Goldie, Resurrected!
Once Dohyeon returned from the Tower and called up his status window, the description of his newly acquired skill unfolded before his eyes.
New Skill Acquired
Raise Jade Bone (New): Allows bones crafted into jade bone to be raised as a Jade Bone Skeleton. When raising a skeleton, Mana and Domination are occupied depending on the condition of the materials; they may also be raised as one-use skeletons that occupy no Mana or Domination.
"Goldie! Your big brother pulled it off! Just hold on a second!"
Dohyeon dropped his bag—the one stuffed with the goblin warrior's bones he'd gathered, along with its sword, shield, straw mat, and the rest—carelessly onto the floor and began laying out Goldie's bones.
"Hmm... this one's the neck, and this one's bigger than that, so it goes farther back..."
He didn't let a single tiny bone of Goldie's escape him. Like someone piecing together a puzzle, he poured his heart into arranging everything exactly the way it had been in life.
Perched there on the table, Goldie's gaze seemed to wander back over his own body.
"There. Perfect! Raise Jade Bone!"
The instant Dohyeon cast the skill, his mana drained away in a rush and settled into Goldie.
Then came the unexpected part: his Domination stat wasn't occupied at all.
Had he fumbled something, using the skill for the very first time?
Goldie was, after all, the companion who would share the rest of Dohyeon's life. He had fully intended to let him occupy his Domination stat, whether that cost 10 points or 100.
"What the—?"
While Dohyeon stood there flustered, Goldie began to come back to life, wreathed in a soft glow.
The jade bones floated up one by one and assembled themselves into a moving Jade Bone Skeleton. The few vertebrae that had been out of sequence found their proper places and clicked home as he rose, and the soul-fire pooled in his hollow eye sockets blazed fiercer and livelier than ever.
Clack, clack! The sound unique to skeletons—teeth striking teeth.
Dohyeon was still turning over why his Domination stat hadn't been occupied—and whether he could claim it belatedly after all—when Goldie came bounding straight at him.
"Aigoo—Goldie! You must have been so cooped up! I missed you like crazy too! Handsome boy, such a handsome boy! Aigoo, good boy!"
Dohyeon never got the chance to glance at his status window; he was too busy stroking the knobby, uneven bones of his dog.
The soul of "Goldie" has sworn complete loyalty to its summoner, allowing it to be raised without occupying any Domination stat.
"What? Since when was there something like this?"
Closed as the world of Climbers tended to be, the entire nation kept its eyes on it, so broad information and stories inevitably seeped out to the public one way or another. That he had never once heard of a phenomenon like this suggested that Dohyeon differed rather considerably from every necromancer who had come before him.
After spending a long while playing with the newly revived, overexcited Goldie, Dohyeon opened his status window.
"Status window."
In Dohyeon's status window, a full fifteen stat points lay dormant—hoarded all this time because he hadn't known what the future would hold.
Before distributing them, he calmly took stock of his situation.
"Well, for one, I quit the company when I awakened as a Climber. Climbing from here on out should be easier than it's been, and I've brought Goldie back to life... There's nothing urgent left."
It wasn't as if he lacked money for daily living, and selling off the Tower byproducts he'd earned clearing up to Floor 5 would easily fetch a million won or so.
"Come to think of it, I should put in a byproduct collection request while I'm at it."
Dohyeon stuffed the goblin's dagger, the straw mat, and every last piece of loot from the goblin warrior he'd slain into the byproduct collection pouch and set it down in front of his door.
"Now I just file the pickup request through the app and I'm done. Maybe it's because this is my first time applying as a customer, but it feels a little strange."
Logging into the app of the company he'd worked so hard at until just recently—this time as a customer—Dohyeon completed the collection request and set his phone down.
Goldie, who had been biding his time and watching Dohyeon's every move, plunked a tug-of-war toy down at his feet.
"What's this, Goldie? Want to play with your big brother? Oh, right—it'd be nice to take you for walks too... Don't Climber summons have to be registered with the Management Bureau?"
When Dohyeon held out the toy, Goldie clamped down on it—chomp!—and shook.
"Whoa, Goldie! How did you get this strong?! And you're so much lighter now!"
Clatter-clatter-THWACK! Clatter-THWACK! Clatterclatterclatter-THWACK!
The sound of bone striking the floor.
There was no excited panting, no ring of vocal cords, the way there would have been when Goldie was truly alive—but even so, this was something.
Dohyeon was content simply to be able to play with him again.
If there was one problem... it was that Goldie's claws kept shredding the flooring.
"Goldie. You're going to need some time to adjust to that body of yours. You'd admit that much yourself, wouldn't you?"
Goldie, seated on the floor with his pelvis planted flat against it, let his gaze slide away to the side, as far from Dohyeon as it would go.
The day after Goldie's resurrection, the Management Bureau employee he'd requested through the app arrived at his home.
Ding-dong.
"Yes~! Come on in!"
Dohyeon opened the door and showed the employee inside. A woman with a sharp bob, impeccably turned out in a business suit, she greeted him with a polite bow.
"A pleasure to meet you, Climber Cha Dohyeon. Pardon the intrusion."
"Can I get you something to drink? I've got cola and lemon-lime soda, at least."
The Bureau employee declined his offer with gentle courtesy.
"I'm quite all right, thank you. More to the point—is this the puppy you wish to register?"
Goldie, standing at Dohyeon's side, seemed to find her a novelty and was observing her with great diligence. A Golden Retriever through and through, he couldn't hide the wagging of his tail.
"Haha. Yes. He used to be my pet dog. His name is Goldie."
"Then I'll register the summon under 'Goldie.' Would you prefer provisional registration, or formal registration?" Tapping briefly at her tablet, the employee asked for his preference.
"Uh... what's the difference between the two?"
Dohyeon had kept close to the Climber industry, but he'd never been deeply involved in it, so the fine details escaped him.
"A provisional certificate is issued with nothing more than the summon's name and species. With provisional registration alone, you're free to visit parks and move about in public—and by 'free,' I mean legally free. Even if residents file complaints, the district office screens them out before they ever reach the Climber."
"Hmm. So walks are no problem, in other words?"
"Of course."
The employee gathered her thoughts for a moment, then continued her explanation.
"A formal certificate requires a whole battery of separate examinations—aggression, raw strength, how faithfully the summon follows its summoner's control... It's issued only when the results establish that the summoner can control their summon completely. With a formal certificate, you can bring your summon into bathhouses, libraries, study rooms, and the like without any issue. And by 'without issue,' I mean without legal issue. No one can turn you away. Think of it as treatment roughly equivalent to that of a guide dog."
Dohyeon paused to consider how long obtaining a formal certificate might take.
"Hmm... it sounds like there'd be quite a lot of testing involved. Does it take long?"
The bob-haired employee seemed to be choosing her words; she worried her lips briefly before answering.
"As an employee, I'm obligated to tell you that the process takes about five days at four hours per session inside the Bureau building, and that we nonetheless recommend formal registration. Personally, however, I can tell you that provisional registration alone rarely causes any real trouble. The general public doesn't know Climber-related law well—more often than not, they don't even know provisional registration exists. And there's no way to tell a provisional certificate from a formal one anyway. That's why most Climbers simply do the provisional registration. They're busy climbing every day, after all... Anyway, that's how it is."
In other words: even with nothing but a provisional certificate, no one would dare pick a quarrel with a Climber.
Why a woman with such a crisp, clean-cut impression was showing this much flexibility, Dohyeon couldn't say—but for him, it was good news. Trekking down to the Management Bureau and sitting through four-plus hours of examinations at a stretch was a considerable nuisance.
Five straight days of it, no less? Even the famously unflappable Dr. Sa Eun-young would have been cursing by the end.
"Then I'd like to go with the provisional registration."
"If you'll excuse me a moment, I'll print it in the car and bring it right up."
"The certificate?"
"Yes, indeed. You'll have the certificate in hand today, though the name tag for your summon will take a few days. It has to be made from a material that can enter the Tower itself, so we'll need the cooperation of a crafting Climber. Until then, simply carry the certificate with you."
True to her word, the employee returned in no time and held out the certificate.
"Registration is complete. And this..."
She offered him something made of leather.
"What's this?"
"This one is a personal gift. Given your class, I suspect you'll be adding more summons before long—this is a wallet for keeping all their registration certificates together. It's made as a business card case, but it's sized to fit a Climber license and summon registration certificates as well."
"Oh... thank you."
By this point, even Dohyeon was beginning to sense something odd. Here was a career woman whose armor left no room for so much as a needle at a passing glance. For someone like that, the personal advice, the gift of a card wallet... none of it felt like standard procedure.
Could it be... did she fall for me at first sight?
Embarrassing as it was to admit, that was the daydream he'd entertained.
But if she had fallen for me, where did the card wallet materialize from all of a sudden?
The notion that the bob-haired Bureau employee carried one around in preparation for precisely this scenario—falling head over heels for a Climber she met through work who happened to need a card wallet—made no sense whatsoever.
"I'm Song Seogyeong, from the Climber Support Team."
"Ah... yes."
The bob-haired employee—Song Seogyeong—bowed at the front door and offered him her business card.
Click.
Before the door closed, Song Seogyeong left him with one last remark.
"Assistant Manager Lim Seonwoo of IM Solutions is my boyfriend. I've heard a great deal about you."
Thud.
"...Ah—pardon?"
Dohyeon, his soul briefly departed from his body, pulled a comically foolish face at the closed front door.
So... she hadn't fallen for me at first sight. She'd just done a favor for someone she knew.
Dohyeon snapped back to his senses and flung the front door open.
"Wait—no, Sister-in-law!"
3... 2... 1...
The elevator had already reached the first floor.
"No, seriously, Assistant Manager! Shouldn't you have given me a heads-up? I couldn't even offer you a drink before seeing you straight off! I have my pride too, you know!"
"Haha. It's not like I knew I'd be meeting you today. Don't dwell on it. She's cool about that stuff. A 'teto' type, as the kids say these days—cool head, warm heart."
Dohyeon was clutching his smartphone, working himself up into a proper lather.
"Look, I get that Sister-in-law is a 'teto.' Still, it doesn't sit right with me. I learned so much from you back at the company, you were the closest colleague I had, and you looked out for me well beyond what office life ever called for. I was grateful, and I always meant to repay you once I'd made something of myself... Today just feels like a blunder on my part."
"In that case, buy me a meal sometime. I'll set something up."
"It's a promise. But let me be the one to host once I've found my footing—I'll be pretty busy for a while."
"Will do. Talk soon. I saw the byproduct pickup request—looks like you've cleared up to Floor 5? Impressive. The kid who used to sit at a desk is out there slaying monsters now. Keep at it!"
"Yes. Next time, dinner's on me for sure."
— Click —
Call ended, Dohyeon pressed a hand to his forehead.
"Phew... That just about smooths things over."
Dohyeon scooped up the featherlight Goldie and settled him on his lap.
Sleek and smooth, sleek and smooth.
"Now it's truly time to design the future of Climber Cha Dohyeon."