Warrior Rock (1) - Orc
Core Room
At Heok-o's words, Dohyun's eyes turned cold.
An enemy?
He had found the one thing missing from his calculations.
If the cultivators had concealed their approach, then they were enemies.
Dohyun never looked kindly on anything that muddled his calculations.
Heok-o, however, seemed to think differently, his expression a little uncertain.
"Well?"
Then what is it?
"No, as far as you know, the master of this place known as the Yokai Forest... has no reason to be hostile toward you."
Is that information certain?
"If the dragon isn't losing his mind, it's right."
Fine.
Though doubt crept into Dohyun's mind as he looked at Heok-o, he did not let it show.
"That tree doesn't move."
Heok-o narrowed his eyes.
"But it does have thousands of eyes and hands."
....A tree?
At that moment, a faint ripple passed through the dungeon's flow, and with it came the uncanny sensation of an invisible gaze brushing past him.
"Don't worry, dragon. At most, one of its underlings was playing a prank."
Dohyun learned nothing more, but the word underlings made him suspect that whoever ruled the forest might be someone too inept to even keep control of his subordinates.
Or perhaps he had deliberately used them.
Dozens of possible uses raced through Dohyun's mind.
But in the end, there was no point in dwelling on it any further.
...Trust it for now.
What he needed instead was another way to gather information from outside besides Heok-o.
Even after the conversation ended, Dohyun remained lost in thought for a long while.
He was sorting through the information he had gained from this attack.
Let's organize this.
He analyzed it in his head and tried to think of a way to avert the next crisis.
This won't be easy...
Just as he began to feel the limits of his own ability, Dohyun suddenly lifted his head.
Light rose from the core.
An unseen current was moving through every corner of the cave.
That flow is...
He had seen it before.
Thump... thump...
The core pulsed like a heart, flashing white light in repeated bursts.
The core absorbs enough experience points.
The core levels up.
The core levels up.
The core levels up.
The core levels up.
The core levels up.
Along with the window that floated before his eyes, he felt the flow of dungeon energy become especially vivid.
It's a lot.
He had killed a cultivator.
He had killed a martial artist.
Three in total.
He had not killed that many, and yet the flow of dungeon energy before him was anything but ordinary.
Within that current, he sensed things he knew well.
Goblins.
It was the dungeon energy belonging to those creatures.
The core absorbs everything.
In the game, only enemies became experience.
But not now.
Everything that died inside the dungeon belonged to the core.
Enemy or monster alike.
He understood one more rule that had changed from the game.
The dungeon even absorbed the life force of beings produced within itself.
As the dungeon energy kept surging into it, the core shone ever brighter and continued leveling up.
The core levels up.
The core levels up.
The core levels up.
Before he knew it, it had reached the very first stage he had once thought about so casually.
The core has reached level 20.
Available facilities have increased.
The core's surface was slowly changing.
A pale jade hue seeped through the pure white light.
Like pigment spreading through water, the glow widened little by little.
And then, at that moment, a faint image flickered across the surface of the dragon pearl.
It was the dungeon.
Interesting.
There had been no such change in the game.
Even without the system window, he could see the inside of the dungeon just by looking at the core.
After studying the transformed core for a while, he began to see the various unlocked facilities in the system window.
Not traps made by goblins, but reinforced traps and mechanisms that used dungeon energy.
He shook his head.
Traps aren't enough.
In a world where average combat power was high, what a dungeon needed was not traps.
Among the newly added facilities, there was something he wanted.
He had wanted to build it long ago, but his level had been too low.
What I need is manpower.
Dungeon leveling was slower than in the game.
Seven days in reality were shorter than they sounded.
Preparation took time.
The goblins were living beings now, unlike in the game, and they tired easily.
They also lacked strength.
So leveling up had been slower than expected.
But this time was different.
The deaths of a thousand goblins surged in all at once, becoming dungeon energy.
If the goblins were sacrificed continuously,
the dungeon would grow quickly.
If this were a game, that would be true.
And because this was reality too, anyone making ordinary calculations might conclude that sacrificing goblins over and over to raise the core's level quickly would help them survive.
But...
That isn't right.
If the goblins were sacrificed continuously, the dungeon would grow quickly.
That was not a legion.
More importantly, that logic lacked the most important premise.
It lacked what should exist between a dungeon master and his monsters.
A leader's calculations are only complete when there is trust.
Once again, the goblins proved to Dohyun that they believed in him beyond death.
So...
Dohyun cleared the ordinary goblins' combat power from his mind, since it was too hard to factor into his calculations.
Instead, he thought of something else.
A production building that had just become available through construction.
Because production from the boss bonus still exceeded upkeep, it could be built right away.
Construct it. Warrior Rock.
When he gave the order from the Core Room, a massive rock fell from the outer edge of the forest on the first floor.
Rumble.
A boulder that had been brought down using nothing but a vast amount of dungeon energy, with no physical force at all.
The enormous stone, easily over thirty meters tall, began to be carved away in the corner of the dungeon.
As if an unseen stonemason were working it down, the rough surface turned smooth.
Lines were etched into it, circles overlapped, and stone meshed with stone.
At last, the shape of something like a giant cluster of grapes emerged.
Once the outer shell was finished, faint patterns began to be carved into each of the stones that made up the cluster.
Geometric designs appeared on every rock, each one different from the next.
The dungeon energy flowing out from the core began to run through those patterns.
As the energy flowed slowly between the carvings, light began to fill them.
A green radiance rippled along the patterns.
When everything was complete, a notification appeared before the dungeon master.
Warrior Rock has been completed.
It's finished.
He called up the familiar window.
The description was similar to the game, but a little different.
Unlike the goblin production site, it required production costs and upkeep, and the control number was lower.
A little different... but it's fine.
Strictly speaking, he might even have been lucky.
They had made it this far without issue.
Orcs.
They were the true warrior class of the greenskin build.
At last, production is possible.
When the completion alert rang out, warmth pulsed through the cluster-like Warrior Rock.
It trembled softly, faintly, as if it had a heartbeat of its own.
Dohyun watched it and gave the order to produce.
Come out! Orc.
Dohyun felt the dungeon energy released from Warrior Rock circulating through the dungeon.
At that instant, one change spread across the dungeon as a whole.
The goblins sensed something strange.
A goblin worker who had been clearing away a mountain of corpses felt the weight of the bodies lighten in his arms.
He stopped in the middle of his work and tilted his head in confusion.
Wondering if he had perhaps lifted the wrong corpse, he set it down and checked it over.
Then he saw something impossible.
The blood was draining from the corpse.
It flowed along the ground in one direction.
The goblin carefully extended a finger.
The blood sliding across the floor brushed past it.
It was warm.
Ki-eek?
He was startled for a moment by the bizarre sight.
But this was the dungeon.
All the enemies were dead, and the dungeon master was here.
As long as they trusted their master, there was nothing to fear, even if something strange happened.
Ki-eeek!
The worker goblin, who had been despairing at the mountain of corpses, realized the work had become easier.
So he decided that the corpses had grown lighter thanks to the dungeon master's mercy, pitying him.
After briefly offering his thanks to the dungeon master, he went back to work.
He needed to clear everything as quickly as possible for the dungeon master, and he had to rebuild the traps too.
Inside the dungeon, there was not only the blood being drawn out of the corpses.
The black blood that had been spilled by the cultivator, the martial artist, and the goblins had also sat for too long and hardened into the earth, and now it too began to change.
The blackened blood
slowly loosened like water,
turned red, and flowed in one direction.
Toward the outside of the dungeon.
Toward the area where Warrior Rock stood.
Beneath Warrior Rock, now shaped like a cluster of grapes, a river of blood slowly seeped through.
Thump... thump...
As the flow of blood was slowly drawn into the Warrior Rock, the strange patterns on it began to emit a pale jade glow.
And then.
Like a heart beating, something within the cluster began to take shape.
The cluster expanded.
Something inside it swelled outward.
It was stone, but it looked almost like real grapes.
The cluster grew and grew, swelling as if it might burst.
Rrrrk.
The sound of stone splitting echoed through the dungeon.
Amid a bright jade light, the cluster of grapes slowly began to crack open.
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