Chương 7: The Camp on His Doorstep

"Enough! All of you, shut your mouths!" The shout cut across the foot of the hill without warning. The voice wasn't especially loud. The rasp of exhaustion in it was plain. But it shut down every last bit of the clamor. The crowd, a moment ago all talking over one another, fell silent in unison, as if an invisible hand had clamped over every mouth at once. A few young adventurers shoving toward the portal stopped in their tracks on reflex.

Greer leaned on his cane and walked, step by step, to the front of the crowd. He made no effort to straighten his back. His body, worn down by twenty years of old injuries, had long since lost the ability to stand fully straight anyway. But when he planted himself and let his gaze sweep slowly across the gathering, those adventurers, faces lit with excitement only seconds before, found that hardly any of them dared meet his eyes head-on. A few veterans recognized him and quietly stepped back.

"Greer, Branch Guildmaster of Blackstone Town." He spoke slowly, each word carrying weight.

"Some of you should still remember this old face." The crowd went quiet for a beat. Greer looked at those gleaming eyes. He knew the look all too well. Not courage, but greed. The look of people who smelled easy money.

"I know what you're all thinking." He raised his cane and pointed it at the glowing white portal behind him.

"A dungeon where you can't die, and which hands out magic crystals on top of that." Someone in the crowd swallowed. Greer let out a cold laugh.

"Twenty years ago, I might've charged in faster than any of you." That gave more than a few of them pause. They'd braced for a scolding. They hadn't expected the old man to open with this. Greer didn't give them time to react.

"But here's the thing. You really believe there's no risk behind any of it?" His gaze sharpened as it swept over every face caught between hesitation and greed.

"Does the resurrection come at a price?"

"How many times can you die in a day?"

"Die too many times, and what happens then? Can you still be fixed?"

"You can come back today. What about tomorrow? The day after?" One question after another, thrown out into the silence.

"A dungeon isn't an amusement park. It kills people. That's what dungeons do." Greer regarded them coldly.

"And the greed on your faces right now is exactly the weakness it finds easiest to seize." The young ones who'd been beaming a moment ago slowly went stiff. They clearly hadn't thought any of this through. Or rather, they'd thought of it and chosen to pretend they hadn't. Greer's voice dropped lower.

"Relax. I'm not telling you that you can't go in." He paused.

"Just the opposite. The Guild is going to find a way to keep this dungeon running for the long haul." Another stir ran through the crowd.

"But we do it under rules. Not like this." Greer's cane came down hard against the ground. Thud.

"Not the way you're doing it right now: a mob of people getting worked up and charging in to die." The crowd went completely still. Greer looked toward the young adventurer who'd been shouting earlier about dying twice.

"You." The man's already pale face went paler still.

"After your second resurrection, did you walk out on your own?" The young adventurer opened his mouth and couldn't get a word out. Someone beside him said quietly, "We dragged him out… he wasn't waking up at the time." The line landed on the crowd like a bucket of cold water. The greed in more than a few eyes gave way to unease. Greer didn't let the moment slip.

"You hear that?" He looked around at all of them.

"You can come back. That doesn't mean there's no price." This time, the crowd made no sound at all. Greer drew a slow breath, pressing the exhaustion back down into his chest.

"As of this moment, this dungeon is under the provisional control of the Blackstone Town Adventurers' Guild." Someone looked ready to object. Greer fixed him with a single look, and the man's mouth shut at once.

"You want in? Fine," he said.

"Once we're back in town and we've talked it through and settled on a plan, we'll open the dungeon up."

"If there's profit to be had, you'll get your share." He paused, his voice cooling by a degree.

"But anyone who forces their way in now — when the time comes to open it up, don't even think about setting foot inside." As the words landed, another stir went through the crowd, but it died down fast. The adventurers traded glances. Most of them wore sour expressions, plainly unwilling to let it go. But being unwilling was one thing. Actually squaring off against the Blackstone Town Branch Guildmaster was another thing entirely. And besides, Greer hadn't been wrong just now.

The more a dungeon looked like an amusement park, the less simple it usually was beneath the surface. At last, someone muttered a curse under his breath and turned to head down the mountain path. Then a second. A third. The crowd slowly broke apart. A few parties drifted off the hill in twos and threes, still grumbling, their eyes flicking back toward the portal every so often. Greer stood where he was, propped on his cane, and watched them go.

Only when the last of them had disappeared at the far end of the path did the tension in his shoulders ease, almost imperceptibly. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it In truth, sheer willpower was the only thing holding him upright through that speech. After exerting himself inside earlier, his old legs were still aching, and there was a tight, anxious pressure sitting in his chest. But he didn't get even a few breaths to recover.

At the edge of his vision, the young adventurer who'd died twice was standing off to the side all alone, shoulders hunched, trying to slip quietly down the hill from another direction.

"Hold it." Greer's voice wasn't loud, but on the open hillside it carried with perfect clarity. The young man went rigid all over, his feet nailing themselves to the spot. A few of his companions who hadn't gotten far stopped too, turning back to look.

"Yes, you." Greer lifted his chin.

"Come here." What little color was left drained further from the young man's face. He looked back at his teammates — who promptly looked away and quickened their pace down the hill. No one was coming to his aid. He let out a resigned sigh and shuffled reluctantly over to stand in front of Greer. Up close, the young man looked ghastly pale. His lips were nearly bloodless, and he seemed so drained that a stray gust of wind might knock him over. His once-gleaming eyes kept dodging away from Greer's.

"What's your name?" Greer asked.

"…Finn." The young man swallowed.

"Finn Hurlington, sir."

"White Porcelain?"

"Low White Porcelain." Finn's head sank slowly.

"I only… only signed up a little while ago." Greer looked him up and down. Shabby gear. A sword that was the cheapest grade the Guild rented out. Leather armor patched over its patches. A wet-behind-the-ears newcomer, dead broke and down to his last coin. And a reckless fool who'd died and gone back for more.

"Why go back in a second time?"

"…I didn't think it through. I just wanted to get my gear back." Greer let out a sigh and studied him for a moment.

"Come back to the Guild with me," Greer finally said, his tone betraying neither anger nor approval.

"There are some things I want to ask you." Finn flinched.

"G-Guildmaster, I didn't do anything—""Easy. Nothing's going to happen to you." Greer cut him off, his voice softening, a rarity.

"Look at you. You need a healer before you fall over. And while we're at it —" He glanced at the glowing white portal.

"— you're going to tell me, in full, what it felt like to die and come back. And how you feel right now." Finn went still. He'd assumed he was about to be punished. It hadn't occurred to him that what Greer wanted to ask about was the experience of dying and resurrecting. That spark of excitement, only just tamped down, came creeping back up into his eyes.

"…All right." He licked his cracked lips.

"I'll come with you." Greer glanced back at Rayne.

"Soon as we're back in town, get the Guild to send people out here to cordon off the road. We're short-handed right now, so for the moment we take this kid back and get him checked." Rayne nodded. They both knew it wasn't the ideal arrangement. But there weren't enough hands on the hill, and Greer couldn't very well leave a newcomer with suspected Soul Damage sitting out here. Only then did Greer turn and start down the hill, leaning on his cane. Finn followed half a step behind him, matching his pace.

Some distance back, Rayne's party slowly fell in after the two of them. As Finn walked away, Tyren muttered under his breath:"I didn't think there was anyone in this world crazier than me." Then he immediately noticed Serin beside him, staring at him hard. He straightened his spine in a hurry and walked on, doing his best to look like nothing was wrong. At the back of the group, Rayne and Asar caught the whole thing, traded a glance, and couldn't help a quiet laugh.

Only Barton scratched his head, lost as to what was funny. They had not been gone long. The hill settled back into quiet. Then came the faint rustle of footsteps from the woods. Someone had come back. ◆ ◆ ◆ In the Core Chamber, Owen let out a long breath. That crowd outside had finally dispersed, at least for now. Honestly, when that many adventurers had massed outside earlier, he'd panicked a little. Not fear, exactly. Adventurers were how a dungeon stayed alive, after all.

It was mainly that he wasn't fully prepared yet. With that many people flooding in at once, he was afraid he simply wouldn't be able to handle the load. Thankfully, calm had returned before long. Owen's attention drifted back to the management interface, his mood finally settling. All things considered, the psychological weight on him now was far lighter than it had been when he'd first awoken. In the beginning, he'd run the place with his heart in his throat the entire time.

What he'd dreaded most was Trial Return failing: some poor soul actually dying here, never able to go back. The thought of "killing a person with my own hands" gave him the creeps just to entertain. The dungeon had been open for less than two days, and yet every party that had come in had, at the very least, walked out of the dungeon alive. On the one job that mattered, keeping people alive, Trial Return hadn't failed once. Not a single person had truly died inside his dungeon.

That fact put Owen more at ease than any amount of profit could.

"At least… I'm a fairly friendly sort, all things considered." He paused, and the crystal seemed to dim a little.

"If only I could take the edge off the pain at the moment of death." So far, he hadn't found any adjustment option resembling that on the control interface. Then again, maybe that was for the best, Owen thought cheerfully. If he could tweak it at will, he might carelessly turn the dungeon into a theme park, which would run flat against his original intent. Just as Owen was slowly turning over thoughts of future plans, the portal at the entrance rippled once more.

[External Activity Detected] Following the sensation, Owen looked over and caught sight of several furtive figures hunched low, poking their heads out of the stone chamber, glancing left and right, the very picture of guilty consciences. Owen: "…" He could more or less guess what was going on. The old man outside had barely finished chasing everyone off, and these few had found a gap to sneak right back in. A few days ago, Owen would have watched them with his nerves stretched tight. But now, things were different.

"Well, you're here now." Owen sighed.

"Good luck on your run, I guess." He had Trial Return as a safety net regardless. As long as they didn't rack up too many deaths back to back in a short span, it shouldn't cause any real trouble. Keeping one eye on the group's condition, he let the corpses near the entrance continue their usual patrol routes. As it turned out, the few adventurers who'd snuck back in were a touch stronger than Finn's party, but not by much. They didn't get wiped, but they didn't get far either.

After losing one member at the second wave's ambush point, they finally lost the nerve to push on. Grimy and deflated, they slunk back to the chamber with their freshly resurrected teammate and left at a slow walk. At least they'd quit while they were behind, instead of stubbornly ramming their heads into the wall. No one actually came to harm. Owen breathed easy again. That night, his Soul Energy crept quietly up another notch. ◆ ◆ ◆ Owen had been ready to reassure himself.

Maybe the days ahead would just be adventurers trickling in, a few at a time, while he steadily raked in energy. A bit of a hassle, sure, but at least it would keep things running. And yet barely a night had passed. The sky had only just begun to lighten when a commotion he'd never heard before rose up outside the portal. Not the sound of adventurers gearing up to enter a dungeon. It was something… heavy, rhythmic, threaded with the knock of metal against wood. Owen pushed his senses out past the portal.

And there he saw a group of people utterly unlike the others. No swords at their hips, no armor on their backs. In their place were logs hoisted onto shoulders, coils of rope, tool bags clinking and clattering. A dozen or so burly men, under the direction of that old man with the cane, were hard at work right outside his front door… Digging foundations. Owen blanked for a moment. One stake, two stakes, three.

Thick wooden posts were driven into the soil one blow at a time, marking out a clean rectangular outline across the open ground in front of the portal. The workers called out to one another: some raising frames, some tamping the ground level, one lugging a wooden signboard and grunting as he hammered it into the dirt. Men built like that would have been star workers on any construction site back in his old world. The thought struck Owen at a wildly inappropriate moment. He stared blankly at the whole scene.

"… What are they doing?" He let his senses sweep over the site. The longer he looked, the more wrong it felt. This setup looked nothing like people coming to explore and clear a dungeon. It was practically a declaration that they were going to set up camp like squatters right on his doorstep. Owen's core gave a faint shudder. He'd always assumed a dungeon was like a convenience store: open around the clock, waiting for the occasional customer to wander in.

But as he watched the camp go up piece by piece, something dawned on him for the first time. The people of this world seemed to have a far more sophisticated approach to managing dungeons than he'd realized. Things were getting out of hand in ways he absolutely hadn't planned for. What in the world was that old man trying to do? Was he going to wall the place off and keep people out? No, please. That would starve him to death. But going by the looks of it, that didn't quite seem to be it either. Was he…

going to manage who came and went? Or were they getting ready to establish a long-term camp and clear the dungeon outright in one sustained push?! One thought after another spun around inside Owen's core, tangling further with every turn. Up to now, he hadn't once stopped to consider a question like "how a dungeon and the humans outside it are supposed to coexist over the long term."

In his original picture of things, this was a simple back-and-forth transaction: adventurers came in to run the gauntlet, supplying emotion and Soul Energy, and he supplied the thrills, the magic crystals, the treasure rewards, and most important of all, Trial Return, the thing that kept the adventurers safe. A simple exchange. They challenged the dungeon. He gave them rewards. Everyone got what they came for. But now, that camp taking shape outside was telling him, plain as day: It wasn't going to be that simple.

"Haah…" Owen let out a lungless sigh.

"What do I do if they wipe me out in one wave? I haven't even done anything wrong." His attention never strayed from that camp for a second. He didn't know what was coming next. But he had a feeling. His "poorest dungeon ever" was probably never going back to those quiet days when nobody cared he existed.