Editor: Tide
Proofreader: Hydragea
Antarctica (2)
“Hochi, go check the extractor. Let’s see what he has done.”
At that moment, a man opened the second side door to the right and went into the room precisely at the center of the dungeon, near the dungeon’s extractor.
Thomas could neither stop nor hold back the man trying to reach the center, which never allowed outsiders inside.
The extractor was the dungeon’s everything.
It was not only responsible for the play log, but the dungeon’s management and status of monsters spread around the globe.
Giving up the extractor was tantamount to giving up the whole dungeon.
“Why are you crying? Do you think it’s unfair?”
It was unfair and unjust. Thomas couldn’t accept the current situation.
Thomas Feltchuk was a German-born scientist.
He had a Ph.D. in astronomy and was a scientist who’d devoted himself to pseudoscience.
Most of the followers of pseudoscience pretended to be scientific and use logical theories. Still, it was quite unusual considering that they had never received professional training in the field.
Thomas Feltchuk was somewhat of a prodigy in the field. It could be called a mere boast.
His theories were not that absurd, and even a renowned astronomy doctor supported his idea.
It was what raised the validity of pseudoscience. But on the other hand, it also pointed out loopholes in pseudoscience’s flawed logic.
It wasn’t a smooth religious life.
When Thomas first started with pseudoscience, and his name appeared in the magazines, academic seniors who had never seen him before criticized him.
What surprised Thomas, though, was that his colleagues, who once sided with him, did the same.
It felt wrong when his colleagues, who usually treated him like he was invisible, gave interviews and voiced their condemnation of Thomas’s pseudoscience.
Of course, that was just Thomas’s personal views. Soon, Thomas’s career was like rotten food thrown out by the roadside.
Somehow, people in the Academy sent texts such as “I’m disappointed” after obtaining his number.
But Thomas was happy every day.
When he went to a meeting, he liked seeing people look at him with respect. He liked to make speeches as if he were in a high position.
It felt good to be treated like that—to be noticed. People listened to his every word as if they were God’s words, acting thrilled and anxious.
The criticism from the Academy and his colleagues was also bearable.
At first, it hurt his mentality, but he got used to it over time.
Thomas even enjoyed the blame soon.
Every time he was criticized, Thomas felt like a villain from a famous comic book. He was the centre of attention and interest.
When he first accepted the pseudoscience group’s proposal to pay off his debts, he had a lot of regrets, but when he looked back, it was the right decision.
One day, when he was spending his time like that, a cataclysm occurred. Monsters appeared from all over and began to run wild.
Naturally, everything stopped. There was no longer anyone to criticise Thomas.
They were all about to die, so they couldn’t afford to be interested in criticism.
In a world where existing values collapsed, Thomas was just an older man without acquaintances or friends.
He blamed the world for changing, and the people who left.
At that time, he heard God’s voice in his ear. Frankly speaking, he was surprised.
He had committed himself to pseudoscience, but he didn’t believe God existed beyond the universe and watched over him.
God was pleased with Thomas, who confessed his faults, begged for forgiveness, and suggested Thomas become a prophet of God—like Noah, who saved people and animals that believed in him from a great flood and punished humans stained with sins.
Thomas could not resist the proposal to become the prophet of God and lead the few who would remain on Earth.
It would have been the same for him, even if it hadn’t been God’s suggestion. So he became the owner of the dungeon in Antarctica.
Operating the dungeon was like a game.
Thomas controlled a dungeon with a hologram that emerged at its center and messed around with it here and there. It made him feel like he was playing a game.
Thanks to that, Thomas was able to shake off his guilt quickly.
Rather than agonizing over how many people would be hurt and killed by his own choices, he pondered how effectively he could harm the city.
The more damage he did, the more the people died, the more joyful Thomas became.
There were Awakened people who had cleared the Tutorial, but they were not a threat to Thomas. They could only prevent small monsters.
Over time, the amount of energy collected at the dungeon core gradually increased.
After giving all the energy needed to give to God and to run the dungeon, excess energy remained. From then on, Thomas began to invest energy in himself.
His aging body quickly became young and healthy. His recovered youth made him feel great joy just by taking a walk in the dungeon.
As Thomas became healthier, his greed grew. A few years later, he could break glaciers with a few swings of his fists and could fly in the sky.
Among the numerous monsters in Dungeon, none were stronger than Thomas himself.
Thomas set up portals and began to wander from place to place in the Antarctic dungeon. He would be waiting at the site where the attack was scheduled, just to watch the raid and the soldiers and Awakened, who fled in confusion over a low-level monster’s appearance.
He began to feel omnipotent after seeing their fierce struggles. He knew the secret behind the world that no one knew. He controlled the monsters wrecking the world.
Even the Awakened couldn’t be compared.
Thomas was like a god. It wasn’t precisely wrong, since he was God’s agent.
He felt confident when he confirmed the Awakened identity that had wiped out a group of monsters near the Dungeon.
He was well aware of who they were. Lee Ho-jae and his party were the Awakened of Korea’s Hell Difficulty.
Thomas thought about bringing them in.
It was also fun to look down on humans with overwhelming superiority, but the excessive gap in their strengths made him bored.
He wished that he had a suitable subordinate and companion. He wanted someone to talk about topics he couldn’t share with others.
So he prepared dinner and faced the group of Awakened.
And as if all of his past was a lie, Thomas, who’d been flying in the sky, fell to the ground.
* * *
[Lee Ho-jae]
“About 42 billion points.”
“That’s all?”
I didn’t know how many points were usually used in the dungeon, so I couldn’t tell if this was good.
“The target for the 89th-floor stage was 100 million points. If we collected all the planet’s source on the 89th floor, it’d be about 100 billion points.”
The total points from sources of the planet was about 100 billion? Forty-two billion was already missing from here.
“You’ve sucked up a lot. Hey, hey.”
I slapped him on the cheek and poked his eyes to see if he had regained consciousness. I was getting used to controlling my power.
“Hey, how could you not run away, huh?”
It was incredible. I thought this guy would disappear as soon as we got into the dungeon. I wondered if he was keeping himself hidden until the end, but he even guided us.
It wasn’t a trap.
“Did you think I’d be equally happy if the guy who was controlling the monsters on Earth told me he was happy to see me now? I don’t understand.”
Thomas opened his eyes but couldn’t answer me. He didn’t even seem to understand me.
Had my plan of strength controlling failed?
I looked at Hochi. “What do you think? Can you make do?”
“Of course, though, there is some security.”
“And?”
“I’ve had it all cracked,” Hochi said with a grin. He was not only motivated but also competent, perhaps because it was his favorite field.
It was strange.
“Then we won’t need this one.”
After pulling off Thomas’s neck from his body, I got up from my seat.
Over the past decade, he’d been such a brute. I couldn’t believe he’d hurt tens of millions, perhaps even hundreds of millions of people.
“There are a few more dungeons like this?”
“Yep. Leaving aside Pyongyang and Antarctica,” Lee Joon-suk told me.
Maybe because it was hard to understand the situation, Lee Joon-suk had been struggling for a while and had gone around the dungeon with Hochi to adjust.
He hadn’t experienced it directly in Hard difficulty, but he quickly adapted because he had been through something similar.
“With four more dungeons like this, the Earth’s source would be almost exhausted.”
“I don’t know. This dungeon could have been exceptionally mined.”
Still, there wouldn’t be much left. I understood why the gods were reluctant to extract the source of planets. The consumption rate was too fast.
The dungeon had mined half of the planet’s source for just over a decade.
I didn’t know exactly how much power the source of that would be, but Kirikiri had replied that it was incomparable to the power drawn through faith for a long time. In just a decade, they were trying to kill the source that had produced faith stably for thousands of years, no, tens of thousands of years.
From the gods’ perspective, I wondered if the source’s extraction would be seen as illegal fishing that would destroy the ecosystem itself by wiping out even a small fry with a thick net.
They couldn’t do this crazy act in their territory, so naturally, they would hide in other people’s territory and do it like a Chinese fishing boat.
I’d heard that planets with extracted sources would decline rapidly, and that new civilizations would not be born easily.
But what happened to a half-extracted planet?
I didn’t know. I asked Hochi, but he was clueless as well. I could once again feel that there was still a lot of information I didn’t know.
“Stop the extractor first. Let’s think about it later.”
“Okay.” Hochi turned back to the room with the extractor.
Hochi, who had been walking one step at a time, suddenly halted.
“Stop.”
I heard a voice from behind me that made Hochi stop. And behind me was Thomas’s body, who was decapitated.
A headless Thomas stood up from his seat.
I could recognize it with a glance. He was a Ruler and, at the same time, a god.
He was a Ruler who couldn’t even compare to the Mantis inside Yong-yong’s box.
We’d finally met. Before dealing with the Ruler, I looked at my party. Hochi was shaking his feet as if he was confused by the fact that he’d stopped for a while.
Lee Joon-suk… was kneeling down and vomiting blood.
Why was he so weak? Yong-yong ran towards Lee Joon-suk in surprise. He could treat Lee Joon-suk on his own.
Turning away from my party, I looked at the Ruler, who was covering Thomas’ body.
“Who’s trying to shut down my dungeon?”
When Thomas died, I said I’d stop the extractor, and at that time, the Ruler popped out. Or was the Ruler just taking time to get here?
I was curious and had a lot of questions. So, I talked with a bright smile just like Thomas, whose head had been separated from his neck.
“Now that the boss is finally here, it’s time to talk.”
