“Th-that thing…is alive, right?”
Unlike Han Jaeyeong, who stammered despite themself at the shocking sight, Jeong Daon remained calm. “It doesn’t look like an undead monster. There’s no system message.”
“That’s a pretty brutal joke…”
Even as they said that, Han Jaeyeong cautiously approached the figure. Just as Jeong Daon had said, there was no system message identifying it as a monster, so it did seem to be human…but the form was far too grotesque to be confident it really was a person. Its body was so dried out that even its gender was impossible to tell. If a mummy could move on its own, this was probably what it would look like.
“Hey…are you okay?”
At the sound of Han Jaeyeong’s voice, the unidentified being suddenly lifted its head. It looked no different from a corpse, yet a fleeting spark of awareness flashed in the eyes when they spotted another person.
“Ggh… ggeeeeurgh…!”
Letting out a sound as if trying to speak, it barely managed to stretch out a hand, but lacking even the strength to form words, it soon collapsed limply back to the ground. It looked like a fish dragged out of water.
“Ghk… ghk…”
“At least it seems to be human.”
Han Jaeyeong immediately took out a potion. With someone this completely exhausted, recovery magic could actually do more harm than good. They straightened the body that had been crawling on the ground and pressed the potion to its lips. The ragged breathing slowly returned to normal. At the same time, a hint of reason returned to the once-vacant eyes.
Not missing that moment, Han Jaeyeong quickly asked, “Try to focus. What’s your name? Where were you being held?”
“Ggh… ugh… s-save me…”
“Do you know where you are right now?”
“Th-this… I-I… I won’t do it again…”
The answers didn’t match the questions, and the person’s cognitive state clearly wasn’t normal. It was obvious this wasn’t something a potion alone could fix.
Han Jaeyeong turned to look at Jeong Daon, who had been silently observing the situation.
“It’ll put a strain on their body, but even so, we should use recovery magic—”
“Aaagh—! Hngh—aaaagh!”
“Wh-what the—?”
The patient, who had been lying there without strength just moments ago, suddenly began screaming. Han Jaeyeong hurriedly tried to restrain them, but the resistance was so fierce it was hard to believe where that strength was even coming from.
“N-no! No! I said nooooo!”
“Calm down. You’re safe now—!”
“Aaaah! Nooooo!”
Thud! Thud!
Perhaps because Han Jaeyeong had grabbed their limbs, the human, dried out like a mummy, suddenly began smashing their head against the ground. It was grotesque beyond words. In the end, just as Han Jaeyeong was about to knock them out to stop it—
Thump.
“…They’ve stopped breathing.”
The body went completely limp. To suddenly go on a violent rampage and then die like that… It was a hollow, pointless death. And profoundly bizarre. Bringing them back to consciousness with the potion had been fine, so what on earth had triggered this?
Remaining silent, Han Jaeyeong searched the lifeless body. What they found in the pockets were an old receipt for a hamburger, a few losing instant lottery tickets, and a crumpled flyer advertising same-day loans, stuffed in carelessly. There was nothing else that could identify the person, leaving them with nothing but speculation.
“Looks like they were suffering from financial hardship. If it’s anything like that alchemist earlier, you could say they came through a similar route.”
Wasn’t Lee Yunho the same? Someone who’d been struggling financially before accepting Shining’s offer? It was too early to be certain, but this unknown corpse likely had entered the dungeon through a similar path.
"I agree." Jeong Daon nodded. “People crushed by poverty are easy to lure in. And if they were being chased by debt, no one would’ve come looking even if they suddenly disappeared.”
Given that Jeong Daon herself had lived through severe financial hardship before awakening as a Hunter, the words carried weight.
Han Jaeyeong added, “And…it was only for a brief moment before death, but I saw mana trying to move inside the body.” They didn’t know the person’s rank, but if their mana had moved at all, it was certain the deceased had been a Hunter in life. “With low-rank Hunters, it’s even harder to notice when they go missing. They can get caught up in a dungeon and die without anyone ever knowing…”
“A Hunter, huh.”
Jeong Daon gazed down at the body sprawled on the ground, her expression thoughtful. Yet there was little to no trace of sympathy on her face. Instead, a cold air lingered around her, as though she were looking at an inanimate object.
That was what confused Han Jaeyeong. When you looked at her like this, she wasn’t some pushover like Yu Hanul.
“Step aside for a moment. I’ll take a look.”
After saying that, Jeong Daon reached out toward the dried, shriveled corpse without the slightest hesitation.
Whoooosh!
For a brief moment, mana surged around Jeong Daon, then quickly settled.
The way she used magic was so natural it hardly seemed worth remarking on anymore.
“Did you examine the mana circuits?”
“Yeah. You didn’t look like you had any intention of doing even this basic spell. What are you even doing? You tried it on Jeong Dajeong.”
“In a situation like this, it’s better to conserve mana… so what did you find?”
After withdrawing her hand, Jeong Daon spoke calmly. “There isn’t a single drop of mana left in the body.”
Han Jaeyeong wasn’t stupid enough to miss the implication. No matter how low-ranked a Hunter was, as long as they had mana circuits, some mana would normally remain in their body, just like blood continues to circulate in a living person. The complete absence of mana was clearly unnatural.
“Could they have been hit with some kind of energy drain?”
It was rare, but monsters with mana-drain abilities did exist. Han Jaeyeong knew this from reports. People who were unlucky enough to run into demonic monsters like vampires or succubi sometimes ended up like this.
In theory, if a monster absorbed all of someone’s mana, it could result in a state like this…
“If a monster had done it, the dungeon’s synchronization rate wouldn’t have increased.”
“So it was artificially drained, then. But why? What use would anyone have for a low-rank Hunter’s mana?”
“Why are you asking me?”
After answering coldly, Jeong Daon pulled out her phone and took a photo of the corpse’s face.
“What are you doing?”
“We need at least a photo of the face to report it. We can’t exactly carry the body out.”
“Oh, Yu Hanul would’ve somehow carried it out anyway.”
“Yu Hanul would. But I have a fragile body, and who knows what might happen. I can’t afford to waste my stamina. What about you?”
“I’m already busy lugging around a bomb of a burden myself.”
If there had been even a chance to save them, it might have been different, but neither of them intended to take risks just to transport a body that was already dead.
After a brief moment of silence, Han Jaeyeong turned away. “We don’t know what else might show up, so let’s proceed with an even more thorough search.”
Still, aside from that shocking encounter, they found nothing else. If someone had been detained here and died, there had to be a place nearby where they’d been held. But no matter how much they searched the village, nothing fit. Dungeons were other worlds to begin with, but this place must have once been a very ordinary village even among those other worlds.
“Wait.” At that moment, Jeong Daon quietly raised a hand. “Looks like my kid found something.”
“Meoww.”
The voice of a feline being excessively affectionate drifted over. It seemed Leo had finished scouting. Sitting quietly between the alleys, he looked exactly like a witch’s ominous familiar.
“What did you find?”
At Jeong Daon’s gentle coaxing, Leo flicked his tail and trotted ahead, taking the lead. Following behind the small cat felt a bit ridiculous, but they had no other choice.
"This..."
“If there’s another way, say so.”
“…Let’s follow it for now.”
With no other choice, they followed Leo, and before they knew it, they had left the village.
The place where Leo—looking as though he’d grown about a handspan larger than before they entered the dungeon—stopped was a small well that appeared to have been abandoned for a long time. Above the well, its wooden roof had completely collapsed inward.
Jeong Daon tilted her head slightly. "Clear it."
“Aren’t I the boss here?”
“I’m a bomb of a burden, what do you expect me to do…”
Instead of answering, Han Jaeyeong kicked the wooden planks blocking the well out of the way.
Bang!
Dust billowed up as the wood shattered, and Leo coughed softly.
Peering down into the well, it was pitch-black, with no light reaching the bottom. Jeong Daon asked Leo, “You’re saying there’s something inside the well?”
“Meow.”
“That’s what he says.”
“Can we really trust that cat? You two aren’t teaming up to mess with me, are you…?”
“Grrrr.” Leo bristled, arching his back and glaring at Han Jaeyeong.
Han Jaeyeong let out a sigh. Honestly, they didn’t want to go down there, but at this point, it didn’t seem like they could avoid it.
Risking this just to satisfy curiosity really doesn’t feel worth it.
Han Jaeyeong first pulled an item from their inventory, ignoring Jeong Daon’s pointed stare. They opened the lid of a glass bottle and sprinkled the powder inside down into the well. As it fell into the darkness, it sparkled faintly as it drifted downward.
The well wasn’t as deep as they’d expected. The powder settled on the bottom without moving, which meant it was a dry well with no water.
“…Isn’t there another way? The person we saw earlier wouldn’t have crawled out through a well like this.”
“Probably not. But we couldn’t find anything else. Want me to go down first?”
“…I’ll go.”
No matter how uneasy
they
felt, Han Jaeyeong wasn’t about to make someone so much younger take the lead. In the end,
they
dropped down into the well themself.
Thud.
Once at the bottom, it turned out to be less cramped than it had looked from above. Han Jaeyeong looked up.
“You can come down—ah.”
They’d tried to brace her landing, but Jeong Daon ignored their and landed lightly on her own. The ease of her landing made
them
wonder, could someone really change that much with just a week of training?
Maybe she really is a good match with Yu Hanul.
As those pointless thoughts crossed
their
mind, the glowing powder scattered across the ground began to dance with light. It was starmoss, a dungeon plant that needed little more than a bit of moisture to survive. Above all else, its greatest advantage was how quickly it spread.
Following the moisture in the well, the glowing starmoss spread in an instant. As it did, the dark interior of the well was revealed.
“There’s a passage.”
At the bottom of the well, a long passage stretched out; no one knew where it led. It was narrow and low, barely tall enough for an adult man to pass through with his knees bent. In the past, some Western villages had built escape tunnels beneath wells to flee beyond the village in case of invasion. This might have been a passage built for that same purpose.
"I'll go first."
With that, Han Jaeyeong moved ahead, carefully advancing through the passage. It was an unavoidable choice, given how cramped it was, barely wide enough for a single person. The damp air clung unpleasantly to them, and if they straightened their back even a little, they’d smash their head.
“So then… an experimental facility inside a tunnel like this? Hm. No matter how you look at it, it seems unhygienic. I doubt you’d get proper research results in a place this contaminated.”
The hypothesis they’d formed earlier was starting to feel increasingly questionable. No matter how they looked at it, modern Korean researchers wouldn’t use a place like this as a lab.
This place was more like…
“An abandoned path that monsters have made a nest in. Injured monsters sometimes hide like this.”
“That’s ominous.”
“What, are you scared?”
“That doesn’t explain the dungeon’s synchronization rate. Anyway, there has to be people somewhere—”
Jeong Daon, who had been following behind, abruptly fell silent. At the same moment, Han Jaeyeong, who was in front, also stopped walking.
“That is…”
At the end of the dark, narrow passage, water dripped steadily onto the floor. The grown starmoss faintly illuminated something at the far end of the passage. What lay beyond was a vast cavern. And at its center, there was unmistakably the shape of a human.
Han Jaeyeong narrowed their eyes and stared. And the moment the two of them recognized the human form—
The system has detected hostility toward the user.
A “Soul Core” has been discovered.
A new monster not registered in the system has appeared.
Dungeon difficulty is being recalculated.