Climbing the Tower with Multidimensional Avatars - Chapter 90

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 90. Public Dungeon Subjugation (5)

As I climbed the mountain toward the location marked on the request form, three trees bearing massive fruits came into view.
The fruits radiated a peculiar magical energy.
The trees were protected by an enchanted barrier, and according to the details, the Magic Tower had purchased ownership rights from the discoverer and periodically harvested the fruits for use in magical reagents and materials.
Naturally, the Magic Tower should have handled it themselves, but apparently they found it bothersome and delegated the task to climbers.
On the Common Floor, the Tower’s constraint preventing climbers and natives from committing crimes against one another had paradoxically established a trust relationship more reliable than any other.
Of course, I couldn’t completely rely on that trust.
It seemed that emergency evacuation applied if someone unknowingly picked a fruit or two, or ate them out of desperation for survival.
The Tower’s administrative capacity wasn’t infinite, after all.
That’s why they measured trustworthiness through public dungeon subjugations.
After filling baskets with the fruits and storing them in my inventory, we headed to the next location.
Halfway up the mountain stood a small research outpost where the Magic Tower observed and recorded various phenomena.
When I knocked on the outpost door, a haggard-looking middle-aged man emerged.
“You must be Craven? I’ve come to deliver a letter.”
“A letter?”
After receiving it, he read through the contents and his face brightened.
“Excellent! I’m finally heading back!”
Catching a glimpse of the letter, it appeared he rotated through duty assignments at this outpost much like soldiers cycling through forward positions, though the rotation periods seemed irregular.
The letter I delivered was a notification of his reassignment, instructing him to pack his personal belongings and prepare for departure.
Apparently, since mages accumulated numerous personal experimental tools, they granted adequate time for packing.
“I’ve also been tasked with collecting your observation records.”
When I presented the request form, the mage examined it, asked me to wait a moment, and disappeared inside.
He then handed me a stack of documents.
“Here are the observation records listed on the form.”
I placed the stack of documents into my inventory.
As I bowed and began heading up the mountain, the mage called me back.
“Wait, you’re heading up?”
“Yes, I am.”
“The timing isn’t favorable right now. Recently, monsters have settled near the mountain peak. Once the city handles the monster subjugation, you can head up then.”
At his words, I smiled and nodded.
“Understood.”
As the mage retreated into the outpost, Lee Su-young asked brightly.
“So we’re heading back down now?”
“What are you talking about? We came here to expand our inventory. Everything else is secondary.”
Though admittedly, that secondary objective was rather substantial.
“Ah….”
“And that monster subjugation is one of our requests too.”
Now the remaining commissions were the collection of Sunrise Flowers and the subjugation of the monster ‘Qiongqi’ that had settled at the mountain peak.
To be precise, it was a lesser subspecies of Qiongqi—the kind commonly referred to as Lesser variants.
The true Qiongqi was a dangerous monster that required at least hundreds of missiles or small nuclear warheads to hunt.
Of course, being inferior didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous, but compared to the original, calling them the same species was embarrassing.
If I had to compare it, it would be like grouping gray wolves and Maltese dogs in the same genetic category, yet their combat power was as different as heaven and earth.
Compared to the true Qiongqi, this was just a winged cat.
“Even as a subspecies, wouldn’t it be too dangerous?”
At Diana’s concern, I paused to think.
Once I hunted the Qiongqi and collected the Sunrise Flowers, today’s objective would be nearly complete.
There was one more thing I needed to collect on the way back to the City, but if time ran short, I could abandon it.
However, the Sunrise Flowers were essential for the Quest to expand my inventory.
“Well… no, I don’t think she would have given us a Quest we couldn’t handle. Actually, looking at the Community, while they’re dirty, petty, annoying, and dangerous, there’s no mention of anyone being given a Quest they couldn’t manage.”
Despite my rough words, I showed her some goodwill.
“People who couldn’t handle it probably wouldn’t be able to write posts on the Community, right?”
At Lee Su-young’s point, I had nothing to say.
She hit me with facts so ruthlessly.
“Then let’s skip the Qiongqi subjugation and quickly collect the Sunrise Flowers instead.”
The reward for subjugating the Qiongqi was expensive, but honestly, it wasn’t much compared to the Lake water and blue soil.
What would normally require thousands of trips was being finished in one go, so it was only natural.
“In the worst case, if we encounter the Qiongqi and it’s too strong, if it seems like we’ll lose in a fight, I’ll evacuate the two of you and use my trump card escape method.”
“A trump card method?”
“There’s one method I can only use if the two of you don’t ignore my orders and refuse to evacuate. What it is remains a secret.”
A trump card escape method.
It was the forbidden means of repeatedly dying and coming back to life while killing the Qiongqi and escaping.
In other words, the zombie escape method.
“What if we say we’ll fight alongside you until the end?”
At Diana’s question, I smiled wryly.
“Then we all die together.”

* * *

We climbed the mountain with caution.
As we passed the midpoint and drew closer to the peak, territorial markings of the Gung Ki subspecies appeared scattered throughout.
By extending my qi perception and carefully navigating around magical concentrations, I managed to avoid encounters with the Gung Ki subspecies.
Unlike the Aulbear, the Gung Ki seemed to make no effort to conceal its presence—I could sense it even from a distance.
“That winged cat creature seems stronger than the Chimera?”
Among all the monsters I’d encountered so far, the Chimera had been the strongest.
I excluded the Orc Warrior since it wasn’t technically a monster.
Lee Su-young asked with curiosity at my words.
“You can sense that?”
“I can.”
Diana asked enviously if my senses were something she could develop.
“Would I be able to sense it too if I learned more martial arts?”
“Possibly.”
In the Galactic Martial Arts World, few of my classmates properly extended their qi perception, but with continued martial arts training, they would eventually develop the ability.
Upon reaching the mountain peak, the Sunrise Flower was nowhere to be found.
“Wasn’t the Sunrise Flower supposed to be here?” Lee Su-young asked in confusion.
In response to her bewilderment, I swept the surroundings with my qi perception, just as I had when collecting the requested herbs near the triangular rock.
“It’s here. But it seems to be below us.”
Both of them were startled by my words.
“It’s buried in the ground?”
“There seems to be a cave beneath the earth.”
I paused briefly before practicing the Wind Cultivation Technique right there.
The Wind Cultivation Technique was a qi-based wind manipulation art founded on Wood Qi.
The Sunrise Flower wouldn’t have burrowed deep underground from the start, so there had to be a passage through which the seeds were transmitted.
By sensing the surrounding winds, I found that passage.
“Found it.”
I approached the cliff side of the peak.
A cave entrance opened in the cliff face.
“It looks like we can enter from there.”
“From there? How do we get in?”
“I’ll create a path for us.”
I descended along the cliff face, creating footholds with simple earth magic as I went down.
With stones scattered all around, fashioning a ladder-like path was straightforward.
“Is this martial arts too?”
“No. This is magic.”
While living in my Reincarnation Clone’s body, I’d often grown bored with hobbies and passed the time reading magic books as a new pastime.
At that time, my inner energy was sealed in the Reincarnation Clone’s body, so I couldn’t practice magic, but my original body on Tower Floor 1 practiced frequently.
As a result, my original body’s magic level was higher than my Tower Clone’s.
Still, I couldn’t ignore the value of experience—even my Tower Clone’s body could use magic with ease.
Upon reaching the Cliff Cave and stepping inside, a bright and scorching light greeted us.
Fist-sized stones embedded in the cave ceiling radiated intense heat, and the Sunflowers basked in that luminescence, growing vibrantly.
“I, I found them!”
Sunflowers—each worth hundreds of thousands of credits, millions of won—bloomed by the hundreds, no, over a thousand!
To put it bluntly, the 2,000 liters of water I’d drawn from the Lake was worth roughly the same as a single Sunflower.
The merit points the Hunter Association would grant me reflected that disparity equally.
How much was all this worth?!
I’d suspected there would be multiple flowers when I saw the Quest was issued, but I’d assumed at most a dozen or so. Never imagined there would be this many.
Most surprising of all was that scorching stone that had cultivated so many Sunflowers.
Sunflowers were expensive precisely because cultivation was impossible.
But if that stone existed, couldn’t Sunflowers be mass-produced?
What could that stone possibly be worth?
More importantly, how did that Old Witch Woman know this was here?
Do people high up in The Tower have ways of knowing such things?
Lost in these thoughts, I used earth magic to uproot the Sunflowers entirely.
“Pots, I need pots….”
I entered my Reincarnation Clone’s body and hurriedly retrieved plastic bags, placing the flowers with their soil inside.
After diligently transferring everything through my inventory to Tower Floor 1, I extracted the stone embedded in the ceiling.
“Ah!”
That’s when I sensed a presence—directly above us, precisely above the Mountain Peak.
The magical aura radiating from the Sunflowers and the stone had blocked my perception, delaying my detection.
“Could this actually be a Skywhale’s nest?”
I didn’t know much about Skywhale ecology, but I suspected it had settled on this mountain, drawn to this stone.
As I exhaled and drew my sword, Lee Su-young and Diana prepared for combat.
Both seemed to sense the Skywhale’s presence, their eyes fixed upward toward the ceiling.
“What do we do? If we leave like this, we’ll be discovered before we can climb out.”
We were inside the Cliff Cave.
Skywhales could soar through the sky with their wings and made such places their nests, but we had struggled just getting in and out.
“Let’s fight here first. If it seems hopeless, do as I said.”
Both their expressions hardened at my words.
My plan was for them to abandon me and flee—their stiffened expressions weren’t personally unpleasant, actually.
It meant they didn’t want to leave me behind.
Of course, if they actually refused to escape, I’d be more than frustrated—I’d be furious.
Diana nodded at my words and spoke.
“Let’s fight first and assess. Even if this cave is a Skywhale’s nest, it’s not an ideal battlefield for aerial combat.”
The terrifying aspect of Skywhales is that they’re flying monsters.
But here, the ceiling was barely 2.5 meters high—flight was meaningless.
The width allowed the three of us to stand side by side comfortably, roughly 4 meters across, though it narrowed toward the entrance.
If we blocked before it could enter the wider space, we had a genuine chance of victory.
Diana and I positioned ourselves near the entrance.
Lee Su-young summoned her slime at a distance and prepared to attack at any moment.
“Now I’ll draw it out.”
I placed the stone into my inventory and switched on the flashlight, tossing it to the ground.
Even after the mana-emitting stone disappeared, the flashlight’s beam illuminated the surroundings brilliantly.
The inferior subspecies Qiongqi, noticing the stone’s mana had vanished, let out a bewildered roar and entered the cave entrance.
The Qiongqi before me was slightly larger than the tigers I knew, with wings sprouting from its body.
Being an inferior subspecies, it was considerably smaller compared to the photographs circulating online.
The Qiongqi in those images was nearly the size of a two-story building.
Perhaps this one was merely a juvenile.
“KYAAAAAHHH!!”
The inferior subspecies Qiongqi, witnessing the intruder who had illegally invaded its nest, unleashed a cry as if declaring American-style self-defense.

(To be continued in the next chapter)

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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