The White Drake
Finish this as fast as I can.
From the next morning on, Jin-soo kept himself moving. Every hidden piece and achievement Floor 50 still had to offer needed to be in his hands before he climbed to Floor 51.
The blessing's grown quite a bit, too. The bonus it granted to every stat had climbed from 22.2 percent to 32.2.
Do the stats come up after skill attack power and defense? Or is it the other way around? His base stats had sat frozen at 922 for a long while now. The percentage increases have fattened the totals, sure. The base numbers haven't budged.
If he had his way, the blessing's next growth would finally raise those base stats. Failing that, pushing a skill or an item to level 122—or simply increasing how many times he could use the effect—would hardly be a loss. Only once a skill or an item actually reached level 122 could he confirm the nature of the blessing's stat lock.
Does the level lock to 122 apply only to skills and items I already fixed at level 22? Or can I stamp an entirely new skill or item at 122? The answer would decide how many skills and items he could lock in total. I'd rather be able to use a level-122 lock on something new.
He wanted the stacks to multiply past a mere two as well. Even if the blessing grew strong enough to fix skills and items at level 122, two stacks and no more would gut its usefulness. He had to hoard them against the day he obtained a better class, or a better item. In the end, all he could do was wait for the blessing to grow.
It will. Sooner or later. What mattered now was reaching Floor 51 as quickly as possible. The faster I climb, the faster the blessing grows.
Growing it through level-ups was miserably inefficient. Achievements had been excellent fuel at the start, but now that the blessing had matured, that growth had slowed to a crawl. The easiest path was simply to do something bound to the number two.
From Floor 51 on, I clear again in twenty-two hours, twenty-two minutes, and twenty-two seconds. If that proved too steep, aiming for a clear in exactly two days and wringing the maximum from the blessing was still the fastest road to power.
The elixirs are selling well. The number of listings he could put up had risen to a hundred, too.
If there was one headache left—
What in the world are the growth conditions for the Shining Longsword and the Ring of Revival?
He had kept hunting as a dark-affinity Blood Demon Swordsman, both to make use of the Shadow Summons and to grow the Shining Longsword, the Blood-Sucking Sword, and the Ring of Revival. He still hadn't uncovered the conditions for the longsword or the ring.
So that's why they ended up on the auction house. No mystery there. If he hadn't known the Shining Longsword was a growth weapon destined to become Baekcheonsingeom, and that the Ring of Revival was an absurdly broken item, he would have used them for a while and sold them off himself.
Well. I'll figure it out eventually.
He took Shin Sua with him and threw himself into hidden-piece dungeons and the monster hunts required for achievements. The hidden-piece rewards he kept for himself. Shin Sua had no complaint. That had been the contract from the start, and she was grateful for his generosity all the same.
These are hidden dungeons I could never have cleared alone. She had stumbled into them at his side and walked out with experience and achievements both. Now and then, when a clear reward turned out to be an elixir that raised mana or mental power, he pressed it into her hands and told her she'd earned it.
Elixirs are that precious, and he just gives them away. In her old party the others had snatched every one the moment it dropped, each insisting they needed it more. Shin Sua had never so much as gotten a proper look, let alone a taste. Achievements had been just as cutthroat. Her party members had sometimes cut her out of a hunt on purpose so they could claim one for themselves.
Jin-soo isn't like that. Elixirs, achievements, experience—the things that mattered most to a Player's growth—he shared without hesitation. Safer than she had ever been with her old party, she was leveling faster, had gained a rare healer class, was earning achievements, and had even received elixirs. He had gone further still, staking his own mana on a contract and swearing he would see her reunited with her younger sister, Shin Sujeong.
All of it is thanks to him. That her trust in Jin-soo kept climbing, and her dependence with it, was only natural.
I'm never leaving his side.
In truth, what he shared with her meant little to him. Elixirs did nothing even if he took them himself, so they were bound for the auction house; handing a few to Shin Sua cost nothing but a handful of points. As a bribe to buy the trust and affection of the Holy Saintess and the Dark Saintess, it was absurdly cheap. Achievements were the same story. With the blessing's growth from them already slowing, what mattered was not the handful of stats each one gave, but whether his accumulated total hit 122, or 222. Experience wasn't even worth discussing. Stuck at Level 2, he could send his level exploding upward by killing a single orc.
"Shall we call it here and head back?"
"Yeah."
"By tomorrow we should have everything Floor 50 has to give."
"So we climb to Floor 51 the day after?"
"Right."
Shin Sua's face brightened at once.
In the end we're leaving without that thing. Bring it down, and it wouldn't be an achievement. It would be an Impossible Feat. He held three Impossible Feats in total. Had he killed it on Floor 50, the fourth would have been his. It wasn't placed there to be killed, though.
Impossible Feats fed the blessing well enough, but the rewards mattered more. The odds of an advanced class tome or a skill book are high. And they were worth stacking. The moment I hit twelve, or twenty-two, the blessing's growth is going to surge. He had wanted the kill if he could get it. But what was he supposed to do?
If it never shows, it never dies. Simple as that.
He forced the thought down and set off with Shin Sua toward the village.
Something crashed through the brush.
"Hah—hah—hah!"
A figure burst into the open, breath ragged and desperate.
Cha Hee-soo? The woman who had warned him when he joined Kim Ji-seon's party, and who had been sharp enough afterward to keep her mouth shut about him.
Why is she alone? No party members in sight, and she was a wreck—blood-soaked, a huge slash laid open across her back.
"P-please, save me!" Cha Hee-soo cried the moment she saw him, voice raw with desperation.
"Want me to heal her?" Shin Sua asked.
"Yeah."
The moment he gave leave, Shin Sua cast a recovery skill on Cha Hee-soo. The bleeding from the great wound on her back stopped, and the flesh slowly knit shut.
"Did something happen to you?"
Cha Hee-soo answered through tears. "Hic—! I ran into an enormous monster with white scales. I ran the instant I saw it. The whole party died. I was the only one who barely—"
Jin-soo's eyes flashed.
"An enormous monster with white scales? Did it look like a dragon without wings?"
"Huh? Y-yes. Now that I think about it, I think it did."
Certainty settled over him.
That's the one. The quarry he had been determined to hunt. A dragonkin monster. The White Drake.
Dragonkin—one of the highest races among monsters. A lesser dragon, not a true one. Dragonkin all the same. It showed up on Floor 50, so the level ought to be low. Even so, on this floor the mere existence of a dragonkin monster was a calamity. I can still hunt it.
He had met a White Drake on Floor 50 before his regression, too. That time I ran for the city and barely lived.
He still didn't know the exact conditions for its appearance. He did know the hypothesis Players favored most. Once the number of Players on Floor 50 hits saturation, the drake shows up. When their numbers grew large enough to damage the floor's ecosystem, the theory went, the System stepped in by force—loosing an unhuntable high-tier dragonkin drake to cull them. Plausible enough, as theories go. Unproven, of course. Nothing more than guesswork. What mattered more to him was simpler: the drake that sometimes haunted Floor 50 was an unhuntable monster.
"Where is it now?"
"That way."
"Get back to the village as fast as you can."
The moment the words left him, he caught Shin Sua up under his arm and broke into a dead sprint.
"Eek!"
Reduced without warning to baggage, Shin Sua went white.
He's insanely fast. The landscape blurred past too quickly to track, and being hauled like luggage left her stomach lurching and her head spinning.
"Put blessings and protection on me and the summons."
She clenched her teeth and cast them. Landing skills on the summons while they were moving was no easy thing.
He's bringing me because he needs me. I have to pull my weight, no matter what.
The wind pressure made it hard even to turn her head, but she forced his orders through.
"Krrrrrr!"
"Aaaah!"
"Save me!"
A cry that raised the hair on her neck reached her, tangled with screams of raw terror.
"Support from here! If it turns dangerous, or your mana bottoms out, use Sanctuary at once!"
He set her down with a thud.
"Haa—! Haa!"
She dragged in a breath, pushed herself up, and saw him charging a colossal monster sheathed from head to tail in scales of pure white.
The Blood-Sucking Sword and the Shining Longsword in his hands were wrapped in aura, one red, one white.
Nice and clean. Keep it simple.
While the White Drake's attention was still on the other Players, he drove both blades in.
They punched home with a sickening crunch.
"Kuaaaaak!"
The Blood-Sucking Sword and the Shining Longsword buried themselves in the White Drake's massive body. Jin-soo's expression did not brighten.
Shallow. He had been aiming for the neck. The beast had twisted and denied him the vital point. These scales are disgustingly hard. How high is its durability? Worse, even with the blade sunk in its flesh, the Blood-Sucking Sword couldn't properly drink the dragon blood.
He wrenched both swords through the wound, forcing it as wide as it would go. Almost no blood came.
Bleed resistance, too. Like this, the Blood-Sucking Sword can barely do its work.
"Kyaaaaang!"
The enraged White Drake lashed out with a forepaw, and a pall of freezing white frost burst outward in every direction.
Jin-soo met the incoming paw with a flood of mana.
Cutting Power Enhancement
He swung the Blood-Sucking Sword and the Shining Longsword as one.
Four of the fingers on the White Drake's forepaw sheared away in an instant. Red blood sprayed, and the Blood-Sucking Sword drank the dragon blood with naked greed.
In that instant, the Blood-Sucking Sword's level began to climb like something unhinged.