The starting chamber was unnaturally quiet.
The glow of the circular pattern had already faded, leaving only a few faint lines etched into the flagstones, as if that impossible return had only ever been an illusion.
Nobody spoke.
Serin sat where she was, her oak staff laid across her lap. Her hands were still shaking, though her breathing had steadied somewhat since the moment she’d come back. Barton leaned against the wall, eyes fixed on his right arm, opening and closing his fist over and over, slow and deliberate, as if he couldn’t quite trust that the arm was still in one piece.
Asar was crouched next to Tyren, checking him over.
Tyren normally hated being fussed over like this, but for once he sat still and let it happen. He just stared down at his own chest as Asar pulled his shirt aside, checking whether any wound remained.
There wasn’t one.
No sign he’d been injured at all.
The spot where the broken sword had crushed him moments earlier was now whole, untouched, like nothing had ever happened there.
Asar was silent for a few seconds before he tugged Tyren’s shirt back into place.
“You all remember what just happened, don’t you?” Rayne said slowly.
His voice came out low, and not quite steady.
“I — I just remember shoving Serin out of the way,” Tyren said. His face drained of color in an instant. “After that, nothing.”
Serin flinched. Her eyes reddened, tears welling up, but she nodded. Barton said nothing, only lifted his gaze to meet Rayne’s.
Asar straightened up and let out a slow breath.
“That kind of pain. It didn’t feel like the kind you make up in your head.”
Rayne leaned against the wall and closed his eyes.
Which meant: that whole thing hadn’t been some hallucination he’d had alone.
They had really… died. Just now.
And then woken up again, here in the starting chamber.
“I’ve been an adventurer for nearly ten years.” Rayne folded his arms. “I’ve never even heard of anything like this.”
“Is this… a miracle?” Serin asked quietly.
Nobody answered her.
Any other day, Tyren would have come up with some flippant remark by now. But he just sat there on the floor, staring blankly at his own chest, and finally muttered:
“What I actually want to know is whether I’m still alive. Like, for real. We’re not gonna step out of the dungeon and just —”
Serin lunged forward and clapped a hand over his mouth. Through her tears, she made a small, raw sound. “Don’t say things like that… you’re okay, that’s what matters.”
Tyren froze, then gently pulled her hand down and gave her something like a smile.
Rayne pressed a thumb between his brows. His head was still aching faintly, not severely, but somewhere deep inside there was a low, persistent hum. Even so, his symptoms were clearly milder than the others’.
Tyren tried to stand up and almost dropped straight back down again. Serin caught him in time. Barton looked fine on the surface, but he still hadn’t stopped flexing his right hand.
“Fatigue, dizziness, headaches. But no external injuries.” Asar took quick stock. “Barton aside, those seem to be the symptoms across the board.”
“For now,” Rayne repeated.
He looked around at the group. His tone slowed, became deliberately softer than before.
“No severe reactions. That’s good. But don’t take it for granted. If anything feels off, you say so immediately.”
“Got it.”
They glanced at one another and nodded.
Just then, Asar seemed to remember something. He looked down and checked the side of his waist.
“Our gear,” he said, his expression changing. “Check your gear.”
The whole party started checking.
The results came quickly. Their bodies had come back unharmed, and their clothing was intact.
Anything carried on their person that hadn’t been broken seemed to have come back with them too.
But whatever had been destroyed in the fight was gone.
Rayne’s sword was technically still there, but the cracks running through the blade and the bent grip made it clear the weapon was finished.
Tyren’s face crumpled.
“My dagger…”
Serin opened her mouth to comfort him, then thought better of it and closed it again.
Tyren liked to show that dagger off, but he’d also treasured it.
Barton stared in silence at the empty side of his left arm, where his shield should have been hanging.
The only one who hadn’t taken a real loss was Asar. He’d slid his sword back into its sheath before the end.
Rayne’s headache got worse.
“Good news first. We’ve confirmed the good news.” He gave them a bitter smile. “Now let’s talk about the bad news. Any of you actually got the coin to buy new gear?”
All four of them went silent at the same time.
Tyren looked away. Serin glanced at Tyren. Barton didn’t say anything, but his broad shoulders sagged a little.
The answer was obvious.
Asar’s eyes swept around the chamber and stopped abruptly on one of the corners.
He walked over quickly and picked up a small linen sack from the floor.
“This thing… anyone see it when we came in?”
Everyone followed his gaze.
It was a small, battered linen sack, the mouth tied shut with rough cord, unremarkable in every possible way.
Asar hefted it in his hand.
Something inside shifted with a faint clicking sound, like stones knocking together.
Tyren blinked. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Asar didn’t open it right away. He looked at Rayne first.
Rayne nodded.
The cord came undone slowly. Asar tipped the mouth of the sack open, and several hazy blue magic crystals tumbled into his palm.
Everyone in the chamber seemed to stop breathing for a second.
They were the same crystals the party had collected from the Desiccated Corpses.
Rayne took them and counted, his frown deepening.
Asar was quiet for a moment. “We killed twenty of them.”
“Half are missing.” Rayne nodded.
“The question is, why are they here?”
Tyren stared at the sack. His throat worked.
“They shouldn’t be here… When we died, the loot should’ve dropped back there.”
Silence settled over the room again.
Rayne braced his chin in one hand.
Coming back from the dead was already strange beyond words.
And now, with a sack of returned loot in front of them, things had gotten more complicated still.
The most direct way to confirm the rules would obviously be to have someone walk back in with the loot and see what happened.
But Rayne glanced at the others. His fingers tightened around the pendant on his chest.
No one could guarantee the miracle would happen a second time.
And he couldn’t put their lives on the line just to find out.
In the end, he set the thought aside. He pulled the cord tight again and tucked the sack inside his coat.
“Either way, we take it back with us.” He looked up and clapped once, drawing their eyes back to him. “Don’t touch it until the Guild’s had a look.”
He paused, then glanced at Tyren and Barton.
“If we get to keep it in the end, it goes toward replacing the gear we lost.”
Rayne turned and looked at the gate set into the wall. Its faint glow hadn’t gone out.
“Let’s head back.”
“Was about to suggest the same thing,” Tyren muttered.
Asar and Serin helped Tyren to his feet together. No one objected.
“One more thing.” Rayne paused. “If we end up coming back here again, don’t treat the resurrection as a given.”
Tyren didn’t argue this time.
He just glanced at the faded circular pattern in the center of the chamber and said quietly:
“Don’t worry.”
He patted the empty back of his belt.
“That’s not something I want to feel a second time.”
Rayne didn’t say anything more.
He took one last look around the chamber, too quiet by half, confirmed everyone could still walk, and led the party back through the gate set into the wall.
White light swallowed them.
The starting chamber settled back into silence.
◆ ◆ ◆
In the Core Chamber, Owen stayed quiet for a while.
He’d expected to feel relieved.
After all, Trial Return had worked. All five adventurers had walked out of his dungeon alive. By any reasonable accounting, this should count as the first genuinely successful day of operations since he’d opened for business.
Provided you didn’t hold it against him that he’d very nearly pulped his entire opening-day playtest team in the process.
If he’d been an honest-to-god murder dungeon, that would have been one thing. But he wasn’t. And if he scared every customer he had into never coming back, what was he supposed to maintain this place with? Good intentions?
The management interface unfolded in front of him. Lines of system prompts scrolled past one after another, like ticker text.
[Trial Complete]
[Challengers: 5]
[Challenger Status: All Incapacitated]
[Trial Return: Successful]
[Calculating Trial Yields…]
Owen locked his attention onto those lines. The light inside the crystal wavered, uneasy.
Come on, come on, come on, give me a little extra, just a little…
He didn’t feel like some imposing dungeon master at the moment. Not in the slightest.
More like a wage slave hunched in front of an ATM at the end of the month, waiting for the paycheck to clear before the bills could siphon it all off first.
Soon enough, new numbers came popping up one after another.
[Emotional Fluctuation Yield: 382]
[Death Threshold Yield: 265]
[Loot Reclamation: 20]
[Total Trial Yield: 667]
[Current Soul Energy: 680]
The Core Chamber fell quiet for a beat.
Then Owen’s crystal flashed, again and again, in the wholly undignified manner of someone who’d just had a small fortune fall on his head out of nowhere.
“Jackpot.”
He breathed it out softly.
“I hit the jackpot. More than I started with. Ha. Hahaha —”
From a dozen-odd points of energy to nearly seven hundred. If he’d still been alive with a face attached, he would not have been able to wipe the grin off it.
Once he’d calmed down enough to actually read the numbers, though, the emotional yield generated during the adventurers’ exploration had come in significantly higher than what he’d gotten from outright killing them.
Hmm. Maybe there was a strategy worth tuning in that direction.
On the other hand, because of Trial Return, the Death Threshold Yield had been cut clean in half.
“But if they walk out alive, that’s sustainable resource management,” Owen grumbled. “I’m not some monster who throws perfectly good adventurers in the trash after one use.”
He sulked under his breath for a moment, then moved on to the next line.
[Loot Reclamation Rate: 50%]
[Unreclaimed Loot Returned to Challengers]
[Estimated Loss: 20]
Owen barely reacted. He even started humming a little tune that didn’t quite hold together as a melody. Numbers like this were pocket change at his current scale. Pocket change.
And besides, when he thought about Cassandre, he started feeling a little too guilty to say much of anything.
He genuinely hadn’t expected the thing to be that strong.
It had wiped the entire party with what amounted to basic attacks. If Rayne and the others had accidentally triggered any of the special mechanics he’d so painstakingly designed in, god only knew how messy it would have gotten.
He had no idea what the general skill level of adventurers around here even was. If most of them were comparable to Rayne’s group, then sticking Cassandre at the end of a Newborn Dungeon as a Gatekeeper had been, frankly, an act of pure cruelty.
The whole way in, the difficulty was a Sunday hike in the woods. And then, the second you stepped through the arch, it was a horror flick. Masked killer versus five unfortunate college kids.
A difficulty curve like that in a video game?
He could already picture the carnage in the review section.
A few sample comments drifted, fully formed, through his mind:
“Casual mode to hell mode in one chapter. Dev, who hurt you?”
“Refunded. Never preordering this studio again.”
“First 30 min I thought I bought a cozy game. After that it was straight Souls-tier.”
Owen had nothing to say to that.
All the same, asking him to scrap Cassandre right now, well, he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it either.
Just then, the management interface threw up a fresh prompt.
[Replenish Fallen Guards? Estimated Cost: 60 Soul Energy]
Owen stared at that line, the color of his core shifting by a faint shade. The cheer that had been bubbling up a moment ago cooled by several degrees.
He wasn’t going to restock all the guards at once, though. Half for now. After that he could think about gradually phasing in some new guards at slightly higher tiers.
That way the difficulty curve would smooth out properly. Then, later, he’d figure out a way to add more depth to the map.
…Hold on.
Suddenly there seemed to be a hell of a lot of things to handle.
The feeling threw him a little. It was uncomfortably close to how he’d felt in his old wage-slave days.
For a couple of seconds, Owen found himself missing the version of himself that had drifted around freely in the upper atmosphere with no responsibilities whatsoever.
But only for a couple of seconds.
After all, at least now he had something to do. Unlike back then, he’d been so bored he hadn’t even known where he was floating to half the time.
Even now that he’d turned into a glorified rock, he was still the same contrary, self-contradictory bastard he’d always been.
A low, idiotic chuckle echoed faintly through the Core Chamber.
◆ ◆ ◆
That lasted until the management interface threw up another new prompt.
[Dungeon Editing Interface Unlocked]
Owen’s laughter cut off.
Then the crystal grew noticeably brighter.
“Alright.”
“Version 0.1 patch: officially in development.”