Village

[Entering the 24th Floor (EXTREME) of the Tower.]

The higher the floors, the rarer the minerals that appeared.

My goal was clear.

To mine more Orichalcon and Mithril.

"If it still isn't enough here... do I really have to buy it?"

I suddenly regretted it.

Should I have left some diamonds to sell instead of eating them all?

I had gathered quite a lot of mana stones in the meantime, but I still didn't have nearly enough money to buy rare metals like Mithril, which only appeared in the Tower.

I shook off my stray thoughts and looked around.

The scene spread out before me was different from usual.

"What is this...?"

The 24th floor was a cavernous hollow unlike anything on the floors before it.

A ceiling so high the end couldn't be seen, and countless tunnels stretching out like a net in all directions.

There were even elevators connecting the tunnels on each level.

"Did civilization suddenly advance or something?"

Besides the familiar giant drill, there were plenty of machines I'd never seen before.

Conveyor belts and huge cranes for transporting minerals.

Even the kobolds' equipment had changed.

They were no longer holding primitive pickaxes.

Instead, the kobolds were wielding machine tools like rock drills.

Of course, a bit better equipment wasn't enough to make them my match.

Viiiiiiing-!

At that moment, the machines sensed my presence and all at once began moving toward me.

Their huge claws came crashing down at me.

But my automatic barrier didn't even budge.

If anything, only the claws of the attacking machine got scratched.

I decided to test a new technique.

"Diamond Cutter."

At my will, I created a blade of sand and diamond particles spinning rapidly.

Viiiiing!

A blade that sounded like a chainsaw.

Since it was the first time I'd made it, my control was still shaky.

The blade twisted this way and that, dangerously slicing through the air.

Still, after a few tries I managed to make it look somewhat decent.

"If this were a skill, I could just click and be done with it."

Bang! Bang!

Even while I was getting used to the new technique, the machines kept pounding away at my barrier nonstop.

Of course, it was pointless.

I carelessly swung Diamond Cutter at the machines in front of me.

Screeech-!

The drill machine closest to me was sliced apart as smoothly as butter.

A cross-section gleaming smooth like a mirror.

"It's stronger than I expected."

I was stunned by its power.

The movement and the technique were clearly clumsy.

I had just swung it around carelessly, and it had this kind of power?

Soon I had finished off the remaining machines and recovered all the cores from their wreckage.

The cores were absorbed into the crevices of the Mountain Heart.

"Ah, it's hot!"

The red light seeping out from the cracks in the stone had become far more intense than before.

And more than anything, much hotter.

The stone radiated heat so intense that I couldn't hold it with bare hands.

I quickly controlled the sand to pick up the Mountain Heart.

"Kieeeek!"

In any case, the kobolds who saw me smashing the huge machine equipment lost their will to fight and started running away.

I set off after them.

After all, they were only fleeing in one direction, so I had more than enough time.

The way ahead would be blocked anyway.

However, things played out differently than usual.

This time, it wasn't a dead end.

"A village?"

At the end of the cave's wide passage, a huge hollow opened up before me.

There was a village there.

A village of enormous scale, packed tight with dozens, no, hundreds, of houses.

The houses were extremely crude.

Shacks made by haphazardly piling up scrap metal and stones as if they'd been scavenged from here and there.

The whole village seemed to reek of something foul.

"What am I supposed to do with this?"

After staring blankly at the sight for a moment, I made my decision.

I summoned dozens of sand clones.

"For now, search the place. There might be something useful."

At my command, the clones all began moving toward the village.

That was when.

Peeeeep-!

Chohogi, perched on my head, took out the small whistle hanging around its neck and blew it in a panic.

"What is it? What's wrong?"

Wondering what was going on, I turned my gaze toward where Chohogi was pointing.

Sure enough, there was a new monster there.

The creature that emerged from the biggest house at the very back of the village.

It was three or four times bigger than the other kobolds.

It wore golden armor and held a huge war hammer as tall as itself.

Both items looked quite valuable.

"I guess I can call it a Kobold Champion."

"Wooooooo-!"

Its appearance instantly changed the atmosphere of the battlefield.

As the champion roared, the kobolds who had been scattering and fleeing all stopped at once.

As if they had found courage, they began gathering one by one behind the champion.

There were twice as many as before.

The kobolds no longer ran away.

The way they tightened their grips on their weapons was downright solemn.

The champion raised its hammer high and charged.

Watching that, I casually snapped my fingers.

A small tungsten bullet formed at my fingertip.

Shoo-!

The bullet cut through the air and struck the kobold champion square in the chest.

Boom!

The expensive-looking armor didn't block the bullet at all.

The champion's massive upper body vanished outright.

…….

Silence fell over the village.

Every kobold stood frozen, staring blankly at their hero whose upper body had vanished.

A moment later.

"Kieeeeeeeek!"

A scream burst from them.

The kobolds started to scatter wildly in all directions again.

I clicked my tongue and lightly stamped my foot.

"If you run any farther from here, it'll be a problem."

Rumble-rumble-rumble!

A huge sand barrier rose from the ground.

A huge hemispherical wall surrounding the entire village.

Now the kobolds had nowhere to run.

"Keep a close watch on them."

I ordered the sand clones to keep watch over the kobolds.

From now on, they were my precious labor force.

"This place looks like it definitely has something."

I headed for that unusually large house where the champion had come out.

A house built from neatly processed black stone and metal.

It was a stark contrast to the other shacks made of mud and scrap metal.

It had the uncanny feel of something plucked straight out of a far more advanced civilization.

"There's probably some backstory here, though..."

The difference in technology was blatant.

The same technological mismatch I'd felt in the mine's machines and the kobolds was just as clear here, between this building and the other shacks.

In any case, I decided to go inside.

When I opened the heavy iron door, an unexpected scene greeted me.

The interior was astonishingly clean and tidy.

Machine contraptions of unknown purpose lined the walls, and in one corner there was even a well-made workbench. But there were no signs it had ever been used.

"Found it."

And in the very center of the house.

On the pedestal placed there, a mineral I'd never seen before was shining.

Even in the long report Dung Beetle had put together for me, it was something I'd never seen before.

About the size of two fists put together.

A silver stone in the shape of a perfect sphere.

It looked as if a star were shining inside it.

A shape that was anything but ordinary at first glance.

"How am I supposed to use this?"

Just in case, I brought over the still-hot Mountain Heart and held it against the mineral.

But no special interaction occurred.

Apparently it was something separate from the hidden piece that ran through the floors in the 20s.

Thinking it might come in handy, I carefully tucked the mysterious mineral into my inner pocket.

***

The next day, I ran to the Tower as soon as I woke up.

I had hardly slept the night before.

My mind was full of thoughts about that mysterious stone.

[Entering the 24th Floor (EXTREME) of the Tower.]

Sure enough, the exact same scenery lay before me.

The kobolds' village filling the huge cavern.

The same Kobold Champion, letting out the same roar.

There was no trace of the destruction and plundering I'd done yesterday.

Without hesitation, I shot the Kobold Champion dead and headed for its house.

"As expected."

As soon as I went inside, the same stone was sitting on the same pedestal as yesterday.

I looked down at it for a moment.

I already had a spare at home.

And I could come to this village three more times after this.

Wouldn't it be fine to use one as a test piece?

"If it's a stone, then it's a stone."

With that thought in mind, I picked up the mineral and bit straight into it.

Crunch.

It didn't feel like the hard, brittle crunch of other minerals.

It was like biting into cold modeling clay.

It had no taste, of course, but I forced it down anyway.

And at that very moment, a violent shock surged through my entire body.

My mind went blank.

"Ah, this..."

This sensation wasn't unfamiliar.

The same feeling I had when I first ate a Trent fruit!

I barely steadied my swaying body and hurriedly sat down cross-legged right there.

I closed my eyes and began meditating.

Right now, I had to focus only on accepting the energy rampaging through my body and making it my own.

My consciousness sank into an endless abyss.

There, an endless desert of sand stretched out.

And in the middle of that desert sat my essence on a massive throne—a god whose limbs were made of sand.

I looked up at the giant sand statue of myself.

Then the newly arrived power crashed into the desert like a meteor.

The crashed meteor began blasting power in all directions, starting to shatter my mental world.

The ground shook, and the throne began to crack.

I focused my consciousness. I'd done this before.

The sand god opened its eyes.

The god within my body made the same movement.

I stretched out both arms and grabbed the raging giant meteor.

Countless grains of sand—tens and hundreds of billions of them—became giant arms that wrapped around the foreign power.

It felt like a storm of blades raging in my hands.

Intense friction and resistance. Pain as if flesh were being scraped away.

But I didn't stop.

I clenched my fist even tighter, so the thing in my hand wouldn't dare resist.

The power that had fiercely resisted at first gradually lost its momentum before my will.

I could feel the stone breaking down. The finely ground meteor gradually became one with my sand.

During that process, changes began to occur in the god within my body.

Arms and legs made of sand—the boundaries between them crumbled as the torso slowly turned to sand.

At the same time, the other minerals mixed inside my body were broken down even finer.

Things that had previously been little more than impurities in my body fused perfectly with the sand under the new power.

As if they had always been one and the same.

How much time had passed?

At last, the storm within me subsided.

I slowly half-opened my eyes.

Kugugugung-!

At the same time, the ground gave one huge rumble.

As if an earthquake had struck, the crudely built huts collapsed.

"Success."

I could feel the changes in my body immediately.

The part of my body I could turn into sand was much broader than before.

Meanwhile, I also felt the minerals inside me blending together more smoothly.

It felt like the variety of minerals my body could hold had increased a little.

I slowly got to my feet.

The village, which should have been noisy, was silent as a grave.

As soon as I stepped outside, I couldn't help but be shocked.

"What in the world is going on...?"

Hundreds of kobolds were all bowing down before me at once.

With faces full of fear, as if worshipping a god.

I stared blankly at the scene for a moment.

But soon I came to my senses.

"That was that, and this was this."

I did what had to be done.

What I needed to do was mine Orichalcon and Mithril.

At the sound of Chohogi's whistle, the mine resumed operations.

The mine was huge, and the labor force was exceptional, so the output was enormous.

Before long, mountains of Orichalcon began piling up in front of me.

I started processing them one by one and eating them, as casually as peeling an apple.