The Rainbow Pit
Golden Jar 057 Golden Jar Kureung – The ground tremors faded, and the enemies began to appear. Roughly two hundred of them. Their formation was stable, with a well-balanced mix of vanguard and rearguard units. At the front stood twelve figures, noticeably larger and more flamboyantly armed than the rest. A different breed from the Guardians. Their thick armor and the massive hammers strapped to their backs made them look like siege specialists.
‘So the mid-bosses are showing up?’ They definitely felt stronger than a regular round. But only up to that point. I couldn’t picture any future where I lost.
Ba-bam – A trumpet blared, and arrows rained down. They poured like a storm over the heads of the leading zombies. But with the zombies’ armor significantly upgraded, such crude attacks meant nothing.
Ting-ting – Thud – Thud-thud – Of course, some zombies still got hit in the open spaces. Yet zombies had always been fairly resistant to arrows. The dark elves quickly realized their arrows were ineffective and drew their weapons, charging forward.
“Kyaaaak!”
“Kikiki!”
The monkeys, grown burly from devouring their own kind, also rushed out to meet the enemy. The two armies collided, and it soon became clear our side held the advantage.
‘What a mess.’ I’d felt it every time, but the zombies’ fighting style was brutally primitive. They offered an arm and swung their swords. They offered their bodies and bit with their teeth. They attacked while accepting damage, infecting the enemy, then recovered their wounds by eating meat afterward.
The dark elves, clearly unaccustomed to fighting such opponents, looked flustered. They relied on attack and evasion as basic tactics, but when their swords sank into zombie flesh, dodging became far harder than expected. The zombies took wounds; the elves met death. And with those dead elves, the zombies would recover their injuries and even improve their skin.
Crash – On one side of the battlefield, the bulls clashed with the special mid-boss units. Each had found a target matching its size. Here, the outcome was even more one-sided. Their flashy, sturdy-looking armor couldn’t withstand the bulls’ axe strikes. What had seemed thick tore like paper. The dark elf inside staggered back, bleeding.
I shouted urgently at the sight. “Hey! Don’t break the armor!”
We currently lacked the technology to craft weapons or armor. Even if we had it, the odds of these idiot zombies becoming blacksmiths were close to zero. We had to loot military equipment with as few defects as possible.
After watching for about twenty minutes, Nareun-i, who had finished off the enemies, approached while licking the blood from her hands. She looked very satisfied.
“Good work, Master.”
She handed me the relic looted from the Guardian mixed into the battlefield. The final relic of this stage.
“Well done. Rest a bit, then head out on another dispatch.”
“Yes, understood.”
Nareun-i received the command authority and returned to her duties. Another one had work to do as well.
Purr – Purr – Baengnae had fallen asleep leaning against me, apparently bored by the fight. I poked her.
“Baengnae, wake up. Time to work.”
“Mmm… Baengnae not sleeping.”
“Get up quick. We’re going to the pit.”
“Pit?”
“Yeah. The witch says she senses ominous magic there. I want to scout it out first.”
Baengnae closed her eyes again and leaned back into me.
“Mmm… Baengnae sleeping.”
She was slacking off, so drastic measures were needed. I pointed at the chaotic battlefield.
“If you stay here, you’ll have to infect all those dark elves yourself. So, you going or staying?”
The lazybones clung to me.
“Baengnae go to pit.”
She could think that way—using Baengnae’s infection might yield stronger zombies. And that was a perfectly valid idea. But through repeated infection work, I’d discovered something new.
‘Infection’ accumulated. In other words, if you kept condensing the poison without using Baengnae’s, it gradually became a better poison. And that top-tier poison was best saved for exceptionally outstanding zombies like the witch. That was why the ‘responsibility of infection’ rotated among the higher-ranking zombies.
Since the slacker was motivated now, it was time to work.
“Let’s go to the Rainbow Pit!”
“Pit!”
Have you ever wondered what lies at the end of a rainbow? Westerners once held a superstition: if you reached the rainbow’s end, you’d find a massive jar overflowing with gold coins. A few Stage 4 users who clung to that fantasy chased the rainbows floating in the sky. After enduring countless hardships, avoiding native creatures, and wandering through mazes, they arrived at the spot where the rainbow touched down.
A cluster of brilliant light. The place pointed to by the white light that supposedly contained every color in the world held a pit. An unfathomably deep pit of darkness.
The users weren’t insane for chasing rainbows. Most Stage 4 users suffered from food shortages. To them, gold meant life. And the illusion of vast gold at the rainbow’s end was clearly worth risking their lives for.
Countless—truly countless—people threw themselves into the pit chasing massive amounts of gold. But what awaited them below wasn’t gold. It was a nightmare far removed from riches.
The moment they leaped into the pit, they were forcibly transported to some underground space. Those who sought gold wandered the small maze, evading its master to survive. Eventually, they were either discovered and killed or starved to death without encountering anything.
But I had no problem. With how powerfully I’d grown, how could some native creature be an issue? I would claim everything—the pit’s master and the enormous amount of gold it possessed.
‘Heh, a jar full of gold, huh?’
It wasn’t sudden greed. Gold had become a crucial resource for me, who was using the infection stockpiling strategy. Because of the ‘Black Cave.’ Originally a useless place, but now I had the confidence to handle every type of enemy that would emerge from it.
A space where you could buy one bull for 690 gold. Then what if you spent more? Even stronger entities would appear. If I poured Baengnae’s concentrated poison into those superior beings, I would command an elite group.
Following the rainbow that adorned the sky for a while, the pit appeared just as described in the community. A place not far from the Relic Temple. An area where countless lights danced brilliantly in the air and a dark pit lay on the ground. Its official name was the ‘Rainbow Pit,’ a high-risk zone.
“Alright, shall we go in?”
Baengnae stared blankly down into the ten-meter-wide pit. I took her hand. If our bodies weren’t connected, we’d be transported to different spaces.
“What are you doing?”
“Mmm, going.”
We threw ourselves into the pit. Chasing the scent of gold. Dreaming of a brilliant golden future, we leaped into the unknown darkness.
Whoosh – The sensation of falling into a deep space lasted only a moment before a slight dizziness hit and the surroundings changed.
“Ugh…”
When I came to my senses, I was underground. Looking up, the hole we’d entered through was gone—only rock remained. Just as the community posts had said, we’d been transported.
A sudden thought occurred to me.
‘By the way… which idiot was the first to think of throwing themselves into the pit?’
No matter how hungry you were, normal people would think of hunting wild animals, not leaping into darkness. The first one to enter probably didn’t even know this world was composed of ‘beliefs,’ right?
‘Maybe they just got chased and jumped in desperation?’
That hypothesis was probably correct. This area had many dangerous native creatures, and safe zones were almost nonexistent.
Anyway, my goal was reconnaissance. Wander around, record the paths, and gauge the master’s strength if we met. After all, this was groundwork for throwing the relic.
Though it was an underground cave, bright rocks embedded here and there meant visibility wasn’t an issue. I decided to pick a direction and move.
Baengnae suddenly squeezed my hand tightly.
“What’s wrong? Let’s go.”
“Scary…”
Honestly, I was very confident. An underground mine? No matter the environment, it was still a maze. And I knew the surefire way to escape a maze. If this space remained within Stage 4, my method would definitely work.
The passages varied slightly, but the tunnels maintained roughly three meters in width and height. No wind blew, and it wasn’t humid. The surrounding rocks were mostly purple, except for those emitting light.
‘Hmm…?’
I picked up the pace. We quickly traversed the underground passage. When we reached a fork, I picked any direction and pressed forward. Before long, the color around us shifted to something like navy blue, changing the atmosphere of the space. It felt like entering a children’s playground ride.
An ominous sensation suddenly stabbed at my mind. So I ran even faster. The scenery shifted through blue, green, then yellow.
‘Something’s off…?’
There was something strange in the community posts. The descriptions of the pit’s master varied wildly from user to user. One said it was a worm, another a bear. Yet another claimed it was a dwarf. The inconsistent accounts made me think it was like the dark elves—slightly different for each person.
Finally, at the end of the red-rock space, the purple world began again. The same place we’d first seen. And I couldn’t shake the ominous feeling.
‘For now… for now, let’s get out.’
It seemed there was no ‘pit master’ here after all. The users had all simply starved to death. They’d only left posts out of spite, refusing to suffer alone.
I immediately placed my hand on the wall. I held Baengnae tightly too. We advanced hundreds of steps, but nothing happened. Because this wasn’t a maze.
Do you know the difference between a maze and a labyrinth? A maze is a space with complex, intertwined paths, while a labyrinth is a single passage connecting entrance and exit. This was a labyrinth. A single path from the purple entrance to the red exit.
But it came with one troublesome characteristic. Do you know about rainbows? The rainbows we see are semicircular, but in reality, rainbows are circular. Beyond human visible range, they connect in a full circle. The end of the rainbow. The gold was an illusion, and what existed there was merely another rainbow that hadn’t been visible from the outside.