The bluish glow of the monitor quietly illuminated the dark room.
Each twitch of Taehu's fingers on the mouse sent the screen scrolling rapidly up and down. His attention was divided between two windows displayed side by side: the official Hunter Association database and search results from an anonymous online community.
Two terms sat in the blinking search bar.
Gray Citadel.
And Knight Commander's Seal.
"There's seriously nothing. Not even some baseless rumor."
Taehu leaned back deeply in his chair and let out an incredulous laugh.
The old longsword that had proven its power by cleaving a Magic Golem in two with a single strike at the training facility had revealed a remarkably specific condition for its next evolution.
Recover the Knight Commander's Legacy from a specific dungeon.
The problem was that the designated destination was none other than the Gray Citadel.
Among Hunters active in the Capital Region, it was such a universally familiar dungeon that even a newly licensed rookie could supposedly find their way through it with their eyes closed.
Even neighborhood children could recite the attack patterns of the monsters inside from memory, while every profitable ore deposit and monster material had been exhausted years ago.
There was even a running joke that early-generation Hunters had stripped out every usable brick lining the dungeon's passages in the hope of selling them, leaving nothing but bare dirt behind.
Millions of Hunter parties had combed through the place over the years, examining practically every stone on the floor.
There was no conceivable reason a rare Relic should still be sitting openly inside such a dungeon.
Naturally, no matter how thoroughly Taehu searched the Association database, he could not find a single record of an item called the Knight Commander's Seal ever being discovered in the Gray Citadel.
'An ordinary person would've written it off as a system error.'
A normal Hunter would have doubted the very idea that a Relic could exist in a dungeon that had already been picked completely clean.
But Taehu was different.
His Special Appraisal had extracted an A-rank Relic from a 7.2-million-won piece of junk that everyone else had given up on and would have happily thrown into a scrapyard.
The information shown by Special Appraisal had never been wrong.
No matter how absurd or unlikely the location seemed, if the condition window explicitly named it, then something had to be hidden there.
Countless Hunters had simply walked over it for years without ever realizing it existed.
"Let's see if there's a party I can join right away."
Without hesitation, Taehu refreshed the party recruitment board on the Hunter community.
The Gray Citadel was so easy and straightforward that parties constantly formed and disbanded around it.
As luck would have it, a post near the top of the board was recruiting members for a short raid departing immediately.
It was a typical gathering of C-rank Hunters planning to make a quick circuit through the dungeon with nothing but their own weapons, without even bothering to bring porters to collect loot.
Taehu moved the cursor and clicked the join button without hesitation.
Entering the dungeon alone would only attract unnecessary attention from the entrance staff or members of other guilds.
The cleanest way to avoid suspicion was to quietly blend into an ordinary temporary party and remain inconspicuous.
Taehu put on his coat, took up his sword, and left the room with light steps.
Damp, chilly air brushed across his cheek.
A long, broad corridor stretched ahead, carved from rough gray stone.
This was the interior of the Gray Citadel, a C-rank dungeon located on the outskirts of the Capital Region.
Despite the dungeon's inherently gloomy atmosphere, there was not the slightest trace of tension in the footsteps of those walking through its passages.
"All right, everyone, stay close and keep moving! You all know the route anyway, right?"
The temporary party leader at the front lightly tapped his shield and glanced back.
"If monsters show up, don't even bother forming up. Just kill them and keep moving. We need to make three full circuits before sunset if everyone wants to go home with a decent day's pay."
At the party leader's encouragement, the Hunters following behind merely nodded with indifferent expressions.
One man carrying a spear over his shoulder even opened his mouth wide and yawned repeatedly.
At the very back of the group, Taehu silently maintained the rear position as he walked.
From the outside, he looked no different from any other inexperienced Hunter carrying an ordinary leather-sheathed longsword on his back.
But unlike the bored party members around him, Taehu's eyes were constantly moving.
While those ahead focused only on the passage in front of them, impatiently hurrying onward in anticipation of the next monster encounter, Taehu relentlessly scanned both sides of the corridor.
The cracked and shattered remains of the walls.
Chunks of the collapsed ceiling.
Even moss-covered sculptures tucked away in distant corners.
Everything that anyone else would have dismissed as worthless scenery was an object of intense scrutiny to Taehu.
SKREEEEE!
Just then, three or four skeletal monsters crawled out of a recessed hole in the right-hand wall, their weapons rattling in their bony hands.
"Seriously? What a nuisance."
The party leader grumbled irritably and swung his shield with brute force.
CRACK!
Two skeletons were smashed to pieces as they crashed to the floor.
The spearman beside him lazily thrust his weapon forward and pierced the skulls of the remaining monsters in rapid succession.
The disturbance was so short and one-sided that calling it a proper battle would have been generous.
Taehu remained still with one hand resting on the hilt of the sword on his back, keeping an appropriate distance.
There was no reason for him to draw his weapon.
Instead, his attention was focused entirely on the dark opening in the wall from which the skeletons had emerged rather than on the bones scattered across the floor.
He narrowed his eyes, wondering whether some hidden mechanism inside might trigger his Special Appraisal.
But no appraisal light appeared.
It was nothing more than an ordinary hole in the wall.
Taehu swallowed his disappointment.
As he slowed down while staring intently at the wall, the party leader, who had been kicking aside the scattered bones, clicked his tongue in disbelief.
"Hey, back there. Hwang Taehu?"
"Ah, yes."
Taehu turned toward him with an unconcerned expression.
The party leader pointed at the wall.
"Is there gold dust smeared on that thing or something? You've been staring holes into everything since we entered the dungeon."
"I was just wondering whether there might be something everyone else overlooked."
"Good grief. You can search all you want, but there isn't even dust worth taking from this place."
The party leader chuckled and knocked the dirt from his shield.
"I know the feeling. You want to stumble across some mechanism nobody else ever found and make a fortune, right? Every Hunter dreams about something like that at least once. But this is the Gray Citadel. Hidden rooms? Secret passages? The veteran Hunters cleared all that out ages ago. They picked this place so clean they practically took the stones from the floor with them."
He shook his head.
"So don't go feeling around random walls and trigger some ancient trap that makes life difficult for the entire party. Just keep your eyes ahead and walk."
His tone contained a mild rebuke.
It was less malicious contempt than the exasperated meddling of a veteran watching a rookie engage in the sort of pointless behavior beginners often indulged in.
"Understood. I'll keep that in mind."
Taehu smiled amiably and gave an appropriate nod.
It was a perfectly natural performance, making him look exactly like some naive Hunter who did not understand how the world worked and could not quite let go of an unrealistic dream.
Satisfied, the party leader turned around and resumed striding forward.
The other party members glanced briefly at Taehu, then dismissed the matter and continued walking with bored yawns.
But behind Taehu's obediently lowered gaze, the intense light of Appraisal still flickered ceaselessly.
According to the party leader, this place should have been an empty wasteland with no Relics left whatsoever.
Yet the Sword of the Fallen Knight Commander hanging across Taehu's back clearly indicated that somewhere within this ancient fortress lay the key to advancing it another stage.
An ancient mechanism that had remained stubbornly hidden, silently mocking the blind footsteps of countless Hunters who had passed over it.
Discovering its true value was something only Taehu could do.
The party rapidly made its way through the winding corridors without hesitation.
Whenever monsters occasionally blocked the passage, the party leader and the other combatants mechanically swept them aside.
Taehu had not joined as a paid porter, so there was no need for him to take the lead.
He remained comfortably at the rear, devoting his full attention to searching his surroundings.
He had no idea how deep they had gone.
The same monotonous pattern of simple gray-brick chambers and narrow corridors had repeated over and over again.
Then the party ahead crossed a fairly spacious circular hall and began entering the passage leading to the next area.
Taehu, who had been following quietly behind them, suddenly stopped.
His sharp gaze had settled on the deepest corner of the empty hall.
There, abandoned among the debris of a collapsed pillar, stood an old stone statue.
Its head had been completely torn away, and even the right arm that had once held a heavy sword had been broken off at the stump.
The remaining torso was so heavily covered in black soot and thick layers of pale dust that it was difficult to discern the statue's original form.
It was a miserable, worthless lump of stone that none of the hundreds of thousands of Hunters who had passed through this place over the years would have bothered to examine.
But Taehu saw something different.
He fixed his gaze firmly on the damaged knight statue and focused his Special Appraisal upon it.
An intense light burst forth, almost piercing his retinas.
At the same time, a deep blue information window filled his vision.
[Damaged Secret Mechanism / Can Only Be Activated by the Owner of the Sword of the Fallen Knight Commander]
A quiet breath escaped Taehu's lips.
He had found it.
In a forgotten corner of a supposedly empty dungeon.
Inside the barren fortress that even the party leader had dismissed as a place where not so much as a speck of valuable dust remained, something real had been hidden all along.
And the only key capable of unlocking this mechanism disguised as a dust-covered lump of stone was the sword Taehu himself had restored.
The party members ahead were already disappearing into the entrance of the next passage.
Not one of them paid any attention to Taehu stopping behind them or noticed his unexpected movement.
Slowly, Taehu reached behind his back.
The familiar weight of the old, sturdy leather-wrapped hilt settled pleasantly into his palm.
Quietly gripping the Sword of the Fallen Knight Commander, Taehu strode without hesitation toward the ancient statue that had maintained its silence for countless years.