Chapter 159
In Behemoth Guild’s office in the Hunter’s Bureau, Kang-Hyun leaned back against the plush sofa, staring at the calendar hanging near the automatic door. It had a circle around Saturday, August tenth—the date of the next Core Dive.
He picked up a stack of over fifty pages lying on the table, titled “Core Second Floor Strategy Guide.” This guide was created using information Do-Jun had shared a few months earlier about the Core’s second floor.
Currently, Behemoth Guild was practicing with their orange Status Windows to gather additional intel. Unlike the first floor, starting from the second floor, there was access to a feature called the Core Forum, which resembled the countless online communities of Earth.
The posts varied greatly in content. Some were simple “attendance checks,” while others turned into full-on “keyboard battles,” reminiscent of heated online arguments. Thanks to the anonymity guaranteed by the board, it was impossible to identify the authors or commenters.
Most posts weren’t worth reading, but some were surprisingly helpful, like “Tips for Core Newbies (Ver 1.0).” It was a post by someone using the nickname Cecilia. They claimed to have written it to improve survival chances and help others adapt quickly to the Core. With over twenty thousand likes and a hundred thousand comments, it seemed credible.
Kang-Hyun had copied these “tips” into a notebook that had grown to more than a hundred and fifty pages, with about thirty pages covering the Core’s second floor.
“The most dangerous thing on the second floor is the Tarantuloso.
“It’s a catastrophe that feeds on the massive tree Yggdrasil, which is the foundation of the whole floor.
“Tarantuloso is a byproduct of distortions caused during the Transcendents’ travel to the Deep Realm, and now, not even the Transcendents dare to touch it. If you encounter it, don’t look back—just run.”
However, this information was no longer relevant. The calamity, Tarantuloso, was already dead. Speculation about its death ran rampant on the forum. Some claimed it had been killed by a mysterious adventurer named Lee Do-Jun. Others suggested that one of the Transcendents had eliminated it, or that Solomon’s demons or one of the Kings of the Deep Realm had ascended to the second floor to kill it.
I didn’t believe it at first, Kang-Hyun thought.