In the meeting room on the Guild’s second floor, the mood was heavier than the sky outside.
Finn had been taken downstairs to rest. That left only Greer, Rayne, the Guild’s old healer-priest, Bram, and Camilla, the clerk handling the paperwork.
Bram dropped into a chair and tossed his reading glasses onto the table.
“He’s fine,” he said. “Body’s in great shape, no injuries. The only scar on him is one he’s had since he was a kid.”
“Then what’s with the face?” Greer shot him a look.
“Hold your horses. I wasn’t finished.” Bram frowned. “The body’s fine. The soul’s the problem.”
Rayne looked up.
“I’ve been patching people up my whole life,” Bram said, his hands shaping something in the air as if gripping a thing no one else could see. “I’ve only seen this in old men with one foot in the grave. A kid of twenty, and his soul looks like a rag that’s been wrung out and rubbed raw. Not as bad as those old-timers. But close.”
“Will he recover?” Rayne asked.
“No idea.” Bram spread his hands, blunt about it. “Whether he heals or just gets worse, I can’t tell you. All I can do is keep an eye on him. Tell him to stay put for a few days, and above all stay out of that cursed place.”
Greer didn’t answer. His fingers tapped at the table, one beat at a time.
So it didn’t kill you. But it could leave Soul Damage behind?
“Take a look at Rayne, then.”
Greer pulled Rayne over from where he’d been standing and sat him down in the chair beside Bram.
“Mm. Let’s have a look…” Bram picked up his reading glasses and peered at Rayne. A pale green light flickered faintly in his eyes. After a while he nodded. “Nothing wrong here. Body’s good, soul’s normal.”
Greer clapped his hands once, sharp and loud.
“Good.” His eyes lit up a touch. “Then at least this kind of damage isn’t irreversible.”
Bram snorted.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Rayne died once. That kid died twice in a short span. Big difference.”
To Greer, that was still tremendous news.
But he reined the smile back in quickly.
He wasn’t about to trust a dungeon that easily.
“Guildmaster.”
Camilla, silent until now, finally spoke.
Her face was set, giving nothing away, her gaze flat as it rested on Greer.
“Let me say this up front,” she said. “This is more than our Blackstone branch can carry.”
Greer raised his eyes.
“A dungeon that resurrects people, hands out magic crystals with ease, and changes shape by the day.” Camilla had raised a finger for each point. “By Guild regulations, a case like this has to be reported to headquarters in the Royal Capital today.”
“I know.”
“Sit on this and don’t report it, and if something goes wrong, I can’t carry the blame for it.”
“And if we do report it?”
Rayne’s voice was steady, with the faintest tremor underneath.
“Headquarters sends people. The nobles might pull the whole lockdown routine. The army might even stick its nose in.” Rayne’s jaw tightened. “And then this dungeon has nothing to do with Blackstone Town anymore.”
He paused.
“We’re the ones who went in first. We’re the ones who traded our lives for what we know. And we’ll be the ones left without so much as a scrap at the end of it.”
Camilla pressed her lips together. “I understand what you mean. But it’s regulation. It’s not ours to decide.”
“I’m not saying don’t report it.” Rayne shook his head. “But not before we understand what this dungeon is actually doing. If we send it up with no intel at all, we’ll just get brushed aside like we don’t matter. Figure out the situation first, and we keep at least some room to maneuver.”
The two of them had dug in on opposite sides, and both their gazes settled on Greer.
The old man stayed quiet.
He knew, better than anyone in the room, that Camilla was right.
What this dungeon had already shown was past the point where one ordinary branch Guildmaster could keep a lid on it.
And he was no longer The Silver Flash of his prime, just a worn-out relic who’d slid all the way back to Mid Bronze, scraping by at a remote branch. What right did he have to keep a prize on this scale clutched in his own hands?
By the book, reporting it was the correct move.
But what Rayne said did line up better with the interests of everyone in Blackstone Town.
The moment it got reported, Blackstone Town was out.
And worse, something about it didn’t sit right with him.
This dungeon was too far out of the ordinary. There was nothing like it on record.
Handing it off before they understood what it really was would be like shoving a live bomb into someone else’s arms.
Greer’s fingers stopped drumming on the table.
“Give me a week,” he said at last.
Both of them looked at him at once.
“Within a week, we nail down the dungeon’s rules at the very least.” Greer pushed down his irritation and kept his voice level. “The entry limits, the price of resurrection, and the root cause behind the way it changes. We learn as much as we can.”
He looked at Camilla.
“I’ll write the report. I’ll submit a complete investigation report, not a worthless sheet that says ‘we found a strange dungeon and know nothing else.’”
Camilla didn’t answer right away.
“A week is too long,” she said.
“It’s the shortest I can cut it to,” Greer said. “Any less than a week and we can’t even tell whether it changes from one day to the next.”
The meeting room went quiet for a moment.
Camilla pressed her lips together.
“…A week,” she said at last. “But I’m logging today’s events now, sealed as an internal record.”
Greer nodded.
“As you should.”
“Starting tomorrow, I’ll add to the investigation log every day.” Camilla fixed her eyes on him. “Seven days from now, however much you’ve turned up, this goes to headquarters together with your report. And if anything goes wrong in the meantime, I’ll state plainly in the record that it was your decision to hold off.”
“No argument here.”
Greer closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
“I’ll report to headquarters in person. I’ll take responsibility myself.”
The author shares this chapter on their official publication, but this copy was taken without permission; readers support them at the source.
At that, Camilla offered no more pushback.
She looked at this old Guildmaster, the one who leaned on a cane and couldn’t even straighten his back, opened her mouth, and in the end only drew a breath.
“All right.”
“Thanks.”
Bracing himself on his cane, he rose slowly to his feet.
“Rayne.”
“Here.”
“Starting tomorrow, your party comes with me. At least one expedition a day.” He paused. “This time we turn the place inside out. I want to know everything about it.”
“Understood.”
“And that kid, Finn,” Greer added. “Keep him in town, under Bram’s watch. Don’t let him out until his condition’s stable.”
Camilla took up her pen and noted it down.
Greer cast one last look out the window.
Clouds along the horizon had swallowed the setting sun. By the looks of it, a change in the weather was coming again.
He let out a soft sigh.
“One thing after another, isn’t it?”
Couldn’t an old man like him just be left to enjoy his twilight years in peace?
Honestly.
◆ ◆ ◆
That camp outside the dungeon went up faster than Owen had expected.
First thing in the morning it was just a few wooden stakes. By evening, a crude but respectable-looking camp stood squarely at his door.
Owen watched from the edge of his perception, thoroughly entertained.
“Fast workers.” He meant it. “The renovation crew back in my old life would’ve stalled you three weeks just on the estimate.”
He watched the workers hammer the last signboard into place, slap the dust off their hands, and knock off for the day, well satisfied. The signboard stood right in front of the portal, packed edge to edge with carved text.
Owen squinted at it for a good long while.
“…Can’t read a word of it.”
Never mind.
It probably wasn’t insulting him, at least.
From the day the camp was finished, adventurers started lining up outside.
They no longer mobbed the portal all at once. Under the direction of that old man with the cane and a stern-faced woman, they registered, took a token, and waited their turn.
The longer Owen watched, the less he knew whether to laugh or sigh.
“They really set up a take-a-number system for my crummy little dungeon, huh?”
He’d assumed these people meant to dig in for the long haul and clear him out in one go.
Looking at it now, this was no frontline staging ground.
It was a ticket booth, plain and simple.
“Hey, this works out nicely.” Owen brightened.
Someone else keeping order suited him just fine: it meant less work. If it stayed as chaotic as last time, he genuinely wouldn’t have known what to do.
It also settled his mind about something he’d been turning over for a while. He went ahead and officially enabled the limit.
[Entry Limit: 6]
[At Capacity, the Entrance Seals Temporarily and Reopens Once All Challengers Have Left]
“That’ll do.” Owen gave a couple of satisfied hums. “Six at a time, just like last round. Perfect. Not too crowded.”
When it came down to it, the reason for the rule was dead simple:
He had exactly one crummy canyon.
One dead-straight canyon, barely long enough to count as a dungeon.
The past couple of days, with that huge mob crowding around outside, Owen felt his nonexistent scalp crawl just imagining it.
Dozens of people would be crammed into the canyon so tightly they could barely turn around, let alone explore.
And every ambush he’d so carefully laid would be reduced to set dressing.
It might not take long for this crowd to scrape his dungeon clean.
And he wasn’t even sure he had a second reincarnation coming.
“This is a meticulously designed solo… no, small-party instance,” Owen thought, still rattled. “Not some anniversary blowout sale.”
As for whether anyone would actually die, Owen wasn’t so frantic about that anymore.
Trial Return had run cleanly several times now. As long as no one threw their life away over and over in a short window, the system should be able to handle it.
What he really needed to worry about was making the “experience” fun enough to keep adventurers coming back to spend.
“Right.” Owen rubbed his nonexistent hands together, settled his awareness over the entrance, and waited for that take-a-number system outside to send him his first batch of customers.
◆ ◆ ◆
Sure enough, before long, the camp began to stir.
The stern-faced woman stood in front of the gate with a stack of tokens, apparently checking names against a list. A few Guild clerks beside her spoke in low voices, pointing now and then at the white light and jotting something down.
Further back, a party of adventurers, geared up and ready, waited inside the fence line.
Owen counted them off.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
Good. Six people.
Two front-liners, an archer, a cleric, and two more who looked like melee support.
Not a bad setup, a good deal more sensible than the bunch who’d snuck in last night, at least.
“There we go.” Owen was in a good mood. “Now that’s a proper party.”
At a clerk’s signal, the six adventurers walked toward the portal in order, stepping into the white light one after another.
On the management interface, the numbers ticked over.
[Challengers Inside: 1/6]
[Challengers Inside: 6/6]
[Entry Limit Reached]
[Entrance Temporarily Sealed]
“Perfect.”
Then, the next second, one more person outside took half a step forward.
It was a young clerk clutching a clipboard, a leather bag over his shoulder, a little vial of ink at his waist. Head down sorting his papers, he plainly hadn’t noticed all six had already gone in, and simply followed the line forward out of habit.
Owen blinked.
“Uh.”
Thud.
The young clerk walked straight into it, smacking solidly into an invisible barrier.
He staggered back two steps clutching his nose, and his papers scattered across the ground.
“Ow!”
Outside the gate went quiet.
Owen: “…”
He paused, then muttered, a little guiltily:
“I thought the barrier would be gentler than that.”
The young clerk rubbed his nose, bewildered, and reached out to try again. The instant his palm touched the edge of the white light, a force pushed it back, soft but firm.
It simply wasn’t letting him in.
The adventurers in the camp stirred at once.
“What happened?”
“Is the gate broken?”
“What about the six who just went in?”
“Or can only one party go in at a time?”
The stern-faced woman stopped writing, looked up at the white light, frowned, and came over at a brisk walk.
Not far off, Greer had been resting on a wooden chair. Hearing the commotion, he pushed himself up on his cane.
“What’s going on?”
The woman reached the gate and glanced down at the young clerk holding his nose.
“The seventh person got blocked. Can’t get in.”
Greer’s expression darkened slightly.
“Six people.”
He looked at the calmly swirling white light and fell silent for a moment.
“It’s limiting how many can enter.”
The trouble was, there had been no such rule yesterday.
Or at least, they hadn’t caught it yesterday.
Camilla bent her head and wrote rapidly on her clipboard.
Greer let out a sigh.
“That may be for the best. Six at a time. If something goes sideways, at least it won’t be past saving.”
Once word spread, a low ripple of complaints went through the crowd.
“Six? How long are we going to be waiting, then?”
“Should’ve just snuck in last night.”
“Shut it. There’s still room in the Guild’s holding cells.”
Complaints aside, no one actually dared push forward.
In the end, the waiting adventurers could only drift off to the side, chatting, sorting their gear, or trading whatever scraps of intel they’d just picked up.
Seeing this, Greer finally nodded and went back to his spot.
On his way, he tossed a reminder to Camilla as she walked back:
“Every party’s entry time, exit time, casualties. All of it goes in the log.”
Camilla only nodded, saying nothing.
He gave a helpless little laugh. Young people these days had no respect for their elders.
Then he grabbed the straw hat beside him, dropped it over his face, and settled in to rest.
◆ ◆ ◆
The first party pushed through to the second stage, only to lose two members in a pincer between the shambling corpses and the crossbow-wielding ones.
One of them, an unlucky cleric, had been standing safely behind the shield-bearer and still caught a bolt from that hopelessly inaccurate crossbow corpse. It clipped the edge of the shield and struck him square in the forehead.
[Trial Return Triggered]
On reflex, Owen looked toward the starting chamber.
A few seconds later, the cleric reappeared in the center of the chamber and slumped to the floor, face white as paper.
Not dead.
Owen breathed out.
Then he couldn’t quite hold it in.
“How does a shot like that even land?”
The crystal gave a faint flicker.
“Buddy, that luck of yours… are you cursed, or are you the chosen one?”
Some retreated to the starting chamber in a sorry state, some triggered Trial Return, and some came back through the portal to the camp with magic crystals in hand and excitement all over their faces.
Watching his Soul Energy rise and dip and rise again, Owen finally felt a weight lift off him.
His gaze drifted to the one prompt tucked in the corner of the control interface, the one that never went away.
[Current Soul Energy: 734]
[Begin Preliminary Repair of Damaged Core? Soul Energy Cost: 2,500]
It was fine.
One step at a time.
Steady the flow of customers first. Then think about the rest.
The dungeon was officially open for business.