Conquering the Labyrinth with a Trash-Tier Trait - Chapter 1

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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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Episode 1
Thwack.
“Ugh?!”
“You walking around with your eyes closed?!”
The man had run into me and then glared as if it were my fault.
But I had no choice but to look away.
One glance at the writhing tattoo etched across his bald head, his brutal musculature, and the vicious Great Sword slung across his back told me he was definitely an “adventurer.”
‘Damn bastard.’
All I could do was curse under my breath.
If I’d said it out loud and the thug decided to make a scene, I’d be the one bleeding.
They wouldn’t kill anyone inside Zone One, but adventurers got immunity for most acts of violence—only the victim lost.
“Sigh…….”
I let out a breath and quickened my pace.
‘Damn it, let’s just get to work.’
The old man at the miscellaneous shop would throw a fit if I was even a minute late, and he’d use it as an excuse to dock my already meager wages.
Shuffle, shuffle.
As I trudged forward, I became acutely aware of every pebble grinding beneath my soles.
In a world where shoes that fit your actual foot size are hard to come by, these cheap leather things—poorly made, several sizes too large—had almost no cushioning, so every stone and scrap on the ground made itself known.
When I first fell into this world, even walking had been a nightmare.
I’d built up calluses since then, but it was still hellish.
These garbage shoes ripped constantly, and leather was technically an expensive consumable here.
‘If I ever make it, I’m buying artifact shoes first. Or wait—should underwear come first? Damn.’
What I missed most were the mass-produced goods of the twenty-first century.
I’d taken them for granted, never knowing how convenient they were until I fell into this hell.
As I rehashed the same thoughts I’d had for a year now, Johnson’s Miscellaneous Shop finally came into view.
[Johnson’s Miscellaneous Shop]
[We Buy All Labyrinth Merchandise]
Creak.
I pushed open the door with its worn, ordinary sign.
The owner, Johnson, hollered at me the moment I stepped inside.
“Look at you, cutting it close again! Worthless fool!”
“I’m not late, though.”
“What difference does it make if you came a bit earlier?!”
“Good point. It does make a difference.”
“What the hell are you talking about?!”
“My poor feet are falling apart. Want to see?”
“Ugh……. Still training at that Martial Arts School?”
“Of course. I’m going to make it as an adventurer, no matter what.”
I had to clear the Labyrinth and get out of this godforsaken world.
“……You’re all talk. Tsk tsk. Get to work!”
The bald old man adjusted his monocle irritably and swept back the few white hairs he had left, then tossed two crimson crystals at me.
Thud.
Two red gems, gleaming with faint light.
Ability Stones.
The refined essence spit out by the Labyrinth’s monsters.
“What’s this? Ability Stones, first thing in the morning?”
“They came in from the Magic Tower. They’re trash-tier, no doubt, but try appraising them anyway.”
Johnson was good at appraising artifacts, herbs, antiques, and such, but he couldn’t evaluate “adventurer-exclusive” items like Ability Stones.
Only adventurers could do that.
And among them, I was a little bit special.
‘Let’s see.’
First one.
[Mental Fragmentation]
[Strength +9, Endurance +9, Magic Resistance +3, Mana +10]
‘Huh.’
The stats were respectable.
For a red Ability Stone dropping from the first ten floors of the Labyrinth, the maximum stats were spread across five categories with a cap of 10 each.
‘Not bad, really.’
But the name was strange.
‘I’ve heard of Consciousness Division, but Mental Fragmentation?’
I feel like I need to check myself into a psychiatric hospital.
Most adventurers would absorb something like this to learn more details, but if you had any sense at all, you wouldn’t touch it.
It was common knowledge that the more negative an Ability Stone’s name, the worse its side effects.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to absorb it.
‘Additional Information Confirmation.’
My trait as a Summoned One.
It’s an Ungraded trait without even a proper rank, but it comes in handy at times like this.
Hum.
[Through experiments conducted by the Magic Tower’s eccentric prodigy Klinsman, the Consciousness Division ability has mutated into Mental Fragmentation.
While consciousness splits into five rather than two, acquiring it results in a 100% chance of developing multiple personalities.]
“Damn it.”
This was trash among trash—the rarest kind.
“Why?”
“Apparently learning this turns you into someone with multiple personalities.”
“What?”
Mental Debuffs were what adventurers feared most.
Granted, side effects like “excitement” or “rage” weren’t completely hopeless to manage, but a Debuff this unheard of? There was no way around it.
“…Damn it! That’s why he sold it so cheap. What about the other one?”
“Just a moment.”
The second Ability Stone.
[Forced Multiple Contracts]
[Agility +4, Stamina +9, Magic Resistance +4, Physical Resistance +3, Mana +8]
Hmm.
The Stats were decent enough, but the name was peculiar.
‘Don’t tell me this one too?’
Hum.
Running Additional Information Confirmation,
[Through experiments conducted by the Magic Tower’s eccentric prodigy Klinsman, the Spirit Contract ability has been corrupted into Forced Multiple Contracts.
It now allows contracting with four spirit entities instead of one, but is limited to the lowest-tier spirits. Additionally, all other Mana usage receives a Mana –20 penalty.]
“Son of a—!”
“…A dud?”
“Yeah.”
When I explained the side effects to Johnson, his expression twisted even worse than before.
“So both of them are complete garbage, absolute garbage! That bastard Klinsman. I’m keeping score.”
Crack.
Johnson gnashed his teeth, cursing the Magic Tower’s trading partner who’d passed these items along, but I found myself growing curious.
‘What kind of person is this Klinsman, anyway?’
How did someone use precious Ability Stones just to produce nothing but junk like this?
“Get rid of them.”
“Hell. Think how much I spent on these. Still, just in case—display them. I’ve got to recoup my losses!”
“That’s why we keep displaying stuff like this. People call us a minefield shop or whatever…”
“But there are always crazy fools who buy them!”
Though I suspect they weren’t crazy—just desperate.
“…Yes, understood, boss.”
What power did a mere employee have?
I arranged the trash—the mines—on display and went back to spacing out.
With so few customers, I kept nodding off.
After all, once my shift ended, I had to head to the Martial Arts School for training.
Catching sleep however I could was good for my body.
Even as I convinced myself of this, the weight of reality always came crashing back.
‘How did I end up like this?’
The memories of a year ago surfaced naturally.
I’d fallen asleep in my semi-basement two-room apartment, just like any other night.
Then I became aware of standing in an enormous, ornate plaza, light spreading faintly from the ground, dressed in uncomfortable clothes I’d never seen before, surrounded by countless people.
-Welcome to this world. Summoned Ones.
Remarkably beautiful men and women with exotic features, dressed in peculiar garments, offered their greeting.
I thought it was a dream.
The dream didn’t end.
And then—
-Additional Information Confirmation? An Ungraded trait?
—And you’re telling me there’s only one Ability Slot?
—This is the worst of the worst. That such Waste Class exists. Has this ever happened before?
—Not in the Kingdom’s Summoned One records for the past hundred years…….
—Cast him out. He has no value whatsoever as an investment.
They appraised me without my doing anything, then threw me out of that glittering palace.
‘As if the strange Trait wasn’t enough headache already.’
What misery I endured over the next year.
Even the language I thought I was grasping turned out to be nothing but translation magic at work.
That I survived after being dropped bare-handed into Labyrinth City was itself a miracle.
I begged desperately, learned the tongue, mastered the script.
I leveraged what I had—the nature of a Summoned One—to land this job at Johnson’s Miscellaneous Shop, and it took another six months of my wages before I could afford training to become an Adventurer, to start attending the Martial Arts School.
You could call it the fruit of a struggle worthy of human triumph.
And with that pride, the resentment ran equally deep.
‘Those Palace bastards.’
Grit.
They gave me only one thing.
A single hope—that if I cleared the hundred floors of the Labyrinth, I could cross into another world.
Though even that offered no certainty it was Earth.
They’d forced me into hell, plain and simple—me, who’d been scraping by miserably but still trying my hardest.
No, looking at the Labyrinth data I’d collected through work, it really was no different from hell.
‘Still, I’ll do it. I have to.’
Crack.
If I were the type to give up on life just because circumstances turned hellish, I’d never have worked so hard back in South Korea.
Somehow, making even this wretched life a little better—that’s the only defiant resistance I can offer this miserable world, these worlds, to spit in its face.
Exhale.
‘Status window.’
At those words spoken softly to myself, information about me displayed as though a screen had materialized before my eyes.
[Name: Go Cheol-woo]
[Race: Human]
[Level: 1]
[Stats]
Strength: 5
Endurance: 6
Agility: 5
[Ability Slots]
0/1
[Traits]
—Additional Information Confirmation.
No matter how many times I looked, the information was pathetically meager.
‘More than half a year of effort, and I’ve only gained one point in Endurance, one in Agility.’
Bleak as it was, it was proof that I’d genuinely grown.
‘Right. The Martial Arts School wasn’t money wasted.’
Ungraded though the Trait was, I still had a Trait like a proper Summoned One, so stepping out as an Adventurer at least gave me a decent shot at success.
Besides, in this savage world, a nobody without family or connections had no path to a better life except through Adventure.
—One Ability Slot is the worst possible talent…….
I brushed aside what those Palace bastards had said.
Sure, some lucky ones were born with up to five Ability Slots.
But even with just one, the mere fact that a human could equip a Ability—a Trait drawn from monsters—meant I had what it took to be an Adventurer.
‘Save up more money, acquire one decent Ability, then enter the Labyrinth. It won’t be long. Keep training the martial arts, push my stats up by at least one more point. Or better yet, get in there sooner and use Runes to raise my stats…….’
While I was dreaming those hopeful dreams about the future, entranced in my own determination.
Squeak.
The shop door swung open.
Hup.
“Welcome. What can I help you with?”
I jumped reflexively to my feet, wiped my mouth, and switched on twenty-first-century customer service mode.
And immediately regretted it.
“Huh? You’re seriously still here?”
Kim Hyun-sik walked in and snickered.
He went straight to one of the display shelves and grabbed something, tossed it back and forth a few times, and when he didn’t like it, set it down anywhere.
No—”set it down” isn’t quite right.
Thunk.
He tossed it onto the floor.
“Hey, Waste Class.”
Lee Jung-ho followed him in, his eyes raking over me from head to toe.
“What was your name again?”
“Don’t know. Wasn’t it Go something or other?”
Kim Hyun-sik answered instead.
“Oh, right. Go Cheol-woo.”
Lee Jung-ho snorted with laughter.
“Damn, they really nailed the name on you.”
A couple of small-time thugs if I’d ever seen them.
They were the same age as me, bundled together for testing when I was Summoned a year ago.
‘Kim Hyun-sik, Lee Jung-ho.’
They’d laughed openly the moment my Waste Class status was revealed.
A month ago they came back from their first Labyrinth expedition bragging about it, dumped a heap of junk in the shop claiming it wasn’t priced fairly, and even picked a fight over it.
And now.
“So this is Go Cheol-woo?”
Tap-tap.
A woman stepped in behind the two of them.
Cha Hye-ryeon.
She looked straight at me.
The way she stared—not at a person, but at garbage discarded on the street.
“He looks more presentable than I expected.”
A smile tugged at her lips.
“I thought with Waste Class status, there’d be something more… obvious about it.”
Kim Hyun-sik tittered.
“Come on, Hye-ryeon. You’ll hurt his feelings.”
“Why?”
Cha Hye-ryeon’s expression turned genuinely puzzled.
“I’m not the one who decided he was Waste Class.”
“Pffft!”
Both of them burst into laughter.
‘Same as always.’
Four Ability Slots.
A Summoned One with the Rank A Trait, Magic Correction.
I’d heard she received special treatment at the Royal Palace and studied magic there, but somewhere along the way she’d started running around with these two thugs.
I glanced at Cha Hye-ryeon, and Lee Jung-ho stepped closer.
He crooked his finger at me.
“Go Cheol-woo.”
“…….”
“We’ve got customers.”
He smiled smugly.
“Get to work.”
Curses crawled up my throat.
But I swallowed them.
“What can I help you with?”
Best to keep your distance from filth.
“Wow.”
Kim Hyun-sik laughed in mock admiration.
“He really doesn’t remember us, huh?”
“He remembers.”
Cha Hye-ryeon said it casually.
“He’s just not worth knowing.”
Stifled.
Cha Hye-ryeon swallowed her laughter.
Lee Jung-ho, satisfied at last, set a large pouch on the counter.
Thud.
“We’re selling off Labyrinth goods, yeah?”
He upended the pouch.
Clatter-clatter-clatter-clatter-clack!
Stone fragments, broken bones, tattered ornaments and miscellaneous junk tumbled across the counter. A few rolled all the way to the floor.
Lee Jung-ho jerked his chin.
“Pick them up.”
……
“What?”
When their eyes met, he let out a sneer.
“The customer’s things fell, didn’t they?”
At the same moment, he unslung the Great Sword from his back and planted it on the floor.
Thud!
“And.”
He grinned wickedly.
“Give me the same appraisal as before.”
Kim Hyun-sik leaned his elbow on the counter, smirking alongside him.
“Don’t bother us again with ‘this won’t work, that’s garbage, spare us the trouble.'”
……
“We both know it gets exhausting, doesn’t it?”
He spoke with a smile.
But his eyes weren’t smiling at all.
These bastards. Again with this shit.
‘Even at a glance, they’re all garbage……’
Still, with half a year of experience under my belt, it was obvious these were the sort of junk items that came from the lower levels.
Barely worth any coin—true and proper worthless items.
“One moment.”
Carefully.
There weren’t many that looked like they might be worth something, but I checked every single one, even running Additional Information Confirmation on each.
Every now and then there were unusual items among the trash.
But one of them was something I’d never seen before.
“Is this also Labyrinth merchandise?”
An unassuming basket that looked like it was woven from bamboo.
It just seemed like something made carelessly by hand.
“Yeah!”
These types wouldn’t lie about something like this.
[Goblin Basket]
-A basket treasured by a goblin tribe. Appears to have been used in tribal ceremonial rites.
‘A Goblin Basket.’
They really do bring back all kinds of things.
Even based on what the system showed by default, there was nothing special about this junk item.
It hadn’t even achieved a ‘Common’ grade—it was ungraded garbage.
And yet.
‘Additional Information Confirmation.’
I invoked the Trait out of habit.
A resonant hum.
[A basket capable of synthesizing any item.]
[Items created through synthesis gain a high probability of positive enhancement.]
An explanation unlike anything I’d ever heard appeared.

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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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