Phong moved into the dungeon the way some men moved into monasteries.
Not officially. Not permanently.
But close enough.
He still stepped out through the Gate once every week or two, restocked on rice, canned food, water purification tablets. Paid for a storage locker. Replaced worn gloves.
Selling the house and what remained of the restaurant had set him up for years if he lived simply.
And he did.
The world outside tasted sour now.
Billboards of smiling executives funding "Dungeon Safety Initiatives."
Josh standing next to his father as a new "rising star" in the diver space. They throw adjectives at him like throwing breatcrumbs at a pigeon. Honorouble, courageous, noble, dependable, adjectives that had nothing to do with a bastard like Josh in this life and the next now pant him as the ideal diver of the young generation.
News anchors debating liability versus "unfortunate misunderstandings."
Screen then flicker at a young man wearing high collar sweater, freckles, blonde hair meticulously style to look effortless.
Olen was the name.
He's talking about dropping out of Harvard for a project he's researching, dungeon related.
Media clapped loudly, like seals in a zoo, mouth full of fish with dollar sign on them.
Legal system.
Not justice system.
He finally understood what his uncle used to mutter over late-night tea.
The law was a machine.
Justice was a hope.
They weren't the same thing.
So he stopped looking for it out there.
Alexandra and Dominic checked on him.
Not often. Just enough.
They never mentioned the hospital. Never mentioned the settlement. Never mentioned Josh again.
They talked about small things instead.
Weather patterns on Floor One.
New monster variants.
New challenges brought by Shifting event.
A ramen place Dominic insisted had better broth than anything in Queens.
Life moved.
Even if it moved crooked.
Alexandra eventually stopped wearing her med school hoodie.
"I withdrew," she told him one afternoon, standing awkwardly near his growing patch while slimes avoided the area in a wide circle.
"Temporarily?" Dominic had asked.
She'd looked toward the distant ruins.
"No."
What happened at the hospital had done something to her too.
She'd believed in institutions. In systems. In reform. Working in a hospital like the one Phong was sent to had been her dream.
Seeing how quickly signatures could erase testimony had scraped something raw.
Now she dived full-time.
Independent. No sponsors.
Her Mind Blade had grown sharper, quieter. Less theatrical.
Dominic, meanwhile, refused every corporate offer that came his way.
"Not after that," he said.
His team had finally found the entrance to Floor Two after the shifting event scrambled the old route. The discovery alone could've been sold for millions.
They didn't sell it.
"We'll map it ourselves," he said. "Slow. Clean."
He still argued that Pepsi Max beat Coke in blind taste tests.
Some constants remained.
The potatoes grew.
Fast.
Too fast.
In ten days, green shoots broke through dungeon soil. Thick, vibrant, leaves broader than any backyard variety.
The earth here wasn't Earth.
It fed differently.
The air shimmered faintly at dusk, and Phong sometimes felt that same pulse beneath his palms when he knelt to tend them.
Slimes no longer approached within ten feet.
Goblins wandered by without seeing him, yet gave the patch uneasy glances as if instinct warned them something claimed this ground.
On the tenth day, the system chimed softly.
Quest Objective Ready: Harvest
Phong crouched.
Hands steady.
He slid fingers into the soil around the base of the first plant and pulled.
The earth resisted.
Then released.
A potato came free.
Except...
It wasn't exactly a potato.
Smoother skin. Slightly iridescent under the light. Faint ridges along its sides like the segments of an armadillo.
His status panel flickered.
Item Acquired:
Moletato
Common — Dungeon Produce
Phong stared at it.
"…Moletato?"
He turned it over in his hands.
No additional description.
No stats.
No flavor text.
He glanced at the remaining plants, then back at the object.
"What the hell is a Moletato?"
He found out quickly.
Experimentally, he set it back on the dirt.
The moment it touched soil...
It twitched.
Phong jerked back.
The Moletato vibrated, then rotated upright. Tiny root-like tendrils burst from its underside. Not growing downward, but actively drilling.
The thing burrowed.
Not slowly.
It corkscrewed into the ground like a determined mole, leaving a neat spiral indentation before disappearing entirely.
The soil settled.
Phong blinked.
A faint rustle traveled underground, moving several feet away before stopping.
A few seconds later, a small bump formed in the dirt. The Moletato popped its top half out, as if testing the air.
Then it sank back down again.
Self-planting.
Mobile.
Alive? Not exactly. But not inert.
He exhaled slowly.
"…Okay."
He harvested the rest.
Nine more Moletatoes.
Each one wriggled faintly in his palm, as though impatient.
When he set them down together, they nudged against each other before one abruptly dove into the soil, followed by the others in chaotic spirals.
Within minutes, the patch looked undisturbed.
Except—
The ground felt denser.
Richer.
Alive in a new way.
His panel chimed again.
Quest Complete: First Harvest
Phong waited.
For fireworks.
For stat increases.
For a skill.
For an EXP bar.
Nothing else appeared.
No reward screen.
No congratulations.
Just silence.
He checked his status.
Level: 1
EXP: —
Unchanged.
He almost laughed.
"So that's it?" he muttered.
He pressed his palm into the soil again.
The warmth was stronger now.
Subtle vibrations moved beneath the surface. Moletatoes tunneling, repositioning, spreading.
He realized something slowly.
The menu didn't think he needed a reward.
The Moletatoes were the reward.
Self-propagating dungeon crops.
Mobile.
Potentially defensive.
Growing in hostile territory where nothing else cultivated.
The ground under his patch expanded slightly overnight, silver grass receding as if conceding territory.
He sat back against a broken wall and watched the sunless sky dim.
He still didn't have justice.
He still didn't have answers.
But for the first time since the hospital room, he had something that was his.
Not sponsored.
Not granted by a corporate patron.
Not stolen through influence.
Earned.
Ten strange, burrowing potatoes.
The dungeon pulsed softly beneath him.
And somewhere deep below, something vast shifted—
Not in violence.
In acknowledgment.
Phong stopped waiting for the system.
Waiting had cost him a year once.
A year of drifting. A year of selling batteries. A year of believing something would eventually "trigger."
He wasn't going to build his life around another invisible timer.
If the dungeon wanted to hand him quests, fine.
If not, he would plant anyway.
He cleared a second patch beside the Moletato grounds.
The burrowing potatoes had expanded their territory subtly, aerating the soil as they tunneled. The earth was darker there now, looser. When he pressed his palm down, the pulse felt steadier, like a slow, patient heartbeat.
"Chilies," he muttered.
If nothing else, spicy potatoes beat bland ones.
He'd brought seeds from a small Asian grocery in Brooklyn. Thai bird's eye. His aunt used to grow them in cracked plastic buckets behind the restaurant.
He knelt and began preparing rows.
Slimes skirted the perimeter automatically now. A goblin wandered close once, sniffed the air, then veered away with visible unease.
The dungeon was learning the boundary.
Or the Moletatoes were enforcing it.
Either way, it suited him.
That evening, Dominic showed up with a crate under one arm and a bundle of scavenged firewood under the other.
"You're turning this place into a homestead," he said, dropping the wood in a neat stack.
Phong shrugged. "No HOA down here."
Dominic snorted.
They built a small fire in a stone ring between collapsed walls. The flame crackled against the unnatural twilight of Floor One.
Dominic handed him a can.
Pepsi Max.
Phong accepted it.
They clinked aluminum lightly.
For a while, they just listened to the dungeon breathe.
"You know," Dominic said eventually, staring into the flames, "we confirmed it. Floor Two entrance is stable. For now."
"For now," Phong echoed.
Dominic scratched his jaw. "It's different down there. Denser. Smarter mobs."
"You're going anyway."
"Yeah."
A beat.
"You ever think about leveling?" Dominic asked carefully.
Phong watched a spark rise and vanish.
"What the point? Taking lives to feed a non-functioning exp bar."
"And?"
"I prefer farming root vegetables to farming mobs."
Dominic didn't push.
He never did.
Footsteps approached near midnight.
Light.
Controlled.
Alexandra emerged from between two broken pillars.
She wasn't masked.
Her movements were precise but slower than usual.
Phong saw it immediately.
The cuts along her forearm were straight.
Too straight.
Not ragged like claw marks.
Not melted like slime burns.
Clean slices. Narrow entry wounds.
Human blades.
Dominic saw them too.
His jaw tightened.
"You run into something?" he asked casually.
Alexandra flexed her fingers as if testing mobility. "Just sloppy positioning."
"Monsters don't do symmetrical," Phong said quietly.
Her eyes flicked to his.
For a second, the vigilante mask almost came back. Not physically, but in posture.
Then she smiled faintly.
"You growing chilies?"
Dominic's nostrils flared.
She sat down by the fire before either of them could continue that line of thought.
Phong didn't press.
He knew that look.
The look of someone who had already decided not to escalate something.
He reached into his pack and pulled out a small, wrapped bundle.
"Try this."
She eyed it suspiciously. "Is that safe?"
"It's shrimp paste."
Dominic made a face. "Bro."
Alexandra leaned forward, curious despite herself. She dipped a stick into the thick, pungent paste and sniffed.
Immediate regret flashed across her features.
"Oh my god."
"Don't smell it," Phong advised. "Taste."
She hesitated.
Then, because she had always been the kind of person who leaned into discomfort rather than away from it, she dabbed a tiny bit onto a roasted slice of Moletato Dominic had skewered over the fire.
She bit.
There was a pause.
Her eyes widened.
"That is… aggressively alive."
Dominic burst out laughing.
She took another bite.
"…Okay. That's actually edible."
"Told you," Phong said.
Highest praise a German could give is "decent".
The three of them ate roasted Moletato slices with shrimp paste and drank soda while the dungeon hummed around them.
For a little while, it felt almost normal.
Almost.
Later, when the fire burned low, Alexandra spoke without looking at either of them.
"I'm thinking of joining Dominic's group."
Dominic's head snapped up. "For real?"
She nodded slowly.
"I can't keep solo diving."
"That's not what you've been doing," Phong said.
Silence.
She didn't deny it.
Dominic leaned forward, elbows on knees. "You don't need to prove anything to anyone."
"It's not about proving," she said. "It's about leverage."
Her gaze shifted toward the darkness beyond the firelight.
"If certain people think I'm isolated, they'll keep testing that theory."
There it was.
Carefully phrased.
Clean wounds.
Ambush.
Dominic's hands curled into fists.
Phong spoke first.
"Groups change the math."
She nodded. "Exactly."
"And Floor Two?" Dominic asked.
"I'm not afraid of Floor Two."
Phong believed her.
Monsters were simpler.
They didn't stage hospital settlements.
They didn't rewrite narratives.
They either killed you or they didn't.
Dominic exhaled slowly. "Then you're in. But we do it clean. No sponsors. No contracts. We map, we clear, we rotate."
She gave a small smile. "I don't do logos anyway."
The fire crackled softly.
Phong stared at the chilies planted earlier that day.
He could feel the soil adjusting to them already—micro-shifts in acidity, moisture redistributing.
He wasn't leveling the way divers did.
But he was growing.
Something that didn't need courtrooms to exist.
Alexandra stood, brushing dirt from her pants.
"I'll start training with you tomorrow," she told Dominic.
Then she looked at Phong.
"You sure you're good out here alone?"
He glanced at the dark soil where Moletatoes tunneled unseen.
The ground pulsed once beneath his palm.
"I'm not alone," he said.
For the first time since the hospital room, the words weren't hollow.