Chapter 25

Chapter 25. Tower - Slime Summoner (2)

[Name: Han Ji-woo (Slot 1 avatar) / Age: 21]

[Strength: 9 / Agility: 11 / Stamina: 9 / Intelligence: 15 / Mana: 13]

[Status: normal]

[Abilities: Multidimensional Avatar Lv 12, martial arts Lv 15, Magic Bullet Lv 1, Spirit Arts Lv 1]

[-martial arts: Bluewood Sword Lv 15, Bluewood Art Lv 13]

Looking at my Status Window, Bluewood Sword and Bluewood Art had been combined into martial arts.

And thanks to continuously eating spiritual medicine, my body was not as clean as a child’s, but it was still quite tidy.

Normally, taking a large amount of spiritual medicine all at once was a perfect way to get yourself killed.

The fact that impurities were washed away by qi meant that a torrent of qi scraped through the meridian pathways, which meant those meridian pathways would be shredded.

However, I restored my body by absorbing and recreating the clone.

Avatar Absorption had a cooldown, but while I cultivated, the time passed quickly enough.

My qi center had safely formed as well, and I had succeeded in strengthening my body with the qi in my qi center.

In martial arts, the amount of internal energy was important, but the sense for handling qi was even more important.

Of course, below the Transformation Realm, physical ability was more important than the sense for handling qi.

After all, martial arts were ultimately the study of using the body.

The Tower clone had considerably less internal energy than the reincarnation clone, and its meridian pathways were not as clean either.

There was almost no qi accumulated and lying dormant from spiritual medicine, but even in my current state, there was no problem with climbing the Tower.

“Let’s see. Entry Realm spiritual medicine... I have thirty-two left. Should I eat just ten more and call it done?”

In the process of absorbing and recreating the clone, my physical fatigue disappeared.

However, my mental fatigue remained as it was, so I decided to expand my qi center a little more, return to my main body, get some sleep, and then move.

Sleeping in the reincarnation clone’s body would have been fine, but over there, even nap time had already passed. If I slept now, Si-woo might refuse to let me sleep, saying I would not be able to sleep at night.

A four-year-old baby’s daily routine included naps.

---

My Mana and Bluewood Art levels reached 15.

From experience, Mana would grow smoothly up to 19.

Then it would be blocked by the wall of 20 and stop growing, and after surpassing 20, it would grow smoothly again.

It seemed the walls of realms were in units of 10.

After all, when my internal energy properly reached the level appropriate for Third-Rate, my Mana and Bluewood Art levels became 20.

Of course, the Status Window only expressed my status briefly, and it could not show detailed and complex elements, so I could not say for certain.

There would also be a limit to the realms I could catch up to with spiritual medicine.

“Let’s see. My money... I only have 900 Credits?”

One Credit was roughly 100 won. 900 Credits was about 90,000 won.

That amount would be gone after one day of food and lodging.

The money I had earned by selling the weapons and combat uniform the Goblins used had been steadily spent on food, clothes, and one day’s lodging.

For now, I needed Credits to survive. Then there were three options.

Either I hunted monsters outside the city and bought Credits with the Shop Points I earned, sold the loot I gained from hunting, or sold the High-Grade Healing Potion I had bought as emergency funds.

Personally, the potion felt a little too precious.

I could sell it for a high price outside the Tower, and I also needed a recovery method in case my main body was injured.

Well, I did think there should be no reason for my main body to get hurt on the safe Tower’s first floor, but I had nearly injured myself by accident while trying to dig into the first floor’s ground with my sword last time, so I needed to be careful.

“Guess I have to go hunting after all.”

Even if not for Credits, I needed Shop Points.

There were many uses for them, like buying stat-increasing elixirs to raise my lacking Strength and Stamina.

“Should I go to the hunting grounds outside the city?”

According to WPTO information, the 10th floor was a “lower residential tier” shared with the 20th and 30th floors.

The lower residential tier was divided into the 10th-floor-range zone, the 20th-floor-range zone, the 30th-floor-range zone, and the common zone, and Climbers could only act in the zone belonging to their floor and the common zone.

The native residents seemed to have no restrictions regarding zones.

Each zone had numerous cities, and if one went outside the city walls, monsters matching each tier appeared.

In the 10th-floor-range zone, monsters from the 11th to 19th floors appeared. In the 20th-floor-range zone, monsters from the 21st to 29th floors appeared. In the 30th-floor-range zone, monsters from the 31st to 39th floors appeared.

The closer one was to a city, the more low-floor monsters appeared, and the farther one went, the more high-floor monsters appeared.

Because of that, if the monsters grew stronger and then weaker, one could use it as an indicator that one was getting close to a neighboring city.

Most Climbers from the same nation gathered in nearby cities, and apparently, if one went farther away, one could see foreigners too.

However, Agent K of the WPTO was of the opinion that because the distance between cities was quite far, it would be faster to climb the Tower if one wanted to see foreigners.

“Good. My body’s in perfect condition. Now all that’s left is real combat.”

I took off the combat uniform that had appeared when I recreated the clone, stuffed it into Inventory, and put on the clothes I had bought in the Tower.

The combat uniform stood out too much.

I should sell the combat uniform later too and use it for living expenses.

After eating at the restaurant on the first floor of the inn, I checked out and left.

Today’s schedule was to earn living expenses by hunting in the morning, then gather information from the Tower Community while eating lunch.

I planned to collect information about the 11th floor, and if it looked possible, challenge the 11th floor.

Even if my 11th floor attempt failed, I could return to the 10th floor.

If I did not end up challenging the 11th floor, I decided to visit the Mage Tower branch, as the old librarian had recommended.

“Are you a Climber? It’s dangerous outside the city, so how about preparing a little more equipment?”

When I arrived at the city wall, a middle-aged guard standing watch at the gate looked at me with concern.

“Ah, I just arrived, so I don’t have any money. I’m going to catch a few Horned Rabbits nearby and use that money to prepare equipment.”

“Is that so? Well, everything comes down to money. Be careful.”

At my answer, the middle-aged guard wished me luck in battle and let me pass.

In truth, even if I earned money, I would buy a spare sword or so, but I had no particular intention of buying armor.

After the age of gunpowder weapons, martial arts in Galactic Murim had developed around evasion and survival ability rather than defense, so armor was nothing but cumbersome.

If one needed defense, one should raise one’s realm and eliminate situations where defense was necessary. That was the general common sense of people in Galactic Murim.

“If I die, I die.”

There was a penalty for death, but I should still be fine even if I died a few more times.

No matter how I thought about it, playing it safe would mean wasting my clone ability.

With my one-handed sword drawn, I examined my surroundings.

Thanks to the help of Si-woo and Cheon So-yeon, I had trained in reading the qi waves of living beings.

Fortunately, the experience gained through training itself helped me regardless of the clone.

I immediately read the qi wave of a small living creature in the nearby bushes.

When I headed straight that way, the bushes moved slightly, and a Horned Rabbit jumped out from inside.

Normally, I would have blocked it with a shield or armor, but I swung my sword and cut off the Horned Rabbit’s neck in midair.

“...I died to an attack like this?”

I once again felt how weak I had been when I first entered the Tower.

Even now, I was still far from being strong, but I could still feel how much had changed.

I collected the magic stone and the rabbit corpse.

It was said that rabbits killed cleanly and drained of blood had demand for both their meat and hide.

Come to think of it, there were quite a few rabbit dishes on restaurant menus too, weren’t there?

Korea did not eat much rabbit, but in foreign countries, it was quite a common ingredient.

If one butchered and sold a rabbit, the meat could be sold for about 20 Credits per rabbit, and the hide for about 40 Credits, but if one lacked skill, one could sell the whole thing for about 30 Credits.

Naturally, the magic stone was separate.

I roughly stuffed the headless rabbit into the bag I had purchased at the military supply store and wandered around near the city wall.

As I wandered, I additionally hunted six more rabbits that charged headfirst without a thought, twelve fighting roosters with blades on their legs that looked two or three times the size of a Brazilian chicken, and three rodents the size of watermelons.

Seeing as they gave only 1 Point each, they all seemed to be 11th floor level.

According to the Tower Community, 11th floor monsters gave 1 Point, 12th floor monsters gave 2 Points, and 13th floor monsters gave 3 Points, increasing by 1 Point each like that. Once it reached the 20th floor, the increase became 10 Points at a time, and once it reached the 30th floor, it increased by 100 Points at a time.

“I guess this can’t be helped near the city.”

The bag was more than heavy, and I even had headless chickens dangling from it on ropes, so it was burdensome.

I returned to the city and sold the Horned Rabbits and Blade Fighting Roosters to a butcher near the city gate.

Apparently, the chickens with blades on their legs were called Blade Fighting Roosters.

Rabbits could provide hides too, but perhaps there was more demand for the chickens, because the chickens sold for more.

The rabbits were 30 Credits each, seven in total.

The chickens were 50 Credits each, twelve in total. I earned 810 Credits altogether.

“If there is this much prey around the city, shouldn’t the price be cheaper because the supply is high?”

At my innocent question, the butcher answered as if it were no big deal.

“The price is like this because demand is higher than supply. How many people do you think live in this city?”

“Uh... I’m not sure.”

Thinking about it, I had thought the city was quite large.

“A whole fifty thousand. And among them, Climbers like you only number around five hundred.”

The city’s population was much larger than I had expected.

I had thought there were five thousand at most.

“You people don’t hunt like this every day, do you? There are professional hunters in the city too, and even then, they barely meet demand. The amount Climbers hunt and bring back is nowhere near enough to handle demand.”

Even if there was plenty of game, if there were too few people to hunt it, supply would be short.

Well, even if there were plenty of raw materials, if there were too few factories to process them, production would inevitably be lacking.

“And hunters use traps to hunt. They don’t fight directly from the front like you people. We don’t have supernatural abilities like you, so outside the city, if we let our guard down even a little, we’re likely to end up dead.”

That was true. I knew that well, since I had died twice while climbing to the 10th floor and even been turned into a pincushion by arrows.

However, the butcher seemed far more afraid of the outside of the city than I had expected.

Was this fear also one of the Tower’s methods of control?

Having earned a day’s wages, I decided to go a little farther from the city and look for monsters.

As I walked along the road outside the city, I found a narrow trail leading into the forest.

Looking around, other than the narrow trail, the area was shaped like a basin surrounded by mountains, so if I wanted to go farther without taking the trail, I would have to cross the mountains.

Taking the narrow trail was better than climbing a mountain, so I headed down the trail.

Fortunately, the forest’s tree density was not that high, so sunlight entered many places throughout the forest.

After walking along the path for a few minutes, I sensed Goblins hiding among the trees and approaching me.

Before the Goblins could attack me, I entered between the trees and ambushed them first.

Whether because I had learned martial arts, or because the Goblins had let their guard down, killing them was not particularly difficult.

The Goblins moved around in groups of two or three, and after ambushing them, I saw that some of the Goblins were holding bows and arrows, however clumsily.

Rather, if I had fought them in a grassland, dealing with several at the same time would have been difficult, but because this was a forest, it was easier to divide and defeat them individually.

“The ones using bows give 2 Points.”

I picked up a bow and arrow and tried drawing it.

Crack!

The bow failed to endure my strength and cracked, and the arrow I shot flew about five meters before falling limply into the ground.

That was probably because the bow broke, but even if it hadn’t, a stone thrown with all my strength would probably be more powerful.

I collected the Goblins’ magic stones, hand axes, and daggers, then went a little deeper into the forest.

From far away, I heard a “Kyaa!” and hid myself. When I looked carefully, a girl who appeared to be around high school age, with a slime hanging from her shoulder, was being chased by Goblins.