An Easy Way to Make Money (3)
This had to be the dungeon entrance.
To my eyes, the place looked like nothing more than an ordinary stretch of mountain forest. The only real difference was the faint presence of Black Mana—something you never felt on a normal mountain. The entrance itself was probably buried underground.
How do you protect your nest from intruders and keep your true body safe? There are plenty of ways. You could lay down a formation array to confuse and repel anyone who approaches, or raise a barrier that simply blocks access altogether. You could hire bodyguards, dig a bunker and bury the whole thing under the earth, or go further still and cloak the place with invisibility magic. Someone skilled with space could even pull a stunt like the Black family house in Harry Potter—tucked between numbers 11 and 13 on Grimmauld Place, hidden by warping the space itself. I had no idea whether this world even had Harry Potter, but the point stood: even someone who had only been transmigrated a few weeks could think of a dozen methods.
So how was I supposed to break into this dungeon?
For starters, this villain was a mage, so he wouldn’t have used a formation array. The rivalry between mages who study magic and martial artists who cultivate internal energy is legendary—it started the moment Western magic first clashed with Eastern martial arts. Ordinary mages and martial artists refuse to touch each other’s techniques out of sheer pride. On top of that, this particular villain wasn’t especially strong. That much was obvious. If he’d had real power, he never would have died from a literal blow to the back of the head while his guard was down.
This was the kind of guy who drained his family’s fortune to become a mage, built himself a dungeon, then skipped the research he was supposed to be doing so he could stalk women instead. Once the money was gone and no results appeared, his family started meddling—inevitably. And the way those family members began vanishing one by one? That was no coincidence either. Neither was the fact that he eventually swallowed the entire estate and went into hiding. Any aspiring black mage could manage something that simple.
Could a man like that even cast invisibility or spatial magic? That left only one real possibility: he had simply dug a bunker-style dungeon underground and piled dirt and fallen leaves on top as naturally as possible, then layered preservation magic over the cover so nothing would shift. Wind or disaster couldn’t be allowed to expose the entrance, after all.
Under normal circumstances that would have been enough. The magic woven into the cloth hanging at the mountain’s entrance already kept most people away. Even if an intruder did show up, the familiars scattered across the entire mountain would give him advance warning, letting him quiet his presence and hide before he was discovered. Even this particular clearing had been arranged so carefully that anyone who hadn’t come specifically looking for a dungeon would never notice anything out of place. Thorough work.
Which meant he had known about me the moment I set foot on this mountain. How many living things wandering these slopes weren’t his familiars? And while summoning familiars might be the only real skill he possessed, the fact that one of them had slipped all the way into the academy without anyone noticing said a lot about his talent for controlling them. In other words, the whole mountain was almost certainly his domain, and familiars I still hadn’t spotted were probably feeding him every scrap of information right now.
Caught red-handed.
I felt a small creature nearby stir with a soft rustle. Yes—something like a lizard. Black Mana shot from my hand like a bullet and killed the lizard that had been watching me motionless from a tree branch. Then I smiled up at the sparrow perched on another limb, staring straight at me.
“That was a little too obvious.”
By now, through the nearby familiars, he would know I had come to the mountain that held his dungeon—and that I was standing directly above him. He would have heard every word. And once he heard them, he would understand: This man is hunting me. I have to prepare.
From this moment on, it was hunting season. And the prey was a rat trapped in a jar, with nowhere left to run.
The simplest way to find the dungeon entrance right now was this: smash it open. Fast infiltration and psychological dominance in one clean move.
Once the decision was made, speed was everything. Strike while the iron is hot, as they say.
—Shring.
Instead of a bull’s horn, I drew the dagger at my waist. Moonlight glinted coldly along the blade. I wrapped Aura around the edge and tore through every patch of ground nearby in a single breath. Black afterimages trailed the arc of the swing, followed by the dry crackle of shattered leaves—
—Krrrrumble!
—and the heavy crash of something collapsing. A staircase leading underground opened right before my eyes.
I couldn’t help smiling.
“Something felt off from the very beginning…!”
A suspicious-looking man with narrow eyes walking onto this mountain without the slightest hesitation? Fine, that could happen. That same man taking an interest in the masterpiece hanging at the mountain entrance? Well, maybe. A black fox perched on his shoulder? …I could stretch that far too.
But a man who looked that blatantly suspicious taking interest in my masterpiece, strolling onto my mountain without a care, black fox on his shoulder—pointing the fox at the cloth so the fox led the way like a guide—and then stopping dead right above the entrance to my workshop?
That could not happen. No matter how hard I tried to deny it, it simply could not.
He had come for me. Those narrow eyes had even killed one of my familiars and then taunted me. And the worst part? When I saw that man’s smile through the familiar’s eyes, a chill ran straight down my spine and every hair on my body stood on end. He looked like a venomous snake hiding its fangs, like a wolf wearing a sheep’s skin among the flock.
If I’d known it would come to this, I would have fortified everything—more thoroughly, far more thoroughly. I’d just been coasting because nothing had gone wrong so far, because I hadn’t made any real enemies. Had that lazy optimism been the problem?
The peaceful life the man had been enjoying so carelessly had already become a chain around his throat, ready to drag him straight into the abyss. No—abyss was too mild. At this rate he was headed for hell itself.
Thud. Thud.
Footsteps. Hateful footsteps. Footsteps that had already carved through every beloved doll I had poured my blood and sweat into, every monster I had struggled to summon, now closing in with leisurely confidence as if herding me into a corner.
“Damn it! Damn it! Damn it…!”
What had I even done to deserve this? What crime had I committed?
This can’t be happening. This can’t be…!
How many sacrifices had I offered just to summon and control those monsters? How much wealth had I poured out? How much time, how much sweat and blood?
In the end all he could do was cover his face with both hands and sob. He felt so wronged.
He had wanted to become a mage so badly he poured the family’s money and connections into an academy that specialized in teaching magic. But talent that isn’t there doesn’t suddenly appear. And once he was inside, his complete lack of social skills led to constant friction with everyone around him. Eventually he left the academy—half by choice, half forced out.
Even then he couldn’t give up. Magic was everything to him. He didn’t know how to do anything else. He had already dedicated his entire life to it. Sadly, magic never answered his efforts… yet even in that hopelessness there had been a sliver of hope. He had a modest aptitude for black magic, enough to reach a usable level.
He drained the family fortune to build his own workshop and stocked it with pigs and chickens for sacrifices. Inside that workshop he ate, slept, and relieved himself—and did almost nothing else but immerse himself in magic. Of course he had indulged in a little hobby using his familiars along the way. How can a person live doing only one thing? The hobby still involved commanding familiars, so it counted as magical training too. The hobby itself was a bit… niche. Not the sort of thing ordinary people did. But that didn’t matter.
The man who had been sobbing into his hands finally lifted his head.
“I proved it… I did it. I can’t just sit here and take this.”
Yes. In the end he had produced results. The memories from that time were still hazy, as if fog filled his head, and somehow around then his entire family had vanished—yet he felt nothing about it. As if they had been complete strangers from the start.
Now it was time to use those results to survive the crisis right in front of him.
But what exactly were those “results” again?
[It doesn’t matter if you don’t know.]
Is that so?
Then that must be how it is.