Something Has Changed (1)
Lee Jun walked toward the end of the Ant Nest's first floor.
Snow had begun to fall from the sky.
It was a snowfield, so nothing about that should have seemed strange… except he had never once seen anything like this before.
"Snow… huh."
At the sudden anomaly, Lee Jun stopped in his tracks for a moment. He reached out his hand, and a snowflake settled in his palm. It looked like an ordinary snowflake, but in truth it was surely a phenomenon composed of mana.
To Lee Jun, however, who could not sense mana at all, it appeared perfectly ordinary at a glance.
"……"
It wasn't particularly cold. If anything, it felt as though he were growing warmer. Was that an anomaly too?
Thud— thud—
Lee Jun kept walking.
The first floor's reward, as he recalled, had been a sword. Its performance hadn't been half bad, so he could probably use it himself. Or he could give it to someone else later on.
Several people already came to mind who would suit a sword's characteristics well.
The entire purpose of this life, after all, was focused on raising as many hunters as possible. Which meant he could even consider making the Ant Nest public knowledge on a grand scale and accelerating its conquest.
The Nest's rewards themselves weren't all that efficient when concentrated in a single person's hands.
Weapon rewards came pouring out in droves, so unless you were someone like Lee Jun, who specialized in no weapon at all, hoarding them was practically useless. And Lee Jun had no mana to speak of—forget mana, he didn't even have basic skills.
Dividing the weapons among ten hunters, each specialized in their own arm, would inevitably be several times more efficient than Lee Jun lugging ten weapons around himself.
"Right. Let's throw away as much greed as we can. A weapon's better off finding its owner, isn't it?"
Exactly, exactly.
After all, I'm only going to be training the next generation. Once I claim the rewards up through the fifteenth floor of the Ant Nest, I'll be pulling back entirely. I won't be fighting on the front lines myself—what good would a fine weapon do me?
Best to clear it fast and move on to the next floor.
"The door should be showing up around now…"
The moment the thought crossed his mind, an enormous door came into view in the distance. His steps quickened with excitement.
The instant he pushed open that door and set one foot inside, he would pass straight through to the next floor.
Truthfully, calling these 'floors' was just a name he and the others had come up with. Step through a door and an entirely different environment unfolded on the other side—that was the only reason for the terminology.
Honestly, no other double-layered dungeon like this had ever been discovered apart from the Ant Nest, so it hardly mattered what anyone called it.
"Mm… I've got plenty of time before the next floor."
The door's location was random. Once a floor was cleared, a door spawned somewhere within it at random. Because of that, even Lee Jun, who had cleared the first floor in his previous run, had no way of knowing how long it would take to find the door this time.
Still, given the floor's size, he could sweep the whole thing in about an hour. It was on that basis that he'd predicted clearing at most two floors… but at this rate, he might manage three.
…No. Don't overreach.
Always. Always—never overestimate yourself.
It was one of Lee Jun's most important principles.
Every dungeon's respawn timer was different. The Seoul Dungeon he stood in now reset at midnight, Korean standard time.
The problem was that when that hour arrived, the Ant Nest inside the Seoul Dungeon reset along with it.
Which meant he'd have to fight his way back out through the monsters, exactly as he'd fought his way in.
If he failed to leave the Ant Nest before the respawn hit…
"Then I'd have to fight through the whole thing again with whatever strength I've got left, on the way down…"
Just imagining it was ghastly. If he took so much as a single injury along the way, he could end up stranded down here for days on end.
The Ant Nest wasn't even today's main objective in the first place. The original plan had been to clear the Seoul Dungeon's boss early and spend the rest of the day handing out business cards up top…
He had only ducked into the Nest because he had time to spare. There was no reason to get pinned down in here.
"Haah… I really need to assemble a proper strike team and push through this place."
In his previous run, clearing fifteen floors had taken six days, so reaching the twentieth would probably take two to three weeks. Of course, he had no idea whether the twentieth floor even existed—and if there was more beyond that, honestly, there was no telling how long it would take.
What made the Ant Nest so difficult wasn't just its difficulty rating, but that peculiar structure of its.
…Midnight.
The Seoul Dungeon's respawn time. And the Ant Nest, apparently falling under the same classification, reset every floor at midnight as well.
Because of that mechanism, the moment you stepped out of the Nest, any future attempt meant reclearing every floor from scratch.
But the biggest problem was something else entirely: the respawn timer hitting while you were still inside. That was the true nightmare.
The Ant Nest reset mid-conquest. Effectively, each floor came with a twenty-four-hour time limit.
Worse still, thanks to that damned reset, you had to fight your way through the floors on the way out as well. A dungeon harder to leave than to enter.
An ant hell would be a more fitting name than the Ant Nest.
"Besides… anything past the fifteenth floor is unknown even to me."
Having conquest data from his previous run was a certain advantage. But what about beyond that? What if the difficulty doubled from the sixteenth floor onward? Or what if the floors kept going—thirty, forty, past twenty?
If that happened… the time and resources required would balloon exponentially.
Armea wasn't joking when she said clearing every floor in one go might actually be the easiest option.
Though then again, who could say how the world would turn out? It was entirely possible the difficulty stayed flat after fifteen, or that sixteen turned out to be the last floor. The conquest of the Ant Nest would have continued even after his death… a part of him wished he could just dart back to his previous run and check the results.
But even without seeing it himself, one thing was certain: clearing through the fifteenth floor—where the potential-awakening reward waited—alone was impossible. For Lee Jun, a half-baked S-Class, five floors was his limit.
"Maybe… I should just raise a strike team of my own."
Truthfully, that seemed like the best option of all. A dungeon only he knew about, hunters he raised himself, a strike team he assembled himself, and all the rewards split among their own people.
For Lee Jun, whose personal growth had a hard ceiling, that was the optimal path.
"Top priority candidates… people who can comfortably handle up to floor three."
Anyone with that much potential would almost certainly reach A-Class on their own eventually. Give them a safe environment to grow in, nudge their skills up a notch, and they'd take off in no time.
And through them, he would accelerate the conquest of the Ant Nest.
The world had always been the kind of place where you died if luck ran out—or simply died when your time came. That was modern society for you.
But now a world had arrived where the weak died.
Over the past three years—and further back, across thirteen—Lee Jun had watched countless people die. And in the end, the harvest of those thirteen years had been cut short by death itself.
Given this second chance, he had come to understand that he had to grow strong.
Gates and dungeons could appear anywhere, at any time. Remain weak, and one day you would die.
For the sake of a safe, peaceful life… irony of ironies, he had arrived at a situation where he had to walk into dungeons of his own accord.
"If there were truly no method at all, at least I'd be spared this torment…"
Nothing might change. He might die partway through the conquest.
But… even so, he couldn't just sit back and give up.
Even if it ended as nothing more than hope torture, Lee Jun had to stake himself on hope.
This life's top priority was survival. And second—everyone coming out of it alive, together, as much as possible.
He had seen far too many deaths already… he simply didn't want to see any more.
With that thought, he pushed open the great door before him.
Creeeeak—
Conquest of the Ant Nest's first floor—complete. From the first hunt to the discovery of the door: one hour and thirty minutes.
Straight on to the second floor.
The next floor was a vast, rolling sea of grass. If the first floor had been winter, this one was somewhere between spring and summer.
Clean air washed in through his nose.
"Whew… if it weren't inside a dungeon, this would be a lovely place."
Left to his own heart, he'd have built a house here and lived out his days. Everything about it was wonderful—except, of course, for being inside a dungeon.
A place where monsters might come swarming at any moment… and yet, sometimes he couldn't help feeling that a place like this might be safer than the world outside.
"…Haah."
Clear away the pointless wandering thoughts. With that, he looked ahead.
What stood before him was a small pedestal, about waist-high.
The Ant Nest was built this way: a single platform stood before the door to each next floor, with the reward resting on top. The first floor's inaugural-conquest reward sat at the entrance of the second, and the second floor's at the entrance of the third.
The reward appearing on the following floor was likely because finding and opening the door was itself counted as part of the conquest.
In other words, the clear conditions were: kill every monster within the twenty-four-hour respawn cycle, and locate the randomly spawned door.
It was this twenty-four-hour limit that made conquest increasingly punishing the deeper one went. A genuinely tiresome dungeon, the more he thought about it.
But that was a worry for once he passed the fifth floor. Up to that point, he could manage comfortably alone. And with the right people gathered, even the eighth floor would be smooth sailing.
Granted, they'd have to camp out in there and grind through one floor at a time—but that was a problem for another day.
"Now then… been a while. Let's grab a reward, shall we?"
Lee Jun had been genuinely glad to see these Ant Nest rewards again.
In his previous run, the ever-climbing difficulty had squeezed him off the strike teams somewhere past the eleventh floor. For a hunter, overextending meant death—plain and simple.
Worse, a single person's mistake routinely dragged an entire strike team down with them… this was no place for greed.
And so it had truly been a long time since Lee Jun last claimed an Ant Nest reward. Seven years or so, by the count?
"……?"
But then.
His relief at the long-awaited sight lasted only a moment.
He felt that something was wrong.
"……"
Two items sat atop the pedestal.
An ornate key of unknown origin… and a seal made of metal.
The key was so covered in lavish ornamentation that it practically shouted of some important purpose. But Lee Jun's gaze never even touched it.
He looked at the seal and nothing else.
It was an iron plate—rough-hewn on the surface, yet crafted with painstaking care in its fine engraved lines.
"Why is this here…"
A round circle, crisscrossed with lines like a net. And beneath it, the numeral XXI, carved in Roman letters.
"…Kyle."
In the days before anything about hunters had been codified, when Lee Jun drifted from place to place, he'd had a handful of companions. It was nothing more than the Initial Awakeners banding together for the sake of survival—but the year or so he spent with them meant a great deal to him.
One of them had suggested each of them forge their personal emblem into a seal, and so this iron plate had come into being.
Lee Jun still carried his own iron plate from those days at his hip. It had been shattered and lost again and again through countless battles, and each time a new one had been forged to take its place.
Because this plate was never meant to be treasured—it was a talisman, a mark of standing together on the battlefield.
Every one of his old companions had carried theirs the same way… and in the end, for most of them, the plates became what they left behind.
But Lee Jun could not, for the life of him, understand why this was appearing here.
The Ant Nest was a dungeon, unmistakably. A dungeon that had never once been opened in this run of the world.
How could a person's belongings possibly come out of it?
Worse—a dead man's belongings, no less.
"And this seal… in the end, I never did find it, did I?"
He had never recovered this seal from Kyle's body.
Naturally. The man had died three days after losing it, still saying he'd have to make a new one.
"……"
For a moment, the fragment of an old memory left Lee Jun thoroughly disoriented. It made no sense whatsoever. Why was this here? How?
"Hoo…"
He let out a long, slow breath. Pouring out the breathing that had long since become habit, he slipped the seal and the key into his Pocket.
"…There's only one way to be sure."
Clear the second floor. Check the reward. That, and only that, was the clearest answer available.
The third floor's theme was a volcanic wasteland veined with flowing lava.
In the far distance, a volcano smoked in full eruption; the ground was split in places, molten rock seeping up through the cracks. Across the sky wheeled creatures—wyverns, or something like them—their wings wreathed in flame.
"……"
From this floor onward, flying monsters entered the mix. The difficulty spiked abruptly here, but mercifully, the third floor's monsters were few in number. The fourth and fifth floors followed a similar pattern—as if someone had deliberately tuned the difficulty curve.
But in a world already ruled by levels and monsters, nobody gave a second thought to a structure this RPG-like.
Lee Jun was no exception.
Thud— thud—
The scorching air and the geothermal heat rising from the ground made it hard to breathe.
But right now, Lee Jun couldn't spare a single thought for any of it.
Drenched head to toe in the blood of the monsters he had cut down, he trudged forward—and then stopped before the second floor's reward.
A single low pedestal.
Resting on top of it were the seal… and a one-sided tonfa.
Things unmistakably familiar to his eyes.
Beyond any doubt.
Something has changed.