Chapter 2: The Tulip Lion Appears!

The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter — LNCrawler · All chapters

Chapter 2:
The Tulip Lion Appears!

MY FATHER, MOTHER, AND SISTER were all stunned by my new heap of money. After a family meeting, we decided that I would use my Pocket Dimension skill to hang on to it for now. I wasn’t sure what to do with it all. Putting it into savings seemed like the obvious option, but when I consulted with Emma the following morning, she gave me a surprising answer.

“Well, why don’t you use it as capital to grow your investment?”

“Like how?”

“What about opening a monster material store?”

Huh. That sounded like a pretty darn decent idea. The hidden dungeon was chock full of rare monsters, after all. Although, I’d be in a bit of a pickle if some bigshot asked me where I sourced my stock.

“Or what about a second-hand shop?” I asked.

“Oh yeah! You can always buy up stuff cheap and resell it for a profit.”

Also, seeing as I could add skills to weapons, I could buy low-end swords and sell them at a much higher price. Granted, that would require a steady influx of LP, too.

“I’ll do whatever I can to help,” Emma declared. “I think it’d be fun to run a shop together.”

“Wait, aren’t you jumping the gun a little here?”

“Mmm, am I? Weren’t we always talking about running a shop when we were little? I think it’d be a nice life.”

If I had Emma’s help… This really wasn’t a terrible idea. I spent the school day preoccupied with thoughts of how I’d go about getting a store off the ground, and if I’d even have the time. I still owed Lola for her help when I got started at the guild—which I’d needed to do to enroll at the academy—and I wanted to keep working as an adventurer. I wanted to keep exploring the hidden dungeon, too—it was hard to resist the siren song of all those rare materials and items.

Come to think of it, I hadn’t spoken to my master in a while, and I still hadn’t finished the fifth floor of the hidden dungeon. I wondered if that black lion with the tulip growing out of its head was still hanging around down there. Once I remembered it, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. As soon as classes were over, I headed straight for the dungeon.

***

“Hidden dungeon only I can enter—let me train in secret to become the strongest in the world!”

As I spoke the password, the entrance rumbled open. No matter how many times I’d said it, it was still fairly embarrassing. In any case, it really had been a while since I’d last been to the dungeon. I wondered if my master was lonely.

I was a little hungry, so I started my visit by hunting down a golden slime on the first floor. But as I turned the corner without a care in the world, a chill shot up my spine.

“That seems a little…big.”

Was that really a golden slime? It was, uh, pretty, you know, freaking huge. So huge, in fact, that it was touching the walls and ceiling. Maybe it was the golden slime boss or something? Maybe it would make that cute sound all the other golden slimes made when they spat out golden flu—

“Blerrrrgh!”

“There’s nothing remotely cute about that!”

It spewed a river of dark green fluid at me, and I ran as fast as I could. The amount of toxic liquid was nothing to laugh at—it splashed all over the floor. Thankfully, I somehow avoided getting hit.

I put some distance between myself and the creature as it slithered across the floor, coming straight at me. It was, to say the least, terrifying. I frantically deployed my Discerning Eye.

Name: Golden Slime

Level: 138

Skills: Putrid Bile; Combine; Separate

It was a super high level! At first I thought it was a mutant or something, but then it hit me—its size probably had something to do with that unusual Combine skill.

I didn’t have much time to think it out, so I focused on attacking. If things got too dicey, I would retreat and use my Dungeon Elevator skill to jump to the second floor. Once I’d gained enough distance, I fired off a one-foot-diameter Stone Bullet.

“Blerrrrgh!”

That just pissed it off. Its body was elastic, so it looked like stone projectiles probably wouldn’t have much effect.

“How about this then?”

I combined another Stone Bullet with Holy Flame. I crossed my fingers that it would work better, as slimes tended to be weak to fire.

Splat!

A wet noise echoed through the passage as the flaming projectile missed spectacularly. I know what you’re thinking: “But how could you miss such an ungodly huge monster, Noir, you dunce?” In my defense, the giant creature chose that moment to split into five smaller slimes.

Now there were five considerably more normal-sized slimes in the corridor. When I assessed them with my Discerning Eye, they were Levels 24, 22, 28, 23, and 41, which all added up to, you guessed it, 138.

From the looks of it, only the Level 41 slime had the Combine and Separate skills. It was also the strongest, so altogether it was undoubtedly the one that gathered the others into that hulking slime form in the first place. Notably, the present five didn’t look like they’d make something that large if they were squished together, so the skill likely had an additional growth effect. I didn’t really have the time to think about it any more deeply, because they all ganged up on me at once.

“I guess I should give up on my jelly snack…”

Maybe they were just slimes, but they could get pretty scary when they attacked simultaneously. Thankfully, my Holy Flame and Stone Bullet combo didn’t fail me this time, and I finished them off with relative ease.

It seemed like the number of monsters in the dungeon increased over time. They probably spawned at regular intervals. I’d heard that was pretty par for the course.

With the slimes taken care of, I headed down to the second floor to meet my master, my heart still pounding.

“Long time no see, Master.”

<……>

“Master?”

The once great Olivia Servant was still strung up in the cursed Death Chains, just like always. I kept telling her over and over that I was going to find a way to lift the curse that kept her trapped there, but she always brushed me off and said she didn’t need me to. Maybe this bleak hole in a lonely dungeon was more comfortable than it looked?

“Are you asleep?” I felt a flutter of anxiety in my chest. “No…Master, you can’t be de…” I casually jabbed my finger into her bellybutton.

“I knew you were faking!”

<Grr…I hate you!> She sounded genuinely disappointed that I’d seen through her act.

“You really like playing pranks, don’t you?”

“Sorry, I got a little caught up in things.”

<Things?>

“It’s a long story, are you sure you want to hear it?”

“Gonna give that one a big ‘no.’”

<Lame.>

“Well, let’s see, where should I start…” With that, I hunkered down to regale her with everything I’d done to lift Maria’s curse, all the way up to the duke’s reward of a hundred million rels.

<I’m impressed. You really are my disciple after all.>

“I never would have been able to do it without the powers you gave me.”

<Nah, that was all you. I never would’ve used up my own LP to help someone like that.>

I probably would have felt similarly if I couldn’t replenish my LP, but luckily, it was a pretty easily renewable resource.

<Hrm, but, you know, now that you’ve got that big pile of money, you might wanna make a certain skill…>

“Oh? What are you recommending now?”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it earlier?”

Fair point. You could almost call her considerate. But now I was pretty dang flush, and anyway, I was willing to try anything once. I promptly examined the cost of creating the skill she described.

LP Generation via Money — 500 LP

I’d been scrimping and saving LP, so I had over 1,500. As such, the cost wasn’t a particular concern, but I wanted to know more about how it worked, first.

LP Generation via Money: 100,000 rels may be exchanged for 1 LP

Not the best exchange rate. It’d cost a million rels for ten LP, ten million for a hundred, and my full hundred million for a thousand. I investigated whether I could adjust the conversion rate with my Editor skill, but doing that cost an unbelievable amount of LP.

“Hrm…”

<See? It’s pretty brutal on someone who’s totally broke.>

“It’s pretty brutal even if you’re not broke.”

<True, but it might be good to have just in case. You can always use it if you strike it mega-rich.>

Ultimately, I took my master’s advice and went ahead and produced the skill. I did have that hundred million sitting in my Pocket Dimension. I’d officially designated half of it for my family, but they’d asked me to hold onto the entirety for them.

I decided to test the skill with ten thousand rels. As far as I could tell, you could use the skill by summoning it to your mind whilst either looking at the money or touching it. I squeezed a handful of coins and mentally declared my intent. When I opened my hand again, the coins had disappeared.

1025 LP → 1026 LP

It worked precisely as expected.

“I wonder where the money goes…”

“Maybe those coins will reappear in some poor kid’s house.”

<You’re such a romantic, Noir. It’d be nice if that was how it worked.>

“Might as well think positive, right?”

Chatting with Olivia was always fun, but I needed to get a move on. That was when it occurred to me that I’d never mentioned my run-in with the black lion on the fifth floor. My master knew all sorts of things about monsters, so maybe…

<Nope! Or, well, I’ve never seen one myself, but I heard stories back when I was an adventurer. I think there might’ve been a monster like that a hundred or two hundred years ago.>

If it was that long ago when Olivia was adventuring, that would make it three to four hundred years ago now. She didn’t seem to know anything else, so it was time to use my Dungeon Elevator skill to head to the fifth floor.

Having done that, I arrived near the stairway and was immediately at a complete loss for words.

The black lion was right there in front of me. And it still had that weird tulip growing out of its head!

I looked around slowly to make sure I knew exactly where the stairs were. If the creature tried to attack me, at least I could run.

“I can hear you…loud and clear.”

Okay. Okay. The lion really could talk. And it seemed to be a creature of reason, too. I wanted to feel relieved, but I couldn’t let my guard down. “Um, wait, so you’ve been waiting for me…since I was last down here?”

<Indeed.>

“Really? It’s been a while. Have you been waiting here the entire time?”

“But other than that…?”

There was something absolutely terrifying about how calm it was about it!