25. The Reward Is Always Sweet

The pitch-black mask wept tears of blood, the very medium of the curse that had veiled the Masked Demon-Beast’s face. And on top of that, a skill book.

The creature’s body had been so huge, and he’d been so wrapped up in the Dragon-Scale Armor, that he’d gotten sloppy about checking the aftermath.

The skill book, fine. But the mask might have its uses too.

A Necromancer and curses could never be pried apart. The activation mechanism differed from a dark mage’s, who shared the same curse theme, but commanding souls demanded a deep grounding in curses all the same. The soul-fusion formula he’d developed in his past life had itself been one application of curse-craft.

Couldn’t I use it as a ward against evil?

The moment Yujin reached for the black mask, a window bloomed open.

The item’s information spread out before his eyes.

“The mask’s an item?”

— What’s there to be so surprised about?

“Hold on.”

Yujin read over the Shadow Mask’s information slowly.

The performance on this is insane.

He’d written it off as a plain ward against evil, but it carried a unique effect that set off the curses sealed inside it. Which was to say: engrave the curse formulae in Yujin’s head onto the mask, and he could fire them off through it as a medium.

When I hit 2nd Rank, I won’t need to inherit the curse-field knowledge right away.

To draw knowledge of a new field from the Ring of Black Darkness, his Stellar Rank had to climb. In his past life he’d reached the 9th Rank, the realm men called the absolute. Enlightenment, he had in abundance. The problem was levels.

Normally even hitting the level cap leaves you snagged on enlightenment, but…

For Yujin it was the reverse: levels, not enlightenment, were the bottleneck.

With the Shadow Mask as a medium, I don’t have to open the curse field right away.

Alchemy, golem crafting, and more: there was no shortage of fields to claim from the Library of Knowledge. The mask could hold five at most, but since he could erase one already engraved, the limit meant little outside the heat of an urgent fight.

— Swish.

Yujin lifted the Shadow Mask slowly to his face. It had been sized for the Masked Demon-Beast’s own head, big enough that he half-wondered if it was a shield, yet the moment it neared him it shrank down to fit his face exactly. The odd sensation, like pressing on a sheet mask, lasted only an instant; after that it clung to his skin without the slightest discomfort.

— To take up a mask that weeps tears of blood. A pretty foul taste in beauty you’ve got.

“I’m wearing it for the performance.”

A face weeping tears of blood, was it. He hadn’t checked a mirror, but it would hardly be a flattering look.

Ho. A decent skill book had dropped. It was a sorcery built for tracking, but its mechanism ran close to a curse’s, so a mage versed in dark magic could pick it up too. The only catch was how few Hunters worked the dark side.

If it doesn’t sell, I can always learn it myself.

Yujin pocketed the skill book.

“Let’s go now.”

He’d wrung every last thing out of the gate. Yujin put strength into his legs and stepped through the blue wormhole.

Yujin returned to Byeokgolje. The ground around the gate was as raucous as a market square on a fair day.

“They say the Forgotten Shrine’s been cleared. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How would I know. They’re saying the boss monster suddenly got beaten.”
“Was it Phoenix?”
“Judging by how quiet things are on their end, doesn’t look like it.”
“Maybe it was Dawn, then.”

The Forgotten Shrine, cleared in a single stroke without one sign of it coming. The Hunters who’d been farming monsters inside heard the alarm that the gate would soon close and came scrambling out, and the ones waiting outside were every bit as bewildered. Guesses of every kind flew back and forth, but there was no good way to learn who had cleared it.

— How disappointing. To think nobody knows my master was the one who cleared it.

“Want me to take out an ad?”

— Shouldn’t my master command at least a little fame?

“That’ll sort itself out in time.”

Yujin tossed it off lightly. He had no intention of hiding his strength, but there was no need to go around trumpeting it either. Drawing other people’s eyes brought real profit, true, but the nuisance swelled right alongside it.

— But if you’d rather not stand out, why not take off the mask first?

“Ah. There’s no weight to it, so I forgot.”

He peeled off the Shadow Mask and tucked it into his bag. With the Dragon-Scale Armor draped over him in its casual-wear form, not a soul gave it a second glance.

“Boss!”

The Scraps came pelting up from a ways off. Kang Minho’s face was frantic, and he sprayed spittle as he launched into his breathless speech.

“They say the Forgotten Shrine’s been cleared!”
“I know already, so settle down a little.”
“Ah. You were inside the gate too, Boss. Who in the world could’ve cracked the gate’s secret and hunted the boss monster on top of it?”
“I did.”
“I see. As expected of you, Bo—?”

Kang Minho’s eyes went round as saucers, and the rest of the Scraps wore much the same look.

“That’s seriously amazing!”
“Pipe down. No need to shout.”
“No, but — how am I supposed to keep it down after a huge deal like this?”

While he was gently calming the worked-up Scraps, the matter of splitting the take crossed his mind.

I can’t sell the Dragon-Scale Armor, so I’ll have to hand them a fair thank-you payment.

A contract should always be fair. He had no intention of paying out the artifact’s full value, but sending them home empty-handed would wear away at their mutual trust.

“I’ll fold what we pulled off the boss raid into the settlement too.”
“No, no. We didn’t do a thing. Splitting that with you would mean we’d grown hair on our conscience.”

Kang Minho didn’t even ask what they’d gotten off the boss monster.

“I won’t offer twice, you know?”
“Ask me the same thing and you’ll get the same answer.”

Yujin snorted a laugh and turned his back on Byeokgolje.

Meanwhile.

The Phoenix and Dawn guild members who’d been investigating the gate gathered for a meeting after the abrupt clear message.

“The Forgotten Shrine. Did you clear it?”

A man in martial garb. Shin Yuseung, the Dawn Guild’s promising prospect, raised his voice.

“We’d like to know that ourselves. Who cleared it.”

A woman with long hair. The Phoenix Guild’s next Sword Saint answered calmly.

The rising stars that the nation’s second- and third-ranked guilds had so painstakingly raised had collided head-on. Countless media outlets, investors, and plenty of others besides had their eyes fixed on which guild would be the one to clear the Forgotten Shrine.

Shin Yuseung made no effort to hide his suspicion.

“It wasn’t you?”
“If Phoenix had pulled off the clear, we’d have put out a statement at once.”
“As if I could take that at face value.”
“Then let me ask you the same. Isn’t it Dawn that finished the clear and is playing dumb?”

A grinding sound leaked out from between Shin Yuseung’s teeth.

“My blood’s only just starting to run hot, and the gate clear’s already over? Does that make any sense?”

Jang Miseon watched the man across from her boil over, her gaze level.

Doesn’t seem to be a lie.

The Forgotten Shrine was a place the major guild Horizon had clung to for nearly a year without ever clearing. Even the Phoenix prospect team, Jang Miseon among them, hadn’t been spared a hard fight; setting aside the two guilds’ elite personnel, just exploring the shrine’s interior had meant risking life and limb. If not Phoenix or Dawn, then who on earth?

Could it be…?

All at once, the outline of a single figure flickered across Jang Miseon’s mind. A man who marshaled the undead as his summoned beasts. Could it be that Yujin had cracked the gate’s secret and hunted the boss monster too?

No way.

Jang Miseon turned her head and shook off the stray thought that had just surfaced.

The Phoenix Guild had poured a great deal into this clear. A gate-analysis team that joined only the first-string squads had been brought in, and guild-owned equipment had been lent out even to the Hunters taking part. It was generous to call them a 2nd-Rank-class team. In raw strength she took pride that they edged out even a pro Hunter team scraping the tail end of 3rd Rank. And the same held true for the Dawn members seated across from her.

If not us, then who…

Both guilds had been left gaping, the prize snatched clean out from under them. The hush that settled once the storm blew past pressed down hard on the Hunters of both sides.

Yujin and his crew were back in Paju.

“Boss. The workshop looks a little wrecked.”

The moment Kang Minho said it, a man with frowzy hair that looked like it hadn’t seen water in a week came tearing out.

“What in the world did you do?!”

Shin Junseok came charging up with bloodshot eyes, loosing a sound that could have been a scream or a shriek, there was no telling which.

“Did Arahan come around?”
“This is your doing, isn’t it? I knew it’d come to this!”
“You were fretting about advertising, so I ran a little sales promotion for you.”

Shin Junseok let out a long, drawn-out sigh, haaah.

“Do you have any idea how much grief I went through? Day after day, not a single day’s rest, people badgering me to please, please sell them potions…”

Plenty must have piled up while he was gone, because the alchemist poured out his complaints without pausing for breath. Yujin brushed the grievances off with complete indifference.

“Did it help, or didn’t it?”
“Ah. It helped, sure. But still!”
“The result’s what counts. A little annoying, maybe, but the work got handled fast, didn’t it.”
“Eurghhh.”

Shin Junseok ground his teeth, unable to scrape together a comeback.

“So how’s the progress?”
“The patent on the Mid-grade Potion’s been filed, and it looks like we’ll move into mass production before long.”

Faster than I expected.

“Oh, right. The item you ordered came in just yesterday.”

The Darkness Orb. A piece of dark-magic-line equipment, it served to amplify mana.

“The Orb’s a scarce thing, so it can’t have been easy to get hold of. Thanks for the trouble.”
“Lucky for us, dark mages are an unpopular job.”

Shin Junseok let out a low sneer. A dark mage: a subdivided magic-line job built around the dark attribute and debuffs. Its raw destructive power fell short of a pure magic-line Hunter’s, and on the debuff side it overlapped with the Priest job group, so it drew little popularity.

He pressed the Darkness Orb he’d gotten from Shin Junseok up against Fafnir’s chest.

— What shameless thing are you up to this time?

Fafnir furrowed his brow.

“You make it sound like something it isn’t, right where anyone could hear.”

Yujin grumbled as he poured mana into the Ring of Black Darkness.

— Susssh!

The spirit-power, transmuted through the ring as its medium, bridged Fafnir and the Darkness Orb. Soul synchronization: the single most crucial step in making a Lich was joining the vessel to the body, for if the synchronization went poorly, the soul could no longer return to the vessel once the body was destroyed.

— Uuugh. The feeling’s strange.

“Don’t resist.”

A pale, hazy energy seeped out of the Draconian corpse, the essence of the dragon race made one with Park Haneul’s soul.

I guide this into the Darkness Orb.

The soul passed back and forth between the Draconian corpse and the black sphere. After it had crossed a handful of times, he drew the Darkness Orb away from Fafnir’s chest.

A skill identical to a Lich’s. From now on, even if the body was shattered, so long as the Life Force Vessel went unharmed it could regenerate any number of times.

— Then why was it given the name ‘Incomplete’?

“Because if the Life Force Vessel breaks, you die.”

— Whoosh!

When Yujin flung the Darkness Orb into the air, Fafnir gave a violent start, sprang up, and caught it with the greatest care.

“Nice catch.”

— What are you doing!

“Just seeing whether you’d listened to the warning.”

The Darkness Orb, or rather Fafnir’s Life Force Vessel now, he tucked into his pocket. He’d have to get hold of a subspace pouch or the like before long; bound as it was straight to Fafnir’s life, it had to be kept safe.

“Oh. You lot, do one more job for me.”

— Kwoong!

The Masked Demon-Beast’s corpse, which he’d stowed inside the Ring of Black Darkness, abruptly surfaced in the workshop’s front yard.

“We just mine out the mana stone?”
“Preserve the original form if you can.”
“Looks like you’ll be making this corpse into undead too.”

A nod was all it took for him to catch on. While the Scraps set to work, Yujin laid a hand on the Masked Demon-Beast’s forearm and sent spirit-power flowing through it.

A broad, sturdy skeletal frame. Bone as hard as an Ogre’s. Ideal material for crafting a powerful undead.

— What kind of undead are you thinking of making the Masked Demon-Beast into?

“Less an undead, more a golem I’m after.”

— A golem based on a corpse, no less. I truly have lived a long time in this world.

“You’re dead, though.”

— That’s not the important part. Just tell me why you mean to turn the Masked Demon-Beast’s corpse into a golem.

“Because my skill falls short.”

There was a limit to making undead on the fly, too. Crafting undead beyond an Armored Zombie or an offense-and-defense Skeleton was no easy thing.

Fafnir could put out results beyond his Stellar Rank thanks to the Draconian corpse.

To wring the most out of the Masked Demon-Beast’s corpse, he’d need to make at least something on the order of a Giant Zombie or a Skeleton King. But crafting high-grade undead called for 4th Rank at the very least even to attempt.

A golem is different.

Once he reached 2nd Rank and inherited golem-related knowledge, he’d be able to craft a golem out of the Masked Demon-Beast’s corpse.

— Can you make a golem with just that corpse?

“I need an alchemist and materials.”

A fine alchemy slave stood right beside him. And the materials that went into golem crafting could be had with money.

“Business partner. Can you get hold of Arachne’s thread and a mana engine too?”
“Getting them right away is a tall order. Arachne’s thread comes in from beyond the borderlands, and corporations are scouring for mana engines with their eyes lit up.”
“How about Ground Zero?”

A lawless zone in Paju. A place where, so they said, money in the right hand could buy absolutely anything.

“Uh… going there doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

Shin Junseok clicked his tongue as though the very thought disgusted him.