I Gain Infinite Gold Just By Waiting-Chapter 209: Episode 45_SVIP (6)
Episode 209
Chapter 45: SVIP (6)
7.
He had saved up around 1.5 million gold when a thought suddenly crossed his mind.
’Man, this takes me back.’
It took him back to the days of running countless dungeons and hunting monsters just to make a buck, cutting his sleep to the bare minimum and doing nothing but play games.
Before virtual reality blew up and before real dungeons appeared, he had actually been making decent money.
He could cover his living expenses, and if he kept saving at that rate, he had even dared to hope he might get a place of his own someday, maybe on a monthly rent with a high deposit.
Then the game industry was crushed by the dungeon industry. Dungeon videos took over the streaming platforms, and his income dropped to the point where he was barely scraping by.
Of course, it wasn’t like people had stopped playing games just because dungeons existed.
If anything, the hardcore fanbase had only grown stronger.
But viewers naturally gravitated toward the real thing instead of the fake, and for someone who depended on that viewership to survive, the sharp drop in income was painfully obvious.
Even so, unlike other players who just mindlessly grinded low-level content—the equivalent of 1- and 2-star dungeons—he had never been that kind of guy, so he had still managed to save a little money while playing.
No matter how frugally you played, there always came a time when you had to spend what you had saved for growth, for the future.
Those times came to mind now because he was once again living with the same lifestyle and putting in the same kind of effort.
He’d grinded dungeons hard right after his Awakening, too, but this was somehow even more tedious.
It was inevitable.
’Back then, at least there was some tension.’
Currently, the dungeons he was running were 6-star Unique or higher.
He was only level 35 and should have been running 4-star dungeons by all rights, so he was punching way above his weight class.
Yet even so, he was yawning his way through them on repeat.
It wasn’t that he had simply gotten used to dungeons or that his skills had improved.
’Gold Enhancement is just too broken.’
The massive spike in his attack power made him feel that his gold investment had been worth every coin.
Two hundred thousand gold.
The 50 attack power and 6% damage boost he’d gotten for free, combined with his existing Legendary items, allowed him to clear dungeons with minimal mental strain.
Compared to the early days, when he had nothing and had to focus so hard that not a single attack could even graze him, this was a hundred times more boring.
It had been the same when he played games, the same right after his Awakening, and it was the same now.
Repetition was tedious, whether you were tense or not.
Kim Buja was no exception.
The difference was that he pushed through it by focusing on another goal.
’Just a little more.’
It was something he had to do sooner or later anyway.
If you were the type who preferred to put things off and spread them out, that was fine.
But he was one of those people who, once he set a goal, had to see it through.
’The faster I finish, the faster I can move on.’
If the goal had been meaningless, he would have just coasted.
But the SVIP promotion was not meaningless.
Once he was promoted and his skills were strengthened and evolved, he would be able to level up much faster.
That, in turn, would let him conquer content more quickly and unlock even more.
That was why he kept running.
“This is not something a human being should be doing.”
Eventually, he got tired.
He had never once thought about giving up.
In a grind with no alternatives, all you could do was sigh and keep your mind blank as you ran it again and again.
This time, however, he did have another option, so he decided to take a step back.
“I should hit the Trial Tower first.”
He had spent nearly two months doing nothing but dungeons.
He could barely remember the last time he had slept at home; he had been grabbing catnaps inside dungeons or during the travel time between them.
The only real relaxation he got was the one time a week he threw himself into a bath.
It was time for a change.
The Trial Tower was also something he needed to clear, so he could afford to boldly change course. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦
Normally, if you mixed in too many things instead of focusing on one, your efficiency drops.
But he had been repeating the same thing for too long.
“I’m going to run the Tower for a bit.”
“Okay. How long do you think it’ll take this time?”
At Jeong Seora’s question, he paused to think.
“Hmm. As long as it’s not one of those insane quests I’ve been imagining, I think it’ll end faster than you’d expect. As long as the egg doesn’t have some condition like hatches after ten months, like a human pregnancy. I figure I can just smash my way through.”
“Then go smash it and come back.”
They shared a light hug.
She was busy too, trying to figure out how to get the Jeong Cheol Guild to start hunting in the Ice Castle, so even a brief meeting like this felt sweet.
They wished each other luck and went their separate ways.
“Let’s go on a trip together sometime soon. We need a break too!”
“Okay. I’ll be waiting.”
With a light step, he headed for the Trial Tower.
’I’ve got a good feeling about this one.’
“Kyuu!”
Hwangdo, his personal symbol of good luck, who had made the 2nd floor a breeze, was with him as well.
“Let’s treat this like a vacation.”
[Entering the 3rd Floor of the Trial Tower.]
* * *
What greeted him upon entering the floor wasn’t darkness.
“Well, this is new.”
He knew perfectly well that a tower didn’t have to be dark.
Given that each floor had enough space to make you wonder if it was really okay for a “tower” to be this big, the name felt more like a label than a literal description.
Still, seeing a blue sky and open grasslands inside the Trial Tower felt refreshing.
’Is that sky fake?’
He stared up, wondering if there was a wall beyond the sky, but the cloudless blue stretched overhead, giving him the illusion of a wide-open world.
It felt less like a “floor” and more like an entire “world.”
If this had been before he ever went to the Continent, he might have doubted it.
He might have spent a long time sitting there, determined to uncover the secret behind it.
’What does it matter?’
But he no longer wanted to waste his mental energy on trivial questions like that.
He was already traveling back and forth to another world—the Continent—through Gold Missions, and he had decided that that world was just as real as his own.
Whether the Trial Tower contained entire worlds inside its floors, or whether each “floor” was just a portal to another world, didn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered was achieving the goal he had come here for.
“Hatching...”
He lowered his gaze and searched for the “hatching” target that was the objective of this floor.
He didn’t expect it to be easy to find.
He figured the clear condition was just unusual and that there would be monsters guarding whatever needed to be hatched.
He assumed it would be a floor where he either had to defeat them or sneak past them and steal the target.
“Hwangdo, go look arou—”
Because of that, he thought Hwangdo, who could fly, would be a huge help again.
He was about to put the creature to work when his words died in his throat.
Because he saw it.
“...Guess we don’t need to look.”
A gigantic egg.
He wondered how he could have possibly missed it. The thing was massive, towering into the sky.
He doubted even a thousand-year-old tree could be thicker.
The egg was so huge that it made him genuinely curious about what might be inside, and it stood alone in the middle of the grassland.
He was too stunned to speak.
At the same time, only one thought came to mind as he looked at it.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”
Why was this his trial?
What was the point of putting that thing right in front of him?
At least it wasn’t the grotesque, life-disrupting kind of mission he had been dreading, but this was absurd and bewildering in its own way.
The real shock came when he approached the egg.
“Kyuu!”
Hwangdo happily circled around it.
The egg was so big that once he rounded a corner, he couldn’t even see the other side.
When he followed Hwangdo’s voice to the back, he found a pickaxe lying there.
There was something surreal about it.
An egg in the middle of an otherwise empty grassland, and a pickaxe placed right in front of it.
Just in case, he checked it.
[Sturdy Pickaxe]
▶ Grade: Legendary
▶ Durability: 100 / 100
▶ Attack +560
▶ Strength +220
▶ Agility +230
▶ Health +195
▷ A specially crafted pickaxe. It was made to break something.
▷ It will be destroyed when its durability is depleted. It will be destroyed if taken outside a certain area.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
It was just an ordinary wooden handle with a metal pickaxe head, yet it was a Legendary item.
The stats were so absurd that they made him let out a hollow, bitter laugh.
The moment he gripped it, strength and vitality surged through his entire body.
He felt like he could do anything.
’This one item doubles my stats.’
With options like that, it was no wonder.
He hefted the pickaxe and looked at the egg.
His prediction had been completely wrong.
He didn’t have to go through an elaborate process to extract the egg.
It was just sitting there, out in the open.
It was right there, and they had even given him the tool to hatch it.
He knew exactly what that meant.
“I came here to relax. Damn it.”
He had only come here to take a break.
He had wanted to relieve the mental fatigue that had built up from bloody battles, stealth missions, and endless grinding by doing something different.
But this place was likely just as bad.
In fact, he suddenly thought that maybe dungeons would have been better.
He wouldn’t know until he tried.
CLANG!
He fell silent.
He swung the pickaxe hard at the egg, and the recoil that traveled up the handle made his arms tingle.
Even with his stats boosted this much.
The egg didn’t crack. It didn’t even get a scratch.
Was he supposed to break this?
He turned his head.
Hwangdo was there.
“Go see if there’s anything else around.”
“Kyuu!”
’Yeah, there’s no way this is supposed to be hatched by brute force alone.’
If there was a pickaxe, maybe there were other tools nearby.
Like fire, or some device that would make breaking the egg easier.
“Kyuu!”
Hwangdo’s report came back: there was nothing of the sort.
His face twisted into a deep scowl.
This damn game-like reality.
“Haah.”
He let out a long sigh and accepted his fate.
If he wanted to get out, there was only one way.
People thought he took everything in stride and stayed positive, but the truth was that most of the Gold Maker’s content—Gold Missions, the Trial Tower—only ever gave you two exits once you entered.
Die, or clear it.
It had been that way from the start, and it would stay that way even as his level and stats rose in the future.
CLANG!
The harsh sound of the pickaxe rang out again across the open grassland, laced with resignation.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Regular and repetitive.
’Fine. When else am I going to have an experience like this?’
He decided to look on the bright side.
“I haven’t even had a kid of my own yet, and here I am cracking open some stranger’s egg.”
If he didn’t joke about it, he felt like he might collapse in front of this massive wall—no, this massive egg.
“At least there are no interruptions. Yeah. This is its own kind of break. I’ll just stand here, swing my arms, and meditate.”
Thanks to his tripled stats, the repetitive labor wasn’t physically difficult.
“Kyuu!”
“What now?”
“Kyuu!”
He was just about to slip into a meditative state when Hwangdo started poking his shoulder, shattering his focus.
Annoyed, he turned his head and saw some very welcome guests charging toward him in the distance.
“Oh.”
So his prediction hadn’t been entirely wrong.
They gave him the egg, the tool to break it, and now they were sending in the party crashers.
If nothing else, he was sure of one thing: this floor was going to be a pain.
