This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/MrIzuarel on 2024-09-28 11:05:30+00:00.
Chapter 62
The following day was a new beginning for all of us.
My girls, now very excited about what would happen, dived as fast as they could inside random dungeons. I understood their excitement. Their actual goal wasn’t hunting, but the discovery of new dungeons of the second tier.
I was also very interested in exploring new dungeons, but I decided to occupy myself with another interesting topic.
I recognized I was in some sort of major city, maybe even the capital of this fallen country. There were few possibilities except this reason for the fact that there were four heroes present in this city. But the heroes weren’t my goal at that moment.
I had obtained the divine crystals from them and was very grateful for such blessing, but I was not shortsighted enough to overlook something else.
The fact that two heroes had died a peaceful death here and buried in some kind of religious building meant they had most likely collected a lot of treasures during their lives.
Of course, I was not expecting much of it. I seriously doubted that the people would hold back their best weapons when the downfall was imminent, but I wanted to believe that I could find something.
Just like that old fart Morrigan, I expected something more inside these ruins. I speculated about finding two, maybe even four hero’s scepters. The possibility of getting something useful like the goblin knife I stole was also realistically achievable.
There had to be something precious in these ruins.
I was not ready to get rid of the stones blocking the cave to search the debris for valuables, but maybe I would find some treasure inside the castle or the houses of the nobles around it.
This was my first treasure hunt in this sense since I arrived in this world, and I was very excited. I was a total novice in that matter, but I had some common sense that helped me properly plan my exploration.
The houses of the common people were not a good starting point. Such people would not have been able to afford magical weapons. So their houses, or whatever was left of them, were not a viable option.
Rich merchants and nobles were a good idea. They could pay for such luxuries. The merchants were an especially interesting target when talking about magical tools since they valued profitable businesses over good weapons. Tools that would not get used during a fight.
But the best and, at the same time, the worst place to look for treasures was the castle. The best, because the armory was inside those fortified walls, and the worst, because they had, most likely, emptied said armory to protect the city during the crisis.
I knew they had given every piece of magical weapon and armor to anyone with a good arm because I had seen the undead with those weapons. Unfortunately, they were somehow bound with the dead because once I defeated them, their weapons would dissolve too.
As I approached the city, I carefully watched my map. Over the last months, I had properly established where the colored dots roamed around and could safely predict where the safe places were. At the same time, I took my time counting all the black dots on the map.
I could breathe in relief because not one of them had changed. Their numbers and positions were still the same.
That was a good thing.
I thought long and hard about what I should do next and decided to go and gather the crystals in the beginners area, the four I had not collected. Those four were the only ones in areas below level 20, which I hadn’t collected, excluding the three crystals that were situated behind those four. It would be an easy job if I collect all seven on a trip.
The plan was simple. Get level 30, get my wings, fly over the wall, and collect my fourth blessing.
Considering my improved speed in leveling up, I speculated I would not even need more than twenty days to do so. That turned out to be much longer than what I expected.
But it didn’t matter at that time.
I was barely arriving at the castle when the first message popped up.
○○○○○
You discovered the “Eternal Battlefield” dungeon.
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We already had a substantial amount of dungeons in our selection and had raided them so often that I had slipped my mind that those were only the dungeons at level 10. Now that I had level 20, the dungeons of the second tier were available to me. My girls were very eager to obtain new sources of entertainment, and I would also benefit from this.
I knew how excited my girls were about this, but I asked them for the favor of not exploring the new dungeons. I wanted them to wait and enter them together. While I had to admit that my girls had more experience with the dungeons of this world than me, I had more knowledge about dungeon dangers than them.
They weren’t particularly pleased by my decision, but they accepted. It helped that I explained it in such a manner that they understood that it happened for safety reasons.
Over the next hours, more and more dungeons were discovered by my girls, and if they happened to enter one of the new ones, they abandoned that run.
On my side, I was deeply involved in my own search.
My first goal was the castle. I searched the places where I could get in and found nothing.
During the second day, I found something that looked like two scepters, but because my system didn’t react to it and because the two poles were broken, I didn’t expect them to work. I still inspected them by slipping into the realm of the dead, but there was nothing. There was no magic in those two scepters or any other object in the vicinity.
For a few days, all I could tell was the fact that the castle had been expanded multiple times because the colors of the stones didn’t match correctly. More than that was impossible to say about the castle because I found nothing.
I changed my location and searched inside the nobles’ houses for treasures. I was extremely lucky because on the third day, I found something.
○○○○○
$(÷<;!)÷]
Tool, broken
Grade: normal
Use: #&(÷[@#&@(@@<&#;$
[Repair][Upgrade]
○○○○○
I was no expert in magic tools, but even without the small pop-up window, I was able to tell it was broken.
The tool in front of me was a ball of about 1 meter of diameter. It was made out of stone and had a horizontal zigzag cut that separated the upper half from the lower half. At the same time, it had numerous small gears on some places that were placed there in a decorative manner instead of a functional one.
The reason why I knew it was broken even without the additional information from my system was the fact that some stone had crashed against the upper half of the tool and caused that part to be completely broken.
I carefully selected [Repair] and saw it demanded tier 1 stone and metal ingots. That was not a problem for me as I had the possibility to buy them from my mechanical merchant, but that little guy was on a cooldown at that moment.
So I transported that thing inside my dungeon and installed it near the pyramid.
By the way, when I entered my dungeon, I found some of the group managing my inventory near the pyramid. Never thought that those little ones would skip the work and simply sunbathe under the false sky of my dungeon. I wanted to scold them, but let it go. Problems like those would be solved by themselves once the hardworking ones found out about it.