BP Balance: 72,400.
Allen crouched beside the diamond-shaped opening, rolling up the left sleeve of his hoodie above his elbow.
The old bandage, wrapped from his knee to mid-thigh, was frayed at the edges. He unwrapped it and rewrapped it. This time, it was tighter, each loop applying 30% more pressure than usual.
Not for support. To lock it in place.
He had read the vital signs data for the Class C synthesis twice in the blueprint instructions: full-body muscle spasms, peak duration four to seven seconds. During the spasm, if the fascia at the site of the old injury is not externally restrained, the probability of tearing is over 60%.
The bandage was finished. He tugged at it. There was no room for it to loosen.
He pulled the first-aid kit out of his backpack and placed it forty centimeters to his right. Iodine, styptic powder, two rolls of compressed gauze.
Not for external injuries—it was for biting his tongue. He hadn't bitten it during the last Class D synthesis. This time, with 50% extraction, the spasm in his jaw would double.
Management Panel. Automatic Emergency Protocol.
He spent twenty seconds setting the trigger conditions: Health drops below 15%, automatically shutting down all dungeon functions, putting the ruined city into hibernation, suspending the Abyss Watchers, and keeping external monitoring in minimum power mode.
If he died next to this pillar, at least the dungeon wouldn't collapse due to the loss of its administrator.
At least it wouldn't collapse immediately.
The synthesis interface opened.
[C-grade artificial core fragment synthesis. Cost: 40,000 BP + 50% of the architect's current health. Synthesis time: Instant (self-catalyzing path).]
[Warning: 50% health extraction will cause severe physical trauma. Recovery period: 48 hours. Attributes will temporarily decrease by two sub-grades during the recovery period (D-→E grade).]
[This path is irreversible. Confirm? Y/N] Allen's thumb hovered over Y.
Last time 30%. His chest was gripped, he didn't exhale for two and a half seconds, and his head hit the pillar. Health jumped from full to 70%, and after that, he could still sit up. Fifty percent.
It's not about being twenty percentage points more. It's about jumping from "being able to sit" to "potentially unable to stand."
The graph of the Global Abnormal Volatility Index flashed through his mind. The red threshold line. The gap between two scales.
Abysswalker's last words.
"You need a hundred."
A hundred underground cities require an underground city network. An underground city network requires Class C. Class C requires him to split himself in two.
There was another voice. Older.
A text message from Robert Chen a few hours earlier.
"Was it worth it?"
Was it worth it?
Allen looked down at his hands. Gray lint from old bandages clung to his knuckles. These hands had wrapped in bandages, typed on keyboards, pushed crystals, and gripped short swords.
These hands had held an urn three years ago.
Two urns.
One on the left, one on the right. From the funeral home to the cemetery. October in New York. He was nineteen. The two urns weighed less than eight pounds together. A person's entire life ends up weighing this much.
Is it worth it?
Y.
— One second there was nothing.
The next second, the world flipped.
Not a visual flip. Every cell in the body simultaneously received a retreat command—energy was drawn from the extremities, from the fingertips, from the toes, from the scalp, from the thinnest layer of cartilage in the earlobe, towards the center of the torso.
Last time it was the chest cavity.
This time it was the whole body.
Allen's knee slammed into the concrete. The impact traveled from the patella to the femur and then to the pelvis, the amplitude amplified segment by segment in the spine.
His jaw spasmed—the force of his teeth clenching exceeded his conscious control, and the left side of his tongue was cut open by the ridge of his molars. The taste of rust filled his mouth.
The health bar on the management panel plummeted in the corner of his vision.
One hundred percent.
Seventy-eight percent.
Joints. Every joint was trying to dislocate. It wasn't external force—it was the negative pressure generated by the internal energy flow passing through the joint cavity, drawing synovial fluid out. Shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, ankle—twelve major joints simultaneously emitted clicking sounds beyond the realm of human acoustics.
Sixty-two percent.
Allen's forehead slammed into the concrete floor. The impact bounced back and forth across the second basement level of the parking garage. A gash on his temple, blood trickling down his brow and into his eye socket.
His glasses were askew. The left temple slipped off his ear, the glasses dangling precariously from his nose.
Fifty-one percent.
All the muscles in his body simultaneously entered a state of rigidity.
Not a spasm—a spasm is a twitch, with frequency and intervals. Rigidity is locking. Every muscle fiber is stretched to its shortest contraction length and then held.
Allen's body arched into a curve. The back of his head and heels were on the ground, his lumbar spine suspended in the air. The bandages at the site of his old injury were stretched to their limit—a series of fine snapping sounds rang out, but they didn't break completely. The remaining 30% of the tightly bound material saved his fascia.
Fifty percent.
It stopped.
The rigidity was released in 0.3 seconds. All muscles relaxed simultaneously. Allen's lumbar spine slammed back to the ground, his head hitting the concrete again.
He lay there. His face pressed against the cold ground. The left side of his face was soaked in blood flowing from the corner of his mouth. The wound on his tongue was oozing, unable to be swallowed all at once.
Iodine was no longer needed. Hemostatic powder was also unnecessary. The wound on his tongue wasn't large; platelets could stop it within three minutes.
A diamond-shaped beam of blue light converged above his head.
Allen didn't have the strength to look up. But he could feel the changes in the density of the blue light even through his eyelids—the brightness was increasing, the frequency was increasing, the number of superimposed layers of light waves was increasing.
Not a single pulse. It was multiple layers.
Three layers. Five layers. Seven layers.
Each layer had a uniform frequency interval, a locked phase, and pulsed synchronously.
A crystal precipitated from the light. It hovered above the diamond-shaped opening.
Allen braced himself on his right elbow, lifting his face two centimeters from the blood. His glasses were askew, the frame cutting off a third of his left eye's field of vision.
His right eye was fine.
Deep blue. Three shades brighter than the D-grade one. The surface was smooth—so smooth you could see the reflection of cracks in the parking lot ceiling.
The internal light veins weren't a single point. They were a network.
Blue filaments radiated from the core to the surface, each filament beating at a different frequency, but the overall waveform formed by all frequencies superimposed—
matched his electrocardiogram waveform.
Not a heart rate. An electrocardiogram. Every peak, every trough, every slope of the ST segment of the QRS complex was precisely replicated by the crystal's light veins.
Fifty percent of Allen's.
Crystallized. Floating in mid-air. Beating like his heartbeat.
He stared at the fragment for three seconds. The blue light fell on the blood-stained left side of his face. Two things pulsated in the same rhythm—one inside his chest, one above his head.
Half of him was outside his body.
[C-grade artificial core fragment, synthesis complete. Quality: Self-Forged. Catalyst source: Architect's core energy (50%).] He pressed his face back to the ground. Cold. The blood was slightly warmed by his body heat, but the temperature beneath the concrete remained unchanged.
His lumbar spine protested. The synovial fluid in his twelve joints needed time to refill. The wound on his tongue began to scab over, the metallic taste fading.
The crystal slowly descended from its suspended position, landing on the ground thirty centimeters to Allen's right.
Warm. The same temperature as his body.
He didn't move.
Unable to move.
The recovery countdown on the management panel started.
[Physical recovery in progress: 47 hours 58 minutes. Attributes temporarily decreased by two sub-grades during the recovery period (D-→E grade).] E grade. A strong wind could knock him over.
— The upgrade can't wait 48 hours.
The crystal is at hand. BP balance: 32,400. Upgrade requires 30,000. The numbers are enough. The body isn't.
Allen took thirty seconds to move his right hand next to the crystal. The instant his fingers touched the crystal's surface, the temperature didn't change—36.5 degrees Celsius to 36.5 degrees Celsius, no temperature difference.
A light pulse flickered under his fingertip. The rhythm wasn't disrupted.
He pushed the crystal towards the rhomboid opening. Forty centimeters. Fifteen seconds passed.
When the crystal touched the blue light at the edge of the rhomboid opening, it was absorbed. Silent. The light density surged around the opening—brighter than during the D-level upgrade, but deeper in color.
From cobalt blue to sapphire blue. A pure, deep blue that made the retina tremble on the edge of overload.
A confirmation box popped up on the management panel.
[Upgrade Path: D-level → C-level. Consumption: C-level Core Fragment × 1 + 30,000 BP. Confirm?] [Y/N] Allen pressed Y with his thumb.
This time, he didn't even hesitate.
The ground trembled three times stronger than during the D-level upgrade. A load-bearing column in the parking lot made a muffled thud—not a break, but a slight displacement at the interface between the cement and steel reinforcement inside the column. A hair-thin crack climbed forty centimeters up from the base of the column.
The heat from the diamond-shaped beam of light piercing through the ceiling cement slab gave Allen a smell of burning lime.
The data lines on the management panel were flooded.
[Dungeon Upgrade in progress... D-level → C-level. Complete.]
[Room Capacity: 50 → 80]
[New Monster Slots: +10]
[Level 4 Trap Blueprint Unlocked]
Fifth rule.
[Rule Addition - Advanced Version Unlocked. New available rules—Time Flow Modification (0.5x-2x) / Space Folding (Room interior space can be expanded to 5 times its actual volume) / Attribute Lock (Specifies an attribute to be fixed at a specific value within the area)]
Attribute Lock.
Allen lay on the ground, his face pressed against the cement, blood drying into a thin crust on his left cheek. When those three words popped up in the data column, his brain, still sluggish at E-level, still processed half a cycle.
Designate an attribute fixed to a specific value.
Victor Stone entered a room where "Strength attribute locked at F-level." His S-level physique and agility remained, but Strength—his core attribute—was pinned to F-level.
The D-level rule's additional effect on S-level targets had less than a 15% probability.
What about C-level?
He flipped to the gray text at the bottom of the description. Twenty-eight percent. Not enough. But from fifteen to twenty-eight, the leap to level one was almost double.
B-level would likely break fifty percent. A-level— The cage was thickening.
Spatial folding. Five times the actual volume. A fifty-square-meter room crammed into a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-meter battlefield; those who entered wouldn't expect the scale before them to be completely different from what they saw at the entrance. Every step deceived their intuition.
Time flow. Half speed to twice speed. The challenger faces a two-second attack sequence in one second. Or—double the speed inside the dungeon; forty-eight hours in the outside world equals ninety-six hours inside.
Allen lay motionless. But each new feature in the data line sprouted thorny branches in his mind.
Sixth.
[Dungeon Network. Unlock condition progress updated: Dungeon level ≥ C ✓ / Management panel upgrade ✓ / Architect level ≥ C ✗. Remaining conditions: 1/3.] One more. His own level. The dungeon is already C rank, but Allen himself is still stuck at D-.
One hundred dungeons. Require the network. Require him to also reach C rank.
He closed his eyes. The coolness of the concrete floor seeped into the skin beneath his temples through the dried scabs.
The management panel's automatic operation protocol took over the ruined city. Monster AI patrolled. Traps were pre-triggered. BP was automatically credited.
The rerun of the Ruins Tower he designed a couple of days ago should be running as planned. Fifteen-floor speedrun version, BP multiplier tripled.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
Allen spent half a minute reaching into his hoodie pocket. His fingers were weak; the phone almost slipped out.
Robert Chen. Text message.
"Meeting. Forty-eight hours later. Location I choose. No refusal. This is official business. —R.C." Official business.
Last time at the laundromat was a private matter. This time, the words "no refusal" and the signature format were added. Upgraded from informal to formal. Upgraded from Robert Chen personally to a certain authorization process within the GWA.
The System-registered post has been out for thirty-two hours. CNN reported it. Reuters reported it. Seoul reported it. Global attention is skyrocketing.
Someone who can create an underground city out of thin air. The GWA wouldn't just send a deputy director of the Compliance Review Division to go through the motions. They'd send an investigation team. The S-level kind.
Robert came to give a heads-up beforehand.
They're here to escort him.
Allen placed his phone screen-down on the ground.
Forty-eight hours. Recovery period over, interviews begin. The timing is impeccable.
Robert knew his synthesis upgrade required recovery—judging from the density of their conversation that night at the laundromat, this person had his own assessment model of the Dungeon Architect's capabilities. He wouldn't disturb the weakest window of recovery, locking it in the very first second after completion.
Professional habit.
Allen kept his eyes closed.
The fragments in his mind refused to queue. They were crowded together, each one shouting that it was the most urgent.
The death of his parents. Two clues—Robert's "alarm was manually turned off," the Abyss Walker's "spread speed was artificially accelerated." Not two lines, but two parts of the same path. Someone within GWA coordinated with the Abyss's outbreak command. One after the other. Collaboration. But the usable evidence—an investigator's testimony and a statement from an S-class dungeon core—wasn't enough in court.
The Black Serpent. Security checks failed, the roadblocks were lifted. Victor Stone's next move remains shrouded in secrecy. Monica Vanter's name is linked to both the law firm and GWA, a connection yet to be uncovered.
Global anomalies. A broken line. A threshold. "You need a hundred." He can't even build a second one right now.
Three layers. All on an E-rank body. Lying prone on the concrete floor of an underground parking garage. Even turning over requires three steps.
But Allen's brain doesn't stop working. Even at 60% of its usual speed.
F-rank to E-rank, one week. E-rank to D-rank, five days. D-rank dungeon to C-rank, three days.
Time is being compressed, but not because he's accelerating—it's because each upgrade unlocks more tools, each multiplying efficiency.
The Tower of Ruins. BP multiplier tripled. Rule addition. Attribute locking. Space folding. Time flow. Dungeon network— Not fast enough.
Smart enough.
Allen rubbed a piece of the scab from his mouth onto the concrete floor.
His consciousness sank to the rhythm of the dripping drainpipe.
—Thirty-six hours into his recovery.
He woke up four times.
The first time was at the eighth hour. He woke up in pain. The synovial fluid in his left knee hadn't fully returned, and when he turned over, the patella and femur rubbed together painfully, causing sweat to bead on his forehead. Then he passed out again.
The second time was at the fifteenth hour. There was an intrusion alarm on the control panel. He pushed himself up from the ground and glanced at it—a false alarm. A stray cat had stepped on the sensor wires outside the warehouse. The cat had been frightened away by the monster's passive pressure. He pressed his face back against the concrete.
The third time, he couldn't remember how many hours had passed. He had a dream. In the dream, he was walking down a corridor in a funeral home. He had no urns in his hands. At the end of the corridor stood a white-haired humanoid silhouette. Blue eyes. The dream ended when he reached it.
The fourth time. Thirty-six hours.
It took Allen twelve seconds to sit up from the concrete. Every vertebra reported the stiffness that had accumulated over the past day and a half. His neck twisted and snapped twice. The synovial fluid in his shoulder joint had returned to about 70%—still stiff, but he could move it.
The management panel was piled with 147 unread notifications.
BP Balance: 134,000.
The number was lit up in the upper right corner.
Allen stared for two seconds. The triple BP multiplier of the rerun of the Ruins Tower, combined with the regular operation of the Ruins City, resulted in over 100,000 BP generated in 36 hours of unattended operation.
Customer Tracking Module. He swiped to the highlighted area. The system automatically marked three highly active users.
The first—a returning customer, a B-rank mage, who had run the Ruins City four times with a 100% success rate. Normal.
The second—a C+ rank warrior team, their first entry, wiped out on the twelfth floor of the rerun of the Ruins Tower. Normal.
The third. Allen's finger hovered over the screen.
Customer ID: SilentBlade_7. Rank: B. Class: Shadow Assassin. First Entry Time: Twelve hours ago. Completion Record: Ruins Tower Rerun, Floor 15. One-time completion.
Time—Eleven minutes.
Eleven minutes.
Floor 15. Each floor has unique monster configurations, trap matrices, and environmental rules. The triple BP multiplier means the monsters' aggression is also multiplied.
A Rank B Shadow Assassin—the class synergy is indeed high; stealth and burst damage are the core rotation for a Shadow Assassin. However, clearing all fifteen floors in eleven minutes averages forty-four seconds per floor.
Forty-four seconds includes entry, scouting, combat, kill, and transition.
Allen pulled up the replay of SilentBlade_7's playthrough.
The replay loaded for two seconds. The screen popped up.
First floor. A black figure vanished the instant it stepped through the entrance threshold. Not Shadow Step—Shadow Step leaves an afterimage. This one didn't.
Only monsters patrolled the screen, then fell.
There were no visible attack animations between standing and dying.
The combat log in the management panel recorded the kill, but the attack type field displayed—garbled text.
Not "Unidentified." Not "Encrypted." It was garbled text.
Allen switched to SilentBlade_7's system registration information page.
Name: SilentBlade_7. Rank: B. Class: Shadow Assassin.
Registration Location—garbled text.
Awakening Date – Garbled.
Attribute Panel – Garbled.
Of the seven information columns, four are garbled.
This is not a system read failure. System's data parsing precision below SSS level will not result in decoding errors. The simultaneous display of garbled characters in four columns suggests only one possibility – the information was deliberately corrupted during the System's writing phase.
Someone contaminated the data at the source when System created the file for SilentBlade_7.
The person capable of this possesses an exceptional understanding of the System's underlying protocols –
Allen turned off the recording.
Customer tracking shows that SilentBlade_7 left the dungeon after clearing it in eleven minutes and has not logged into the forum or appeared within external monitoring range since.
Comed, cleared it, left.
No forum posts, no communication with other adventurers, no claiming of completion rewards.
Completion rewards unclaimed.
A B-rank Shadow Assassin cleared fifteen floors of the Ruins Tower, but left without opening the final reward box. It wasn't missed – the completion interface forcibly pops up a reward claim window; closing it requires manually clicking "Abandon." SilentBlade_7 voluntarily gave up the reward.
He wasn't here to farm gear. He wasn't here to level up.
Allen wrote a line in his memo. He paused for three seconds. Then he added another line.
"SilentBlade_7. B-rank Shadow Assassin. Eleven minutes to clear. Data garbled. Reward forfeited."
"He wasn't here to raid the dungeon. He was here to watch the dungeon." In the lower left corner of the management panel, the closed black eye remained quietly in its place.
Allen closed the memo.
He rubbed the inside of his left wrist with his right hand. The pulse beneath the skin was pounding. An E-rank heart rate is twelve beats faster than a D-rank—the heart is compensating for lower output power with a higher frequency.
Twelve hours to recover.
He shifted his gaze from SilentBlade_7's page to the corner of the management panel—the line graph of the Global Abnormal Fluctuation Index was shrunk to the very bottom of the notification bar.
He clicked on it.
The line jumped two more bars.
Half a bar away from the red threshold line.
His phone vibrated again in his pocket.
A text message notification. Robert Chen, the "unavoidable" message sent twelve hours ago now had an additional line.
"Bring your System registration certificate. I'm the head of the investigation team." The global anomaly fluctuation line on the management panel jumped again in the far corner of his field of vision.
Half a tick.
The threshold line didn't move, but the end of the line had touched the lower edge of the red horizontal line.
Allen locked his phone screen and turned off the last name.
A drop of water dripped from the parking lot drainpipe, landing on the second joint of his right index finger. Cold.
He glanced down at the trace left by the drop—yellow stains of iodine mixed with cement dust on his fingertip, and dried blood from when he bit his tongue six hours earlier still clung to his fingernail.
Dirty. Quiet. Alive.
The gold icon in the lower right corner of the management panel jumped.