The Reward Is... Me?
The instant the dragon fell, Ji Yu was whisked away to a reward room.
Before her eyes stretched a boundless expanse of pure, blinding white.
“What the hell?”
It hadn't been particularly hard—well, actually, it had been terrifying—but she had nonetheless brought down a monstrous boss and earned her way into the reward room. By all rights, the place should have been overflowing with dazzling treasures, glittering gold, and legendary gear.
“Hello? Where is everything?”
The problem was that there wasn't a single thing in sight.
Normally, a cluster of ornate chests would be sitting front and center, waiting for a conqueror to pick one and claim their prize.
“Nothing? Are you kidding me right now?!”
Not a single chest graced Ji Yu’s reward room. Panic setting in, she scrambled to pull open her Hunter Device to check her status.
[10th Floor Clear Reward (Enhanced)]
— Acquisition Complete.
“Wait, what kind of bullshit is that?!”
All she had on her person was a ludicrously cute sailor uniform radiating frilly feminine charm. As for actual rewards, there was not a trace.
“Dammit all… Where the hell did that jerk Seon-woo go, anyway?”
Worse than the missing loot was the fact that Seon-woo, who had been right beside her a moment ago, was nowhere to be found. Left completely alone in the Tower without warning, an overwhelming wave of anxiety and dread crashed down upon her.
“Uuugh…”
She had tried her best to put up a brave front, but her mental state was already shredded to ribbons. A solitary, glittering tear welled in the corner of her eye, spilling over before she could stop it.
“Where are you, Seon-woo…”
Burying her face in both hands, Ji Yu choked back a quiet sob. The sheer mortification of shedding tears burned hot against her cheeks. Deep down, she still possessed the stubborn pride of a twenty-five-year-old guy.
“Why does this keep happening to me… Haah, forget it. Stop thinking. Just stop.”
Taking a shuddering breath, she forced her emotions back into lockstep. No matter how hopeless things seemed, curling into a ball wouldn't solve anything. If Seon-woo caught her like this, he’d probably scoff and tell her she didn't have what it took to be a hunter.
Let's just try anything.
Clinging to that thought, Ji Yu pulled out her smartphone. Grasping at whatever digital straw she could find, she tapped into the Hunter community boards.
“Huh?”
Miraculously, the data bars were full. The internet was working perfectly.
“Wait a second… If the connection works, can't I just call him?”
Knowing she wasn't cut off from the outside world brought an immediate wave of relief. Her trembling fingers punched in Seon-woo’s number without hesitation.
Ring, ring—
“Ahem! *Cough!*” Ji Yu quickly cleared her throat, clearing out the lingering tightness in her voice. The moment her nerves steadied, a fresh wave of embarrassment washed over her.
—Hey, where'd you wander off to? Dude, this place is completely nuts!
“What?”
Seon-woo’s voice crackled through the receiver, sounding utterly thrilled—the exact opposite of Ji Yu’s miserable panic.
—Messages keep popping up left and right saying crap like [The Ancient Castle Where the Dragon Was Sealed recognizes Ji Yu as its master], and all the shattered rubble is literally rebuilding itself!
“Wait… seriously?”
It sounded downright miraculous.
“Hey! Why didn't the system show any of that to me?!” Ji Yu protested, a potent mix of indignant betrayal and sheer disbelief coloring her voice.
—Whoa, now that the debris is clearing out, this place looks insane.
“Stop rubbing it in! Why are you the only one who gets to watch?!”
—Where the hell are you, anyway?
“The reward room.”
—All the rewards are sitting out here, so why did you go in there?
Seon-woo posed the fundamental question, but Ji Yu hadn't the faintest idea how to answer.
“How should I know, damn it…”
—Did you get trapped inside?
“Yeah… Once the repairs are finished out there, it'll register as a clear, right?”
—Probably. Hang tight, let me see if I can pull you over to this side.
After a frantic scramble on both ends, freeing Ji Yu from the blank expanse didn't take nearly as long as she had feared.
Chime!
A crisp notification pane materialized in front of her.
The internal warp gate of [The Ancient Castle Where the Dragon Was Sealed] has been restored.
Teleportation to this location is now operational.
“You could've told me that a lot sooner… Teleport!”
With a flash of light, Ji Yu returned to the space that had once been the 10th floor. What greeted her was a world entirely transformed from the smoking ruins where they had battled the dragon.
“Did you seriously cry?” Seon-woo asked, cocking an eyebrow the moment he spotted her reddened eyelids.
“Did not!”
“Right. As if. You’re the same guy who woke up in a new body and immediately copped a feel of your own chest.”
“Why the hell are you bringing that up right now?!”
Flustered by the unmentionable topic, Ji Yu brushed past him in a hurry, deliberately pivoting to take in the sprawling fortress around them.
“Is this really mine? A whole area inside the Tower? Has that ever happened before?”
“You basically received territory inside the Tower. It's ridiculously rare, but there's precedent.” Apparently, a handful of legendary figures had pulled off something similar. “Though you're almost certainly the first person in Korea to pull it off.”
“Whoa!”
Becoming the first person in Korea—or even the world—to achieve something was technically old news for her by now, but claiming an entire territory within the Tower hit completely different. This wasn't some cosmic joke forced upon her body; this was earned through battle. She had genuinely accomplished something monstrous as an Awakened hunter.
“Hehe. So this place is basically our house now, right?”
Ji Yu's mood rebounded at breakneck speed. Any memory of tears vanished as she began exploring every nook and cranny of the fortress like an excited puppy.
“From what I remember, you’re only the third person globally to ever claim territory here.”
Seon-woo noted that only the Mongolian S-rank hunter known as the Great Khan and Europe's premier S-rank, the True Ancestor, possessed Tower estates. In terms of prestige, it was every bit as momentous as setting a world record on the leaderboard. Ji Yu had every right to be ecstatic.
“Man, this really is incredible…”
Fractured floorboards snapped together with seamless precision. Massive stone blocks from collapsed walls floated gracefully into the air, slotting back into place as if time itself were flowing backward. It was a spectacle of pure, breathtaking magic.
The formal rewards popped up only after the castle's self-repair process reached total completion.
The message had arrived late because the system held off until every pillar was re-erected. Her Hunter Device must have registered the completion flag earlier than the environmental script. If only it had pinged her five minutes sooner, she wouldn't have disgraced herself by tearing up like a helpless damsel in distress.
“Ha! Where else on earth are you gonna find a real manly man like me? Nowhere, that's where!”
“What are you randomly babbling about now?”
Caught in her own defensive rationalizations, Ji Yu muttered loudly to herself. She refused to acknowledge that her past masculine dignity had just taken another massive hit.
“So what does the prompt say? Anything else pop up?” Seon-woo asked.
“It's a little strange. It says there's an 'Item Vault.'”
According to her Hunter Device, she had already collected the reward. Instead of popping out of a prize box, it seemed to exist physically as an artifact anchored somewhere within the estate.
“Oh, that? I saw something like that earlier. Follow me.”
Having roamed the castle while Ji Yu was stuck in the white void, Seon-woo casually caught her wrist and guided her toward a shadowy, secluded basement stairwell.
“Down here?”
They descended flight after flight of spiraling stone steps, sinking deep into the earth. The dragon had clearly been guarding whatever lay at the bottom—or more accurately, the trial was designed so that reaching this subterranean sanctuary was impossible without slaying the beast first.
“Is this the core of the castle?”
Ji Yu's heart thumped hard against her ribs. Overtaking Seon-woo, she shoved open the heavy basement door.
A solitary vault stood in the center of the chamber. Even in the gloom, it radiated a cool, azure luminescence that cast long shadows across the floor.
“Was it protecting this?”
“Go ahead and check it out.”
Placing her palm against the cold metal surface, an information window blossomed into the air.
◈ Items purchased prior to exiting the Tower may be stored within this vault.
◈ Stored items may be retrieved upon payment of a nominal gold fee. Withdrawal costs increase if retrieved outside the Tower.
“What the…?”
Reading through the description, Ji Yu’s jaw dropped.
“Does this even make sense?!”
“Of course it doesn't,” Seon-woo muttered, his expression souring. “It basically means you can turn every single Tower shop item into an artifact you can drag into the real world.”
Seeing his friend catapult straight up the societal ladder evidently proved a bitter pill to swallow. Baek Seon-woo wasn't quite magnanimous enough to offer unconditional applause when his former slacker classmate eclipsed him in one fell swoop.
“Hehe. Stomach hurt from jealousy?”
Watching the guy who always lagged behind suddenly turn into a world-class powerhouse would make anyone's guts twist in envy. It was only human.
“This is completely absurd…”
“Pfft!”
Seeing Seon-woo eat his words made the victory taste twice as sweet. To be entirely honest, Ji Yu had harbored a mountain of quiet jealousy watching Seon-woo cruise into elite A-rank status right out of college.
“Man, ever since I turned into a girl, nothing but good things have been happening!”
Sure, she had lost her most prized anatomical possession overnight, and going commando under a pleated skirt was starting to feel disturbingly natural by the minute.
Wait… is that actually a good thing?
On second thought, she had arguably lost a lot more than she had gained. Still, the rewards were colossal enough to soften the blow. That was the story she chose to stick with.
“I guess your dearly departed junk went up to heaven and pulled some strings on your behalf,” Seon-woo deadpanned.
“Pfft! Shut your trap!”
Seon-woo had lined up a razor-sharp killshot of a roast, but to the newly minted landlord of an S-rank Tower fortress, the attack didn't deal a scratch.
“Who am I? The official owner of Tower real estate, that's who!”
Possessing an entire territory had inflated Ji Yu’s ego into the stratosphere. Granted, her noble lordly demeanor lacked a certain gravitas. Underneath that crisp sailor skirt, there was still nothing covering her vitals.
She was, in the truest sense of the phrase, a pantless lord.
Not the Emperor with no clothes, but the Lord with no panties. Since she was only a petty lord and not royalty, she had only stripped the single most critical area.
“Ahem! So what are these question marks supposed to be?”
“There's more?”
Seon-woo leaned in to peer at the lingering question marks on the reward ledger. After landing an artifact as game-breaking as the Secret Vault, it seemed impossible for the Tower to cough up anything better.
“The reward list on my status window just has a string of question marks at the bottom.”
“Hmm…” Seon-woo rubbed his chin, pondering for a second. “Could be dragon byproducts.”
He arrived at the conclusion almost instantly. For all Ji Yu's newfound glory, Seon-woo still had vastly more practical hunter experience under his belt. His intuition was usually spot-on.
“Let's look around. I have a rough idea where it might be.”
“Excuse me, this is my house! Why do you know it better than I do?!”
Bickering like old biddies, the pair marched through the castle corridors. To any outside observer, they looked suspiciously like newlyweds inspecting their new home, though pointing that out would have earned a prompt death threat from both of them.
“Here?”
Seon-woo brought her to an expansive chamber that looked like a storage depot. Scrapped metal and miscellaneous junk were stacked high against the perimeter walls, but the dead center of the room was swept immaculately clean.
“When the castle was repairing itself earlier, it deliberately left this spot completely bare. I figured it was clearing room to store something substantial.”
“Wait, did it dump the dragon's corpse here?”
Ji Yu strode toward the center of the warehouse, eyes shining. Monster byproducts dropped randomly alongside mana stones; you couldn't just butcher a raid boss and haul the carcass away by hand. But if she could store an entire ancient dragon carcass in the Secret Vault and haul it out into the real world?
It would be a literal money-printing press.
We were talking about an ancient dragon, the pinnacle of fantasy beasts.
“Hehe. Wait… what is that…?”
What sat waiting in the cleared ring was something on an entirely different plane from mere dragon meat and scales.
“What is it now? What did you find…? Wait, what in the…”
Sensing her sudden freeze, Seon-woo rushed inside and pulled up short. Both of their gazes locked onto a smooth, midnight-black oval resting silently on the pedestal.
Sitting in the middle of the warehouse was a pristine dragon egg.