Turning Crisis into Opportunity
"Turning crisis into opportunity..." While moving frantically, the place I stopped was in front of a beehive midway up the cliff. Even if it wasn't platinum-grade honey, it was still honey, so my body reached into the hive without my consent and began ruthlessly stealing the honey. Chomp chomp chomp.
Even as bees swarmed over my entire body, the spider webs wrapped around me sliced them all apart. How the hell can it precisely lick only the honey in that situation? It looked like I was crudely scraping the hive with my hand, yet not a single larva or bee got chewed. I had left it alone out of curiosity about what would happen when the penalty triggered, but this was unexpected. It's useless.
I had thought there might be some difference since this was reality rather than the game, but there wasn't much of one. On the contrary, since my body moved on its own, it was dangerous. I'd have to prepare honey candies and eat them regularly. It wasn't like I was under some curse, yet I needed such thorough countermeasures. I hadn't expected the penalty to be this troublesome.
[Honey consumed. Status abnormality 'Honey Lover' has been lifted.]
A penalty that could be lifted just by eating honey once a month. But if I ever couldn't eat it, a disaster would strike where I lost control of my body. "The human didn't die! Shoot! Fire the arrows!" Right now only crude stone arrows flew even in this situation, but I had no idea what would happen later. Still, if I use this situation well, something good might come of it.
That was why I hadn't prepared countermeasures for the penalty right away. If I could gain something using the ability to find honey, it seemed worth it. "Should I deal with what's in front of me first?" I pulled out spider webs, hooked them onto the cliff edge, and yanked myself up like a wire action. The more I fought using spider webs, the more I thought of heroes from Earth. Having idle thoughts in this situation means I still have some leeway.
After finishing my self-assessment, I charged straight at the monsters. The time for leisure was over. Now it was time to move.
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After Lee Seokhyun handed over the Magic Armor blueprints and left, Gi Juseon's laboratory was now in a highly heated state of active research. "A blueprint claiming the foundation of my research so far was wrong."
What Gi Juseon wanted was power that even the weak could use to defeat monsters. Naturally, he had believed the Magic Armor must be perfect in every aspect. Since commoners wouldn't have money to embed magic stones, he had planned a method where the armor itself produced, charged, and consumed power. But Lee Seokhyun's Magic Armor was based on squeezing every last drop of a commoner's strength. It reduced energy consumption by amplifying even a single grain of remaining mana and added more power to lethality. There were major issues with safety and mana exhaustion, but since it was a prototype, Gi Juseon nodded at the explanation that it was fine. It was simply the process of creating mass-produced items rather than a finished product from the start.
When researching alone, he couldn't think this way and had obsessed over perfection, but Lee Seokhyun's involvement made that unnecessary. "But how can he make something like this?" How could a first-year student who had just entered produce such blueprints in such a short time? Even if he had been thinking about it normally, Lee Seokhyun was a commoner. Gi Juseon didn't look down on commoners, but there were fields where genius could shine and fields where it couldn't. Especially in areas requiring academic research rather than artistic achievement, the gap was even wider. One could learn one thing and understand ten, but this field required a perfectly prepared environment just to learn the first thing. Yet here was a blueprint of this level despite a commoner having no environment to learn magic engineering. The most surprising part was the lack of hesitation. "It was like he already knew the answer."
Normally, when students presented their blueprints to a professor, they felt shame first. They should have expressions like they were showing an embarrassing work or faces like livestock being dragged to slaughter. Lee Seokhyun had none of that. He confidently revised and tore apart the blueprints, pushing his own convictions. He knew this was the way it would definitely work. It was confidence as if he knew the future. "It makes me curious what kind of life he's lived."
If Lee Seokhyun had been a noble, the professors would have used all their connections to thoroughly investigate his past before admission. A promising candidate's past was very important to them. But because he was a commoner, the professors weren't particularly curious about Lee Seokhyun's past. 'Because they're all the same.' The lives of commoners, whether a hundred or a thousand, tended to be similar. The only way for a commoner who had learned nothing to enter Mirinae Academy was through exceptional talent. They had to stand out from a young age, be called geniuses, and pass the entrance exam. Besides, investigating wouldn't yield anything special anyway, since commoners' pasts weren't separately investigated or documented from childhood. Therefore, Lee Seokhyun could be seen as a genius wrapped in a veil.
"Is the mana ratio correct like this? The iron will become extremely soft at this rate." While Gi Juseon pondered Lee Seokhyun's identity, Kim Seokcheol had been summoned by Gi Juseon and was performing mana forging. 'Can this really work?' Mana forging was simply explained as embedding mana during forging to create higher-performance smelting, but the core was the ability to contain mana within the iron itself. What mattered here was how efficiently and how much mana could be embedded into the iron. According to Lee Seokhyun's blueprint, it demanded embedding mana up to the iron's limit. The problem was that doing so drastically reduced durability. Mana conductivity would be good, but in practice, it might become unusable after only a few uses. 'The efficiency won't come out.'
It would be quite disappointing if the prototype made by bringing even Forenta seedlings and connecting them to mana circuits could only be used two or three times. But Kim Seokcheol didn't voice any other complaints. 'He must know everything.' He firmly believed that Gi Juseon couldn't possibly be unaware of such drawbacks. How could someone far more educated than him not know these flaws? He was convinced that raising objections here would only offend the professor. Clang! Clang! Clang! With all doubts and curiosity placed under the belief that "Gi Juseon will handle it," Kim Seokcheol continued the mana forging as requested. 'But durability will be handled by Lee Seokhyun, right?'
Even Gi Juseon felt doubts about this part, but because he firmly trusted Lee Seokhyun, he moved past it. Though it was their first collaboration and he felt uneasy, his trust in Lee Seokhyun was greater.
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'This should be about enough.' After clearing the small fry on the cliff and successfully infiltrating the powder magazine, I pondered how to use the gunpowder in front of me most efficiently. There were over twenty explosive barrels full of gunpowder, and over a hundred cannonballs that were just iron spheres without gunpowder. The most ideal method would be to lure the boss monster here and detonate the gunpowder the moment it arrived, but such a convenient thing wouldn't happen easily. The moment I charged into the boss monster's location, all the monsters would come out. If that happened, clearing the dungeon or whatever would be impossible—I'd die on the spot for sure. 'It's really hard doing this alone.'
If there was just one more person, it would have been easier with one handling the gunpowder and another dealing with the monsters. Solo play had many drawbacks if it wasn't perfect. So the solution I came up with was... 'Two people should be enough.' A way to increase the number of personnel. What could be obtained from the jungle fortress wasn't just dungeon clear rewards. If you dealt with all the small fry, there was a rare chance of valuable rewards dropping. In my case, since most monsters had come outside, I could obtain the rewards very easily. "How was the spirit magic circle made again?"
The reward was a spirit stone, an important item that allowed even those without talent in spirit arts to form contracts with spirits. It didn't guarantee a contract—various compatibilities and conditions were needed—but with the natural mana present now, it was fine. Drawing the spirit circle with gunpowder powder and placing the spirit stone in the center would complete the preparations. I could prepare to contract with a spirit through a very simple method. Originally, I would have needed to learn both the method of obtaining the spirit stone and how to draw the spirit circle, but since I had played Final Destiny countless times, I could skip those trivial parts. 'Let's give it a try.' It was time to create an ally.