The Green Wyvern Lord (1)
While Killing Machine was scouring the world for him, Sanghyuk was fully absorbed in slaughtering beasts at the Wyvern's Nest.
Having perfected his theoretical grasp of wyvern hunting long before setting foot here, Sanghyuk needed only a taste of real combat to internalize the muscle memory. Once the rhythm took hold, he dispatched them with terrifying speed and precision, fighting as though he had been born solely to hunt wyverns.
Four minutes. That was all it took for Sanghyuk to bring down a single beast once he found his groove. At a pace of one kill every four minutes, he swept through all twenty-seven peaks across the Wyvern's Nest in barely two hours.
With a respawn timer of thirty minutes, he had unlocked an endless hunting cycle.
Wyverns yielded massive amounts of Karma, accompanied by a bounty of high-grade crafting materials.
Wyvern leather, claws, and fangs—which dropped at an almost one-hundred-percent rate—ranked among the most valuable crafting components traded on the open market. Even rarer drops, like the Wyvern's Heart, were indispensable resources Sanghyuk desperately needed for his own progression.
Coupled with an assortment of other lucrative spoils, the creatures were effectively living treasure vaults.
Not even Sanghyuk could predict when other players might stumble upon this place. His only choice was to harvest as many as humanly possible while the entire hunting ground remained exclusively his.
To that end, he cut his sleep to the barest minimum and poured every ounce of focus into the hunt. Every second was precious, and he refused to let himself be distracted for a single moment.
A half-month vanished in a blur. Sanghyuk hunted with even greater intensity than he had in the Snake Cave, and the payoff exceeded all expectations. His level climbed to 44, and rare, exorbitant materials piled high in his storage.
Considering the highest publicly known level in EL was 43, his progression was nothing short of absurd. Everything was going smoothly—save for one detail that continued to nag at the back of his mind.
The Green Wyvern Lord, the sole male and named monster of the Wyvern's Nest.
‘I know there’s a trick to triggering its spawn... but for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was.’
In his past life, Sanghyuk had camped at the Wyvern's Nest for four solid months, but summoning the Wyvern Lord had always been someone else’s job. He had merely participated in the raid once the monster appeared.
As a result, while he knew the combat mechanics like the back of his hand, the summoning ritual eluded him.
‘The one thing I know for certain is that it involves an egg. But what comes after?’
Had he arrived here through a normal questline, clearing the standard Green Wyvern objectives would have naturally unlocked a follow-up quest to slay the Green Wyvern Lord. The quest log’s hints would have easily laid out the summoning process.
Yet Sanghyuk was a regressor moving purely on personal memory, entirely detached from standard quest paths.
He racked his brain between hunts, but the answer remained out of reach. Monsters like the Green Wyvern Lord that required specific prerequisites to appear were classified as conditional named monsters, and defeating them typically rewarded unique bonuses.
Slaying the Green Wyvern Lord granted not only its direct loot, but also bestowed a sixteen-hour field buff known as Wyvern's Majesty upon every player who took part in the kill.
This buff doubled the quantity of drops from all subsequent wyvern kills and noticeably raised the drop rate of higher-tier items.
In short, taking down the Green Wyvern Lord would more than double his farming efficiency.
‘Taking down the Lord is where the real windfall is...’
Frustrating though it was, he had no choice but to keep grinding until the memory surfaced.
Once his pricey Space Expansion Bag was packed to the seams, Sanghyuk had no choice but to head back to Falcon City. By now, every corner of the city teemed with players.
While the Twilight Lands spanned an area larger than most entire game worlds and Falcon City was a metropolis in its own right, the sheer influx of users was beginning to push the infrastructure to its limits.
Overcrowded districts were managed by spinning up mirror channels to disperse the population, which kept things stable for the time being, but at this rate, viable hunting grounds would soon become scarce.
Even now, at least five major guilds were violently contesting territory in the Snake Cave, and other equivalent hunting zones were embroiled in similar chaos.
‘Which guild was the first to clear the Giant’s Cave? Or was it an independent party? I can’t quite recall.’
He couldn't remember who had cleared it first, but the timing was etched clearly in his mind.
‘Four months from now. Just as the Twilight Lands hit the brink of absolute saturation, the first party clears the Giant’s Cave. Only after the very top tier of players stream through does the dungeon’s strategy gradually leak to the general public.’
Beyond the threshold of the Twilight Lands lay continents so vast they defied belief.
Once the Hellfire Desert, the Continent of Heroes, and the Continent of the Sun opened up, talk of population congestion would vanish entirely. If anything, the sheer, endless expanse became a problem of its own.
‘Four months, huh... All right. I’ll break out of the Twilight Lands within two!’
His initial goal had been to clear the Giant’s Cave about a month ahead of the rest of the world. But with his growth outstripping even his own estimates, he advanced his timeline by another full month.
Sanghyuk went through his routine, bouncing between the consignment shops and the auction house to liquidate his haul.
He sold what needed selling and bought what needed buying.
His relentless farming in the Wyvern's Nest had yielded an immense stockpile, leaving him plenty to trade. Just as he had reaped a fortune by monopolizing steel scales from the Snake Cave, he now exerted total control over the supply of wyvern leather, claws, and fangs, driving prices sky-high.
Because he was effectively the sole supplier on the market, anyone desperate for those materials had no choice but to pay whatever exorbitant price he set.
Sanghyuk listed small batches of leather, claws, and fangs at prices calculated to be just within reach of the wealthiest elite players.
Though his warehouse was overflowing with stock, he never flooded the market at once. It was a classic premium pricing strategy, and with no shortage of willing buyers eager to gain an edge, his goods sold out almost immediately.
‘Can I hold this monopoly for another month?’
He would have loved to maintain his stranglehold right up until he left the Twilight Lands, but other players wouldn't stay idle forever. Someone might already be nearing the prerequisite questline to discover the Wyvern's Nest.
He estimated he had a month at most before others began ascending the peaks.
‘Which means I really need to take down the Lord as soon as possible...’
Having finished his business at the consignment shops and auction house, Sanghyuk picked up a few consumables and opened his Marking Book. He placed a thumbnail-sized, lowest-grade mana stone atop the rune etched into the page to trigger it.
Flash!
The Recall magic bound to the Marking Book flared to life, enfolding Sanghyuk in a pillar of light and instantly transporting him back to the marked coordinate at the entrance of the Wyvern's Nest.
Mana stones were pricey consumables, but Recall was far too convenient an asset to skimp on.
When crossing vast distances, spending a mana stone to skip the travel time was objectively the smarter investment.
‘Right. Back to work.’
Grinding the same monster in the same spot for hours on end was tedious by nature. Gamers often called it "the grind," but Sanghyuk was no stranger to repetitive labor.
The soul-crushing exploitation he had suffered in the sweatshops of his past life had been far worse than this.
"Ah! That's it! It wasn't the egg first—it was Orc's Blood!"
After several more days of grinding in the Wyvern's Nest, the elusive memory finally clicked into place.
‘How could I have forgotten the Orc's Blood? The blood comes first, then the egg...’
In the game's lore, orcs were a wyvern's absolute favorite prey.
‘First, kill the wyvern nesting in the center of the peaks, then douse the nest in Orc's Blood and wait for the Lord’s roar... Or was it some kind of herald? Either way, an omen occurs, and once you confirm it, smashing the egg brings the Wyvern Lord plummeting from the sky. Yes! That was definitely it.’
A wave of relief washed over him, sweeping away days of mounting frustration like unclogging a stubborn drain. He felt like he could finally breathe again.
‘First, I need some Orc's Blood.’
Orc's Blood was a crafting material with a low drop rate from orcs. While relatively uncommon, it wasn't exceedingly rare or prohibitively expensive; the auction house usually had plenty in stock.
Sanghyuk used Recall to dart back to Falcon City and procured a generous supply. Returning to the Wyvern's Nest, he made his way to the central nest and swiftly eliminated the resident wyvern.
With the creature slain, only a solitary egg remained sitting quietly in the center of the hollow. Sanghyuk ran through a meticulous final check of his equipment and combat readiness. Satisfied, he uncorked the vial and splashed the Orc's Blood across the nest.
Splash!
He stepped back, standing motionless as he watched for the omen. After a tense wait, the silence shattered.
SKREEEEEEEEEEECH! Grrrk, grrrr-k!
A thunderous cry reverberated across the entirety of the Wyvern's Nest. The sheer resonance left no doubt—it was the roar of the Wyvern Lord.
‘The roar is the trigger, just as I thought.’
Whoosh—CRACK!
The moment the roar died down, Sanghyuk drew his sword and brought it down hard, shattering the blood-stained egg.
ROOOOOOOOAAAAR!
The beast's screech mutated into a fury that tore across the skies. Far above, a tiny black speck plunged downward at breakneck speed.
A massive emerald reptile, easily three times larger than any ordinary female Green Wyvern...
The Green Wyvern Lord had finally descended before him.
The Wyvern Lord's Wrath
All conditions have been met. The rare quest [The Wyvern Lord's Wrath] has been triggered.
Though an unexpected rare quest had materialized, Sanghyuk's focus was locked entirely on the descending terror; he barely spared the prompt a glance.
‘There’s only one rule to remember when fighting the Green Wyvern Lord: do not fall off. That’s everything!’
Sanghyuk had slain countless Green Wyvern Lords in his previous life. He had never tackled it solo—always relying on a party of at least four comrades—but his tactical experience was extensive.
And that experience told him exactly what determined survival.
‘Phase one is an aerial dogfight!’
KRAAAARGH!
The moment the Green Wyvern Lord touched down, it drew a massive breath into its chest. It was the wind-up for its Breath attack—any player caught standing flat-footed in the nest would be annihilated in seconds.
There was only one way to evade it: mount the beast's back.
Tap, tap, whoosh!
Having prepared for this before the beast even landed, Sanghyuk vaulted across a sequence of jutting rocks along the nest's outer rim, catapulting toward the Wyvern Lord’s spine. In truth, the terrain had been deliberately designed with these natural stepping stones for this exact mechanic.
In his past life, countless players had perished just figuring that out, but their sacrifices allowed Sanghyuk to transition effortlessly into the first phase.
Thud, clatter!
The instant his boots hit the Green Wyvern Lord’s scales, he lashed the Ten-Thousand-Year Golden Bone Whip tightly around its neck.
In his previous life, strategies had relied on driving a blade into the hide and holding on for dear life, or clinging to the base of its wing joints. With his whip, such crude and precarious methods were entirely unnecessary.
SKREEEEEEEEEEE!
Enraged by the intruder on its back, the Green Wyvern Lord launched itself straight into the heavens. For the next fifteen minutes, Sanghyuk would have to cling to its bucking frame while the beast went into a violent, thrashing frenzy.
A single slip meant death. The objective of Phase One was simple: endure until the monster exhausted itself.
WHOOSH—BOOM!
High above the cloudline, the Wyvern Lord barrel-rolled and twisted violently, thrashing with all its might to dislodge its rider. Yet Sanghyuk clamped down on the Ten-Thousand-Year Golden Bone Whip with both hands, pressing his body flush against the creature's spine.
‘I’m not letting go!’
The Green Wyvern Lord seeking to cast him down, and Sanghyuk refusing to yield.
Their fierce battle in the open sky had begun.