Dungeon King: The Hidden Ruler-Chapter 37: [The Silent Duel Begins 1] - The Forums Ignite

The Primordial Abyss forums lit up like wildfire. Suspicious dungeon activity. Audit notice. Emberstone Burrow.

Adrian Voss leaned back in his chair, smirking. Too late.

City lights flickered like static on a muted screen.

Adrian lounged in his apartment—neither lavish nor bare, just comfortably lived-in. A clean upgrade, courtesy of Titan Corp.

The building was quiet. Upper floor. Mostly corporate residents—VR testers, AI compliance agents, maybe a few streamers with NDAs they didn’t understand. His neighbors worked in the same machine he dissected.

Books sat neatly on proper shelves. A dusty VR headset lay untouched.

Beyond the silent hum of his apartment, distant sounds tried to pierce the barrier he had built.

Somewhere two floors down, a group of players laughed—a sharp, carefree sound carried faintly through the ventilation shafts. It clashed against the sterile calm of his bunker-like home.

Further away, out in the city, sirens wailed—a muted cry from another life Adrian no longer acknowledged.

He tapped his fingers once against the edge of the desk, absorbing the quiet tension.

Out there, chaos simmered. Inside here, it stayed cold. Measured. Controlled.

And it needed to stay that way.

He let the noise fade into the background, another irrelevant detail in a world already on fire.

Old ramen cups lingered beside scattered notes—everything functional, nothing sentimental.

His upgraded desktop hummed gently, three monitors glowing with forums, news feeds, and live gameplay threads.

He leaned back, lazily munching potato chips. The only sounds: crunching starch and the occasional groan.

Sometimes, a low chuckle.

On his center monitor, an official dev post dominated the screen—bold red letters screaming at the top:

"[OFFICIAL NOTICE] Suspicious Activity in Emberstone Burrow – Dungeon Audit Pending"

"We’ve identified irregularities involving boss behavior and teleportation anomalies. We are investigating to ensure fair play."

Adrian scoffed mid-crunch, voice soaked in boredom and mild irritation.

"Oh great. Another stupid thing that’ll delay my gameplay."

He scanned the post. No bans. No names. No real answers. Just a corporate shield made of vague language and empty gestures.

"Classic PR smokescreen. Say everything. Admit nothing. They probably fired an intern just to say they ’took action.’"

"They still don’t know what they gave me," he muttered, rubbing a fleck of salt from his lip.

The chains? Legal. Part of his class.

Monster manipulation? Just smart mechanics—tools any Tamer could use.

Stealth? No scripts. Just synergy and planning. Not a single rule broken.

Not his fault the ones he killed were newbies.

Just git good, noobz.

Still, he recognized the signs.

Heat like this drew clout-chasers and opportunists.

Streamers. Guilds. Wannabes. All flooding Emberstone.

Time to pull back.

He didn’t touch the keyboard. No need. He’d already done it—before logging out. Every layer of Emberstone’s AI tricks had been peeled back—reset hours ago, the moment the raid ended.

Not improvisation. Calculated cleanup.

A small loss—not profiting from Emberstone ore for a few weeks.

But he was still untraceable.

Long term? That was the real win.

And considering a game with 300 million players worldwide, this wouldn’t trigger a large-scale AI audit. Just a regular integrity check.

Titan Corp didn’t swing the banhammer without paperwork.

Too many investors. Too many whales locked into subscriptions and battle passes.

No, they’d study the terrain first—quietly flag patterns, trace purchase footprints, simulate encounter logs.

And if they did find him?

Immediate character ban.

Character and class deletion.

"They’ll get bored eventually," Adrian said with a sigh, arms crossed. "They always do."

He logged out.

The forum post still glowed on-screen, reflected faintly in his glasses as he leaned back and grabbed the remote.

Now playing: TOP 10 CHAIN PHANTOM MOMENTS – What Even Was That Thing?!

The screen exploded—blurred chains, panicked screams, raid wipes, and chaotic edits. Adrian watched with dead eyes, absentmindedly tossing chips into his mouth.

One particularly dramatic segment featured a slowed-down camera pan on the Emberforge Titan stuttering mid-attack.

He watched this originally to try to gauge public perception—how long he’d need to lay low.

But watching streamer content like this?

Torture.

He yawned. "Huh. They make me some kind of mythical poltergeist... That’s crazy."

Still, his eyes stayed locked. He wasn’t here for praise. He was here to measure penetration.

Chat logs rolled by beneath the video:

"no way that’s a player"

"is that a dev testing unfinished content???"

"someone glitched boss AI?"

"yo they gotta ban this dude lmao"

Adrian scoffed at each take. One even accused the Titan of being AI-generated backstory content. He bookmarked that one.

Public hysteria was doing his job for him. Speculation fueled the fire. He wouldn’t need to re-enter Emberstone until the flame burned out.

"Let them gorge on speculation. I’ll return once they’re bored and broke."

Until then? Economics.

With Emberstone too hot to touch, Adrian pivoted to background play. The ore and shard market could stabilize without him—let others undercut each other. He’d work smarter.

In a world ruled by grind, he preferred the algorithm. Buy low, vanish, let greed inflate the market—then swoop in. Dungeon Phantom or not, profit was king.

He tabbed over to the market overlay—an internal graph of player-to-player trades filtered by material type and dungeon rarity. Emberplate Core prices had spiked 40% in two hours. Oathsteel Clasp listings were either gone or held hostage at absurd markups. The real prize—Crested Flameweave Circuits—had fewer than five active listings across the entire marketplace, all locked behind level restrictions or private guild contracts.

One seller had panic-dropped their price to 42% value. Amateur.

Adrian flagged that user with a mental note. He’d buy the listing on cooldown, relist it in pieces, and flood the forums with bait builds that made the materials look required.

He tapped a tag beside the circuit component from the lieutenant’s mythic shield. "Two days," he muttered. "Let them melt first."

He tabbed to another screen: PvP logs and loot tallies.

The raid had been chaos—and profitable.

Some gear was clean—decent stats, tunable, easily flipped. Others were loud. Red or orange rarity. Too recognizable. Too risky.

He lingered on one item in particular.

Molten Aegis of the Oathbound Bastion.

Mythic tier. Shield. Heavy.

A tank’s prize—triple-reforged. Enchanted reflect damage. The kind of item Kaelthasx’s lieutenant would have worn proudly.

He hovered over the tooltip in his memory. He knew what it would yield.

Disassembling it would split it four ways:

Emberplate Core Fragment – a crafting staple for Tier IV tanks.

Oathsteel Binding Clasp – rare material that enabled reactive enchantments.

Sovereign Rune of Heat Retaliation – super rare. Triggered AoE burn on perfect block.

Crested Flameweave Circuit – rarer still. Used for dungeon-specific black-market gear.

One Flameweave Circuit could bankroll an entire guild storage upgrade.

He sighed. Beautiful item. Too hot to handle.

He’d strip it later on an alt, sell the circuit raw, and spin a new story with the rest.

He didn’t just sell gear.

He sold believable fictions.

Adrian cracked his knuckles and leaned forward, pulling up his notepad again. The real trick was what came next: the alt accounts. He would repost altered versions of these items—tweaked stat lines, changed attributes—to make them untraceable.

He didn’t just sell items. He sold narratives. Each listing told a lie that buyers wanted to believe. And that’s why they fought over scraps like fools.

"Emotions sell faster than ores," he whispered, cracking his knuckles again.

He closed the notepad, leaned back, and sank into the quiet hum of legend in motion.

Watching the myth grow was almost better than making it.

He never planned to be a myth.

But sometimes... it was nice to watch yourself become one.

For a second, he considered the potential of stirring the fire. Maybe create a fake streamer persona. Leak blurry footage. Tease a myth.

But he shook his head.

No. Better to let the uncertainty grow.

The more they wondered, the harder it was to pin him down.

And in a world ruled by patches and purges, staying invisible wasn’t just smart—it was survival.

"...In other news, the Throne Wars monthly event returns in two weeks," the streamer voice cut in, almost lost under heavy dubstep.

"But here’s the twist: for the first time ever, it’s sponsored. Yep. White House Energy Drink is officially backing this month’s war. You heard that right—corporate PvE hype."

Adrian raised a brow. Even the most sacred PvE format, the most prestigious monthly event in Primordial Abyss, had been bought.

He smirked. "Draining your player from microtransactions is not enough, huh?"

He grabbed another chip, the screen still running chain replays in the background. Then, a line from chat made him pause:

"I bet this was all staged. No way a solo player could do this."

Adrian chuckled. Then leaned forward again. His fingers hovered just above the keyboard. And stopped.

He whispered, "Nope, let them keep guessing."

And clicked play on the next highlight reel.

Knock knock.

He froze and closed the loot tab. He would finish the calculations later.

Another knock at the door.

He didn’t move. Frowning at the door, thinking.

Another knock. Sharp, deliberate.

He hadn’t ordered anything. He wasn’t expecting anyone.

His mind lagged, still tangled in loot cycles and market graphs. It took a full second for reality to catch up.

Dragged into the real world, blinking.

Adrian set the chip bag down, wiped his fingers on a nearby napkin, and stood.

The room still glowed red with Emberstone’s lava—the stream running on loop.

He opened the door.

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