Hoarding In Hell [EN]: Chapter 186

186. One Goal, Different Paths (1)

Hyun-woo staggered to his feet and looked around.

The battlefield was eerily desolate.

There was nothing. No corpses, no armor.

It was as if a swarm of locusts had swept through.

More than anything, the absence of Undead was incomprehensible, considering the Wailing Star could revive them endlessly.

‘Did we win?’

There was no way the war could continue here. It seemed a conclusion had been reached in some form.

Then, Hyun-woo spotted the Tam [a type of sword] stuck on the hill.

On the desolate hill, only the Tam retained its proper form.

The Stars had created the Tam as a token of the bet, waiting for the victor there.

Hyun-woo approached the Tam and loosened his shoulders, the cracking sounds were loud.

The time had come to change the victor of the bet that had never changed for thousands of years.

Hyun-woo lightly pulled out the Tam.

[Quest Completed!]

[You have passed the trial.]

[‘Gaul’s Gift Box’ has been provided as a reward.]

[Curse: Immortality has been lifted.]

Hyun-woo was taken aback by the notifications.

‘Gaul?’

Gaul, instead of Verd, Ardan, or Yogulem, who had participated in this bet?

It was an unexpected name, but there was no time to dwell on it.

As soon as he received the reward, the space before his eyes began to collapse.

The battlefield shattered and crumbled, and his vision soon went dark.

***

When Hyun-woo opened his eyes, the surrounding scenery had changed to the shelter.

Kazat and Kirson were looking at him with bewildered expressions.

“Great One, are you alright? You seemed a bit… unwell for a moment.”

“The Boss always gets like that, so there’s no need to worry too much, I say.”

The black tendrils that had been swirling around the Tam were no longer visible. Instead, Hyun-woo found a pure white Tam in his hand.

Hyun-woo hurriedly checked his neck first. There was a slight cut, but it wasn’t dangerous.

Something caught on his feet. It was the goblins and ratmen with their heads cut off.

Hyun-woo recalled the story of some goblins and ratmen being dragged away before he was captured by the Tam.

‘Did it just drag them and stab their necks with the blade?’

Then why was Lenia fine?

Questions arose, but Lenia was always an exception, so he decided to let it go.

The Tam looked like a plain and simple straight sword, just as he had seen it for the first time.

He was disappointed that the flashy appearance had disappeared, but it was better than being in a situation where he had to stab himself.

“Back to the original form after going around in circles….”

Thinking about why it had become like that, he figured the Tam might have been measuring some kind of threshold.

It assigned scores to each item it absorbed, and when it reached a certain score, it dragged its owner into a hallucination.

And it seemed that absorbing the item he had turned into a crystal at the end had definitely exceeded the threshold.

Hyun-woo gripped the Tam. The first thing he did was check the Tam’s status.

[Tam 貪 (Mythical/Genuine/Limit)]

[Attack: Highest, Speed: High, Penetration: Medium]

[Special Ability: Summons the records of absorbed weapons to unleash their abilities. It splits as many times as the number of absorbed weapons, and each fragment has the attack power of the absorbed weapons. The arrangement of the fragments changes according to the user’s will and can be stretched or shortened flexibly.]

[Note: ]

As expected, there was no note.

Perhaps this was the first time the Tam had reached its current state.

Since it was difficult to understand what it meant just by the explanation, Hyun-woo put the Tam in his inventory for now. Then, he looked for the next item, ‘Gaul’s Gift Box.’

The unpleasant feeling was one thing, but the reward was another.

“Huh?”

But he couldn’t see anything in his inventory. For a moment, he wondered if it had been used without him knowing, then he heard a voice from behind.

“Butler, let’s open the box!”

Blackened Lenia was holding the box.

Until now, Hyun-woo had only seen the box open as soon as it was touched, so he didn’t know that it could be held or carried. And she could take it out without his permission.

As Hyun-woo stared at her with an absurd look, Blackened Lenia tilted her head for a moment and then hit Hyun-woo’s forehead with the box.

With a thud, the box opened. It seemed that touching it with the forehead instead of the hand also counted as opening it.

“I opened the box for you! Good job, right?”

“……”

“She’s the kind of child who needs a dog collar.”

Whitened Lenia, who had appeared unnoticed, muttered with a worried look.

He agreed, but it seemed useless to put a dog collar on a kid he couldn’t even detach from his body.

As Gaul’s box opened, a platinum card appeared.

[The Shattering Star, Gaul, bestows a blessing upon your intellect.]

[The Magic Understanding (Rare) skill is enhanced to World Understanding (Legendary) skill.]

“……Magic?”

He had expected something better because it was a platinum card, but he got something ambiguous. Hyun-woo didn’t have good memories of benefiting greatly from magic, so he wasn’t very happy about it.

Even if a magic book came out, the magic that people could read was different, and it was only useful for people with only one or two skills.

It didn’t seem like learning a few debuffs now would be a big advantage.

[The Shattering Star, Gaul, is watching you.]

But Gaul was even making it obvious that he was watching Hyun-woo.

Hyun-woo clicked his tongue, feeling the piercing gaze.

‘What does he want me to do?’

Anyway, these perverts can’t say it outright, so they give hints with their eyes.

Hyun-woo wondered what Gaul was expecting and remembered the Nameless Book.

The magic book he had obtained after catching the hamster or puppy-like beastman.

It was still a book that made him shed tears of blood, but now that its grade had increased, he thought he might be able to read the table of contents.

‘Is that what he’s expecting?’

Hyun-woo took out the Nameless Book from his inventory for now.

[The Shattering Star, Gaul, is watching you.]

[The Whispering Star, Monstrill, is watching you.]

It seemed right.

This time, even Monstrill had appeared and was watching. Hyun-woo thought to himself to say something if they had anything to say, but there was no answer from Monstrill.

The book, bound in beast hide, had something written on the cover, unlike before.

「Dedicated to ■■■■■■■.」

He couldn’t read it at all, though.

“What are you saying?” Hyun-woo muttered and opened the book.

As soon as he opened the cover, he felt a headache that made his head throb and a distortion of his vision.

Hyun-woo felt like he was going to vomit.

An indescribable ominous feeling consumed his body, and his nerves screamed at him to run away.

It was a very encouraging result.

‘At least it doesn’t make me shed tears of blood and prevent me from reading it like before.’

In other situations, he would have run away without looking back if he had felt this ominous.

It was like the fear of seeing a book that was rumored to be incredibly interesting but whose final volume had not been released.

But Hyun-woo knew that this was just a warning message that this ‘book’ was throwing at the reader.

Hyun-woo boldly turned the page.

「Table of Contents.」

The letters were written.

He could read the letters!

It was difficult to concentrate because of the headache, but he could somehow put each letter into his eyes.

The first word written was ‘Hellgate.’

‘Hellgate?’

Hyun-woo couldn’t understand what it meant, but he went on in order.

Unfortunately, there were many words he couldn’t read besides ‘Hellgate.’

The only words he could read here and there were ‘blowing from the underworld’ and ‘abyss.’

It was a table of contents that seemed to have been written by someone whose life was very serious in many ways.

Or someone who had a case of middle school syndrome [a Japanese term for when someone acts like they’re in middle school].

Hyun-woo turned the page again. If the order of the table of contents was correct, it was the page where the magic ‘Hellgate’ was written.

The moment he turned the page, his left eye went dark with a thud.

“Argh!”

Hyun-woo hurriedly wondered what was going on and tried to touch his left eye, but he realized that his hand was already there.

No, to be exact, he was holding his left eye.

Hyun-woo had pulled out his left eye without even realizing it.

Hyun-woo was speechless when he saw his left hand holding up the eye as if worshiping it.

He belatedly dropped his eye as if startled, but it already felt like it wasn’t his hand.

Hyun-woo blew away the dust on his left eyeball and roughly put it into the hole.

A high-grade potion could reattach severed parts and heal them as long as the cut surface wasn’t severely damaged.

He felt the eye settle into place. But his vision didn’t return. Hyun-woo frowned.

‘I haven’t completely lost my sight, have I?’

If he died and came back to life, it might return to normal.

For now, there was nothing immediately uncomfortable, so Hyun-woo turned his gaze back to the book with a suffocating feeling.

He wondered if he would have to pull out his right eye too, but that didn’t happen.

Rather, he could look into the book with a much more comfortable feeling than before.

Hyun-woo chuckled.

“Is this some kind of admission fee?”

It’s already so expensive, and it’s even demanding an admission fee of one eye.

Hyun-woo felt like biting the book and was strongly intrigued at the same time.

If it’s this dangerous, the reward must be huge.

Hyun-woo, who had been slowly reading the text, was speechless for a moment.

It was completely different from what he had imagined.

‘……Is this magic?’

This was completely different from the debuffs or buffs that Seo Ji-hoo used, or the curses that Kazat used.

To use a more accurate analogy, Hyun-woo had to go back to a very old example.

When he met an ‘angel’-like being in the Taean Dungeon.

At that time, the angel summoned undying maze dogs by entering strange commands and even granted them immortality.

Hyun-woo was still unable to grasp the identity of that being.

The contents written in this magic book, to be exact, were different from the commands that the angel used, but that was the closest analogy.

‘It can raise the difficulty of the area around the caster at will?’

It was literally a magic that opened the gates of hell.

That was it. Hyun-woo couldn’t overcome the rapidly increasing fatigue and closed the book.

Hyun-woo looked at the Nameless Book with a queasy look.

If his thoughts were correct, it was definitely a valuable book. But it was even more dangerous than that.

If it was a book that could touch the system of this world, it might have some influence on his resurrection.

‘I need to be careful when looking at it…… or find a suitable guinea pig.’

It was then. Suddenly, Kazat grabbed his pants and clung to them.

“Great One! One who has immersed himself in the abyss, one who has glimpsed the fragments of truth!”

“Huh, what is it?”

“I, I have clearly seen with my own eyes that you have read the ‘Nameless Book’ that only a prophet can see! Please, reclaim the names of me and my people!”

Ah, right. The ratmen were desperate to find their race name.

He didn’t know why they cared about such things when the werewolves were living well without caring about such things, but it seemed to be an important matter for them.

But Hyun-woo didn’t really find out anything just by looking at the magic book.

“Yeah. Not now, next time.”

“Great One! Thank you!”

Kazat was moved to tears. He had roughly put it off, but he felt a bit uneasy because he was so touched. He didn’t even know if there would ever be a day when he would really find it for them.

Hyun-woo roughly calculated and thought that he had gained quite a lot this time.

‘The Tam has found its form, the crystal stone has been consumed, I’ve reached level 50 and gained an ultimate skill, and I can read the magic book.’

The preparation is complete.

Next is Pyongyang.