Chapter 5: Starting Life in Another World
Chapter 5: Starting Life in Another World
Having found a quiet, deserted corner a short distance from the dungeon entrance, Guwon began by taking the monster corpses out of his inventory.
Alright, should I start with the simplest one, the Giant Rat?
Whiskers and incisors. The difficulty was clearly lower than the other two.
The only problem was that it was visually more disgusting than the rabbit and the raccoon, but at this point, beggars couldn't be choosers.
“Okay, let’s do this!”
Guwon steeled himself, placed his hand on the Giant Rat’s incisor, and squeezed his eyes shut, trying his best not to see the gruesome sight as he pulled.
Crack!
Along with the disgusting sound and the sensation in his fingers, the incisor came out much more easily than he’d expected. It was all thanks to his Strength stat, but he didn’t feel particularly grateful.
It wasn’t a matter of a guilty conscience from desecrating a corpse; the feeling in his hand was just purely, viscerally gross.
But I can’t get weak now. If I back down here, I’ll just be a legendary dumbass who starved to death after falling into such a beautiful world.
Guwon pushed down his weakening resolve and reached for the whiskers.
Pluck. Pluck.
The whiskers came out with an unpleasant sensation, like tearing out a clump of hair.
All that was left was the Magic Stone.
I have to rummage through this damn corpse to find a Magic Stone that could be anywhere.
He’d briefly considered putting the Magic Stone aside and dealing with the other things first, but he quickly realized he had no other choice.
Putting aside the raccoon’s claws, he couldn’t shake the grotesque image that yanking its tail would pull out its entire spine along with it.
As for the rabbit, he had no clue how he was supposed to separate the hide and meat with his bare hands.
Let’s just dig in like I’m carving meat off the bone.
When you think about it, how is this any different from deboning a chicken?
It just has organs inside, and it’s not cooked, so the texture is a little slimier, right?
Guwon steeled his resolve and, putting strength into his fingers, began to dig into the Giant Rat’s corpse.
Thanks to his sufficient Strength stat, his fingers pierced the hide and tore through the flesh without much effort.
After about three minutes of what could only be described as a bloody struggle, Guwon managed to find a blue stone the size of his pinky nail.
Honestly, since this was the first time he’d ever seen a Magic Stone, he couldn’t be sure if this was it, but there was no reason for something like this to be inside a Giant Rat’s body, so it had to be one.
If I pull this out and it turns out to be the half-digested remains of what this rat ate for breakfast, I’m not kidding, I will cry.
I’m telling you, I’m not joking.
For real. This is absolutely not a joke.
If you don’t want to see a grown man sobbing while clutching a bloody rat corpse, you’d better be a Magic Stone.
Guwon pulled out the blue stone while muttering a threat to who-knows-what.
The moment he did, the Giant Rat’s corpse shriveled as if it were rapidly decaying, then turned to dust and vanished.
“Huh…? Wh-what…?!”
Holy shit!
No way…. No way…!
A groundless certainty flashed through Guwon’s mind.
He immediately reached for the pile of Giant Rat corpses and dug into the area near the digestive organs where he’d found the Magic Stone before.
As expected, the location of the Magic Stone was the same for each monster, and he soon found another blue stone.
When Guwon pulled out the newly discovered stone, the Giant Rat’s corpse once again shriveled up as if decaying and vanished into dust.
It left behind only its incisor, just like a drop item.
Holy shit! Fuck! Then what the hell was all my suffering for?!
Getting told to fuck off by that pig-like shopkeeper! Going through hell wandering those wide streets just to find one shop! And even pulling out the teeth and whiskers of a disgusting rat!
Guwon swung his proud, red foot, which had been his star player for the last three hours, hard against the wall.
Fuck! Fuck!
I knew something was weird when that employee tilted her head!
This is what she meant!
You should have just told me! It just made me look like a total moron!
He had kicked the wall thoughtlessly, but it was surprisingly painful.
He quietly lowered his right foot and opened his status window to see that his health, which hadn't dropped a single point in three hours, was now down by over 100.
Thanks to that, he was able to cool his head a bit.
Right. Kicking a wall only hurts me.
Let’s think positively.
Thanks to figuring out that pig-like shopkeeper’s true nature, I found a shop with a cute employee, right?
And what’s more, I found this out before I tried to butcher the rabbit and the raccoon.
If I had ignored the Magic Stone and started butchering the rabbit and raccoon first, I probably would have never forgiven myself.
Thinking about it this way, I’m actually pretty proud of myself.
Could I be a genius? Or maybe, in that moment, I unknowingly awakened a superpower like future sight?
He got all excited and even opened his skill window, but of course, there was no such skill.
However, a new skill had taken its place.
Butchery 1
>
Active Skill
>
Cost: 1 Resource
>
Marks the location of the Magic Stone in a monster’s corpse.
>
Item drop rate increases by [1%].
Ooh!
Yes, this is it! This is what I wanted!
As expected, a world with a game system should have this kind of convenience.
Since he’d just gotten it, he used the skill right away. A part of the belly of the first rabbit corpse in his line of sight began to glow.
He dug inside and pulled out the Magic Stone. As he’d expected, the corpse decayed and vanished, leaving only the hide behind.
It seems like I only get one drop item from the Magic Stone, just like before.
The skill description mentioned an item drop rate, so does that mean getting items from the Magic Stone is dependent on probability?
With his gamer instincts kicking in, Guwon forgot all about the disgusting feeling lingering on his hands and immediately began to test his theory.
First, he laid out the remaining rabbit corpses and extracted the Magic Stones one by one.
The results were varied, ranging from corpses that dropped nothing at all to corpses that dropped both hide and meat.
It was safe to assume the drop rate was purely based on probability.
Next, he laid out the 10 remaining Giant Rat corpses.
He pulled the incisors and whiskers from each one, then lined them up so he could tell which parts came from which corpse.
Then, one by one, he extracted the Magic Stones while checking the items he had already dismantled.
The result was, well, just as he’d expected.
The moment he extracted the Magic Stone, some of the drop items he had already dismantled would disappear.
In other words, whether he dismantled the drop items first and then extracted the stone, or just extracted the stone directly, getting items was ultimately dependent on the drop rate.
For Guwon, this was a truly fortunate result.
Even as he was testing his theory, he had been seriously worried. If manually dismantling guaranteed all the drop items regardless of the drop rate, Guwon, a natural-born gamer, would have had to sacrifice his sanity and manually butcher every single monster he killed.
Now I can just comfortably extract the Magic Stones without any worries!
And there was another bonus effect to extracting the Magic Stones.
Some of you might have noticed it when I mentioned that some of the dismantled drop items disappeared.
When he extracted the Magic Stone, the foreign substances on his hands, like the blood and guts from rummaging through the corpse, also quickly vanished.
Well, I guess they have to provide at least this much of a service. Otherwise, adventurers would come out of the dungeon covered in blood every single time.
Ah, come to think of it, that shop girl was worried about my leg because she thought it was my blood. Heh, how cute.
The pig shopkeeper said that too? Who’s that?
For the record, the blood on his right foot didn't disappear.
He hadn't retrieved the corpse from his first hunt that had exploded.
That corpse was blown to bits, so it should be easy to get the Magic Stone. I wonder if someone passing by will find it and take it for me.
Should I just go back and get it myself?
Yeah. Let’s do that.
He remembered the general location on the map, and besides, now that he was back in the dungeon, it felt a bit weird to leave right after solving his problem.
Most importantly, his sneakers and tracksuit were items he would probably never be able to get again in this world. It was too much of a waste to abandon them like this.
Having made up his mind, Guwon finished extracting and organizing the Magic Stones from the remaining corpses and immediately set off.
The journey to the location of his first battle was now incredibly smooth.
For one, after digging through all those corpses, he had grown accustomed to the sensation of hitting monsters and seeing them explode. Also, now that he knew any blood that splattered on him during combat would automatically disappear once he extracted the Magic Stone, he no longer needed to rely solely on his right foot.
In fact, making them explode made it easier to get the Magic Stone, so he actively used his Low Kick to raise his skill proficiency.
His stats were already overkill for this area, so now that the obstacle holding him back was gone, his movement speed was more than double what it was before.
Jogging lightly while checking the map, he soon arrived at the site of his first battle.
The bloodstain was still there, making it very easy to find.
He used the Butchery skill on the corpse fragments and separated the Magic Stone.
With that, the lingering, grimy feeling that had plagued his right foot was finally gone.
He felt a strange mix of relief and nostalgia.
Though the trace is gone, the experience that stained my right foot red has become a part of me and will live on inside me forever.
Thank you for everything, you son of a bitch!
Guwon fought back the tears welling up for some reason, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and quickly left the spot.
Of course, he didn't do anything like a deep bow.
Even he wasn't crazy enough to give a deep bow to a vanished corpse in a dungeon. Someone might see him, so there was no way he’d do something like that.
After walking a bit, his pounding heart calmed down, and he felt the need to set a new goal.
He had failed to check the market prices earlier, but common sense dictated that a few hours of hunting near the dungeon entrance wouldn't be enough to cover lodging, meals, and drinks on top of that.
If it were that easy, every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be rushing to become an adventurer.
Should I try going down to the next floor?
He didn't know the way, but in a dungeon this vast, there couldn't be just one path down. If he kept walking, he was bound to find one eventually.
How long had he been walking aimlessly?
He hadn't felt like he was descending at all, but at some point, the map had switched over.
It seemed this dungeon wasn't structured with perfectly separated floors, but rather with naturally sloping paths that led gradually downward.
It was so natural that if the map hadn't suddenly changed, he wouldn't have even known he'd descended.
He had a feeling that understanding the dungeon's structure was going to be much harder than he thought.
More than that, it had taken a considerable amount of time to get here.
It couldn't be helped, since just like before, he had been revealing the map by moving in expanding circles from the entrance.
It was a tedious method, but as long as he planned on coming to the dungeon more than once, it was best to conduct basic exploration this way.
Doing this would allow him to take the shortest route from the entrance to the next floor from now on. And more importantly, his gamer's desire for perfection made him want to reveal every nook and cranny of the map anyway.
Of course, in a dungeon this ridiculously huge, where even the end of the first floor was unknown, it would probably be impossible to reveal the entire map even in a lifetime. But at the very least, revealing the areas he frequented would surely come in handy someday.
Woof! Woof!
The scenery hadn't changed, and he hadn't felt himself descending, so it didn't quite feel real, but it seemed he had definitely made it to the next floor.
A Wolfdog, a monster he had never encountered before, had appeared.
And not just one, but two at the same time.
They were probably opponents he could more than handle at his current level, but since it was his first time seeing them, he tensed up slightly and clenched his fists.
“Alright, come at me whenever you’re ready.”
As if they understood his words, the two of them charged the moment he finished speaking.
They’re fast!
When he first met the rabbit, he had felt it was fast for a low-level monster, even for him at level ten-something.
But the Wolfdogs were closing in at a speed that surpassed even that.
But I’m not one to panic over something like this.
I still have a trump card up my sleeve.
Secret Technique: Allocate Bonus Stats!
Before the Wolfdogs reached him, he invested some of his remaining bonus stats into Agility, and their closing speed became slow enough for him to easily react.
He sidestepped the Wolfdog that leaped for his waist and hit it with a knee kick. Then, as the other Wolfdog came in aiming for his shoulder, he smashed its head with his elbow. For good measure, he unleashed a series of Low Kicks on the two that had fallen to the ground.
Yeah! I'm on fire! Wasn't that cool as hell?
Isn't this what they mean in martial arts novels, that state where your body reacts the moment you think?
Awoooooo~!
While he was briefly reveling in his own coolness, one of the Wolfdogs he thought was dead got up, tilted its head back, and howled as if it were a real wolf. He finished it off with another Low Kick.
This little shit doesn't know how to read the room when someone's trying to enjoy the moment.
No longer in the mood to admire himself, he used his Butchery skill to check the corpse. Its balls were glowing.
Seriously? Even if it's a corpse, isn't it too cruel to castrate it?
More importantly, do I have to touch a dead dog’s balls?
Did that moment of hesitation prove to be his undoing?
Before he knew it, a pack of Wolfdogs had surrounded him.
One, two, three… twelve of them?
Haha. I guess you heard your friend's cry, huh?
But there are a lot of you.
Didn't your momma ever tell you ganging up on someone is bad?