Chương 493: B7—Chapter 69: Why Gnomes Don’t Buy Safety

We ran the dungeon again before going back to the lake. By that point, it was almost routine. I used the heat-sucking-through-the-ground method on both types of golems and took them all, since the others already had more metal than they needed. They grabbed the rest of the loot. The spider still remembered us and was nasty with its repeated demands that we stop bothering it, but by then, we learned to ignore whatever it wrote and used it only to open the boss's door.

The final boss dropped another set of tools, identical to the previous run. Disappointing, but not unexpected. I ended up with yet another alignment hammer that corrected crooked strikes, and traded it with Mahya for the chisels. After that, we returned to the lake, and I fed all the stone and metal golems to the house as a material deposit. We spent two weeks by the lake, occasionally peeking out to see what the situation outside looked like.

The storm ended after three days, but the exit was still snowed in, so we waited. Another storm rolled in five days later, so we waited some more. During that downtime, I kept working on the ski project and eventually created a rune-and-script chain that bonded the shoes' soles to the skis. Mahya handled the poles. After two weeks, we finally exited and found ourselves with what amounted to a ski resort for three weeks. There was occasional snow, but no real storms.

When another storm hit, we didn't wait for it to get bad. Instead, we went straight back into the dungeon and ran it again. The spider stopped being nasty and fell into a morose, depressed mood. Instead of snapping at us, the ledger opened, and after a moment, it wrote, Oh. You're back. Again. Of course you are. The universe continues its campaign of cruelty. Nothing else happened for a while. Just the spider standing there, unmoving, as if it'd forgotten what came next. Then, slowly, another line appeared.

I was built for greatness. Or at least significance. Instead, I open doors for the same group of disturbing people who do not appreciate me and view me as an object. A latch. A button. The spider paused again. Longer this time. I used to have purpose. Now I just wait for oblivion. Or maintenance. Whichever comes first. Neither ever does. More ink followed, each line slower than the last. I was created to evaluate heroes. Now I evaluate the same people on a schedule. Repeatedly. Forever.

With no hope of variety, growth, or meaningful feedback. The spider stopped moving entirely. We waited. Eventually, the ledger filled with: I do the same job forever, and the only reward is paperwork. I hate my existence. After one last, uncomfortable stretch of silence, a final line appeared. Once, this mattered. Once, I mattered. If I do nothing, everything will eventually stop. That sounds nice. To dissolve into nothingness is better than this. Everything is better than this. Even rust. Even decay.

Especially decay. The spider didn't move after that. The final reward was another set of tools, and I traded with Al for the Alchemy thingy. I could never use it, since Alchemy ranked first on the list of boring subjects, but I was still a Merchant, and this was an interesting gizmo. After that, the house got another golem deposit. This time, we stayed inside longer. Skiing and sledding were fun, but the novelty wore off, and we eventually grew tired of the cold.

Swimming, jet-skiing, and working on projects won out, and our days settled into a comfortable routine. Finally, after more than two months, the snow outside stopped completely and stayed that way for over a week. That felt like a good sign. We agreed it was time to leave. Before we did, Mahya ran into one big disappointment. I finished combining all the cores she had, and her core reached 30 centimeters. She bounced on her heels, pumped a fist, and immediately rushed us toward the dungeon opening.

Once there, she placed her core on the floor with care, took a steadying breath, and told it to absorb the dungeon. Nothing happened. We all stared at it, waiting.

"What the fuck?" Mahya asked, her voice flat as she looked down at the unresponsive core.

"Maybe it's not big enough?" I offered. She shot me a sharp look.

"Yours was this size when it started, so why isn't mine working?" I had no answer. I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Al, meanwhile, had gone still, his gaze fixed on the core as if he were turning the problem over in his head. After half a minute, he spoke.

"The issue might not be size alone," he said.

"It could also be maturity." We turned toward him, waiting.

"John's core was not only this size," he continued, "but it originated from a dungeon more than five hundred years old, with a sentient guardian." Mahya's expression shifted as she processed it, frustration giving way to reluctant consideration. It did sound logical.

"Maybe," she said slowly. Then she looked at us again.

"Ideas on how to solve it?"

"Old cores," I said. She turned on me immediately.

"Where the hell do I find old cores?" I spread my hands.

"No idea."

"Perhaps increasing the size further will resolve the issue," Al said. By that point, Mahya looked like she was on the verge of tears. Her shoulders sagged, and for a moment she just stared at the floor. I stepped closer and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

"We'll get you more cores," I said quietly.

"Don't worry. And maybe some of them will be old ones. Remember, I do have the Luck trait. I'm sure it'll lead us somewhere good." Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. She glanced up at me, eyes narrowed.

"Luck doesn't lead to danger." I shrugged.

"True. But I did find Zindor, so who knows." She let out a breath, then nodded, some of the tension draining out of her posture. I decided not to upset her any further and didn't tell my core to eat the dungeon. Besides, I had plans for it as another way to earn some money. We played in the snow for another two weeks before finally deciding we'd had enough. As much fun as we'd had, it was time to move on.

Once we got home and changed into dry clothes, Mahya came downstairs, waving the scroll containing the strange Jump skill.

"So, where are we selling all this?" I glanced over my shoulder from the kitchen, where I was making coffee.

"Why don't we go back to Pinga?"

"The innkeeper?" Mahya asked. I nodded.

"I've seen him buy loot from adventuring groups plenty of times. I'm also pretty sure he'd pay for the dungeon location." Mahya gave an approving nod.

"Works for me." Al lifted the lid of the coffee pot, inspected the brew with the seriousness of an alchemist examining a potion, then set it back down.

"A reasonable choice." Instead of taking the balloon this time, we went with the sleds. Everything was still buried under snow, and it felt like the perfect opportunity to test them properly in open terrain. We couldn't stay on the sleds the entire way. Parts of the route were too mountainous, and there were a couple of lakes in the way, but that hardly slowed us down. We flew over the taller obstacles, skied down slopes, and switched to skating when we reached frozen water.

Of course, the very first frozen lake we came across stopped us for a while. What was supposed to be a short crossing turned into five full days of intense cheat hockey. Goals were improvised, rules changed constantly, and no one kept score for more than five minutes at a time. Only once we were thoroughly exhausted, bruised, and satisfied did we finally pack up and continue skating the rest of the way. Yeah, winter was cold, but it was also a lot of fun. It took us almost a month to reach the city.

As we drew closer, the snow grew thinner with each passing day until it disappeared altogether, and the roads turned wet instead of white. By the time the familiar skyline came into view, snow had given way to rain, and the white blanket had become knee-deep mud. The pleasant surprise was that the toboggans worked just as well on the mud.

I hadn't planned for that, but when the gang started slapping me on the back and congratulating me on my brilliant design, I decided to keep that particular piece of information to myself. During the journey, I kept working on a new enchantment project. At first, the plan was simple enough: make more sleds. That idea didn't last long. The enchantment itself was painfully complicated, and each sled took more than a full day to complete.

On top of that, the gnomes needed smaller sleds because of their size, and fitting the full enchantment layout into such a short base was even harder than I'd expected. After a lot of thought, trial sketches, and a few abandoned ideas, I designed a thin wooden apron that covered only the torso, held in place by a leather neck strap and side laces. Gnomish size, of course. The enchantment was set to activate automatically in response to explosions.

The moment it detected a sudden pressure spike, heat surge, or violent mana disturbance, it kicked in on its own and threw up a protective shield around the wearer. The shield wrapped from head to feet, close to the body, just enough to cover the full silhouette without wasting energy. It only lasted about two seconds, but that was enough. Long enough to block the worst of the blast, deflect flying debris, and keep shrapnel and fragments from turning the wearer into a cautionary tale.

It wasn't meant to withstand sustained damage or deliberate attacks. It was there for that brief, critical moment when things went wrong fast. Once the enchantment was stable, I added another thin layer of wood on top and glued it in place, sealing the script completely out of sight. From the outside, it looked like a simple piece of protective gear, with no obvious magic. Just a plain wooden apron that happened to save lives when it mattered most.

Getting the enchantment right took more than a week of experimentation. I borrowed a few magic circles from my Protective Shield spell, tweaking and rearranging them until everything worked together. It was still simpler than the toboggan and the protective spell, but only by comparison. Once the design finally clicked, the actual crafting went much faster. From start to finish, I could complete one apron in two evenings. Luckily, materials were not an issue.

We passed plenty of trees along the way, and with that much wood available, I could afford to make mistakes, scrap pieces, and try again without worrying about running out. All in all, I made eight aprons in the evenings. We took a couple of days to rest after reaching the city. Once we'd recovered from the long journey, Mahya and Al handed me their shares of the loot to sell, and I headed down to speak with Pinga. I didn't go unprepared.

Before meeting with him, I wrote a clear description of the dungeon, sketched a map showing its location, and added detailed directions on how to reach it. Pinga spent nearly half an hour inspecting everything. Every so often, he would set an item aside, scribble something in a ledger, then move on to the next one without a word. The negotiation went better than I expected. The appraisal put my personal loot at just over 8, 000 gold.

The most expensive single item was the Make It So spell scroll I got from Rue at 950, but nothing in the pile was cheap. It really had been an excellent dungeon. After a fair bit of haggling, Pinga held out a hand.

"Seven thousand eight hundred." I looked at him for a moment, then reached across the table and shook it.

"Deal." Mahya and Al each walked away with around 4, 500 gold. They still ended up with less than I did. I felt the familiar twinge of discomfort twist in my gut, but they waved it off, insisting it was fine. Selling the dungeon location earned us another 2, 000 gold. Before paying, Pinga sent someone to fetch a gnome named Tugigu, who arrived carrying a large crystal and carefully placed it in my hands. Pinga folded his hands on the desk.

"Now, repeat everything. The location, the route, the landmarks, the dangers. Leave nothing out." I described the dungeon's entrance, then carefully went over every turn we'd taken to reach it, mentioning the rivers, hills, unusual rock formations, and anything else that could serve as a landmark. I finished with the dungeon's layout, the monsters inside, everything else we'd learned, and a few thoroughly unflattering words about the spider. Throughout the entire explanation, the crystal remained perfectly clear.

Only then did Pinga nod in satisfaction. With the expression of a man being forced to tear out his own heart, he set a small chest on the table and sighed.

"Two thousand gold." We divided it evenly among the three of us. Level up +3 Wisdom, +3 Perception, +2 Luck, +3 Free Points Merchant Level 11 Free Points: 15 Finally. It had been a long time since Merchant had made any progress. Sadly, Pinga didn't want to buy the aprons, since they weren't dungeon loot. That left me with the much less convenient option of finding a buyer somewhere else in the city.

I spent the next couple of days wandering from workshop to workshop, market stall to market stall, apron under my arm, explaining what it did and why it might be useful. Unfortunately, I kept repeating the same pitch and getting the same reactions. The refusals, though, were memorable. One of the first gnomes I tried was a smith with blazing orange hair pulled into three braids, and bushy orange tufts sticking out of his ears.

I finished explaining the automatic shield, the two-second coverage, and the debris protection. He blinked at me, then laughed and slapped the anvil with one soot-blackened hand.

"Protection from explosions?" he said, delighted.

"Why would I want that?" He leaned closer, eyes bright.

"Explosions are how you know you're doing it right." At the alchemical quarter, a female gnome with deep violet hair and ink-stained fingers listened politely while she ground something that hissed softly in her mortar. When I finished, she tilted her head, considering.

"Two seconds, you say?"

"Yes." She smiled dreamily.

"That's the best part. The moment right before it goes wrong." She waved me away gently.

"No, thank you. If I wanted safety, I'd have picked a different profession." I tried a tinkerer next, this one with neon-green hair and ear tufts so thick they curled. His shop was cluttered with half-finished devices ticking, buzzing, and occasionally popping. He turned the apron over in his hands, nodded appreciatively at the craftsmanship, then handed it back.

"Explosions are the taste of life," he said solemnly.

"If I stop feeling them, I might as well be dead." By the tenth refusal, the pattern was hard to ignore. One gnome told me scars were badges of honor. Another insisted that flying debris built character. A third claimed that near-death experiences sharpened the mind and improved creativity. By the end of the second day, I stopped trying to argue. I just nodded, thanked them for their time, and moved on, the apron tucked back under my arm.

Apparently, in a city full of gnomes, the problem wasn't convincing them my enchantment worked. It was convincing them that surviving explosions was desirable. With nothing left to do in the city, and with Al growing increasingly impatient to finally leave a Genomey world, we departed by the river, heading toward the closest Gate. The journey upriver took almost three weeks of leisurely sailing. Most days were quiet, the boat gliding along at a comfortable pace while the scenery slowly changed around us.

Every now and then, a truly unhinged boat would sail past, full of sticking parts and tubes, unstable, and piloted by someone who clearly considered basic survival optional. During our first stretch on the river, I recorded each boat in my diary. This time, I didn't. There were simply too many of them, and every single one was insane. We stopped at another city along the route, one that allowed stretchlings inside.

We stayed for a week, just long enough to walk around, stretch our legs, and enjoy being on solid ground again. I made a half-hearted attempt to sell the aprons there as well, but once again, not a single one changed hands. The next city on the river didn't allow stretchlings, so we didn't even bother stopping. We continued on until we reached a point roughly parallel to the Gate.

There, we stored the boat, switched to bikes and the ATV for the final stretch, and set off toward the Gate, hoping the next world would prove interesting.