Chapter 43
Once the city entrance became visible, the expedition decided to send Abnontha and his two disciples ahead first.
Yohan did not explain his exact reason.
Even so, the others accepted his repeated suggestion without much objection.
Exactly two hours passed after the three dark mages left.
The desert at sunset felt both ominous and dreamlike.
The expedition members quietly watched it for a while.
They reached the city entrance before the sun completely disappeared.
There, their eyes met a group of large men passing nearby.
“……”
“Judging by their appearance, they’re either mercenaries or thieves… It doesn’t look like anyone tried to stop them.”
Yohan lightly tapped Dexter’s shoulder at his sharp observation.
They had no reason to cause trouble near the city entrance this late in the day.
The expedition simply moved inside.
As the sun set, every tent in the plaza was taken down.
The residents walking through the city hurried toward their homes as if something were chasing them.
An indescribable foul smell drifted past the expedition members’ noses.
The only buildings still giving off light were inns and taverns.
No one could be seen walking outside anymore.
The expedition also entered the nearest inn.
After failing three times, they finally found one large enough to accommodate over three hundred people.
The innkeeper assigned them fourteen huge rooms.
He even allowed them to use the large common room connected to that floor.
While those exhausted by the desert heat rested, the experienced members began explaining what they needed to be careful about inside the city.
“Don’t cause unnecessary trouble. As long as you follow that one rule, there shouldn’t be any major problems. This place is something like a neutral zone.”
“The conditions for opening the passage are also much easier than on the eleventh floor. You can offer corpses, or bring items useful for maintaining the city.”
“And obey the priests. That’s the most important part. They wear masks and purple robes, so they’re easy to recognize.”
“Masks and robes… writing it down, writing it down.”
“Anyway, don’t challenge them. They’re friendly enough to answer directly if you ask, ‘I want to reach the next floor, what do I need to do?’ But they show no mercy to people who break their laws.”
General Kalkelak glanced toward Yohan, who was leaning against the wall behind the others.
“Do you have anything to add?”
Yohan only shrugged.
They continued talking about Zul-Bha-Sair and the environment of the twelfth floor.
Only near dawn did everyone finally go to sleep.
At the same time, Yohan headed alone to the rooftop.
His strange body recovered stamina and mana naturally as long as he remained still.
He did not truly need sleep.
If he closed his eyes and forced himself, he could still fall asleep.
However, ever since receiving the curse of immortality, Yohan had never once enjoyed peaceful sleep.
Sometimes it was because of his failures.
Sometimes because of the goddess.
Sometimes because of the countless memories accumulated through his life.
Most appeared as nightmares.
A few appeared in the form of hope.
For example,
dreams where he died.
Dreams where he sacrificed himself for his companions.
Whenever he opened his eyes after believing he had finally met his end, he would realize once again that nothing had changed.
Sometimes he gouged out his own eyes after waking.
When being awake became unbearable, he sometimes wished to shorten each day by sleeping, even if all he saw were nightmares.
But sleep did not actually make time pass faster.
Eventually, Yohan became accustomed to spending his time alone in thought.
Tonight’s subject was his own position on sharing information.
Yohan Blake.
Including the days when he had been a Player, he was the only being in the current era who had successfully cleared ninety six floors of the enormous one hundred floor Dungeon and reached the ninety seventh.
Then he had added hundreds of years of experience on top of that.
He had accumulated information about the Dungeon world for an absurd amount of time.
The environment of each floor.
The deity governing it.
What to be careful of.
The methods needed to clear it.
He already knew most of it.
Even so, sometimes he hid information completely.
Sometimes he gave hints.
Sometimes he explained things kindly.
Why did he not simply tell them everything?
Sometimes knowledge itself was poison.
The more a person knew, the more they thought.
The more they thought, the slower they acted.
There were moments when caution was necessary.
But when a single decisive breakthrough was needed, hesitation could be fatal.
More importantly, Yohan still did not trust them enough to reveal everything he knew.
Imagine one of them betraying the group and becoming an Apostle of an Inner God.
If Yohan had shared all his information with that one person,
within days, every Inner God in the Dungeon could know the same information.
The difficulty of clearing the Dungeon would increase drastically.
For those reasons, Yohan had always been unwilling to share too much.
Yet he had rarely explained those reasons directly to his companions.
He often hid his true thoughts behind deliberately provocative words like,
“Why would I bother telling someone who’ll die soon?”
That was partly for himself.
And partly for each of them.
[From where I’m standing, I think there’s another reason too.]
Of course you do.
[I can see it already. The future where you finally realize feelings you didn’t even understand yourself, then collapse into despair. Ah, what an exciting sight that’ll be. Hehehehehe.]
The goddess trembled with excitement by herself.
Yohan grabbed her, tore her away, and threw her onto the floor.
Then he raised his head.
A crescent moon partly hidden behind clouds faintly illuminated the dry city.
Near the temple, wolf like howls sounded especially loud.
Yohan could physically feel an ominous gaze moving across his entire body.
He returned inside the building.
Gray smoke carrying black shadows rose all the way to the top of the highest spire.
Then dark vapor slowly settled across the entire city.
Almost like a blessing.
And so their first day in Zul-Bha-Sair came to an end.
Starting in the morning, those with experience on the twelfth floor gathered and began organizing a list of supplies needed for the next floor.
“…This should be enough basic necessities.”
“Don’t we need water containers?”
“That’ll make our luggage too heavy.”
“It rains a lot anyway. We can collect rainwater whenever it does.”
“We need plenty of antidotes and purification medicine. They’ll be useful from the fourteenth through seventeenth floors.”
Yohan, Danforth, Belvar, Albern, and Kalkelak finished organizing the rough list.
Then they gathered the other expedition members.
Belvar volunteered to conduct the briefing himself.
“As I roughly explained yesterday, the twelfth floor and Zul-Bha-Sair should be viewed as a base and resting point for the deeper parts of the Dungeon.”
It was a city like an oasis in the middle of the vast desert.
Many different races from the six nations existing on the twelfth floor visited Zul-Bha-Sair every day.
“The competition between those nations is severe. Only this city is protected by an Inner God. Today it serves largely as a charnel ground and crematorium, but when the city was first established, its main role was as a trading city. You could call it a buffer zone created by people who no longer wished to fight.”
As the city became more famous, ordinary civilians tired of war increasingly tried to move there.
But the desert treated everyone equally.
With their limited strength, they could never defeat the giant desert magic beasts or Sand Giants.
As a result, huge amounts of supplies were abandoned throughout the desert.
“The city priests only collected the dead bodies. They showed little interest in anything left behind. Those supplies were far too valuable to simply leave in the desert. Eventually, powerful people within the city began recovering them. That work continued for a very long time, leading to the city we see today.”
Zul-Bha-Sair became like a massive general store.
It was filled with food, wealth, weapons, armor, and countless other objects.
Its value as a base grew even further.
The city’s managers prevented a small number of people from monopolizing all those goods.
They distributed them among merchants and helped ensure they were resold for reasonable prices.
Slowly, the city became a paradise for visitors.
“Even so, absolute laws established by its god prevent the city from becoming a lawless zone. That may be Zul-Bha-Sair’s greatest strength.”
In short,
“We can buy nearly everything we need here at fair prices. Including items that would be impossible to find in the underground cities.”
There was one more reason so many items existed in the city.
Yohan decided there was no need to explain it.
Belvar began listing the necessary supplies one by one.
“Glowing Stones are absolutely essential. The darkness of the underground cities is as bad as the Dark Lands, perhaps even worse.”
“As you can see, the twelfth floor gets extremely strong sunlight, so Glowing Stones aren’t used often here.”
“Even at night, the priests constantly move around while producing light themselves. Outside the temple entrance, very few places keep Glowing Stones active at all times. It should be easy to buy plenty of spares.”
The next item was antidotes.
“Never assume healing magic will work every time. We need antidotes capable of dealing with many different poisons from creatures living in the underground cities.”
“Zul-Bha-Sair has the most advanced medicine on the twelfth floor. Buying them here is our safest option.”
Most agreed they should mainly bring dried food.
“Stock up on dates. We should bring at least several dozen kilograms.”
“We probably don’t need much water. They’re called underground cities because they’re dark, but many areas actually receive excessive rain. Innsmouth on the sixteenth floor is a good example.”
Yohan changed the topic.
“From the thirteenth floor onward, there are many long term survivors.”
“Some have completely settled inside the Dungeon. Ideally, we should find groups willing to cooperate. But the underground cities are even larger than this entire twelfth floor. Assume most people are enemies until proven otherwise.”
“……”
“That doesn’t mean no one will help us… When we establish a base, we should search for potential allies immediately.”
Once the discussion of basic supplies was finished, they moved on to weapons and armor.
“We need equipment capable of dealing with the Great Old Ones, their Apostles, and the magic beasts appearing on each floor.”
“Hmm…”
“Good. Let’s list everything that comes to mind.”
The four commanders listed more than one hundred and ten potential weapons and pieces of armor.
Yohan quickly reviewed the list.
He marked several useful tools and added suggestions for other items.
Every one of them was a special item intended for clearing specific situations.
“If we can find it, Este’s Song would be the best candidate. But the Hourglass of the Gate or the Fetish of the Black Pharaoh would also work. Either way, gather anything connected to time or hallucinations.”
Then Yohan remembered something else.
He raised one more finger.
“Also prepare purification medicine for the fifteenth and sixteenth floors, especially Innsmouth. Everything there is connected to Deep Ones. It’s extremely easy to become contaminated.”
“…True. The muddy mana, blood, and bodily fluids of Deep Ones cause mental confusion in anyone who hasn’t already been contaminated. Purification medicine would certainly be valuable.”
“As for the remaining weapons and armor, each expedition should find equipment suited to its members. Old weapons once used by raiders or tools used by Apostles of Outer Gods would be ideal, but finding things like that on the twelfth floor is unlikely.”
The discussion finally ended.
Looking at the expedition members who had finished taking notes, Yohan grinned.
“We’ll probably need at least five days to gather everything. Hurry. We still have a long way to go.”
It was time to begin seriously gathering supplies.
