Fruit

The long, boring forced vacation was finally over.

I stepped into the tower. Today it was time to climb the 13th floor.

The tower's air, which I was breathing in for the first time in nearly a month, felt especially fresh.

"Mm, a pleasantly fragrant jungle scent."

Hot, humid air enveloped my whole body the moment I passed through the door.

The overpowering smell of grass, the damp humidity clinging to my body, even the unidentified insects buzzing by my ears.

Everything about this terrain was still infuriating.

I snapped my fingers.

"Field Normalization."

Sand spread out like waves from beneath my feet.

The soggy ground dried out, the lush undergrowth crumbled away, and turned to sand.

"It's a lot faster now, isn't it?"

The speed of desertification was on a completely different level from before.

I could also feel my mana consumption had noticeably decreased.

Looks like all those days and nights holed up in my room researching weathering hadn't been in vain.

"Ah, and I need to pay attention to the poison as well."

In the 10th-floor range, the poison gets worse the higher you go.

I remembered seeing a post on the gallery saying that the debuffs stack up to the point where you can't hold out without a healer.

I took out the orb I had received as the first-clear reward for the 11th floor.

The Seed of the World Tree.

The Purification Seed that others pay money for.

Judging by the name, it was clearly a superior version.

The blue orb began to emit a faint light in my palm, drawing in the surrounding air.

Though I couldn't see it, I could feel the poison in the air thinning out.

The seed also seemed to have grown just a tiny bit larger.

"So all I have to do is keep raising it like this?"

According to the people on the mage gallery, growing this seed to its maximum size was the key to the 20th-floor hidden piece.

Still holding the seed in one hand, I set out in search of today's target.

Today's target was one of the key monsters in the 10th-floor range: the treant.

It was said to be a tree-shaped monster, with one on each floor.

"Though I heard people saw as many as three on Hard mode."

Then Extreme would have even more treants.

Of course, since it was random, if you were unlucky you could pass through without seeing a single one.

In fact, I didn't see a single one on the 12th floor.

"Maybe I should've just run the 12th floor one more time?"

That thought crossed my mind for a moment.

On the tower, you could repeat-climb the same floor up to five times.

Of course, boss floors were the exception.

Even then, repeat clears only gave mana stones, no experience.

"The tower system, if you think about it, is pretty transparent in its intentions...."

No one knew why this tower existed, or who made it.

But there was one fact everyone tacitly accepted.

In any case, the tower was designed to keep hunters climbing upward no matter what.

If you didn't climb for a set period, it collapsed, and you couldn't stay on one floor for long.

It was impossible for high-rank hunters to clear the lower floors in your place.

The structure forced as many hunters as possible to climb the tower from their own positions.

Why was that? What lay at the end of this tower?

But what mattered to me right now wasn't the end.

Right now, I wanted to break through Hard Floor 20—the so-called bare-minimum threshold for an A-rank.

A walking tactical nuke—an idiot, but so monstrously strong no one could stop him. Demigod.

Knowing he'd set his sights on capturing me, becoming an S-rank hunter was no longer some vague dream, but a realistic goal.

"I don't know if I can beat that lunatic who supposedly crushed several S-ranks by himself...."

I shook my head.

Worrying about something that far in the future won't get me an answer right now.

Either way, whether I fought him or spent my whole life running, I'd still have to get stronger before I could have any options.

And right now, there was only one way I could grow stronger.

Climbing the tower.

If treants still didn't show up, I could always start repeat farming at the last floor.

Treants were strange monsters in several ways.

They had two special gimmicks.

First, they were neutral-camouflage monsters.

Until you hit one, there was no way to tell them apart from ordinary trees.

The problem was that if you attacked first, you couldn't get the second gimmick—the fruit, the very key to hunting treants.

Treants bore fruit.

When eaten, this fruit permanently increased your stats.

Naturally, it traded at a sky-high price of over 100 million won each.

Since they had already chosen the lower difficulty, hunters who would still have trouble reaching A-rank even after passing Floor 20 usually chose to stay at C-rank or B-rank here.

But farming them wasn't easy.

Real fruits and fake ones were mixed together.

If you cut off the real fruit, the treant still remained neutral.

This real fruit was the key item that permanently raised stats.

But the moment you touched a fake fruit, it was treated as a first strike, and the treant immediately switched into its attack pattern.

"Without a search skill, there's not even any point trying to farm...."

As the first gate, you had to find one or two treants among the countless trees in this jungle forest.

Then you had to succeed at actually plucking the fruit.

A difficulty you could never get through with luck alone.

So to farm here, a party member with a detection-related skill was essential.

"Should I seriously think about party play too....?"

They said detection skills would only become more and more useful in the tower from here on.

Was party play really necessary?

"But there's no way there'd be a hunter willing to climb at my pace."

Because I was going straight up the tower without ever repeating floors.

Normally, you climb while collecting as many mana stones as possible on every floor.

With the money you make, you gear up, and only once you're ready to challenge the upper floors do you finally attempt a safe climb.

"Looks like it's about time I started worrying about party members too...."

I heard that once you reach A-rank, some people run into trouble because they can't find party members of the same level to climb with.

Maybe I should start thinking about a countermeasure too.

Well, I'd prefer to keep soloing all the way.

My thoughts grew complicated, but I soon shook my head.

The party problem can wait until it actually comes up.

For now, I needed to focus on what was right in front of me.

I activated Desertification and cut across the jungle.

Every so often, I ran out of mana and had to stop for a moment to meditate.

Strangely, meditating here replenished my mana faster than usual.

I could even feel my maximum mana capacity increasing little by little.

When I looked closely at the flow of magical power with my awakened eyes, it seemed to be happening because the mana density in the air itself was on a completely different level from outside the tower.

"I should start meditating here whenever I get the chance...."

The larger the maximum mana pool, the better.

And since there was no time limit, it seemed worth considering absorbing mana for as long as I could endure.

How long had it been?

An amusing sight unfolded before my eyes.

In the middle of the desert I'd created, trees stood all alone as if nothing had happened.

Treants.

The goblins that popped out here and there along the way were no longer even a threat.

I dealt with them casually and counted the treants.

"One, two.... Wow, ten of them?"

With that many monsters around, I was actually getting excited.

Ten chances at the fruit gacha.

A hundred million each. Unless I had absolutely rotten luck, at least 500 million won.

If I was insanely lucky, I could even make 1 billion.

"Let's go for the 1-billion gacha~."

I cheerfully approached the treants.

Ten trees standing rigidly on ground that was nothing but sand looked grotesque and out of place.

A thought suddenly occurred to me.

Why hadn't desertification counted as an attack?

Why hadn't these guys—half plant already—weathered away?

With that curiosity in mind, I stood before one treant and observed it.

At that moment, the world started to look different. My mana vision activated, letting me see through everything like X-rays.

I saw a current of mana inside the treant's body resonating with the ground deep below, which had already turned into sand.

I still couldn't tell what it was.

But I discovered something even more interesting.

"Huh?"

There were two kinds of fruit.

Fruit with a faint flow of mana, and fruit with no flow at all.

"Jackpot.... I can see the difference?"

But the problem remained.

Which of the two was the real one?

"Guess I have no choice but to go by feel on the first one.... Can't be helped."

I had ten chances, after all.

First turn. I bet that the fruit without mana was the real one.

A small sand bullet formed at my fingertip and neatly severed the fruit's stem.

It happened the very next instant.

"Grrrrrr...."

The tree before me began to twist with a chilling sound.

The bark split, and through the cracks a blood-red glint flashed.

"Damn, a dud."

The branches turned into giant arms and reached toward me.

At the same time, thick roots burst out from the ground.

The thing tried to kick off the ground with its sturdy roots and charge at me.

But that place was no longer ground.

That ground was already my domain.

Crash!

The treant's roots futilely dug up the sand.

The moment the foot that should've been firmly planted sank in, its huge body lost balance and toppled forward.

With a thud, sand dust billowed into the air.

"Grrr...?"

....

I stared at the scene with a dumbfounded expression for a moment.

It struggled to get back up, but its feet kept sinking into the sand and all it could do was flail uselessly.

"Seriously, this is ridiculous."

I snorted and showered its body with a few sand bullets.

Bang-bang-bang!

The treant couldn't even scream before it shattered into a handful of wood chips.

"Aw, there goes 100 million won...."

Still, one thing was certain now: the fruits with mana flowing through them were the real ones.

I headed for the next treant.

This time, I didn't hesitate and shot the fruit with mana flowing through it.

The fruit fell to the ground. The treant didn't even twitch. A perfect success.

I picked up the fallen fruit.

That was when it happened.

The World Tree Seed in my other hand suddenly swelled up and swallowed the fruit on its own.

"What?"

The seed chewed on the fruit for a bit, then spat it out.

The fruit the seed spat out had shriveled up. It looked worthless at a glance.

For a moment, I lost my head and shouted.

"No, you crazy bastard! Spit my 100 million won back out!"

After that brief meltdown, I quickly pulled myself together.

Right. This had to be part of the hidden piece.

"No, it had to be...."

If that's how it is, let's make the gamble of a lifetime.

Using the same method, I harvested all the real fruits from the remaining eight treants.

And fed all of them to the World Tree Seed.

"That's right, that's right, eat up, you little bastard...."

The seed, having eaten all the fruit, had swollen to the size of a baby's head.

"Please, hidden piece.... Please, hidden piece...."

I had no idea how this would turn out. But for now, let's keep it.

Then I fired a sand bullet at the last goblin I'd intentionally kept alive.

As soon as the thing collapsed, the familiar clear message appeared.

[Ranking No. 1 bonus applied!]

[First-clear bonus applied!]

And a skill book appeared before me.

Brown and brown.

Among them, one platinum-colored skill book blazed brilliantly, its grade having risen thanks to the bonus.

It had been a while since my last level-up.

I accepted the reward with satisfaction.

[Passive Skill : Awakened Eyes]

"What the hell?"

What? A duplicate? Don't tell me it's useless?

This couldn't possibly be real.

I squeezed my eyes shut.