Chapter 55
Chapter 55
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 55
Chapter Title: Village
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[Entering Tower Floor 24 (EXTREME).]
The higher you go, the rarer the minerals that appear.
My goal was clear.
Mine the orichalcum and mithril I still needed.
“If it’s not enough here either… do I really have to buy it with money?”
For a moment, I regretted it.
Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten those diamonds and should’ve saved some to sell?
I’d gathered a decent amount of magic stones in the meantime, but it still wasn’t nearly enough to buy rare metals like mithril that only dropped in the Tower.
I shook off the stray thoughts and looked around.
The sight before me was different from usual.
“What is this…?”
Floor 24 was a massive cavern incomparable to the previous floors.
A ceiling so high it stretched out of sight, countless tunnels branching out like a web in all directions.
Even elevators connecting the tunnels on each level.
“Suddenly advanced civilization or something?”
In addition to the familiar giant drills, there were tons of equipment I’d never seen before.
Conveyor belts hauling minerals and massive cranes.
Even the kobolds’ gear had changed.
They no longer wielded primitive pickaxes.
Instead, kobolds holding mechanical drills and such.
Of course, better equipment didn’t make them my match.
Whiiirrr-!
At that moment, the machines detected my presence and all turned toward me at once.
Their massive claws came swinging down at me.
But my auto-barrier didn’t even budge.
Instead, the attacking machines’ claws got scratched.
Time to test a new technique.
“Diamond Cutter.”
At my will, grains of sand and diamond spun rapidly into a blade.
Whiiirrr!
A blade humming like an electric saw.
It was the first time I’d made it, so control was shaky.
The blade wobbled unstably through the air.
Still, after a few tries, I managed to shape something decent.
“If it were a skill, I could just snap my fingers without all this.”
Thud! Thud!
While I got used to the new technique, the machines kept pounding my barrier relentlessly.
Useless effort, of course.
I swung the Diamond Cutter roughly at the machines in front of me.
Slice-!
The nearest drill machine sliced clean through like butter.
A cross-section gleaming mirror-smooth.
“Stronger than I thought?”
I was shocked by its power.
My form and technique were clearly clumsy.
Just a casual swing, and this kind of damage?
Soon I scrapped the rest and recovered the cores from the wreckage.
The cores absorbed into the crevices of the Heart of the Mountain.
“Ow, hot!”
The red glow leaking from the stone’s crevices was far more intense than before.
And above all, much hotter.
The stone now radiated heat too intense to hold barehanded.
I hurriedly manipulated sand to pick up the Heart of the Mountain.
“Kieeeek!”
Anyway, the kobolds who’d witnessed me smashing their massive machines lost the will to fight and started fleeing.
I moved to chase them.
They were all running in one direction anyway, so I had plenty of time.
The path ahead had to be a dead end.
But things didn’t go as usual.
This time, it wasn’t a dead end.
“A village?”
Where the wide tunnel ended, a massive cavern opened up.
And there was a village.
Dozens—no, hundreds—of houses crammed densely together.
The houses were incredibly crude.
Huts slapped together from scrap metal and stones gathered haphazardly.
A musty stench seemed to waft from the village as a whole.
“What to do with this?”
I stared blankly at the scene for a moment before deciding.
I summoned dozens of sand clones.
“For now, search around. Something useful might turn up.”
At my command, the clones surged toward the village.
That’s when it happened.
Piiiii-!
Super Hawk, perched on my head, pulled a small whistle from around its neck and blew frantically.
“What? What’s wrong?”
Wondering what was up, I turned toward where Super Hawk pointed.
Sure enough, a new monster was there.
Emerging from the largest house deepest in the village.
A body three or four times bigger than the other kobolds.
It wore golden armor and gripped a warhammer as tall as itself.
Both items looked extremely valuable.
“Kobold Champion fits.”
“Roooaaar-!”
Its appearance instantly shifted the battlefield’s mood.
The Champion bellowed like a roar, and the fleeing kobolds halted as one.
Emboldened, they began gathering behind the Champion one by one.
Their numbers were twice what they’d been at first.
The kobolds no longer fled.
Gripping their weapons resolutely.
The Champion raised its hammer high and charged.
Watching, I lightly snapped my fingers.
A small tungsten bullet formed at my fingertip.
Swoosh-!
The bullet cut through the air and struck the Kobold Champion’s chest dead center.
Boom-!
The expensive-looking armor failed to block it at all.
The Champion’s massive upper body vanished entirely.
“…….”
Silence fell over the village.
All the kobolds froze, staring blankly at their hero—minus its upper half.
A moment later.
“Kieeeek!”
Screams erupted from them.
They scattered in panic again.
I clicked my tongue and stomped lightly.
“Running further would be a problem.”
Rumble!
A massive sand wall erupted from the ground.
A gigantic hemispherical barrier encircling the entire village.
Nowhere left for them to run.
“Aene’s keeping good watch.”
I ordered the sand clones to manage the kobolds.
They were now my precious labor force.
“This place looks like it’s got something good.”
I headed for that unusually large house the Champion had come from.
Built of precisely cut black stone and metal.
Starkly different from the other mud-and-scrap huts.
It felt like it’d been plucked straight from a far more advanced civilization.
“Something’s off about the backstory…”
The blatant tech gap.
The disharmony I’d felt from the mine machines and kobolds carried over between this building and the other shacks.
Anyway, I decided to go inside.
Opening the heavy iron door revealed an unexpected sight.
An interior shockingly clean and orderly.
Walls lined with mysterious machinery, a well-crafted workbench in one corner—untouched.
“Found it.”
And in the center of the house.
Atop a pedestal there gleamed an unfamiliar mineral.
Not even in that long report Super Hawk had organized.
Size of two fists combined.
A perfect silver sphere.
Stars seemed to shine inside it.
It looked extraordinary at a glance.
“But how do you use it?”
Just in case, I held the still-hot Heart of the Mountain up to it.
No reaction.
Seemed like something separate from the hidden piece piercing the 20s floors.
Just in case, I carefully pocketed the mysterious mineral.
***
The next day, I rushed to the Tower right after waking.
I’d barely slept last night.
My head was full of thoughts about that unidentified stone.
[Entering Tower Floor 24 (EXTREME).]
Sure enough, the same scenery as yesterday sprawled before me.
The kobold village filling the massive cavern.
The Kobold Champion roaring identically.
No trace of what I’d smashed and looted yesterday.
I shot the Kobold Champion without hesitation and headed for its house.
“There it is.”
Inside the building, the same stone sat on the same pedestal as before.
I gazed down at it briefly.
I had a spare at home anyway.
And I could come to this village at least three more times.
One for experiments wouldn’t hurt, right?
“It’s a stone, so stone it is.”
Just in case, I picked up the mineral and bit into it.
Crunch.
Not the hard shatter of other minerals.
Like biting cold clay.
No taste, naturally, but I forced it down.
And right then, a violent shock surged through my body.
My mind went pure white.
“Ah, this…”
The sensation was familiar.
Just like when I first ate that Trent fruit!
I steadied my staggering body, sat cross-legged in place, closed my eyes, and began meditating.
Right now, I had to focus solely on absorbing the rampaging energy inside me and making it mine.
My consciousness sank into an endless abyss.
There stretched an endless sand desert.
And in the desert’s center, my essence: a god of sand limbs, seated on a massive jade throne.
I looked up at the giant sand statue in my image.
Then, the newly incoming power crashed like a meteor into the desert.
The fallen meteor unleashed power in all directions, shattering my mental world.
Shaking ground, cracking throne.
I focused my mind. I’d done this before.
The sand god’s eyes opened.
Matching my movements, the inner god moved identically.
I extended both arms and seized the rampaging meteor.
Dozens, hundreds of billions of desert sand grains formed massive arms, enveloping the alien power.
Inside my hands, a storm of blades raged.
Immense friction and resistance. Pain like flesh grinding away.
But I didn’t stop.
I clenched my fist harder. Ensuring what was in my grasp couldn’t rebel.
The fiercely resisting power gradually lost momentum before my will.
I felt the stone breaking down. The pulverized meteor slowly merged with my sand.
In that process, changes began in the inner god.
Arms and legs of sand—their boundaries crumbled as the torso slowly turned to sand.
At the same time, the other minerals mixed heterogeneously in my body broke down finer.
What had been like impurities in my body perfectly fused with the sand under the new power.
As if they’d always been one being.
How much time passed?
Finally, the inner storm subsided.
I slowly half-opened my eyes.
Rumble-!
The ground shook violently once.
Like an earthquake, the crudely built huts collapsed.
“Success.”
I immediately sensed the changes in my body.
The range of my body I could turn to sand had expanded far beyond before.
Meanwhile, the minerals inside felt better integrated.
Like I could hold slightly more types of minerals in my body.
I slowly rose.
The village, which should’ve been noisy, was deathly quiet.
Stepping outside, I couldn’t help but be shocked.
“What the hell…”
Hundreds of kobolds prostrated before me as one.
Worshipping like a god, faces full of fear.
I looked down at the scene in bewilderment for a moment.
But soon snapped out of it.
“That’s that, and this is this.”
I had work to do.
Mining orichalcum and mithril.
At the sound of Super Hawk’s whistle, the mine restarted.
With the massive mine and exceptional manpower, the yield was insane.
Soon, a mountain of orichalcum piled up before me.
I processed and ate them one by one, like peeling apples.