Chapter 37
After I finished the handbook, I moved to another location.
That was because it had advised me to inject mana somewhere with no people around.
Luckily, there was a perfect spot nearby.
Hwayeomsan Dungeon.
Or, more precisely, the B-class Hwayeomsan Dungeon.
It had once been the Seoul World Cup Stadium, until a B-class gate burst and turned the place into a dungeon.
As the name suggested, it was a mountain that spewed flame.
Most of the monsters living there were wrapped in fire, and the most numerous of them were Flame Golems.
Because the heat was more than just oppressive, because it was suffocatingly hot and the monsters had ridiculous defenses, hunters didn’t come here often.
Every so often, only Association hunters came to hunt the golems down before the dungeon mana could overflow.
“Phew. This should be far enough, right?”
I passed the mana cooler set up to keep the flames from spreading and climbed the mountain for about ten minutes.
Thanks to my passive skill, the fire of Hwayeomsan had absolutely no effect on me.
Still, breathing was strangely difficult.
It seemed the blazing flames had thinned the oxygen in the air.
I sat down on a rock that wasn’t on fire and rested my butt on it.
The stone was hot, probably because everything around me was burning.
“…Huh?”
Suddenly, my body tilted.
I hurriedly caught my balance before I could slide off the rock.
“…Crap.”
What I’d been sitting on wasn’t a rock.
It was a Flame Golem’s head.
The one that had been sleeping woke up because I’d plopped down on its skull.
Thwack!
Before it could fully wake up, I smashed its head with Warm Touch.
The Flame Golem died from that one blow, its head and the red core inside it shattered at once.
Thud.
Its body turned back into a huge rock.
“You startled me…”
I muttered and glanced around, half expecting other golems to appear.
All I heard was the crackle of flames licking over the stones.
The golems were the sort of creatures that only slept in their own territories until something happened.
Now that I’d dealt with the one under my ass, there shouldn’t be any others nearby.
“Shall I begin…? Volume One of the Manager’s Handbook.”
After checking the area, I activated the skill.
The handbook of the Manager floated in midair.
I opened it and flipped quickly toward the back.
I stopped turning pages when I reached the section that explained how to inject mana.
[How to Inject Mana into the Body]
[The method commonly known as "pruning" is very simple.]
[You need only caress your body with Warm Touch.]
[Of course, remember that you must touch exactly 108 places.]
[The next page will explain in detail with illustrations.]
That was why I’d opened the handbook again even though I’d already read it.
I had to tap exactly 108 spots on my body, and there was no way I could memorize all of that at once.
While I took off all my armor and stuffed it into my magic pouch, I thought about how the hell I was supposed to tap myself.
The handbook clearly said that I only had to touch the places indicated, and the order didn’t matter at all.
I decided to start with my left leg and work my way upward slowly.
“…Is this really right?”
Half doubtful, I carefully tapped my entire body.
After I finished, even my head included, I waited a little.
Because the handbook said:
[If you wait a little, blue dots will appear where you tapped.]
“Oh.”
Sure enough, that was exactly what happened.
After quietly waiting for about ten seconds, blue dots began to rise from my left ankle.
One by one, they started appearing, slowly filling my body.
And then,
Bang!
“……?”
It exploded.
My left ankle.
The part below it exploded and vanished.
Red blood sprayed over the rocks.
Why? Why was it exploding?
That question ruled my head for a moment, then disappeared.
A little time passed, and an even greater pain came rushing in.
And not only that, the pain didn’t end with one blast.
The part above my ankle started exploding too.
Apparently, it was blowing apart in the order I’d tapped myself.
“Wai-! Then…”
That meant my head was going to explode too!
I gritted my teeth so hard I couldn’t even mutter.
My knees were going now, and then...
[Nothing is gained without pain.]
[Endure this pain and be reborn as a true Manager.]
[I, Dishing Na Tor, sincerely hope for it.]
Those words appeared in the blank space of the book.
That bastard?
Curse words jumped out of my mouth on their own.
“You son of a bitch, aaaagh!”
[Hey now, don’t insult your senior.]
[I’ve gone through this pain too, so I understand your feelings well enough.]
[Back in my day, you know...]
Unfortunately, even with my rage boiling over, I couldn’t get the full insult out.
The pain was too much, so all that came out was a scream.
Now I understood why it had told me to inject mana somewhere with no people around.
Of course it hadn’t been possible to have someone do this where people could see, not with my body exploding like this!
I couldn’t even imagine how worried Do-hee and Tae-cheon would have been if they’d seen me like this.
They would’ve blamed the World Tree and said I should delete it from my smartphone right away.
[Saessak of the World Tree asks Manager Baek Do-woon if he is all right.]
[Saessak is sorry that it cannot understand why the Manager is in pain.]
No, Saessak. What the hell does that even mean?
You saw this and still don’t understand why I’m in pain?
Who on earth could feel fine with their arms and legs flying off…?
[Saessak sends encouragement to the Manager.]
Ah. Right.
Saessak wasn’t human.
It was a tree.
A tree doesn’t ache or suffer just because a leaf falls off or a branch breaks.
Now I understood why that gentleman named Dishing had described this method in the handbook as “pruning.”
While I was suffering and gaining profound enlightenment, a thudding sound came closer.
“Hhkh, go... golems?”
Several Flame Golems were running straight toward me.
My shouting and flailing had woken the others nearby.
Looking at those golems, I somehow became even more curious about Dishing’s face.
At the very least, couldn’t he have mentioned that it would hurt?
If he had, I would’ve done this pruning thing alone in my room at home instead of out in a dungeon!
[That’s what happened, yes.]
[Oh? Are you complaining that I didn’t warn you it would be painful?]
[If so, I’d say I had my reasons.]
[Your heart may have been too weak to carry out pruning if you’d known in advance.]
[Since this is something the World Tree Manager must do, I merely concealed it for a moment...]
[As a junior, I hope you will generously understand and forgive your senior’s deep consideration.]
“You’re full of crap!”
Deep consideration from a senior?
Generously understand and forgive as a junior?
If he really thought I’d do that, then Dishing had made a serious mistake.
I wasn’t that kind of person.
From tonight onward, I was going to shower that man with every curse and hex I could think of every single day!
“Uuunnngh...!”
A Flame Golem swung a red-hot arm at me.
What got shattered, of course, wasn’t my face but the arm that had tried to hit it.
Actually, the golems’ attacks themselves weren’t the real problem.
I could block them just fine with bark armor.
The problem was that I still had to breathe.
No matter how far my recovery exceeded even a troll’s, I couldn’t survive without breathing.
If enough flame-spewing golems gathered here, they might strip all the oxygen from the place.
I needed to move somewhere else before that happened.
As I was trying to roll away, I saw green sprouts pushing up beneath the Flame Golem’s feet.
Had I summoned Saessak?
“……!”
No, that wasn’t Saessak.
I didn’t know how, but grass was growing out of the blood I’d spilled.
That wasn’t all.
Young trees were sprouting too, as if saplings had been planted in the ground.
The grass and trees that grew that way spread their seeds and brought forth still more plants.
“What in the world is going on….”
I stared at the scene, and then I lost consciousness.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t endure the pain.
It was simply my turn.
My turn to explode.
Yes.
The last thing I’d tapped was my head, and that had finally blown apart.
“Ahh, that’s refreshing.”
I came out of the shower and wiped the water from my hair and body with a towel.
As I pulled my clothes on roughly, I headed for the living room.
I could hear a man’s voice blaring from the TV.
“An unbelievable thing has happened.”
After saying that much, the male anchor on TV rattled off the details of the report.
All the Flame Golems that had lived in the dungeon were gone, the blistering heat had disappeared, and a forest that gave off warm energy had grown in its place.
The caption at the bottom kept scrolling the words, “Dungeon disappears overnight!”
“Hmm. Hmm.”
I cleared my throat twice and sat down on the sofa.
The reason that dungeon had disappeared, as the news was blabbing about, was none other than me.
The plants I’d seen sprouting before I lost consciousness had kept going until they became a dense forest.
It had been as if the dungeon’s mana was food, and they’d just devoured all of it.
When pruning was over, Hwayeomsan was gone without a trace and only a thick forest remained, and I’d been so stunned...
After that, the news had gone on exactly as it was now.
The dungeon had completely lost its function and become a forest emitting warm energy.
That warm energy was probably the World Tree’s mana.
“I erased a dungeon, huh...”
Up until now, there had never been a case of a dungeon simply vanishing.
Not even after the entire world had worked together, studying every possible method of destroying them and throwing every effort it had into the problem.
People had even run mana generators, one of modern science’s inventions, for a full year in an attempt to suppress dungeon energy, but it had all been useless.
About twenty years ago, a Tibetan master known as a living Buddha had even prayed through three thousand prostrations.
For a while, sacred energy had stayed and then departed, but the dungeon itself had not disappeared.
So I could understand why the news was screaming the same thing over and over like that.
A dungeon that had refused to disappear no matter what anyone did had vanished overnight and turned into a forest.
If I hadn’t known that the person who did it was me, I would’ve found it amazing too.
I would’ve called Do-hee and Tae-cheon to ask if they’d seen the TV.
Come to think of it, that was a little strange.
Such a huge thing had happened, and yet why hadn’t the two of them contacted me?
Had they not seen the news yet?
Ding-dong.
The sound of the doorbell erased my question.
I pressed the intercom on the living room table and checked who had come.
In the holographic image showing the front of the door stood a man I had never seen before in my life.
Thinking he might be one of Do-hee’s guests, I hit the connect button.
“Yes, who is it?”
“Hello. I’m Choi Gi-woo, team leader of the Hunter Management Team 4 at the Hunter Association.”
Through the lens, I met Team Leader Choi Gi-woo’s eyes.
His employee badge hanging from his neck said Hunter Association.
If he was from the Hunter Association, then he was here to see Do-hee, just as I’d expected.
That was unfortunate.
If he’d come thirty minutes earlier, he could have met her.
Do-hee had gone to work by the time I got home.
When she saw my clothes stained red from pruning, I expected her to scold me for coming back hurt like that, but thankfully she didn’t.
She only added, “Please take better care of your body...”
Maybe she thought that because my recovery had gotten better, I didn’t worry much about getting hurt.
There was some truth to that, admittedly.
“Do-hee isn’t here. She’s already gone to work.”
- Huh? Ah, no. I came to see Baek Do-woon.
“Me?”
Why would the Hunter Association be looking for me? What had I done?
[Due to the recent disappearance of the dungeon, the President has issued a special investigation order.]
A news anchor’s voice sounded in my ear.
No way... they hadn’t figured out that was my doing, had they?