For the first time in history, the commoners between the Goblins and Orcs reached a compromise and banded together to try their luck in the Dungeon Cave. For the reward of attempting to see each other as equals, Orc King Frost Echo had personally enchanted the first ten parties with his ice magic, making their armour stronger and sturdier.
Goblin King Sol did the same by enchanting their weapons with his Light magic, making them sharper and emitting a small shining light, allowing for an easier time in the dungeon without the need for torches.
To the adventurer’s surprise, the first floor was brightly lit with various lighting that did not seem to originate from lanterns or torches. They saw miniscule wires along the cave tunnels and at every five to ten metres interval, there was a small bulb like object that shone brighter than any torches they had ever seen.
Most orc villages were too poor to afford any lightings, and even in some of the smaller towns, it was a bit rare. Except for the capitals and the major towns, the orc villagers in the first party had never seen such stuff before. The goblins, on the other hand, were not as surprised with most of their cities powered by electricity.
As they would eventually find out these lightning privileges were only available on the first ten floors. On the eleventh floor onwards, the System was programmed to place torches at irregular intervals. They would need to steal the torches to proceed forward or learn to bring in their own lighting source to compensate for it.
Jin had designed the whole Dungeon Cave experience similar to an MMORPG. He wanted to make things easy and approachable, providing everyone with an authentic taste for adventuring. The first ten floors were intended to act like a tutorial. The first time an adventurer cleared a level would result in a guaranteed chance of a random weapon and armour pieces that consisted of chest plate, boots, helmets, gloves and perhaps shields.
Any subsequent visit to an already cleared floor would yield lesser rewards, most often in the form of materials, but it would not be impossible for parties to try and make a living by not risking their lives.
The first floor was filled with copies of the Wyrm Ants. The System had disabled their elemental properties for the first floor, only activating them on the second. That itself had already proven to be a challenge since the parties never seen such a monster before.
They assumed those wyrm ants were just a variant of an Ant but most of them were dead wrong when they came charging towards them without any regards for their life. Howwever, the Wyrm Ants were not stupid and did retreat whenever it sense that it was in a trap, giving its prey a chance to chase after it too.
Starting with the third floor onwards, Zombies began to appear as requested by Half Ghoul Lord Derek. Derek felt that his zombies were not getting much love in the Great Wall of China Instance as they used too.
He wanted them to practice more, but after the introduction of the Raid Instance, the zombies had seemingly been forgotten by most of the cultivators. This particular dungeon was an excellent way for his zombies to gain more experiences and hopefully grow stronger in the process.
Their progression was similar to the wyrm ants with the third floor holding regular zombies and the fourth level of the Dungeon Cave adding elemental zombies. Only unlike the wyrm ants, the adventurers would have to contend with various kinds of elements like poison, sleep, paralysis and stun as compared to the wyrm ants who had fire and frostbite.
While some parties managed to power through the particular floor by tolerating the aliments, this notion did not hold true for all of them. Thus, they would be forced to return to the base camp where the merchants were selling antidotes and even potions against specific ailment resistances.
The merchants knew that selling these various antidotes and ailment resistance potions would generate a relatively reasonable sum of profit at the start, but these miscellaneous recovery items were all needed to lead up to the sale of the more potent remedy that could increase resistance to ailments.
An all resistant potion.
Of course, the merchants employed by the System were not stupid. By pricing the various antidotes fairly cheaply, they could jack the price of a minor ‘all resist’ potion by at least three to four times the price even though the System bought all these potions for nearly the same cost.
Besides, the potions were selling like hotcakes when the adventurers pieced the information together at the makeshift adventurer guild headed by someone who Jin felt that she was working out of her normal scope of work.
Zhi Nu.
She felt wanted to contribute more towards Jin when she saw Niu Lang working hard in the Star Cross Industries. The Weaver Girl knew nuts about machines, but she had learnt a fair bit about management when she was being schooled back in her world’s Heaven’s academy. That was why Zhi Nu wanted to help Niu Lang by first establishing and learning the ropes from the beginning by being in this particular adventurer guild.
Zhi Nu would tell the other merchants about the gathered information she overheard while handling the farming humans through the System Channel. This gave the merchants a heads up to perform their tricks as well preparing sufficient stock for sale.
Thus, the adventurer’s guild and the Merchants had long coordinated among each other even though they were all busy handling their customers and ‘compete’ against each other (They all had a quote to fulfil after all).
Meanwhile, some adventures who were too poor to afford those potions had decided to fight more cautiously, and others had decided to return to take on jobs that were in the vicinity. What jobs one might ask?
The dungeon supplier had told both Kings that he had already created an opportunity for the two races to work together. The rest was up to them, but Jin ‘leisurely hinted’ that a small village could be useful and fortunately, there was an abandoned town in the vicinity.
Thus, the two kings had signed a royal decree and pooled money together to create the village. Any adventurer’s who did not mind this back breaking labour could earn some additional cash by helping clear the abandoned village and aid with the construction of it. Qiu Yue also chimed in by providing improved schematics by Jin’s researchers to improve the quality of life of the adventurers. (At a cost too)
That was how Jin pushed his self driven economy and started to take the share of this Goblin World’s money pie to eat. With the tasty food by the (half masked) penguins, the constant avenue to earn some revenue and a possible permanent place to stay when they built the site up, the opportunistic goblins and orcs began to see that there was hope. And it was this hope propelled them as a united front.
In the subsequent days, the Human Kingdom had sent emissaries to visit both the Goblin Kingdom and the Orc Kingdom proposing that the Humans take part in the village building endeavour as well. They were farsighted enough to see that the cooperation of the Goblins and Orcs could threaten their own existence if they decided to stay their hand on this particular matter.
Frost Echo and Sol had both agreed to the human’s participation on the condition that they who had come in late invested the same amount both Kings had already paid into this village. Unable to decline, they accepted and the humans sent out their own entourage of adventurers as well as the paraphernalia support needed for the construction of the village (Not to mention more gold.)
As expected, budding alchemists, mages and healers had decided to come in and try to make a quick buck when they heard how the dungeons could not be coped with brute force alone.
Unfortunately for them, the merchants who were present offered a wide variety of options so that those support adventurers who arrived eventually ended up paying for more to enhance their own supportive roles by providing their value added services to join the adventurers.
As the days went by, some of the adventurers managed to hit Dungeon level five where Jin had placed Shu’s Praying Mantis as their first boss that they would be fighting against. There were no tunnels, no tight spaces but a spacious hall with the praying mantis munching on some meat. Jin purposely placed the Praying Mantis there as a definitive test of the adventurer’s teamwork.
It was by no means an easy fight, but it gave many of the adventurers the feel of adrenaline with the Orcs undoubtedly excited to be fighting against such a terrifying monster.
Eventually, after a full day had passed without any team able to defeat it, the first three adventure groups who had managed to reach that floor had met up and discussed possible ways to overcome this challenge.
In the end, they not only succeeded in defeating it, but their names had appeared under the Panda Statue as the first few parties to succeed leading to the most other adventure teams following their example by making use of each race’s natural talent.
The Orcs took pride in their sturdy build, enabling them to take and dash out a lot of beatings, so most parties had them act as the tank of the party or their offensive tank. The goblins were generally nimble due to their size, and most of them took on the role of sub attacker, by providing ranged support or surprising the enemies from behind. Lastly, the humans took the positions of support or finishers where they were either healers or mages.
Nevertheless, there was a considerable number of exceptions, turning party matching in the adventurer guild almost a bloodbath. In these moments, Cross and Gladios’ security regiment came in to break the fight.
Many of the Orcs tried to challenge the famed Sword Goblin General after the war, and those who lasted for more than ten exchanges could be counted with less than one hand. Meanwhile, Cross was so agile that the battle ended even before it could start.
This showed that the presence of security and the response of security teams was equally important even in this (relatively) small adventurer base camp. So that brought in the question of how?
Let’s start with Qiu Yue previously pressurising the two kings to succumb to her demands by allowing her to buy the land at the middle of their borders at a very cheap price. (Jin tried to stop her, he really did, but in the end, he was powerless to stop her too.)
So, although it was stated that the dungeon cave was in between the borders of two kingdoms and was still under their authority, the land actually belonged to the humanoids.
With that in mind, the System had full control over that area and had placed various magic eyes to keep track of the place. As the land owner, the Red Panda Cultivator rented the place out to both kings at a rate that they were both satisfied paying. (Considering how much they owed her, they believed it was a reasonable thing to do while the kings seemingly forgot that they were pretty much controlled by her.)
Thus, Cross was sent out via the System’s commands to catch those lawbreakers and explicitly showed that the laws of their kingdoms were applied strictly. It was not a pleasant sight, but it reminded people that while this might be a new haven, big daddies were still watching among the people.
However, the heartening thing was that all three major races despite their differences and the usual racist remarks towards each other could still put aside their long standing grudge in just a few days to work together and fight against a common enemy.
The kings while still cautious of the optimistic early results, were delighted to see such a scene and had pledged to aid the place even more to ensure it would stay this way.
Even though a whole Earth day had passed, the profits that Jin had earnt from this particular endeavour were increasing by the (Earth) hour. The dungeon supplier now hoped that more of this profit would continue to roll in the coming days giving him more assurance in terms of money flow for he had started to focus more on the Tiangong Shopping District.
“With only 12 days away from Christmas, let’s hope that I can finish in time, so there is at least a week of sales for the owners.” Jin thought as he prepared a bottle of Blue Mountain Coffee right beside him. Going through all nighters was one thing, but communication with the rest of the store owners was another nightmare he had to brace himself for.
Though right now, he was going to build the most unique and iconic feature Shenzhen would ever have. One it would be remembered for in the future.
