Chapter 24
“What... is... this...?”
Carl Isaac, who was monitoring the stock prices of Hawaii State’s DDF and individual companies, was on the verge of fainting.
Carl Isaac was a seasoned short seller on Wall Street, but even he had never faced a situation like this before.
That was because his investment strategy was to set up every variable and only enter when victory was all but certain.
Only after his mind went blank did he remember something an old friend had once said.
‘Do you believe in dungeons? Research? Analysis? It’s a shame you aren’t an Awakened. Spend just one day inside a proper dungeon, and you’ll change your mind completely.’
Even after hearing his friend say that, his investment strategy had continued to work.
That was why the words he’d forgotten for a while had come back to him.
Of course, he wasn’t thinking anything softhearted like, ‘I’ll learn from his advice and make a comeback.’
Carl Isaac immediately picked up his phone and called someone.
─Hello.
“...Thank you for taking my call.”
─Carl, is something wrong?
“Yes, something... something very serious...”
After pausing for a moment, Isaac carefully spoke up.
“I need your help, Kaiser.”
**
When regular trading hours ended,
Hawaii DDF X5 (+100.7%)
Current unrealized return: 2,236.05%
It all felt like a dream.
If I cashed out right now, I’d have more than two trillion won.
Even accounting for some losses from selling such a large volume, I could expect to walk away with around 1.8 trillion won.
I stared at the screen for a while, dazed, wondering if I really deserved to make this much money.
Money didn’t feel like money anymore. It felt like game currency.
“I know that feeling.”
Zephyros, who was beside me, patted me on the shoulder as he spoke.
“Want to know the best way to handle a lot of money?”
“What’s that...?”
“It’s simple. Don’t let money handle you.”
“...I don’t get what you mean.”
“Just keep working hard at what you’ve been doing. Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Weren’t you the one who told me to seek ‘financial freedom’?”
Zephyros firmly shook his head.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I hadn’t planned on it anyway, but he was so adamant that I couldn’t help wondering why not.
“Because I’d be jealous.”
“......”
“When I was your age, I had to run dungeon after dungeon just to plug the holes in my stock account. You should have to do the same.”
He might have said it like that, but I knew the real reason was that he thought it would be a waste of my potential as a Hunter.
“Don’t worry. I’m not planning to quit being a Hunter until we clear a dungeon together.”
“Hey, I’m retired. What do you mean, ‘together’?”
“Michael Jordan came out of retirement twice and became a legend again.”
“You should’ve stopped while you were ahead.”
Zephyros gave a wry smile, then glanced at the chart and said,
“Still, Carl Isaac’s no ordinary man. He managed to cap the rise at just 20% during trading hours, even with news this good.”
The five-times-leveraged DDF had risen by 100%, meaning the underlying asset itself had only gone up by around 20%.
It was ridiculous. With news this good, it wouldn’t have been strange for it to rise at least 50% from the previous day.
“When things suddenly turned into ‘Isaac Enterprises: The Show,’ I thought we were in for it. But this news is so good that even Isaac’s grandfather couldn’t do anything about it. It’s only a matter of time. Leave it alone, and it’ll keep growing.”
Zephyros thought the same way I did.
Right. Now all I had to do was wait for my profits to keep growing past two trillion won.
There was no need to hastily take profits just because an obviously rising stock had already gone up a lot. Who would that benefit?
“So stop staring at your account and go to sleep.”
Zephyros said this as he snapped the laptop I’d been watching shut.
“All your money isn’t going to disappear in the blink of an eye.”
“Got it.”
I’d been planning to sleep anyway.
There was just one thing I needed to do first.
After Zephyros left the hotel room and I was alone, I took a ticket out of my inventory.
[Would you like to use the ‘Random Artifact-Grade Equipment Item Selection Ticket’?]
I’d been too busy these past few days to check my reward, but this was no small matter, either.
It might be an even bigger jackpot.
“Use it.”
Still, having two trillion won to my name had, in fact, put me a little more at ease.
Before, I would’ve taken several deep breaths and prayed for a lucky drop a few times before opening it.
The fact that I could open an artifact-grade item so casually meant I’d grown a little bolder.
After the roulette spun for a long while, five choices appeared before me.
“Aw, come on.”
The problem was that four of them were weapons.
A sword, a bow, a spear, and an axe. What a varied selection.
I couldn’t check their options, and I wasn’t short on money right now, so there was no need to choose something to resell.
“Oh, still...”
Fortunately, the last one was a ring.
Rings were in huge demand among accessories, since you could wear up to ten of them.
I’d been meaning to fill a few ring slots now that I’d made some money, so this worked out well.
A weapon couldn’t compete with an artifact-grade ring unless its options were exceptionally good.
Naturally, choosing the ring was the obvious thing to do.
The ring was a murky black, with a red crystal dangling from it. It looked ominous, but that only made it cooler.
At last, the ring dropped from the air into my hand, and its item information appeared.
[Mad Emperor’s Authority]
[Grade]: Artifact-Grade Accessory
[Description]: An artifact left behind by an ancient emperor who was enthralled by black magic. The mad tyrant, who had come to trust no one around him, eventually decided that only the undead deserved to be citizens of his empire. In the end, he remained the lonely ruler of an empire inhabited solely by the undead.
[Details]: All functions are currently sealed for the user. (To break the seal, a minimum cumulative total of one million and a maximum of 100 million undead must be summoned.)
It seemed like an item for a necromancer.
A seal, huh...
“A cumulative total of 100 million?”
It was so many that another necromancer would’ve balked, but for me, it was a number I could manage while picking my nose.
After putting on the ring,
I needed to replenish No. 2 anyway, since I’d reverse-summoned it. I took out the spare samples I’d set aside from my inventory and used the Undead Rise skill.
[You raised 284,720,223 corpses of the Caulobacter Crescentus strain.]
[They will become your loyal subordinates and follow you.]
The usual summoning-related system messages appeared.
Immediately after, a message I’d never seen before appeared.
[You have dedicated 100 million subjects to the empire.]
[The item ‘Mad Emperor’s Authority’ has fully recovered its power!]
“Let’s see.”
The item’s grade and description were the same...
[Details]: Once every 24 hours, you can grant an ‘Imperial Edict’ to the undead. The edict’s duration varies depending on the number of undead who receive it and the content of the edict.
[Imperial Edict (Active Item Skill)]
Description: O great emperor, your loyal subjects will obey any command, even if they must risk their lives to do so. It doesn’t matter whether the command is right or wrong, impossible or possible. So please, just give the order!
“I can’t tell from this alone.”
Whatever it was, it was unusual.
It certainly felt like an artifact-grade item.
Still, it looked like it would be difficult for anyone but me to use.
A hundred million individuals... It was easy to say, but...
Even the minimum requirement of one million would be difficult for most necromancers.
Which meant...
“Its resale value is crap.”
What was that about a hundred trillion won?
Looks like I’m destined not to make money off divine items.
I’ll have to earn it fair and square(?).
“Tch, what a shame.”
Still, satisfied that I’d gotten an item I could at least put to use, I lay down on the bed.
My heart was still pounding with excitement, but I’d already been awake for over twenty hours.
At this point, there was no stopping the wave of sleep washing over me.
...I’d figure out the Imperial Edict skill tomorrow.
**
The hunger hit me as soon as I woke up, so I went down to the hotel’s breakfast restaurant.
I didn’t usually eat breakfast, but I’d kept skipping meals yesterday, so I was starving.
An American breakfast buffet was hopelessly unsuited to a Korean palate, but this hotel had plenty of Korean travelers, so they even served kimchi. It wasn’t bad.
When I got downstairs, I spotted Zephyros on the phone.
He saw me arrive, gestured for me to wait, and continued his call.
Once he finished, Zephyros pressed a hand to his forehead, his face full of worry.
“Is something wrong?”
“It’s bad. We sent an advance team yesterday, but...”
“But...?”
“They say it won’t be easy. They’re giving up.”
The advance team sent by the Association was a party assembled from some of the state’s most prominent Hunters to make the first attempt at clearing the Gate.
If such an elite advance team had given up after saying it wouldn’t be easy, that meant the difficulty was pretty high.
“The dungeon’s name was ominous enough.”
“Inferno... That really does sound like hell.”
Zephyros’s phone rang again while he was wearing a bitter expression.
“It’s him.”
“The chairman?”
“Yeah.”
Zephyros picked up the call from Chairman Jake again.
At once, the chairman’s urgent voice came through the receiver.
─We’ve got a problem.
“I heard. A party went into the Gate and ran away.”
─No, that’s not it... There’s an even bigger problem. According to the first party, this dungeon is barely worth attempting unless your fire resistance is as high as possible... But right now, none of the people with fire-resistance skills or buffs are answering my calls.
“...The information leaked.”
─Yeah. In the short time since then.
It was while the two of them were talking.
News came on the TV installed in the breakfast restaurant.
“You’re watching, right?”
─Yeah, I’m watching.
The news was making a big story out of the advance team’s failure, and they’d even brought in a panelist to analyze it.
[Hawaii DDF rebounded quite a bit yesterday, but the fact is, discovering a dungeon means nothing if you can’t clear it. Nothing has changed at all, yet people are buying mindlessly. This is dangerous behavior.]
The panelist, wearing a dungeon expert title no one knew where he’d gotten, was spouting nonsense.
He was exaggerating the risks of buying Hawaii DDF as if it were some penny stock about to crash at any moment.
Zephyros’s expression darkened as he watched the panelists talk.
“Hey, looks like someone pretty formidable has gotten involved. I wonder who... It’s definitely a big shot in the Hunter industry.”
─Fuck... What is this, Saving Private Carl Isaac?
The reason the media had suddenly started shaping public opinion in that direction was simple.
They were probably trying to bail out Carl Isaac’s fund, which had gotten trapped after making a massive short sale.
“They’ll probably do everything they can to stop the dungeon from being cleared until then.”
That would be a problem.
Leveraged ETFs are most effective when the market keeps trending upward.
If there’s a cycle of ups and downs, or if the market rises after a long decline, you might not even get to keep all of the gains.
Apparently, it has something to do with the gap between the ETF price and its net asset value, or something like that.
I didn’t know the details, either, but since I’d invested in an X5 product, if the price dropped now, it meant that even if the dungeon was cleared later and the stock price rose, it would be hard to make a proper profit.
─What should we do...? In this situation, it might be hard to get Hunters together for a while.
“You’re telling me. Damn it.”
The two of them continued discussing what to do, their expressions still serious.
Anyway, fire resistance...
What a shame.
If only I could enter the Stage 50 dungeon together with Zephyros... I could solve the whole problem.
No. 3’s fire resistance had already been proven.
Of course, I could also use that protection to shield other people.
After the DPS (No. 1) and the healer and CC support (No. 2), now I had a buffer (No. 3).
That didn’t mean I could send bacteria into a Gate I wasn’t entering and have them operate there.
If bacteria moved beyond a certain distance from their caster, they immediately went dormant.
But then...
[Imperial Edict (Active Item Skill)]
Description: O great emperor, your loyal subjects will obey any command, even if they must risk their lives to do so. It doesn’t matter whether the command is right or wrong, impossible or possible. So please, just give the order!
The word ‘impossible’ in the description had been bothering me.
On a hunch, I discreetly stepped out of Zephyros’s sight and tried using the Imperial Edict on the No. 3 army for the first time.
The result was...
[You are issuing an Imperial Edict to a total of 1,103,398,872 Magmophile individuals.]
[Imperial Edict: The undead will operate normally in an environment where the caster is absent or very far away.]
[Duration of Imperial Edict: 3 hours 57 minutes (base duration: 2.3 minutes, with Control’s 205% effect applied).]
...It works.
That meant I could give them a buff without entering the Gate myself.
In that case, things were different.
My gaze remained fixed on the retired Hunter, who was still engrossed in his phone call with a serious expression.