A Windfall in the Eye of the Storm
The sensation of space splitting apart.
Yet the moment I stepped one foot through that tear, the razor wind that had been flaying my skin vanished as if it had all been a lie.
It worked.
The thrill of success lasted only a moment. I turned my head and stared back at the section of space I had just cut away.
Could I 'interfere' like that again?
If I could still every wind tearing through this canyon, I wouldn't even need to dodge in the first place.
Swoosh.
I strained my eyes again and concentrated my senses, but...
...I can't see it.
The pink solid line that had blazed so vividly moments ago had vanished without a trace, as if it had never been there at all.
So it was still beyond me, after all.
It stung a little, but I couldn't bring myself to feel discouraged.
It's been ten years since I last used this ability out in the field, after all.
Ten years wasted rotting at an office desk, glued to a monitor.
A rusted gear had only just begun to turn again—expecting it to run smoothly right away would be pure greed.
Not once did I think I'd never manage it again.
The sensation was etched firmly into my mind. I would simply need time to slowly hone it back to its edge.
"Hoo..."
Exhaling a short breath, I turned around.
The place I had pushed through, past the relentless hail of blades, was as calm as the eye of a typhoon.
The deepest reaches of the canyon.
An uncharted realm where no one's footsteps had yet touched.
As I walked deeper into the canyon with lightened steps, familiar chunks of metal rolling across the ground caught my eye.
What's this...
To anyone else, it might have looked like a grotesque junkyard of scrap, naturally gathered by the air currents.
But my eyes—eyes that had spent ten years on the front lines of the hunter industry, more or less—saw through them.
Shattered beyond recognition, yes, but examined one by one, their identities became clear.
"A reconnaissance drone launched by [Mir]... and that would be an arm from one of Dokkaebi's mana dolls."
And having worked in the industry, I could roughly estimate their worth.
The engine housing of a wrecked drone yielded a compact mana-stone core motor. The mana doll's joints came apart into their memory-alloy frames.
That wasn't all.
Walking a little deeper, I found older wreckage—mixed with traces of people.
Large panels of mana suit fabric, cleanly sheared as if by a blade, right down to plate armor coated in mana stone.
Traces of Hunter Administration Bureau elite agents.
Lee Seo-yeon's words came back to me. She'd said the Bureau had attempted the first entry and retreated within minutes, their equipment reduced to rags. These must have been the gear they lost back then.
Elite or not, there would have been no room to recover equipment stripped away under an onslaught fierce enough to shred even artifacts.
They'd dropped everything and run. To save their own lives.
...Well. Which was exactly why all this expensive material now lay ownerless, welcoming me.
Swoosh.
I picked up the mana-stone core and the mana doll's joint frame lying on the ground.
The main bodies had exploded spectacularly, but the crucial cores were intact.
"Maybe it's the air currents. Even the stuff from further out got neatly swept in here."
The crafting knife in my hand had cost two million won.
The raw material of this joint frame alone, roughly smelted down, would fetch well over five million.
The large-cut mana suit fabric?
Mere fiber, yet coated in mana stone—top-shelf goods. Coating fiber was several times harder than coating armor, so even a rough roll of it was something you couldn't buy at any price.
Someone might ask: you entered a dungeon risking your life, only to pick through broken loot?
That was rich talk from the well-fed.
To me, this was no different from winning lottery tickets scattered across the ground.
Mom's private hospital room, a dedicated caregiver...
One joint frame would cover it.
The calculator in my head whirred away. Quite satisfying.
And there was plenty more where that came from.
Scrape, scrape.
Without hesitation, I crouched down and began carving out only the core engine sections of the drones with my crafting knife.
Perhaps because the knife itself was mana-stone material, prying into the hard alloys and extracting the cores went smoothly.
"Just these would cover the price of a compact car."
As expected, a dungeon was a land of opportunity in exact proportion to its danger.
...No. More precisely, it's a treasure vault that only opens to those with the 'eyes' to see it.
After spending a good long while diligently sweeping the floor and gathering everything up, I rose to my feet.
This much was enough for side income.
Now it was time to taste the real main course.
The far edge of the canyon. A safe zone where the blades did not rush.
The moment I arrived there, a scene that stole the breath from my lungs spread out before me.
"Wow..."
The gasp escaped me on its own.
Nestled between the rock walls like pomegranate seeds: translucent, blue gems. No—the word gem didn't begin to cover it.
Self-luminous, their brilliant radiance lit the depths of the canyon bright as midday.
A mana stone vein.
Ordinarily, mana stones were a byproduct extracted from the hearts of monsters.
Naturally formed fragments did occasionally turn up inside dungeons—but at most a few finger-sized rough stones, nothing more.
This was on an entirely different scale.
A colony where the entire wall was made of mana stone.
I could feel it in my bones what possibility the Hunter Administration Bureau had seen here—what potential losses they'd been willing to brave to begin exploring.
Even me—ten years in the industry, even if it was all spent staring at monitors—have never seen anything like this. If you mined all of this, how much money would that even be?
Perhaps I was the first person ever to lay eyes on a mana stone vein and confirm it truly existed.
My chest swelled.
This was enough to not just turn my life around but to fund a lifetime of reckless spending that not even a tenth of it could exhaust. My hand moved before my thoughts caught up.
The instant I reached for the nearest protruding rough stone, fist-sized—
Fwish!
"...!"
A very faint red solid line wrapped around the stone, and my hand jerked back of its own accord.
Even as I stumbled backward in shock, the tip of my sleeve was sheared clean off and fluttered to the ground.
What the...?
Cold sweat broke out.
No wind had blown. There were no monsters, either.
If I had touched it just now, distracted as I was, a finger would be rolling on the ground in place of a sleeve.
I looked at the cross-section of the severed sleeve. Smooth as if sliced by a laser.
And gazing at the mana stones again, I came to understand.
...This is...
A faint red solid line was tracing its path along the surface of the rough mana stone, rippling.
The stone itself carried a killing edge, no different from a blade.
This is no ordinary mana stone.
Mana stones hadn't upended entire industries and the paradigm of human technology for nothing. They were fundamentally different from any resource humanity had ever touched.
And among them, mana stones formed in exceptional environments occasionally harbored a Concept.
Perhaps because this one had formed in the Blade Wind Graveyard.
This mana stone held no ordinary mana, but...
A nature that severed whatever it touched.
[Sharpness]—the abstract concept of keenness itself, held as an attribute within a special mana stone.
Huh...
Goosebumps prickled across my skin.
An ordinary mana stone of this size would already fetch an astronomical price—and this was an attribute stone.
The price might not even matter. It could be a case of "if you have to ask, you can't afford it."
The kind of thing that would make eyes roll back in the head of anyone at Dokkaebi—a unicorn company run by master craftsmen at the very front lines of hunter work—or at any hunter enterprise with industrial affiliates.
Because if you processed this, you could grant a weapon itself a special cutting edge.
Selling it is one thing... but if I could refine even a trace of it onto my own blade...
Maybe—just maybe—the dungeon I'd assumed was impossible to clear solo due to my lack of attack power wouldn't be so difficult after all.
Sweet. So very sweet...
For a moment, I couldn't stop the corners of my mouth from twitching at the thought of taking it all—
There was a problem.
...But how do I carry it out?
This stuff cut you just for touching it. Forget carrying it—even stuffing it into a bag or pouch would obviously shred them to ribbons...
Something. Something to shield that sharpness...
My gaze settled on the assorted salvage I'd gathered earlier.
The mana-stone-coated plate armor, presumably worn by a Bureau elite agent.
And the mana-weave special-fiber suit fabric.
"Hoo..."
Normally I'd never dream of marring such precious materials, but there was no helping it.
With an absurd little laugh, I picked up the armor's back plate.
Firm, with a hollow interior.
...I'll just use it as a basket for a moment.
Carefully, with my crafting knife, I began prying loose only as many mana stones as I could carry.
Then I stacked them neatly inside the plate armor.
And when I wrapped the whole thing up in the mana suit fabric like a peddler's bundle, a strange-shaped package stood complete.
Anyone who didn't know better would take one look and call it a junk dealer's bundle...
Well. Judged by contents alone, it could buy an apartment.
Heavy—but a pleasantly heavy weight, I thought.
At the entrance to the 2nd floor—the Blade Wind Graveyard.
"Hey, you bastards!! Pour it on! Dump every last bit you've got!!"
The [Mir] team leader was screaming himself hoarse, eyes rolled back with frenzy.
Delicate exploration? Securing safety?
Such things no longer registered in his mind at all.
In the early stages, their drones had been blown apart, and despite deploying defensive artifacts, his team hadn't managed even ten meters of progress before their equipment was hanging in tatters.
And yet, in all that time, the Suit Guy had slipped inside alone, calm as could be, hadn't he?
His pride was wounded, he dreaded scrutiny from above—but above all, the thought of the losses already sunk, of returning from the exploration with nothing to show for it and a penalty fee on top, had short-circuited his reason.
The method he ultimately chose was simplicity itself.
No path? Then make one.
Simple is best.
He was marshaling firepower-projection equipment and hunters alike to hammer the canyon entrance with a torrent of ordnance.
KWAKWAKWAM! KWAM! FWOOMPH!
Massive detonations, like missiles colliding midair, sent clouds of dust billowing skyward.
The plan was to disrupt the air currents at the entrance with brute firepower and force their way in through the gap.
The other personnel clicked their tongues, watching on the off chance a path might actually open—and that was when it happened.
"...Wait!"
"Huh?"
Mid-bombardment, someone's shout brought the shelling to a halt.
And the moment they moved to ask why—
Everyone understood the reason for themselves.
Through the thick smoke and drifting dust, a single figure flickered.
A man.
Unstaggering, unhurt. Walking out as if on a leisurely stroll.
He parted the smoke and came into view.
A crisp suit, not a thread out of place—as if he'd just left for his morning commute, identical to when he'd first entered.
The impassive mask of his expression. And behind his back...
"What the hell is that now...?"
Every gaze snapped to the bundle on his back.
A bizarre parcel wrapped in ragged scraps of cloth.
Seen anywhere else, it looked like something scavenged from a neighborhood junk shop—easy to dismiss. But everyone here knew exactly where he had come from.
They had all watched him walk out through the very heart of a bombardment as if it were nothing, and they could only stare in stunned disbelief.
What could possibly be inside that bundle on his back? Their eyes couldn't tear themselves away.
And amid it all, the man who had reached the entrance—deadpan, utterly unbothered, explosions still raining down behind him—spoke.
"Please don't block the way. It's heavy."