Chapter 102
I cheered inwardly as I saw the head of the Underground Nation’s General that wouldn’t stick back.
The Underground Nation’s General was just like the stories that had been passed down.
When I sprinkled ash on the cut surface, it couldn’t regenerate.
If I hadn’t brought ash with me, the bastard would have shown its immortality no matter how many times I cut off its head.
‘It has an absurd trait of not dying even if its neck is severed, but it’s not without a weakness.’
As long as I was fully prepared, there was no need to fear it.
However, for the collectors who came here without knowing anything, the Underground Nation’s General was nothing but a nightmare.
It wouldn’t die no matter how much they attacked, and the Underground Nation’s General had supernatural power unlike its appearance.
It swung a great sword freely, and it could fly if it wanted to.
If they couldn’t find the weakness of the immortal, they wouldn’t be able to defeat it even if a high-ranking collector came.
‘This world of thoughts is not a place where you can clear it with just strength.’
You had to catch the core strategy related to the story in advance, or at least some rough information that was handed down. Otherwise, this would happen.
[The spirits admire your preparedness.]
[You received 3,200TP as a donation.]
The spirits enjoyed the strategy I showed and generously threw points at me. I collected the donated points and killed the Underground Nation’s General.
“Kuak! How did you know my weakness…?!”
The Underground Nation’s General, who had already lost four heads, made a frustrated expression and shrank its body.
It would have fought recklessly without caring about its wounds normally, but now it avoided even being grazed by the sword. It felt a belated fear of really dying when its immortality disappeared.
The Underground Nation’s General sweated coldly.
‘I can’t go on like this!’
It was surprisingly quick-witted for its huge body. The Underground Nation’s General looked for a way to survive somehow.
‘First, retreat!’
If I fought here, I would really die. The Underground Nation’s General stabbed its great sword into the ground forcefully and raised a cloud of dust.
Puhwahak!
Taking advantage of the obscured vision by the dusty cloud, it immediately lifted its body with supernatural power and ran away to the inside of its house.
“What! It’s running away!”
I didn’t expect it to run away, and Kwon Jia and I hurriedly chased after it. If we didn’t catch it, we wouldn’t be able to clear this world of thoughts.
kThe inside of the tile-roofed house was huge enough to be called a palace.
As we went further inside, decorated with jewels and objects looted from above ground, several gazes greeted us.
“Wha, what? Hu, humans!”
“Save us! Here! There are people here!”
Kwon Jia and I stopped our steps.
There was a space that looked like a prison on the inner wall, and there were people inside.
They were the collectors who had come here and gone missing.
They looked quite miserable from being locked up for a long time, and they stretched their hands desperately through the gaps in the bars when they saw Kwon Jia and me.
“What are you going to do?”
“…We can’t leave them alone.”
“Then leave this side to me. You chase after the bastard that went inside. It’s not stupid, so it must have some idea why it ran away there. Let’s finish it off before it does anything.”
“That is…”
“You’re not saying you can’t do it alone, are you?”
“…Of course not.”
Kwon Jia nodded her head and ran inside after the Underground Nation’s General.
I was left alone and killed the people locked in the bars.
There were about 10 people.
Considering that more than 50 people had gone missing among those who came here, the rest must have died.
Among the survivors, there were three men and seven women.
However, there was a big difference between the two groups.
‘If they kept the men in a place that smelled bad, they put the women in a place where they could live comfortably.’
The difference was obvious just by looking at their appearance.
The male collectors were thin and their eyes were sunken, while the female collectors looked well-fed and well-rested.
They even looked like they had been treated well by their complexion.
“Here! Here! Please get us out!”
“Just wait a moment.”
I cut off the bars where the male collectors were locked up first and took them out. The three collectors cried tears of gratitude and bowed their heads repeatedly to me.
I told them to wait outside and sent them out. I headed towards the bars where the female collectors were locked up next.
“Hurry up and open it!”
“Yes. Let’s do that. But first, there’s something I need to confirm.”
“What? Confirm what? What are you talking about now…”
“Please answer my question. It’s a necessary procedure if you want to get out.”
The female collectors swallowed their saliva as they read the cold air in my voice.
They realized that I knew something.
They exchanged glances with each other and pretended to be ignorant.
“There’s no one like that! Hurry up and get us out!”
“That’s right! Aren’t you a rescue team? Are you going to leave us here like this?!”
“Hurry up and open it!”
As they became more impatient, the collectors raised their voices.
I didn’t hide my emotions as I looked at them.
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It was the opposite of the polite attitude I had shown before, as if I was facing an enemy.
“Really, not one but all seven of them?”
“What, what are you talking about?”
“Don’t you know? Or are you pretending not to know. Well, you’re not clueless, so I guess it’s the latter.”
The spirits who were listening to the conversation between me and the locked-up collectors sent me a message.
[The spirits ask what the hell is going on.]
[The spirits are curious why you’re not letting them out.]
Some of the good-natured spirits urged me to release the hostages, but I didn’t.
Instead, I moved a little away from the bars and started to tell a story as if everyone could hear it.
“There’s a part in the story of defeating the Underground Nation’s General. The wife who was captured chose to become the monster’s wife and betrayed her original husband. But there’s actually a part that’s not explained in detail here.”
The young man’s wife was kidnapped by the monster, but she eventually betrayed the young man and chose to become the monster’s wife.
And when the young man went to find her, she already had the monster’s child in her womb.
“The monster said it would make any woman who caught its eye its concubine. Why did it do that? Did the monster that could stick its neck back even if it was severed want to leave offspring?”
No.
That’s not it.
The monster knew its weakness.
It knew that it couldn’t regenerate if its wounds were sprinkled with ash.
The underground giant was cunning, unlike its appearance.
It was thinking of its possible death.
“And in the actual legend that was passed down, the young man’s wife was pregnant with the monster’s offspring, or rather, the monster itself. The young man who found out eventually cut open his wife’s belly and killed the underground giant’s offspring. But do you know what’s surprising?”
Right before the monster’s offspring died, it said this.
“If only I had 100 days, I could have been reborn. How regretful…”
That means the underground giant didn’t kidnap women to leave its descendants, but to switch to a new body in case it died, using a strange magic.
Yu-hyun pointed his sword at the seven women who were trapped inside the iron bars.
“That’s what’s inside your bellies.”
The women who were trapped in the cage became thoughtful at his words that hit the mark.
Some of them unconsciously covered their belly area with both hands.
That alone was enough to prove that Yu-hyun’s words were true.
[The spirits open their mouths in astonishment.]
[They shake their heads, saying they didn’t expect such a story.]
“That’s a natural reaction. It’s definitely a shocking story, no matter how you look at it. But don’t you know, spirits? Anything can happen in the world of thoughts.”
Collectors can die fighting.
But sometimes, they could experience something worse than death.
“More than anything, more than 50 people have gone missing here. But only 10 are left? I can understand that those three men are the ones who disappeared recently and barely survived. But what about you?”
The women who received Yu-hyun’s gaze shivered.
If someone else saw them, they might think they were being oppressed, but Yu-hyun never fell for what he saw on the surface.
“Out of 50 people, there must have been more than seven female collectors. But only seven are left. Why do you think that is? And I’m sorry to say this, but you all have pretty good looks.”
Yu-hyun’s eyes showed him the truth hidden behind their glamorous appearance.
“Why should I save those who have become allies with that monster, or rather, those who can no longer be called human?”
“No, no! We just… had no choice to survive!”
“Yeah, yeah! We did it to live!”
They shouted desperately at Yu-hyun as if making excuses.
They said they followed the underground giant’s words because they might die otherwise.
They said they had no choice to survive.
But Yu-hyun didn’t accept their words as they were.
“You did it to survive? That’s an interesting thing to say. Are you claiming that you’re still human?”
Yu-hyun’s eyes were looking at something else now, not books.
“All I see are twisted monsters.”
The seven female collectors trapped in prison.
The appearance of another mutant hidden behind their glamorous appearance.
He would never have seen their true nature if it wasn’t for this time.
‘Is this the power of Laplace’s fragment?’
Yu-hyun could only see the essence of his opponent through books.
But now he could see their hidden appearance without looking at books.
Thanks to the power of [Laplace’s Devil Fragment], which made him know everything.
‘It didn’t activate right away, so it must be conditional. Is it a form that activates through the information accumulated beforehand?’
He roughly understood how to use it, so now it was time to use it as he pleased.
Yu-hyun didn’t think of them as human anymore.
They must have been human once.
But whether it was to survive or because they were affected by the underground giant’s magic, he didn’t know.
“Did you think I wouldn’t know?”
As soon as Yu-hyun finished his words.
“Kyaahh!!”
The female collectors who were locked up in prison revealed their true colors.
They shed their human skin and quickly turned into ferocious monsters.
They broke the iron bars easily and rushed towards Yu-hyun.
[The spirits are startled.]
[100TP donation!]
[Wow. This is crazy. They were really monsters?!]
“They must have been human once. But not anymore.”
The hands of the human-turned-monsters changed strangely and their nails grew long.
Their mouths tore open and a long tongue came out from inside and wriggled.
They quickly crawled on the walls and ceiling and approached him.
It was like a scene from a horror movie.
Yu-hyun didn’t panic as if he knew this would happen and took a fighting stance.
“They probably realized they had no chance and pretended to be human to escape and die. They were planning to revive the underground giant. That would have been quite a headache.”
If it wasn’t Yu-hyun who came here, but someone else, it would have been like that.
Yu-hyun didn’t hesitate and swung his sword.
***
Yu-hyun looked down at the corpses scattered around him with indifference after he knocked down the seventh and last monster.
They must have been human once.
They became collectors and wandered around the world of thoughts to achieve their goals.
But in the end, they became monsters.
They were trapped in this underground country’s world of thoughts and their existence itself caused mutations.
Some might have done it because they wanted to live, and some might have changed against their will.
But in the end, they all had the same fate.
A fair death.
[That’s horrible.]
Bakryeon also said as if it was hard to bear.
[They were human once. To become monsters.]
‘There’s nothing we can do. Their fate was decided when they failed to clear this place and got caught. It’s not hard to mutate like this when you’re affected by the power of a story that transcends cognition.’
[There are cases where it doesn’t end with just dying.]
‘It depends on which world of thoughts you get caught in. Collectors have to take everything with them.’
The current collectors wouldn’t do that, but Yu-hyun thought so.
Being a collector meant fighting for your life.
And collectors should have the determination to do so.𝒏𝒐𝐯𝒆ɭ𝒃ì𝙣.𝘯𝔢𝐭
‘But there are many more people who can’t do that.’
Those who had no determination, no faith, just claimed to be collectors with pride.
But the real collectors weren’t as romantic as people thought.
The few collectors who were admired by everyone as heroes were those who survived until the end among the people who died like this.
The cries of anguish from those who fell did not reach the citizens.
“Anyway, the situation is over with this.”
And that was the same for Kwon Jia.
He saw her walking towards him from afar, holding five severed heads of the underground giant in her hand.
She must have had a fierce fight on her side too.
Yu-hyun smiled at Kwon Jia as if hiding his heavy thoughts and praised her for her hard work.
“Good job. Jia.”
