09
{Awl Fighter who only does 15 damage. After taking Krushvalbi Elixir, I finally found a party in one week!}
The contents of the post were like this.
There was one F- Grade Awakened.
He was an Awakened who had obtained a Trait named Awl Fighter.
Awl Fighter!
After looking into it, the Trait was not weak.
Although it did not produce much damage output in the beginning, with just a little support, it could pull its own weight, and it even had the benefit of being a little stronger than other Traits when climbing to E Grade and C Grade.
In other words, it was a late-blooming Trait!
However, to this Awakened, who had neither money nor backing, the Trait called Awl Fighter was a disaster.
What good was it if things became easy from the second or third floor onward? The first-floor stairs were four or five times higher than everyone else’s!
Parties would not take him either.
A penniless Awl Fighter had no choice but to grow through grinding in the lowest-level hunting grounds.
Then, just as he was in that situation, he ended up taking Krushvalbi Elixir!
It was certainly more expensive than the rabble, but compared to the top-performing items within the same Grade, it was a price within reach.
And the effect was outstanding.
Enough to change his life!
{I’ll always be holding out and waiting. Please sell more. I’m beggiiiing you!}
└ Wow... Awl Fighter. Pity-upvote. Pity-upvote.
└ Isn’t this bastard famous in F-? He’s the guy who always solo-plays grubs in the bug field, isn’t he?
└ Is his luck finally turning around? Because of Krushvalbi Elixir?
└ But even if he takes that, isn’t the efficiency lower than when an ordinary Awakened takes it?
└ It’s all relative.
└ Awl Fighter...you go climb. You deserve to hit the popular posts.
└ I’m a C Grade Awl Fighter. I’m eating other C Grades alive right now, so child of a swan, climb up here! The water here is very clear!
└ What are you doing, mod? Why aren’t you cutting out the humblebrag?
The atmosphere was warm overall.
F Grades were said to have many complaints in the Awakened scene, but everyone knew very well how pitiful penniless, backless Awl Fighters were.
And among the testimonial posts, there were many testimonials from E Grade Awakened as well.
{No matter what I did, Armored Hollow Ants that would never go down in one hit with my specs go down in one hit if I take the elixir! Thanks to that, I can go deeper inside! What if I get swarmed, you ask? Then I use Single-Point Explosion and get out! Krrr, elixir... Krushvalbi Elixir! Please, please sell more! My body has become unable to live without Krushvalbi Elixir now...!}
Awakened of B Grade and above, especially A Grade and above, were curious about Thundercloud himself.
{Where is Thundercloud right now? An F Grade definitely couldn’t make a consumable like this, so he obviously isn’t F Grade. With this level of completion, he should be C Grade or higher, but if he’s C Grade, there’s no need to make and sell elixirs this cheaply, right? On top of that, hidden Traits that the System doesn’t even display? Isn’t this the world’s first phenomenon, something never seen even at S Grade level?}
└ Agreed. This really is a first. F Grade consumables don’t even affect me, so I’m just watching for now, but I’m very curious what will happen when he climbs up to our Grade.
└ Yeah. I sincerely hope he doesn’t stagnate there and climbs higher.
└ And I hope he doesn’t get swayed by trash-tier sellers and choose mass-production-type skills for no reason. He still has a road of ninety thousand li ahead of him, so it would be very troublesome if he listened to the likes of F Grades and ended up at a similar level.
└ I agree. You must not remain in F Grade or E Grade. Thundercloud! What are you doing in a place like that? Good products of this quality being sold at that price...that simply will not do. Please get out of that place. No, out of this place!
└ ???? What’s with that last line?
└ ...I’m an F Grade production-type Awakened. He’s disrupting the ecosystem, so I’m having such a hard time I could die. How are bumpkins like us supposed to make a living?
└ Mod, what are you doing...? Cut him out.
└ I make Dubaing Chewy Cookies. I tried to revive the glory of the old city. They’re delicious, so even if you aren’t F Grade, you won’t regret eating them! Ah, for higher-Grade hunters, this much luxury should be fine, shouldn’t it?
Like that, the production-type Awakened who had tried to squeeze in a little promotion for his Dubaing Chewy Cookies was expelled from the C Grade board.
Ki Ja-hyeon, who had been looking at those posts, merely gave a small laugh.
“I’m going to produce a lot, and I plan to make higher-Grade elixirs too, so don’t worry.”
Krushvalbi Elixir was only the beginning.
In the first place, what he was making now was merely the weakest item on the list of elixirs made with Krushvalbi.
Of course, even after that happened, he intended to keep making and selling the current low-cost(?) elixir as well.
He did understand the feelings of production-type Awakened who were groaning about ecosystem disruption and whatnot, but....
“Then just sell better goods, won’t you?”
Experimental works made forcibly in order to climb to the next Grade, or “let one sucker bite” products that were not worth their price, ought to be weeded out.
That was the “law of nature” as Ki Ja-hyeon saw it.
“Mass production....”
In truth, there was only one reason he could not mass-produce right now.
The size of his underground storage room!
If the underground storage room became better and larger, he could guarantee that much more profitability.
Therefore, he needed a larger plot than he had now.
And to obtain that plot, Ki Ja-hyeon had been working hard for a long time.
Even before he Awakened as a druid.
“It should be about time for him to come....”
Bang, bang. Bang!
Speak of the devil, perhaps?
The knock(?) rang out violently.
Ki Ja-hyeon picked up an armful of things he had prepared, then opened the door.
“Yo~ You been well?”
When he opened the door, a man stood there with neat clothes and a face that was anything but.
He stood crookedly on one leg and had a sleazy impression.
Inside his grinning mouth, a yellow gold tooth gleamed.
He was Yoon Se-hak, the seventh-ranking member of the Scorpion Gang and the middle manager in charge of rentals in this area.
“Yo, Ki Ja-hyeon. Why is it so hard to see your face? Are you still busy doing that odd-jobber crap these days?”
“Heh heh. More or less!”
“That so...ohohoho!”
Yoon Se-hak said that and held out his bracelet.
It meant he should pay this month’s rent.
As a bonus, the stench of stale cigarette smoke wafted sharply from the arm he held out.
Ki Ja-hyeon controlled his expression perfectly and merely smiled gently.
“Oh dear, Mr. Se-hak. Rent day is next week, yet here you are early again....”
“Come on, between us? I can receive it a little early. And anyway, it’s just the same thing in the end, so why are you like this? Are you going to act this hurtfully?”
“Oh, come now. That was just a greeting, so I’ll be hurt if you take it seriously.”
“I was joking too, ohohoho.”
Without hesitation, Ki Ja-hyeon bumped his bracelet against that bracelet, and 800,000 credits were sucked into Yoon Se-hak’s account.
“I like you, Mr. Ki Ja-hyeon, because you always pay so diligently. You’re on a different level from those bastards who earn beatings by saying things are hard these days or asking what they’re supposed to do next time.”
“Is that so?”
“I said that’s so, didn’t I? Ohohoho!”
Suuuck, whooo!
Perhaps because it was a cheap cigarette, it disappeared after only a few pulls, and he took out a new one and lit it again.
Like this, Yoon Se-hak had received the money, but he was not leaving.
He merely rubbed his hands together and grinned.
At that expression, which clearly wanted something, Ki Ja-hyeon also smiled along and handed over what he had been holding.
A kickback? No.
A bribe that could not even be compared to mere kickbacks was piled full inside the cloth bundle.
Perfectly ripe cherry tomatoes!
A full twenty of them!
Yoon Se-hak, his eyes rolling with greed, swallowed a mouthful of plump cherry tomatoes and smiled in satisfaction.
“Ugh...this really is something. Delicious. It’s delicious every time I eat it! When would I get to eat something like this in Area 4? I only get to eat it when I come to Ja-hyeon’s house!”
“That’s true...ohohoho!”
Ki Ja-hyeon’s heart tore as he handed over twenty of them, when he could get 10,000 credits per tomato if he sold them at the Area 3 market.
Because he had made a habit of giving one or two every time Yoon Se-hak came, now the man extorted them without even saying thank you, as though he were taking something out of his own pocket.
‘You shameless bastard who doesn’t even know how grateful he should be!’
But Ki Ja-hyeon was no pushover either.
There was another reason he had been grinding favor(?) with Yoon Se-hak like this.
“This really is a shame... I’d like to give you more, but the vegetable garden is narrow, so this is the limit. If I could move to that place I mentioned before, I could harvest more and give you plenty more...!”
That was right.
Not all of Area 4 was the same Area 4!
There was a separate area with a wider plot than this one.
He actually disliked going farther inward.
Because it was that much more expensive.
He was fine with things like public safety, so he had wanted to obtain the widest plot possible.
And the one who held that choice was Yoon Se-hak before his eyes.
Because of that, even before he Awakened, he had been buttering up Yoon Se-hak.
A former druid was still a former druid; his wish to plant many plant-like fellows and make a small garden was the same now as it had been then.
And now it was about time for that effort to bear fruit.
From Yoon Se-hak’s mouth, after he had chewed and swallowed all the cherry tomatoes that were like Ki Ja-hyeon’s children, the next words flowed.
“Ah, that place? The one with the wide plot?”
“That’s right!”
The place that was not only twice as wide as his current plot, but also had almost no difference in rent from this place. To Ki Ja-hyeon, it was a treasure of a property!
“Right... A vacancy did open there.”
“Did...open, you say...?”
“Yeah. I wondered why you were so fixated on it, so I went to take a look, and it was wider and nicer than I expected. So I decided to go live there! When I think about it, who would mess with me? Isn’t that right? Hahahahaha!”
“......”
Ki Ja-hyeon’s expression could no longer be managed.
Reading that expression, Yoon Se-hak grinned.
“Oh-ho. Mr. Ja-hyeon, you’re a delicate Area 4 softie, so if you went to a place like that, you’d get stabbed and drop dead for no reason. This is right, I’m telling you. Is it because of the tomatoes? Then how about this? We make a field there, and Mr. Ja-hyeon, you raise them for me. Since I’ll be lending you the plot, we split it five to five. For reference, I get the five. How about it!”
“Hahaha....”
“Ahahaha! Isn’t it incredible?”
At that proposal, so incredible that it truly stopped both his breath and his nose, Ki Ja-hyeon had no choice but to laugh.
Suuuck, haaa!
Cheap cigarette smoke that Yoon Se-hak habitually sucked in and spat out.
That smoke, filtered even through Yoon Se-hak’s lungs, seeped into Ki Ja-hyeon’s house.
“By the way, where are Cloud and Thunder? Those little things, why aren’t they jumping out?”
At last, Yoon Se-hak pushed past Ki Ja-hyeon and went inside, ultimately finding Thunder, who had been hiding.
Cloud could escape with three-dimensional maneuvering, but the old dog Thunder could not.
Yoon Se-hak hugged it tightly from behind and grinned.
“Ohoho... Look at that firm little rump. I could get five plates out of you. I’m going to eat you. I really will!”
Woof! Woof, woof! (Master! Help, help!)
Woof. Woof! (Bad smell. Help!)
“......!”
It was the same thing as always.
He knew Yoon Se-hak did not actually intend to eat Thunder.
But from the perspective of someone raising a companion dog, that kind of low-grade humor was always unpleasant.
“Ugh...fur. Fur! Seriously, these fur-covered cockroach bastards are only cute to look at. Ah-choo. Ah-choo! Kack, kack, ptooey! Kraaaagh~ptooey!”
After making every kind of nuisance of himself, Yoon Se-hak gave a snickering laugh and approached Ki Ja-hyeon.
Then, for the first time, he scratched his head and added as if apologizing.
“Hmm, in that sense, you know. I thought those little things were cute, so I bragged about them to the boss a little. But then I was told to raise the rent.”
“......?”
“When I thought about it, he was right. The house won’t be maintained properly, will it? Since the order has come down, I can’t just not do it... I’ll only raise it a little, just a little. That’s fine, right?”
“......”
After saying that much, Yoon Se-hak left Ki Ja-hyeon’s house.
Creeeeeak!
The iron door closed with that sound.
“...They won’t even fix the rust.”
Drip. Drip. The sound of the pipe leaking, always audible and especially irritating today.
“They won’t fix this either...!”
There were not just one or two defects.
Old wallpaper, cracked tiles,
that damned cherry molding, cherry molding!
He had accepted all of it with a hollow laugh, had even offered up cherry tomatoes like his own children as bribes, yet he had gained nothing and was about to pay more in extra costs.
“Whew... So going there is ultimately out of the question?”
Well, if the man himself was going there to live, there was nothing to say.
And when he thought about it, there was no longer any need to do that.
The Ki Ja-hyeon who had tried to look good to that filthy man was Ki Ja-hyeon before Awakening.
That had been reasonable.
It had been natural.
But now that he had Awakened, and now that he was earning a lot of money, this had become unnatural.
He was no longer willing to remain in the filthy position of the weaker party.
“A house? To hell with it, I’ll just buy one!”
While he was at it, Ki Ja-hyeon checked how much money he had earned so far.
The day before yesterday, yesterday, and today!
His coin balance, which had never once been the same, was?
[Coins: 2,200]
“Oof...!”
It took a week for Krushvalbi to fully grow.
He had been repeating like a machine the process of picking the fully bloomed mushrooms, filling the mycelium with natural power, and picking them again a week later.
When he made elixirs with the mushrooms harvested that way, a little over 100 bottles came out.
If he did not release those all at once and instead released them over a week, he could sell roughly 15 bottles a day.
Now that two weeks had passed since he began selling them that way, the coins in his hands had become exactly 2,200.
Converted into credits, that was 22,000,000 credits.
Or more!
Of course, as the saying went, even three mal of beads had to be strung to become treasure, so he would have to exchange them well. Still, it was also true that he had that much money in his hands right now.
In one month, it would be 4,400.
In one year, it would be a full 440,000,000 credits!
“No. It’d be over 500,000,000!”
Once again, the monthly cost of living for Area 4’s middle class was 3,000,000 credits!
In that sense, Ki Ja-hyeon’s current earning power could already be said to be above Area 3.
However,
“I don’t have any savings built up right now....”
Thunder ate a lot, and Cloud broke a lot.
In the first place, with most of the shelter’s population living in Area 5, even living in Area 4 had been quite a strain for him, so he did not have much property saved.
At most, around 3,000 credits?
Even the 500,000,000 credits was income after a year.
And real estate in the Shelter was insane! He had not even dreamed of buying real estate.
Nevertheless, he had often looked at the price of the Area 4 real estate he wanted, as if window shopping.
When he checked again,
400,000,000 credits.
“It went up already... Only a little, but it went up...!”
When he had seen it before, it had been 390,000,000. But now it had risen by a full 10,000,000 credits...!
“I-I let my guard down...!”
To think even a place he had thought no one would buy had gone up like this?
Real estate prices seemed insane in the old days and now alike.
“...I don’t have time to sit around like this!”
Ki Ja-hyeon immediately went down to the basement.
Yes,
he did not have time to sit around.
“It’s time to make a new elixir!”