The Goblin Became My Follower
The first goblin to appear was the kind of green-skinned monster he’d seen countless times in novels before—about the size of a first-grade elementary school child.
Its face was monstrous in exactly the way the word suggested.
A wrinkled, repulsive thing that made your skin crawl just by looking at it.
Its abilities were no more impressive than its appearance.
Now that this was reality instead of a game, the status window had become far simpler.
When it was first produced, every detail beyond its racial trait had vanished.
The difference from the game.
He’d need to keep a close eye on that.
Get to work.
The goblin, which had been standing there with blank, empty eyes, moved its body like a machine.
There were several ways to produce goblins.
Among them, the ones created in a production facility had almost no self-awareness at first compared to those made by other methods.
That made them little more than living dolls at the beginning.
They had only just been produced.
The twenty goblins in the first batch were ordered to gather soil from around them and carry it to the Transformation Table.
The newly born goblins blistered their hands in the process and looked weak in more than one way, but they still managed to complete the task somehow.
Then he had them shape the gathered soil into short-handled pickaxe forms.
And then....
Ta-da!
Once the Transformation Table activated its function, the clump of dirt immediately turned to stone.
A stone pickaxe, complete.
Because the material wasn’t uniform, the quality of each tool varied.
But the overwhelming advantage was that they could be made so easily out of dirt.
If he tried to make a goblin build a smithy this early, it simply couldn’t do it.
With a little luck, the stone would even contain traces of metal and come out hard enough to use.
It was a bit like gacha, but stone was sturdier than soil by default.
And because it was made from dirt, it was also much easier to shape.
The important part was that with only two or three points, he could finish tools for twenty goblins without much trouble.
Once the workers and equipment were in place, the next step was expanding the passage.
All right. Get to work.
The twenty goblins began hammering at the wall.
At the same time, dungeon energy began draining in real time.
When changing the dungeon’s form, physical force was necessary—but so was dungeon energy.
He’d said it before during construction.
If physical labor was involved, the energy consumed would be lower.
The dungeon energy created the framework, indicating where the hollow should begin and end.
Then the goblins swung their tools with all their might.
Following that framework, they shattered the stone.
Slowly.
But speed could be increased through numbers.
Goblin production was fast, so for now there were only twenty, but in time that would grow into dozens, then hundreds.
The problem of speed would solve itself naturally.
Watching the goblins work without complaint, he nodded.
Just as I thought. Greenskins are the construction tech.
Construction-tech goblins had greater patience than goblins from other tech lines, and they followed orders well.
That was, of course, if one ignored their drawbacks: poorer early intelligence than other goblin types, and a lower rate of elite births.
Set those weaknesses aside, and this build was the best of the best.
Lee Dohyun, who had once played Greenskins all the way through, was certain of it.
In the game, a greenskin build didn’t begin with production buildings like this.
The basic route was biological reproduction using a matriarch.
Greenskins could reproduce with other species, and they also possessed the ability to impregnate individuals long past their fertile years.
The goblins digging into the wall had that same ability, but there was no reason for him to use it.
In the early game, that build drew far too much aggro.
Unless they were an upper species like ogres, greenskins gave birth to seven or ten children at a time.
To some, that might sound slower than a production facility.
And in the game, it was even possible to skip the pregnancy period by using core facilities or magic.
That method was, in theory, called the perfect reproduction build, one that didn’t even consume dungeon energy.
At the time, it seemed like he’d use dungeon energy for it.
But because it functioned like a kind of authority, it was theoretically said to consume nothing at all.
At first, Dohyun had relied heavily on biological builds too.
But it wasn’t enough.
At the very least, it wasn’t strong enough to raise his ranking on its own.
Clang—! Clang—!
Every goblin hammering the wall was male.
Right. A species with only men in it.
That made the very structure of needing a pair annoying in the early stages.
What’s more, the early environment of a life-dungeon was brutal.
On one side, there was a clear spring that trickled along.
But even though the spring flowed, the basic structure was still a sealed cavern.
The stench of goblin sweat and earth seeped all the way into the core room.
The smell...
Few life forms had the survival capacity to endure the harsh cave environment of a greenskin species—filthy, foul-smelling, and miserable.
For humans, childbirth required a clean environment.
If it was dirty, the risk of postpartum infection rose sharply.
To preserve the matriarch, he’d have to keep supplying living beings from the surroundings, one by one, over and over again.
It was really hard to get them...
In a fantasy world, even if he summoned them with dungeon energy, if they couldn’t reproduce and died instantly the moment they stepped outside, the cost-benefit ratio became absurdly bad.
Besides—
It’s not good to stand out too much early on.
Because this was a nonstop game, he had to build basic defenses with the resources that accumulated in real time so the dungeon could survive while he wasn’t actively playing.
Otherwise, it was easy to wake up and find the game ruined overnight.
And if he attracted attention by talking about kidnapping or human rights abuse?
...He’d get watched from the start, and there’d be a real risk of being suppressed before he ever climbed into the high ranks.
That was why he had created the greenskin construction build.
Its strengths were that it could be replenished continuously, remained discreet, and allowed a degree of mutual support.
Once again, the goblins hammering at the wall doubled in number.
The fairy-like method of reproducing without a matriarch was perfect for rapidly increasing numbers.
Of course, it had drawbacks too.
If there was no maintenance cost, the structure collapsed, control slipped away, and the goblins either died or ran wild.
So binding a certain amount of the produced energy to the core was painful.
Still—
This is the best I’ve got.
Productivity, stealth, control, and future convenience in management.
It was the building-production build that had raised him all the way to the rankers.
Well, there is the weakness of getting ripped apart by ghost stories.
There was the fact that special elite mutations born from greenskins almost never appeared in this build, and the limitation that dungeon energy was consumed continuously, making it hard to use special functions.
The build’s weakness against ghost stories came partly from its lack of special individuals, which made it weaker in abilities tied to individual power.
For hours without rest, the goblins moved according to his commands.
Even during the work, goblins continued to be born in the production facility, and before long their number had grown to sixty.
As he watched their efforts with satisfaction—
Thud.
One goblin, noticeably smaller than the rest, struck the stone floor with its knee and collapsed.
A hard clack echoed through the cavern as the pickaxe slipped from its hands, followed by a short, strangled groan.
Huh?
The fallen pickaxe rang out sharply as it hit the ground, its sound echoing through the cave for a long moment.
The goblins nearby also stopped working for a moment.
Hmm?
The goblin that hadn’t let go of its pickaxe tried to stand again so it could resume work.
But its body didn’t seem to respond well, and its legs trembled beneath it.
A defective one?
Then the goblin turned its head and met his eyes.
Its stare was meaningless, empty—but at the center of those eyes, something like faint, trembling pain was flickering.
In that instant, a chill ran down his spine.
That wasn’t a machine’s eyes.
It was the eyes of something alive.
A living being that, unlike in the game, could starve to death far too easily.
...So this too is reality.
As the numbers grew, the dungeon that had once felt like a game suddenly acquired weight and texture.
Unlike in the game, the individuals here were not simple resources.
They were living creatures.
They couldn’t survive without food.
There were structures that had to be built to supply them with bio-energy, and there were materials they needed as well.
To begin that supply process, he opened the interface.
As time passed, the dungeon energy that had been spent had almost fully recovered.
First, he tried to summon the seed stock.
This function has been disabled.
A gray message floated in the air.
...Huh. Blocked.
In the game, dungeon energy was all-purpose—it was a divine force, all-purpose resource that allowed him to summon and command living beings.
I can’t summon them?
He tried to call up the summon window so he could bring in deer-bottom mushrooms, the easy-to-eat biofuel he used to feed goblins.
But every summon window he’d seen before had vanished.
As if it were saying, “The choice has been made.”
...It was an unpleasantly arbitrary cut, as though some operator had just decided to yank it away.
It had happened without warning.
There had been no such real-time phenomenon in Dungeon Masters.
Another change.
He had vaguely known.
Functions like summoning cheats might not last long for someone who’d taken the construction route.
Maybe that was why his shock vanished so quickly.
There were still other ways.
He could get food from outside.
The world outside the cave was dangerous, but at least he had a seven-day shield. He could trust it and had to send out a scouting party at least once within those seven days.
Seven days had seemed long in the game.
But in reality, it was absurdly short.
If he didn’t know what was outside, those seven days could easily turn into a nightmare of poor preparation.
Before long, he assembled all sixty goblins.
Now, it was time to prepare to go out.
If he wanted to survive.
---