Yujin obtained here—and the single greatest contributor to making him who he was now. To other players it was worthless trash not even worth a single coin. To Yujin it was different. It would not be an exaggeration to say that learning Body-Mind Unity [E] was what had allowed him to tear the end of the world to pieces and kill it.
You have acquired the skill Instant [E].
You have acquired the trait Body-Mind Unity [E].
Along with the notification windows, the skill book and rune fragment crumbled into dust.
I’ve taken everything worth taking.
No—he had obtained far more than he had originally expected. Yujin casually flung the remaining treasures into the air and spoke toward the players who had been standing around sucking their thumbs.
“Go ahead and grab whatever you want.”
There were ninety-eight players and only fifty treasures left. Exactly as Didascalia had said, no one had expected this many people to survive, so the shortfall was inevitable. But that didn’t mean Yujin was going to make up the difference for them.
Those who can take will take. Those who get robbed will get robbed.
He had no intention of involving himself that far. After calmly watching the players charge toward the treasures scattering through the air, Yujin turned his gaze.
Didascalia.
His eyes, still trembling without fail, met Yujin’s in midair.
“If you’ve got time to stand there gawking, finish this already, you bastard. I’m busy.”