Spirit Cards (Part 1)
Killing Machine scraped together every shred of courage he possessed to overpower the dread suffocating him. That desperate surge of will allowed him to lunge at Sanghyuk.
Yet that was all it amounted to. A burst of courage changed nothing.
Clang! Cl-cl-clang!
His swinging blade was casually deflected by the Ten-Thousand-Year Golden Bone Whip, which writhed through the air like a living serpent. The disparity in raw strength between them was insurmountable from the start, and their gap in PvP capability was not something Killing Machine could even begin to bridge.
Worse still, Sanghyuk possessed a title tailor-made for hunting villains. Crushed beneath such overwhelming odds, Killing Machine folded in less than ten seconds.
Crunch! Thud.
Just like his subordinates, his head was sheared clean off. His corpse hit the stone floor, burst into a spray of sparkling motes, and vanished, leaving behind a small scatter of dropped items.
With Killing Machine gone, all that remained in the subterranean plaza was an immense sea of loot.
These were the remnants left behind by the fallen members of Ghost, Heavenly Destiny, and the Demonic Army. The bear had danced for the crowd, but the master pocketed the coin—three massive guilds had clawed each other to pieces, only for Sanghyuk to sweep up every single spoil of war.
Because the haul was so vast, Sanghyuk loaded his shoulders to bursting, hauled the gear out of the Snake Cave, stashed it in a secluded spot, and made several round trips just to transport it all.
Once everything was secure, he listed nearly all of it on the consignment shop. Many of the items carried substantial price tags, but none suited his personal build, making it far more profitable to liquidate the entire lot.
The consignment shop never displayed a seller's identity, so no one could trace who had put the goods up for sale. Even if Ghost and Heavenly Destiny scoured the market with bloodshot eyes, their suspicions would hit a dead end at the Demonic Army.
As for the Demonic Army—the only ones who might suspect Sanghyuk—their status as Outlaws forced them into hiding for the foreseeable future. If they dared surface now, the villain hunters currently swarming the landscape would tear them to shreds.
I suppose my days hunting in the Snake Cave are finished, Sanghyuk thought.
The cave had served him well, but word of mouth had already spread far and wide, guaranteeing a deluge of competitors. The chaotic guild clash had become the talk of the server, thrusting the Snake Cave into unwanted fame.
My level has climbed nicely, and I’ve amassed a solid mountain of gold. Time to finally get to work on my Spirit Cards.
Sanghyuk had reached an astounding Level 42. Past Level 40, the Karma required to level up spiked exponentially; reaching Level 41 demanded the same effort as leveling to 40 twice over, and Level 42 was equivalent to grinding to 40 three times.
Because leveling grew so grueling, many players past Level 40 put their progression on hold to explore other avenues of the game. Eternal Life harbored countless hidden features and diverse content outside pure combat, and players were gradually discovering and enjoying them.
The recent surge in crafting and production-oriented players stemmed from that very reason.
For the first time in a while, Sanghyuk thoroughly reviewed Falcon City's consignment shop and auction house side by side. He had glanced at listings in passing whenever he stopped by the city, but this was his first deep, systematic inspection.
Let's see… Steel scales are skyrocketing, as expected… and all other crafting materials are climbing in tandem.
Market trends were following his memories to the letter. Whenever he came into spare gold, he had methodically bought up crafting reagents. A few shrewd merchant players had anticipated similar trends, preventing Sanghyuk from monopolizing every single material, but he had managed to corner the market on obscure, niche reagents that even the sharpest traders had overlooked.
Merchants can't see the future, so they played it safe by cornering ores and gemstones. But I know what's coming, so I swept up everything that matters.
The divide between knowing the future and operating blind was vast. Still, underestimating the instincts of seasoned merchants was a sure way to get burned, so Sanghyuk remained cautious.
Steel scales will hit their absolute ceiling within a few days.
Steel scales were an indispensable ingredient for crafting high-tier weapons and armor, and because they dropped in very limited locations, they were treated as premium materials.
In practice, the going rate for steel scales would soon bend to Sanghyuk's whim. His warehouse was practically overflowing with them, and it would take considerable time before other players conquered the Snake Cave efficiently enough to secure a steady supply. He planned to release his stockpile in calculated waves the moment prices peaked.
I can start liquidating my wares one by one, but… the real challenge is buying up the essences.
Sanghyuk had a lot to sell, but he had just as much to buy.
Right now is the golden window to buy essences. Once crafters improve enough to manufacture elemental gear, essence prices will multiply several times over.
For now, essences sat in decent quantities across the consignment shop and auction house. Because their practical utility was virtually unknown to the general player base, most sellers dumped them onto the market without a second thought.
The essences Sanghyuk sought were reagents imbued with elemental affinities.
Essences of fire, water, wind, light, darkness, lightning… there were over a hundred varieties in total.
Typically, fusing five shards produced an essence. Fusing five essences produced a core. Combining five shards into an essence required nothing more than stacking them together, but refining five essences into a core demanded an alchemist NPC or a player trained in alchemy.
Fusing five cores would yield a heart, but that process required specialized, high-tier techniques that were impossible to perform at this stage of the game.
Right now, only shards and essences are listed on the market, so I only need to focus on those two.
Sanghyuk had already been trickling gold into purchasing shards, but he had held off on essences, waiting for their prices to bottom out. Clueless players had initially listed them at steep prices, assuming anything that looked rare had to be valuable. When nothing sold, prices inevitably plummeted, recently scraping rock bottom.
All that remained was to sweep them up.
He wasn't hoarding these shards and essences to flip them for a profit. He needed them for his own use.
Contracting with an elemental spirit inherently required elemental catalysts like shards.
Shards for lowest-grade spirits, essences for low-grade spirits, and cores for medium-grade spirits…
As a spirit's grade rose, the quality of the required catalyst escalated alongside it. Normally, elemental items weren't a heavy financial burden for Spirit Summoners. Standard summoners only needed catalysts during the initial summoning ritual; afterward, they nurtured the contracted spirit through steady care, requiring no further catalysts.
A spirit might occasionally perish under exceptional circumstances, but such losses were rare and negligible.
Why, then, was Sanghyuk hoarding catalysts in bulk?
It all came down to how he utilized his spirits.
Spirit Explosion Art… No matter how I look at it, this skill is the ultimate money pit.
Sanghyuk shook his head with a bitter smirk as he bought up shards and essences from the market listings.
Though he had developed the Spirit Explosion Art himself, its mechanics were downright absurd.
The technique began by sealing a contracted spirit into a Spirit Card. This triggered a broken, system-defying loophole: the spirit sealed inside a card had its summon cost reduced to absolute zero.
Under ordinary game rules, a summoner was bound by strict cost limits that dictated how many spirits they could maintain based on their stats. That cost ceiling was a summoner's greatest handicap. Yet a Spirit Card bypassed it entirely with a cost of zero. Releasing the spirit from the card would restore its normal cost, but Sanghyuk had no intention of releasing them; he could channel their power directly while keeping them sealed.
That was the true power of a Card Master.
The Elemental Buster card synthesis recipe he had once passed to Naruel in his past life had been built upon this exact foundation.
The firepower is unmatched, but burning through a Spirit Card every single time I cast a spell is financial suicide.
That was the fatal flaw of the Spirit Explosion Art. It devoured spirits like firewood, requiring an endless production line of Spirit Cards. That insatiable appetite forced him to corner the market on shards and essences.
I’m only using lowest-grade and low-grade spirits for now, but once I start feeding medium-grade and high-grade cards into the synthesis formulas… Ugh, just thinking about the cost makes my head spin.
Naturally, the destructive output justified the astronomical expense. It was just so expensive that every cast broke his bank and pinched his heart.
I have no choice. I have to steadily stockpile elemental materials from now on to prepare for the future.
Sanghyuk alternated between the consignment shop and auction house, continuously sweeping up shards and essences. To avoid alerting price-sensitive merchants, he bought only items listed below a strict price threshold, leaving higher-priced listings untouched.
A hasty buyout of the entire inventory would tip off sharp-witted traders, creating unwanted competition, so discretion was paramount.
Sell crafting materials, buy elemental catalysts—that was his primary loop, but he did not stop there. As he combed through listings, he snatched up every neglected item primed for a massive future price surge.
One such item was the Cursed Bone, an item so unpopular that almost nobody touched it. Yet a few months from now, a player named Styx—later revered as the Death Master—would upload a gameplay video to D-Tube, flipping the market on its head overnight.
Styx was a diehard Necromancer. For necromancers, Cursed Bones were an indispensable reagent that remained in constant shortage from novice ranks to master tier. When that revelation dropped, the demand for Cursed Bones would outstrip supply completely.
There were several other items like that—hidden gems buried beneath the mud. Sanghyuk diligently dug them up and stacked them away in his storage vault.
For nearly an entire week, Sanghyuk barely took a step away from the trade boards, repeating the cycle of buying and selling.
By the time he finished, his warehouse was stuffed with an immense collection of shards and essences, alongside a healthy hoard of sleeper items. Conversely, his original stockpile of monster parts and crafting goods was almost entirely liquidated.
Knowing that current prices represented a peak that would hold for roughly a year, Sanghyuk showed zero hesitation in clearing his inventory. His near-monopoly on steel scales had allowed him to squeeze maximum profit from eager buyers.
Other players and guilds had recently begun hunting the Snake Cave with stable party compositions, steadily increasing the daily supply of scales, but Sanghyuk had already walked away with his profits.
His liquid gold was almost entirely drained.
He had poured every coin he possessed into buying shards, essences, and future investments. Staring at his empty coin pouch felt a bit hollow, but glancing at the mountain of assets filling his warehouse chased away every trace of emptiness.
Sanghyuk retrieved the diverse assortment of shards and immediately set to work crafting Spirit Cards. Since his summon tier was currently capped at lowest-grade spirits, he focused solely on lowest-grade Spirit Cards.
In total, he crafted sixteen distinct types of Spirit Cards, producing roughly 2,400 cards in all.
The largest batch consisted of lowest-grade fire spirit cards crafted from fire shards, numbering about 400. Next came wind spirit cards, totaling roughly 250. Beyond those, he crafted over a hundred cards each for water, wood, earth, light, darkness, steel, lightning, ice, shadow, stone, moonlight, and several other elemental affinities.
Every single one of them was fuel destined for the furnace of his Spirit Explosion Art.
They take forever to gather, but they burn away in seconds. I have to use them sparingly.
Blowing through them recklessly just because he had a large stack on hand would leave him high and dry when a real crisis hit. Even if his future knowledge allowed him to rake in fortunes, wasting Spirit Cards remained an appalling habit.
A little more progress with fire spirits, and I'll be able to summon low-grade ones. At least the Spirit Explosion Art accelerates skill mastery at an insane pace.
Standard summoners slowly built affinity with one or two spirits over time, but Sanghyuk incinerated them one after another, advancing his spirit mastery several times faster than ordinary players.
The glaring drawback, however, was that Spirit Explosion Art permanently wrecked his affinity with spirits. Even if he tried to bond with a specific spirit sealed in a card, no elemental entity would ever open its heart to a summoner who mercilessly obliterated its brethren as disposable fuel.
In other words, mastering the Spirit Explosion Art meant closing the door on conventional spirit summoning forever.
Preparations are mostly finished… With this much firepower, I should be ready to tackle the Wyvern's Nest.
Sanghyuk packed the mountain of cards securely into his Space Expansion Bag and rose to his feet.
His next destination was the Wyvern's Nest—the most brutal open dungeon in the Twilight Lands, boasting rewards that matched its terrifying reputation.