Chapter 26
Chapter 26
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 26
Chapter Title: Fruit
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A long and tedious mandatory vacation had finally come to an end.
I stepped into the tower. Today was the day to climb the 13th floor.
The air inside the tower felt special after nearly a month away.
“Mm, the fragrant smell of the jungle.”
As soon as I passed through the door, humid air enveloped my entire body.
The overpoweringly thick grassy scent, the sticky dampness clinging to my skin, the unidentified insects buzzing in my ears.
Everything was still as irritating as ever.
I snapped my fingers.
“Desertification.”
Sand began spreading from beneath my feet like waves.
The muddy ground dried up, and the lush undergrowth crumbled into sand.
“The speed’s gotten way faster, hasn’t it?”
The desertification was incomparably quicker than before.
I could feel the mana consumption noticeably decreasing as well.
It seemed the days and nights I’d spent holed up in my room studying erosion hadn’t been in vain.
“Ah, gotta deal with the poison too.”
The poison gas got worse the higher you went in the 10th-floor block.
I recalled a post on the gallery saying that without a healer, the stacking debuffs were at a level you couldn’t endure.
I pulled out the orb I’d gotten as a reward for the first clear of the 11th floor.
World Tree’s Seed.
The Purification Seed that others had to buy with money.
From the name alone, it was clearly a superior item.
The blue orb began emitting a faint light on my palm and started sucking in the surrounding air.
Though invisible to the eye, I could feel the poison permeating the air thinning out.
The seed’s size seemed to have grown just a tiny bit larger too.
“So, I just keep raising it like this?”
According to the wizard gallery folks, growing this seed to its maximum size was the key to the 20th floor’s hidden piece.
Still holding the seed in one hand, I set off to find today’s target.
Today’s target was one of the core monsters of the 10th-floor block: Trent.
A tree-shaped monster, known to have one per floor.
“I think in Hard mode, people have seen up to three.”
Then in Extreme, there’d be even more Trents.
Of course, it was random, so if luck wasn’t on my side, I might pass without seeing a single one.
In fact, I hadn’t seen any on the 12th floor.
“Maybe I should’ve just rerun the 12th floor once more?”
The thought briefly crossed my mind.
You could repeat a floor up to five times.
Boss floors were the exception, of course.
Even then, repeats gave no experience, just magic stones.
“The tower’s system... when you think about it, its intentions are pretty transparent.”
No one knew why this tower existed or who made it.
But there was one fact everyone tacitly acknowledged.
No matter what, this tower was designed to keep pushing hunters upward.
If you didn’t climb for a certain period, it collapsed. You couldn’t linger on a floor too long.
High-rank hunters couldn’t clear low floors for others either.
It was structured to force as many hunters as possible to climb from their respective positions.
Why? What lay at the end of this tower?
But right now, the end wasn’t what mattered to me.
For now, I just wanted to break through the 20th floor on Hard mode as soon as possible—the bare minimum for A-rank.
Low-talent but brute-force strong, an untouchable walking tactical nuke. Demigod.
Knowing he was dead set on catching me made becoming an S-rank hunter no longer a distant dream, but a realistic goal.
“Even a few S-ranks ganged up on him and he beat them easily... not sure if I could win against a monster like that.”
I shook my head.
Worrying about such far-off futures wouldn’t yield answers now.
Whether I’d end up fighting him head-on or spending my life on the run, I needed power either way to have options.
And right now, there was only one way for me to gain that power.
Climbing the tower.
If Trents didn’t show up, I could just go to the final floor and start repeat farming.
Trents were special monsters in many ways.
They had two unique gimmicks.
First, neutral camouflage monsters.
Until you attacked them, there was no way to distinguish them from normal trees.
The problem was that if you struck first, you couldn’t access the second gimmick, which was the core of Trent hunting: the fruit.
Trents bore fruit.
Eating this fruit permanently boosted your stats.
Naturally, each one sold for over 100 million won.
Hunters who chose low difficulty and knew they couldn’t reach A-rank past the 20th floor usually settled for C or B by farming here.
But farming wasn’t easy.
Real and fake fruits were mixed among them.
Cut the real one, and the Trent stayed neutral.
That real fruit was the key item that permanently boosted stats.
But touch a fake, and it counted as first strike, triggering attack patterns immediately.
“No wonder you can’t even dream of farming without detection skills.”
First hurdle: find one or two Trents among the countless trees in this jungle forest.
Second: successfully pick the fruit.
A difficulty you couldn’t pass on luck alone.
That’s why parties farming here always needed someone with detection skills.
“Should I start thinking about real party play...?”
They said detection skills would only get more useful higher up in the tower.
Was party play really essential?
“But there’s no hunter who could keep up with my climbing speed.”
I was blasting straight up without any repeats.
Most people farmed magic stones as much as possible on every floor.
They geared up with the earnings and only challenged upper floors once they had safe specs.
“Am I already at the point where I need to worry about party members...?”
I heard that around A-rank, sometimes you had headaches because there were no same-level party members to climb with.
Maybe I should start thinking of countermeasures.
Well, soloing forever would be ideal.
My thoughts grew complicated, but I soon shook my head.
Party issues could wait until they arose.
Right now, focus on what’s in front of me.
I activated Desertification and crossed the jungle.
Mana ran dry midway, so I had to pause for meditation.
Strangely, meditating here restored mana faster than usual.
I even felt my maximum mana pool slowly increasing.
Watching the mana flow closely with my clairvoyant eye, it seemed due to the atmospheric mana density being on another level compared to outside the tower.
“Guess I should meditate whenever I can from now on.”
Bigger mana pool is always better.
No time limit, so absorbing as much as I could endure seemed worth trying.
How long had it been like that?
An amusing sight unfolded before my eyes.
In the middle of the desert I’d created, trees stood tall as if nothing had happened.
Trents.
The goblins popping up here and there in between were no longer even threats.
I cleared them lightly and counted the Trents.
“One, two... whoa, ten of them?”
So many monsters, and I was thrilled instead.
Ten fruit gachas.
100 million each. Unless my luck was utter trash, at least 500 million won.
If luck was insanely good, even a billion.
“Time for a 1-billion-won gacha.”
I excitedly approached the Trents.
Ten trees standing rigidly in all this sand looked grotesque and awkward.
A sudden question popped into my head.
Why hadn’t desertification counted as an attack?
Why hadn’t these half-plant things eroded?
Puzzled, I stood before one Trent and observed it.
In that instant, the world looked different to my eyes. A mana vision pierced through everything like X-ray.
I saw mana flowing inside the Trent, still resonating with the deep ground that had already turned to sand.
I didn’t know what it meant yet.
But I discovered something even more interesting.
“Huh?”
Looking at the fruits, there were two types.
Ones with faint mana flow, and ones with none.
“Jackpot... I can see which is which?”
But a problem remained.
Which one was real?
“First one’s a guess, no helping it.”
Ten chances anyway.
First turn. I bet on the one without mana.
A small sand bullet from my fingertip precisely severed the fruit stem.
That very moment.
“Grrrrrrr...”
The tree before me twisted with a chilling sound.
Its bark split, revealing crimson eyes gleaming between the cracks.
“Bust.”
The branches turned into massive arms, reaching for me.
At the same time, thick roots burst from the ground.
It tried to kick off the earth with its sturdy roots and charge.
But that wasn’t ground anymore.
This footing was already my domain.
Thud!
The Trent’s roots futilely churned the sand.
With its feet sinking into the sand where they should’ve braced, the massive body lost balance and toppled forward.
Boom. Sand dust billowed up.
“Grr...?”
“...”
I stared at the scene with a dumbfounded expression for a moment.
It flailed to get up, but its feet kept sinking, kicking uselessly.
“Man, this is ridiculous.”
I burst into empty laughter and unleashed several sand bullets into its body.
Boom boom boom!
The Trent shattered into splinters without a scream.
“Argh, there goes 100 million...”
But now I knew. The ones with mana flow were real.
I headed to the next Trent.
This time, no hesitation. I shot a bullet at the fruit with mana flow.
The fruit fell to the ground. The Trent didn’t stir. Perfect success.
I picked up the fallen fruit.
That’s when it happened.
The World Tree’s Seed in my other hand suddenly swelled massively and swallowed the fruit whole.
“What?”
The seed chewed it up, then spat it out with a ‘pthoo.’
The ejected fruit was shriveled and worthless-looking.
I lost my mind for a second and yelled.
“No, you crazy bastard! Spit out my 100 million!”
Freakout aside, I quickly regained calm.
Right. This had to be part of the hidden piece.
“No, it has to be...”
Might as well go all-in on the gamble of a lifetime.
I harvested real fruits from the remaining eight Trents the same way.
And fed them all to the World Tree’s Seed.
“That’s it, good boy, eat up, you little shit...”
After devouring all the fruits, the seed had swollen to the size of a baby’s head.
“Please be a hidden piece... please be a hidden piece...”
No idea what it’d turn into. But pocket it for now.
Around then, I fired a sand bullet at the last goblin I’d deliberately spared.
As it fell, the familiar clear message appeared.
[No. 1 Ranking Bonus Applied!]
[First Clear Bonus Applied!]
And before my eyes, skill books appeared.
Brown and brown.
Between them, one platinum skill book gleaming dazzlingly after a level-up bonus upgrade.
My first level-up in a while.
I claimed the rewards with satisfaction.
[Passive Skill: Clairvoyance]
“What the hell?”
What? Duplicate? No way it’s invalid?
This couldn’t be reality.
I squeezed my eyes shut.