Corrupted Resources
The Corrupted Forest was an extremely dangerous dungeon.
Which was another way of saying the rewards were every bit as fat as the risk.
"It's a gold mine. A straight-up gold mine."
◈ The hide of a gray wolf corrupted by absorbing chaos energy. Extremely tough, with a powerful regenerative property.
◈ When processed into armor, chaos energy may take root in the finished piece.
In my memory, a gray wolf was a B- rank monster. Factor in the rift dimension's corrections and the fact that it had been exposed to chaos energy, and an A-rank rating meant the grade itself had climbed considerably. The hide was bound to be A-rank as well, which was the same as saying every single pelt was luxury leather.
"What's an A-rank hide even worth?"
Lately, looking up real-world resource prices had become a surprisingly satisfying little hobby. It was one of the ordinary pastimes among people who played Farming World to begin with. The rare resource I ground out over dozens, hundreds of hours in Farming World — how much would that be worth in reality? So can you actually bring it back? Ask that, and the conversation always ended with someone slamming the rage button and completely losing their shit. I'd never bothered picking up a hobby that only left me feeling robbed. The rift dimension was different.
Resources obtained here could be taken back to reality. A precious find could sell for its real-world price, or more, and that price became an intuitive measure of just how lucky I'd been.
There was one thing I regretted, though. Even if I hadn't looked the numbers up myself while playing Farming World, I should at least have browsed the community boards and memorized the going rates on rare resources. Then again, maybe not looking them up back then was exactly why I got to feel this happiness and this flutter of excitement while searching now.
Blacksmiths who cut armor loved hides. In reality you could actually die, so armor was valued every bit as highly as raw attack power, and there were exactly two conditions for high defense to stick to a piece of gear. Loot a high-grade piece of armor and wear it, or cut armor yourself out of high-grade hide. There was no third way. Garbage leather had no chance of becoming good armor. No matter how skilled the blacksmith, the craft amplified the value already in the resource. It was not alchemy for turning shit into soybean paste.
Which was why hunters — high-rank hunters from A-rank on up past S — pounded the pavement harder, and paid more, to get their hands on armor than on weapons. In any game, that was a pretty unfamiliar sight. Damage. A weapon being the single most valuable thing you owned was the most basic of basics. But in reality, weapons came in every variety, and everyone used something different, so while they were expensive, they never quite reached the scarcity of good armor.
Anyone could wear good armor. Light armor made from leather, the kind that kept you mobile, was something more than eighty percent of users preferred, and aside from the tanks who had to take a monster's attack head-on, the only reason people weren't wearing it was that there wasn't enough to go around. A-rank was more than worth hauling out.
"I'll have to call it trade-grade."
The way people tacked auction-grade onto anything worth putting under the hammer, I'd coined a word of my own. Trade-grade. An item worth carrying from the rift dimension to Earth and actually trading. For now, of course, the value of trade-grade was low. Even a resource that was fairly precious in reality — the Sunro Mushroom included — wasn't exactly cheap at a few million won, but set against the grandeur the words auction-grade carried, it still fell short.
That would change with time. Bit by bit, the value of trade-grade would climb, and from some point on the word would stop meaning ordinary trade goods and start meaning truly rare resources that were hard to obtain even inside the rift dimension. When that day came, I might have to think a little harder about those resources. Whether to take them to Earth and trade them for items of similar worth, or exchange them for Farm inside the rift dimension and spend them developing the farm.
"Even the weeds are all corrupted resources."
Most things in this dungeon had Corrupted stuck to the front of their names. They'd been steeped in chaos energy for a long time, no doubt. For now, I cut down every weed in sight and pocketed the lot of them. They'd be useful somewhere. Items carrying chaos energy tied to the main quest like this might not be a mandatory ingredient, but they could clearly be spent somewhere important, or put to perfectly decent use — and resources like that were scattered everywhere. Across this entire vast forest.
A thought struck me.
"If I take down the Corrupted Ogre and cut the corrupted trees... what happens to this forest?"
Strictly speaking, I'm a rational person. I have no interest in the stories of whoever gets left behind after a game's ending. This forest was the same. A dungeon. Obviously it would vanish once the boss died. Like the sewers. I'd never gone back to the sewers after clearing them, but once that dungeon was done, every trace of the rats was washed clean away and the place was used as a waterway connected to the lake. That wasn't sad. The Corrupted Forest disappearing, though — that felt like it might sting a little.
"Maybe I should stockpile some corrupted resources first."
It was only the Level 0 Biome, but even so, this was likely the highest-difficulty dungeon the Level 0 Biome had to offer. The odds were good that chaos energy would keep turning up. So I had no choice but to reach a decision worthy of saving the nation.
"Time to harvest."
I drew my axe.
I made it home around the time night had fully settled in.
"Master!"
"Oppa! You okay? I thought you were dead."
"Appreciate the concern."
I'd left early in the morning, so worry was only natural. I hadn't said it would take long — I'd said I was just going to scout — and here I was rolling in close to ten at night. Anyone would wonder if I'd died. Kim Sujeong didn't know Farming World well, but Ruru did, so I understood why she was brimming with worry. Not that I needed to dwell on it.
"Sort these out separately."
"Whoa! Chaos energy!"
"What is this? Huh? A-rank hide?"
After taking down the gray wolf, I'd stayed at the forest's edge, cutting and digging weeds, trees, and stone. I gathered the resources and picked up every fruit and herb I spotted lying around. Plenty of it I'd simply dropped on the ground and left behind, because there was no room left on my belt. By my estimate, fully farming that dungeon was going to take a long while.
"I should upgrade the belt, too."
It was a little late. Normally, when you played Farming World, the first thing you did after gathering resources was upgrade your tools, and the next was raising your belt's grade to expand the space you could store things in. I just hadn't felt the need, so I still hadn't done it. I still saw no reason to raise tool grades in the Level 0 Biome, and I hadn't even gathered C-rank resources yet, so I hadn't given it much thought — but the belt, at least, I wanted raised quickly.
Belt upgrades could be done at the Item Workbench. The required materials were Farm, basic materials, and fifty monster hides. Any monster's hide would do, and the baseline was D- rank, so tossing in just three A-rank hides met the requirement. Once it was upgraded, my belt looked a little more refined. It went from something like a rag of leather hanging at my waist to leather with a faint sheen.
◈ An all-purpose belt made for farming. It seems able to store a variety of items.
◈ Crafted at a size of 130 × 10.
◈ Item weight is reduced by 100% while stored.
◈ Can store items up to medium size.
Three inventory slots were added to the belt, and the stack size rose from 99 to 130. It didn't look like much of a difference, but it was bigger than it seemed. It meant that if I filled it with nothing but resources, I could store ninety more in total. I wanted to upgrade it one more time, but that was impossible for now. It needed hide cut on a sewing machine, not raw hide, and that recipe could only be purchased after the village was restored.
A few resource-storage chests were added to the second-floor warehouse. Outside, I kept mostly the resources I could pull out and use on the spot. On the second floor, I planned to store the ones I wouldn't reach for often — the materials meant for the Item Workbench.
"Oppa. If you're just gathering resources, want me to come help a little?"
"I'd like that, but it's too dangerous."
"I'm a C- rank mage in my own right..."
"The wolves at the entrance are A-rank."
"...Now that I think about it, farming might be better after all."
A plan of sorts came together.
"I'll farm the Corrupted Forest for about four days, log out once, buy a piece of armor while I'm out, farm a bit more, then take down the ogre and restore the village."
The SSS+ Rank ability selection ticket mattered, too. Get my hands on it as soon as possible and run two SSS+ Rank abilities, and I'd be able to farm and develop that much faster. But in Farming World, developing quickly mattered — and so did the moments when you had to farm while shoring up your foundations. Resources steeped in chaos energy. I figured these were pretty important.