Chương 4: Digging in Scraps

Lio's first stop was a shop three streets down from the bar. It sat wedged between two taller buildings, like an unwanted weed growing between cobblestones. Narrow and crooked, the structure leaned at such an angle that it suggested that it was only still standing out of spite. The sign above the door had faded to complete illegibility years ago, the windows were coated in grime so thick you couldn't see inside, and the door itself hung severely crooked on its hinges. In short, it looked like a complete mess.

Around Lio, most people were walking past it without a second glance. After all, why would they stop? The place looked abandoned, or if not abandoned, then certainly not worth entering. There were better, cleaner shops a few streets down. But Lio knew better. He pushed open the door, the hinges groaning and shrieking like chalk against a whiteboard. A bell somewhere overhead gave a weak, pathetic jingle. Inside, the interior was exactly as cramped and cluttered as the outside suggested.

A multitude of shelves lined every wall, packed with rusted tools, broken equipment, dented canteens, frayed rope, and cracked leather belts. The air smelled of old metal and mildew, and clusters of dust motes drifted through the weak light filtering in from the grimy windows. The owner stood at the back, behind a dust-caked counter. He looked to be in his fifties, with a heavily scarred face and a missing left arm. He looked up as Lio entered, his one good eye narrowing marginally.

"Morning. What're you looking for—" The man's voice died as Lio walked past him without slowing, not even acknowledging that he'd spoken to at all. The owner's mouth hung open, confusion flickering across his scarred face as this barefoot kid in his sleep clothes moved through his shop, completely ignoring him. Lio went straight towards the back wall, where a row of mismatched drawers had been built into a rickety cabinet. Most of them were either stuck or broken, with their handles missing.

He stopped in front of the third drawer from the bottom, gripped the handle, and pulled. It was stuck like glue, as it always did. He pulled even harder, until the drawer scraped open with a tortured screech. Inside was a collection of knives—or what barely qualified as knives. It was a collection of rusted blades, metals with handles, and daggers with broken tips. Lio carefully swept the first layer of metal aside, and pulled out a specific knife from the back. It looked like complete garbage.

The blade was crude, unpolished, with an ugly grey finish that suggested its poor-quality metal. The handle was wrapped in old, cracked leather that was coming unraveled at the ends. There was no guard, no pommel, nothing that suggested any sort of craftsmanship or value. But what they didn't know—and what the owner standing behind him didn't know—was that this knife was probably worth more than everything else in the shop combined.

During the 127th loop, Lio had found a journal in a collapsed house on Floor 18, written by a Delver named Chione who'd suffered an accident where he lost his leg, and was forced to retire early. The journal had been more of a diary than anything useful, pages upon pages of rambling about Chione's regrets and memories. But one entry had caught Lio's attention. Apparently, Chione had a rune that let him 'absorb' metal into his body and make it into tools or weapons.

The only flaw was that he lacked precise control over it, resulting in his creations looking broken and lackluster. The important part wasn't the ability itself, but what Chione had absorbed. Deep inside Floor 24, there were veins of strange blue metal embedded in the dungeon walls, a type of alloy that Lio had taken to calling 'Adamantine'. It was a peculiar type of metal that existed nowhere on the surface, and regular blacksmiths still hadn't been able to find any way to shape the non-malleable material.

To make a long story short, Chione had absorbed some of it, tried to forge a knife, but the result had come out crude and ugly because of his poor control. Frustrated, he'd sold it to a scrap dealer in the lower districts for barely anything, needing the money for medical treatment after losing his leg. The entry had also included one crucial detail: the scrap dealer's name. Lio had spent three loops tracking it down.

He had quickly found the dealer's shop, but it had been closed for years now, the previous owner long gone. But undeterred, he had found the nephew who'd inherited everything and moved the inventory. Then he'd found the knife buried in a drawer full of actual garbage. Now, at the start of every loop, he came here first. The blade looked like trash, but it was forged from Ghenna itself.

Something in Adamantine's composition made it harder than surface steel and most importantly, when Lio channeled his [Pyrolysis] or [Isopolity] runes through it, the energy conducted was much faster and stronger than any weapon he could buy in the fancy shops near the market. Lio walked back to the counter and placed five silver Rels on the scarred wood surface. The owner stared at him, then leaned over the counter.

"That worthless thing? You know that's junk, right? I could sell it to you for half a bronze Rel, you don't need to—" But Lio ignored him, already walking toward the door, the knife tucked into the waistband of his pants. The door slammed shut behind him, and Lio continued down the street without breaking stride. His next three stops took less than fifteen minutes. The first one was a baker selling bread at his stand. He always left fresh bread cooling on a rack behind his shop until 10: 15 every morning.

Lio walked past just fifteen seconds before 10: 15, grabbed three loaves without slowing down, and kept moving. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. He really had no taste for food anymore, but his body was still human, and it needed sustenance. At 10: 23, the water merchant near the market's edge turned away to argue with a customer who always complained about her prices.

While her attention was elsewhere, Lio crouched behind her stall and swapped three thick waterskins of expensive spring water for the cheap, contaminated stuff she kept hidden in the back for personal profit. He quickly tucked the good water into his shirt and left before she noticed him. Finally, it was time for the gear merchant's stall.

At exactly 10: 31, two customers began their daily argument about the prices for the ropes—one insisting that it was overpriced, while the other was defending the merchant's rates for some reason Lio had never quite understood. His own personal opinion was that the rope's price was indeed a scam. While the merchant tried to mediate the argument, Lio quickly gathered the things he needed with a quick hand. Climbing gear, a backup knife, coils of thin wire, all disappeared into the waistbands of his pants.

Then he was gone before the argument had even concluded. Three successful acquisitions. Everything was going exactly according to plan. But Lio really felt nothing about it. No satisfaction at his efficiency, and not even guilt at what he'd taken from these innocent people. Yes, it might be theft, and it might be morally wrong, but… These kinds of finite concepts—right and wrong, ownership and theft—were designed for people who lived linear lives. People for whom actions had permanent consequences.

Well, Lio didn't live that kind of life anymore. How could human morality apply to someone who'd existed for a thousand years in the same year? Lio was someone who could undo anything, reset everything, or erase any consequence. All he had to do was simply wait for the loop to complete. Therefore, those kinds of principles just couldn't concern him. Around a few hundred loops ago, Lio had stopped trying to hold himself to moral standards designed for normal people. Still, humans needed rules.

They needed framework and control, lest they go mad and lose their grip on reality. So instead, Lio had created his own framework—five simple rules to keep his mental state at least decently sane. Rule 1: Eat at least once a day. Rule 2: Drink at least 3 liters of water every day. Rule 3: Speak at least one sentence to someone everyday. Rule 4: Do not kill people unless you need to. Rule 5: Don't form lasting emotional connections with anyone. These rules weren't exactly moral commandments.

The first three were mainly there to at least keep his body and mind functional. Rule 4 existed because killing had consequences that persisted in his memory even when the loops reset the world. At first, when he killed people, it was just awful and traumatic. But even once he got used and numb to it, that didn't mean the memories didn't stop piling up, like dirt over a coffin. It quickly began affecting Lio's unconscious body, as he began scratching himself bloody every night and having multiple sleepwalking fits.

Eventually, he just decided to avoid it when possible. Rule 5 was the most important and the hardest to follow. That had been the one he broke the most in the earlier loops. And he had paid dearly for it. Because how would anybody else feel if any person they befriended, or fell in love with, would just end up becoming strangers again in the next year? Reset. It always reset. Everyone forgot. And all their memories dissolved into nothing. And Lio was left all alone. So he stopped trying and caring.

People just became tools, patterns, or obstacles. Nothing more and nothing less. After all, it was easier this way. Lio turned down another street, the stolen supplies bulging in his pockets and shirt. Just one more stop before he could head home, change into some proper Delver gear, and begin the descent. It was time to meet the rookie Delver. His name was… William, was it? Yes. William Bone. A boy at the ripe young age of 18.

His rune had something to do about enhanced hearing, though Lio had really never bothered to learn the specifics of it, as it didn't matter. The kid would die in a few hours anyway. His life story wasn't really that interesting either. The thing that did interest Lio was that after finally signing up as a Delver, William had immediately spent every Rel he had on some fancy gear, thinking that it would keep him protected and secure. A healing salve had been his final purchase.

His life savings had all but been converted into a single glass vial of regenerative paste that supposedly accelerated healing by a factor of three. William carried it everywhere, tucked carefully in his pack, convinced it would be the difference between life and death when things got dangerous. He was wrong, of course. Today, at approximately 4: 23 in the afternoon, William would be on Floor 1 of Ghenna with two other rookie Delvers he'd convinced to team up with him.

They'd be exploring a side passage when a minor earthquake would destabilize a section of ceiling. William would hear it coming with his enhanced hearing, but he'd be too slow. He was just too inexperienced to react in time. The rocks would crush him instantly. His two companions would survive and retreat back to the surface, traumatized. And the healing salve would remain unopened in his pack, buried under several tons of stone. Unless Lio took it now.

He reached the corner outside the Delver's Union building at 10: 46 and fifty-three seconds, according to a giant clock on the building wall. Seven seconds early, but that didn't really matter. William was always punctual, and always in position by 10: 45. Lio knew the coming routine by heart. He'd approach from the left, and William would quickly intercept him with that characteristic blend of eagerness and naivety plastered across his face.

And then he would launch into his rehearsed monologue about heading into Ghenna and the "three essential rules for survival" that every rookie needed to know. Though the boy meant well, Lio did always find that part more than a little bit annoying. Seventeen minutes of the same words in the same order with the same emphatic hand gestures. And it wasn't like the information was useful. The boy himself had only been a Delver for a few months.

But it was worth it, as while William talked, Lio's hand would slip into the side pocket of his pack and extract the salve without any suspicion. Lio turned the corner, preparing a light, friendly smile on his face… And stopped. The spot… Was empty? The Delver's Union entrance stood before him exactly as it always did. The building itself was the organizational heart of Delvers, the place where the government tried their best to control and catalog these supernatural humans.

Every serious Delver passed through these doors eventually, either to register their runes, to log new descents, and to report new floor conditions or claim their rights to recovered treasure according to the Salvage Law—a principle that stated anything recovered from Ghenna belonged to whoever brought it to the surface, regardless of who'd originally carried it down. Huge, colorful banners hung from the second-story windows, proclaiming "Safe Descent Starts Here!" in bold lettering.

The same cracked stone steps led up to heavy oak doors. To the left of the entrance, an old wooden notice board was covered in layers of job postings, floor warnings, and death notifications. The left wall was dominated by a massive map of Ghenna's known floors. Floor 1 through 5 were marked in white (Secured). Floors 5-10 in yellow (Moderate Risk). And finally, Floors 10-35 were in orange (High Mortality). Everything beyond 35 was red, and most of it was blank parchment. Everything was in their proper place.

Except William. William wasn't there. Lio stared at the vacant corner, the specific spot beside the left pillar where William always stood. Where is he?