Class Change

I left the residential district and made my way back to the central hall — the second site I had cleared. Crossing to the center, where the crystal had once stood, I brought my greatsword down on the floor with everything I had.

The impact thundered ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠through the chamber. A body reinforced with mana, a weapon steeped in it, and the weight option cranked as high as it would go — the force behind that blow was anything but ordinary. A web of cracks raced across the stone in a single stroke.

One strike was not enough. I raised the greatsword and hammered the floor again, and again, letting the shocks stack until the stone could take no more. At last it gave way with a grinding roar, and the space hidden beneath was laid bare.

The message confirmed I had found the right spot. The chamber beneath the floor came into view at the same time — and if I had not already shattered every crystal, a spell would have triggered the instant it opened.

What greeted me instead was a mountain of gold and jewels.

This was it. This was what I had come for.

Without this, getting strong fast on the tenth floor would have been a much slower climb. I still had the gold coins and gems I had taken from Mellid Castle, so I would have managed somehow — but having ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠more was always better. Money was the one thing you could never have too much of, and pay-to-win was the gospel no matter where you went.

I swept gold and jewels into my inventory until it would hold no more. A considerable stretch of that inventory, expanded as far as it could go, vanished under coins and stones. The gold stored inside came to roughly ten thousand, and the gems numbered well over a thousand. Even the cheapest among them was worth at least ten gold apiece.

Set beside the secret vault of the lord's castle, this hoard had more gold and more gems. Mellid Castle's stones had been top-grade pieces, every last one of them, so the total value might still have favored that vault — I could not say for certain, since I had never had them appraised, and I had already burned through some of those gems expanding my inventory. Even at a conservative count, my fortune sat at twenty thousand gold. I allowed myself a satisfied smile.

The man who had claimed this place in the first cycle was famous ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠as a mark. He would later gamble this entire fortune away. Crazy bastard. Even now, thinking about it, what a complete idiot.

After stuffing the inventory to its limit with gold and jewels, there would still have been several thousand gold left over at the very least. I had solved that problem with Mellid Castle's secret vault. He had not. And he had thrown every last coin of it onto a gambling table.

The mana and the top-tier gear were what had first made his name as a gifted warrior. He had looked the part, too — right up until he started burning money at the tables every single day, and by the time he reached the Middle Floor that mountain of wealth was gone. For the record, the first place he ever mentioned this dungeon in the first cycle was a gambling den.

After that he ran headlong into the ceiling of his own talent. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠He gambled until the day he died, sold even his own body, and finished his life as a meat shield. I had ended up in a party with him right before he was sold off. The moment I learned he was a gambling addict, I walked.

Still. Thanks to him, I had picked up a dungeon — and a jackpot of one, at that.

Wearing that satisfied look, I moved on to the next item of business. I found a decent spot, sat down, and took the elixir.

It melted on my tongue like water and slid down my throat. And in the same instant, a savage pain tore through every inch of me. The mana circuits inside my body burned white-hot. Muscle and bone felt as though they were being wrenched out of true.

What I had right now was a modern person's rotting flesh with a System patch slapped over it. Building a real body from that took years. This elixir collapsed that timeline, and it raised not only my potential but the stats themselves. If that man's example from the first cycle was anything to go by, it would scour the mana circuits clean as well — which meant the growth waiting for my mana stat looked very, very promising.

I had no intention of washing out the way he had. I was going higher. I clenched my teeth through the pain running the length of my body and waited for the elixir to finish settling in. A long stretch of time passed. Then something surged up my throat.

I heaved. A thick, filthy black mass hit the floor — and that was not all. Black fluid wept from every pore. The stench was enough to make the air itself recoil.

Wait. I have heard of this. Is this that thing? Marrow-washing?

It was a scene I could have sworn I had read a hundred times in those old wuxia novels. I did not know whether to laugh.

Past the Middle Floor, martial arts did exist. The Tower held every fantasy under the sun. That did not mean martial arts in the Tower were an unmixed blessing. Still, because the arts themselves were real, I had heard that things like the Shedding of the Mortal Body and marrow-washing existed too. They were rare — vanishingly rare. I had never imagined I would be the one to go through it.

I circulated my mana at once, wanting to feel what the elixir had done, and the difference hit me like a changed climate. A sound like a hive of bees hummed through my body. Mana attunement sharpened to a degree I had never known; the circuits themselves felt sturdier, denser. The total force I could pour out in a single surge, and the efficiency with which that force moved, belonged to an entirely different order.

Mana-sense had widened so sharply I could feel the range itself leap outward, and within that range the environment came through in far finer grain. Even the speed at which spent mana returned was different. I could feel it recovering, slowly, even as I sat there. The stats were still low — but the efficiency looked to be twice what it had been.

In that moment, the potential of my flesh alone had nothing to envy from even the Highest grade.

The man who had claimed this elixir in the last cycle had worn a body like this and still only shown that much? Had his potential simply been that poor from the start? It was a fresh reminder of how terrifying Rankers truly were. Every last one of them, it meant, walked around in a vessel like this. Add their own talent on top of it...

It was a clean, brutal illustration of why each Ranker was an army of one.

And it was not only the mana. Joints that had been stiff and muscle that had been hard loosened into something supple, and the ordinary body I had been wearing was, somewhere in the middle of all that, becoming densely muscled. My height did not shoot up. What rose instead was everything underneath — joint range, the durability of the flesh itself, flexibility, balance — a comprehensive elevation of the whole machine.

Building a body like this on Earth would have taken years, and even then there would have been pieces no amount of effort could have reached. One elixir had done it. This was not marrow-washing. It was not the Shedding of the Mortal Body. It was something beyond either. More than a transformation — if I stretched the word a little, I could have called it evolution.

A Legendary elixir. Coming here had been worth it.

I washed the filth off my body and took my time resting. Na Seoyun and the other three women would need several days to clear their dungeon. I had finished in less than one. Time, for once, was something I had in abundance.

When I had rested enough, I headed for the mage's chamber. There were things I needed to prepare. I took a portion of what I knew and forged it until it read like the mage's own research journal, working at the pages until I was satisfied. Only then did I leave the dungeon and make for the tenth floor.

The last floor of the tutorial. I had arrived on the tenth.

Nothing had changed from the first cycle. The place was bleak and empty; I seemed to be the first one here. There were not even NPCs. This was nothing more than a hall of altars, each one waiting inside its own Class Change chamber, where a trainee took a class and received a skill.

Change your class here and you were given one skill for free, chosen from a short list. Everything after that you bought with coin or hunted down yourself.

I did not walk straight to an altar. I waited. Before long, the Floor Master appeared — Epathos.

"Shouldn't you be swamped right about now?"

"I had to come. This takes priority."

I had opened with small talk instead of a greeting; we had not been apart that long anyway. Epathos played along without comment.

"Took you rather a while, though, didn't it? I'd figured you'd be done in less than a day."

"Ah — I had a few things to take care of. Loot to collect, an elixir to take, documents to put together..."

At the word elixir he looked me over properly, and a sound of genuine admiration slipped out of him.

"Hoh. So that's what a Legendary elixir does... That body of yours is something else."

Hardware, upgraded. Epathos had read the potential in a glance.

The look did not last. The moment he parsed what I had meant by documents, a wry smile tugged at his mouth.

"Well now. Playing nanny isn't as easy as it looks, is it?"

"Is anything in this world easy? Ugh. Spoon-feeding them is exhausting work."

"Well, hang in there. It's all to save that world of yours, isn't it?"

If I, the man they believed had been summoned alongside them, simply started reciting first-cycle knowledge off the top of my head, the party was not stupid. The suspicion would hit them in a heartbeat. Even sharing what I knew required this kind of groundwork first.

"Still. It was worth the effort."

"I can more or less guess what you're planning. Fair enough. It's worth the trouble. This is the most important place in the tutorial, after all."

He was not wrong. This was the floor that decided the direction a trainee would grow. Take a wrong path at the start and correcting it was brutally hard — most people simply gave up. Sink your potential into the wrong place and you could not take it back; you were left as a half-made trainee, neither one thing nor the other.

This was not a game. You could not redistribute your stats. You could not reset your skills. You had to walk in with a clear plan and choose accordingly.

The irony was that trainees who had only just crawled out of the tutorial were the last people on earth equipped to make that kind of plan. They received scraps of a hint — a Unique Skill here, a random skill card there — but the picture stayed vague. For people like me, or Joo Ha-yeon, or Na-yeon, the answer was simple and obvious. Cases like ours were the rare ones.

Take Na Seoyun. Dual blades, and Magic Affinity. I knew Magic Affinity was one of a mage's essential skills, so I knew she had the makings of a Magic Swordsman. Without that knowledge I would have looked at her and thought, mana-type swordsman, more or less, and she might well have driven straight down the dual-wielding swordsman path without knowing the first thing about magic. The list of classes available to her would almost certainly include Warrior, Swordsman, and Mage.

A close-combat role, so the most basic Warrior. Dual-wielding skill, so Swordsman. Magic Affinity, so Mage. Those three were as good as locked in. Without my interference, a Mage option appearing in front of someone who understood none of this would be something she simply ignored. Faced with a choice like that, people reached for the stable option. They did not casually stake their lives on a thing they could not even name.

Information was vanishingly thin, and experience was no thicker. These were people who had only just cleared the tutorial. The number of trainees who buttoned the first button wrong and never properly bloomed was beyond counting.

Well. I would make sure that particular tragedy did not apply to me, or to my party.

"Anyway — I'll pick my class first, before the kids get here."

Not that my first class was not already decided.

"Go on, then."

I walked straight to the nearest altar. A message window bloomed in front of me at once.

An endless list unfurled in front of me, entry after entry after entry. At that grotesque spectacle, a vacant sound slipped out of me before I could stop it.

"...Huh?"