Conquering the Labyrinth with a Trash-Tier Trait - Chapter 39

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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 39
Once the butchering work began, it stretched on for over twelve hours.
It felt like I’d worked a full day without stop.
My entire body was drenched in sweat, and muscle soreness and burns appeared in scattered patches across my skin.
Every time venomous blood spattered, I’d sear that spot directly to cauterize it.
A mercy burn of my own making, done in the hope that an adventurer’s natural recovery would handle the damage.
[The Butchering Skill has leveled up.]
There were unexpected gains, but I felt no joy in them.
After all that life-or-death work(?), just as I’d nearly exhausted my mana purifying the toxins, the job finally ended.
“Good work.”
“Huh. You didn’t die.”
“Looks like we can actually use this properly.”
Even the orcs in their gas masks showed considerable goodwill toward us for easing their burden.
But the greatest achievement lay elsewhere.
-Your consciousness has already recognized me, so perfect synchronization won’t be far off.
It was the conversation with Illumina, the dark elf.
When I began operating the spirit according to her teachings, I witnessed real change.
[Name: Go Cheol-woo (Lowest-Rank Spirit)]
A status window had momentarily appeared for the spirit into which I’d projected my consciousness.
It vanished quickly, but I couldn’t help my shock.
‘I can see the spirit’s status window?’
-Once synchronization is complete, you’ll even be able to channel your soul’s power through the spirit. When that happens, the spirit’s growth won’t be difficult.
I was skeptical about that claim, at least.
-Your friend shows signs of consciousness synchronization too. Good. With two of you, the odds improve.
Since Bartus was also progressing, the weight on my mind lessened.
On top of that, we’d solved the food problem.
From the scraps of butchered meat, I used a water spirit to extract the venom and blood, then roasted it with a fire spirit until it was edible.
“It’s unpleasant, but manageable. Better than that green slop, anyway.”
“Yes. Definitely.”
“Let’s keep coming here.”
“Of course.”
Besides, I still needed to learn spirit arts from Illumina.
We returned to Basement Level 1 having found a single thread of hope amid despair.
“Wow? You came back alive?”
“How long since someone actually returned alive from butchering work?”
I ignored the prisoners’ greetings.
“Ha. Looks like I’ll make it.”
Whoosh.
Splash.
As I used the spirit to wash the filth from my entire body, the prisoners’ reaction shifted noticeably.
“……a spirit?”
“If he’s a spirit user, his mana wouldn’t be corrupted even here.”
“Damn. That’s enviable.”
The eyes watching us grew complicated, but I didn’t pay them any mind.
‘Everyone in this place is addicted. Don’t expect cooperation.’
‘Right.’
Instead, I sent the spirit through the open doorway and began scouting.
The results were disheartening.
“The ones guarding the surface look even stronger than Krang.”
“Yes. There’s no opening to escape through.”
If Krang was an ogre jailer, the creatures guarding the entrance were proper ogre warriors.
I learned the reason behind this four days later, through someone else’s words.
“Krang! How dare you!”
Crash!
A prisoner who’d rushed at Krang demanding more food was reduced to a bloody pulp in a single punch.
The problem came after.
The wall that had caved inward from Krang’s fist was slowly regenerating on its own.
‘……madness.’
There was no way we could destroy a wall like that with our current strength.
And after surviving the butchering labor for three consecutive days, I heard an even more despairing story from Luka, the prisoner who had suddenly become kind.
“The fallen World Tree drains mana and life force endlessly. Without a spirit’s power, you’d need to be blessed at least four times over to withstand the mana loss.”
“What about the guards here?”
“Minimum fourth-tier blessed. The guards outside are stronger. The captain of the guard detail is supposedly a seventh-tier orc. Ranger class variant.”
Seventh-tier?
‘That means seventh-class job, I’d wager.’
For natives and labyrinthians, class and level scaled almost in perfect proportion.
Minimum level seventy.
‘How is this possible? This is a novice quest!’
Escape by our power alone was impossible.
Yet hope wasn’t entirely lost.
—Learn. Master. And get me out of this place.
Illumina, who was teaching us.
And the prisoners in the lower levels of the prison.
“The World Tree Prison segregates prisoners by rank. Basement Level 1 houses the unblessed like us, or those blessed once. Below that, they’re divided by number of blessings.”
“There’s a Basement Level 5?”
“Yes. I’ve heard there are even a few sixth-tier blessed, though they’re rare.”
At that, the mysterious elf I’d seen on Basement Level 5 came to mind.
There existed a powerful potential ally.
In the end, there was only one method.
‘Use Illumina and the prisoners to escape.’
We pretended to settle into prison life while watching for an opening.
And so.
……three months passed.
* * *
‘Damn it. Damn it.’
Excluding those who’d died or failed in the ten-tier quest, what was the longest anyone had taken?
‘Was it a month?’
What I knew for certain was that I’d already far exceeded that record.
‘I’m nearly at a hundred days already.’
Yet still, no clear escape route appeared.
But that wasn’t the most infuriating part.
All the Magic Stones, Ability Stones, and rare materials I’d obtained through butchering—the orcs had seized every last one of them.
“This one’s got some skill.”
“Good. Keep it up just like this.”
Having everything I’d labored to extract stolen right before my eyes turned my stomach.
‘Damned bastards!’
Slash.
Scrape.
—Your Consciousness Synchronization is nearly perfect now. The problem is unconscious resistance. Abandon your ego and seize the spirit! Erase your avatar’s individuality!
I swallowed my curses and continued butchering while listening to Illumina’s lectures on spirit arts.
But.
—You could do Consciousness Synchronization easily before. Why can’t you get past this final hurdle?
—Your spirit isn’t advancing in rank. Was the genius act just a fool’s luck?
My spirit arts had stagnated for a long time.
‘It’s an ability created from an Ability Stone!’
But I couldn’t tell her the truth, which only made it worse.
Meanwhile.
Whoosh.
—Oh. Bartus is advancing by leaps and bounds. Learn from him, Char.
Bartus was growing at a frightening pace.
At first I’d nearly charged him several times, but close to a hundred days of prison life had made that stiff-necked boy’s limbs considerably more flexible.
‘Patience, young master. Didn’t I tell you?’
‘A noble’s revenge takes ten years and is none the slower for it.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You must lick your enemy’s ass if it means survival. Later, you can tear that ass to shreds.’
‘…….’
I didn’t think I’d spoken quite that crudely.
In any case, his strength had grown as much as his character.
[Name: Bartus]
[Soul Blader (2nd Class) Lv.30]
[Ability 2/5]
—Spirit. Bladework.
Within three months, he’d gained a second Blessing, and the third loomed within reach.
—Just one more wall to break through.
Illumina took genuine satisfaction in Bartus’s growth.
My evaluation, meanwhile, had hit rock bottom.
—If you can’t even receive a Blessing, then achieve perfect Consciousness Synchronization at least. If you can’t manage that either, there’s no place for you in this plan.
God. Seriously.
‘Is it just the limit of the Ability Stone’s power?’
Yet I couldn’t deny that I’d made progress under Illumina’s instruction.
Now, if I concentrated, the Spirit’s status window came into clear view.
But that was where it stopped.
‘Sigh…….’
Crack.
Slice.
I worked the butchering knife mechanically, as if to quiet the frustration in my chest.
After nearly a hundred days of the same motions, I could now predict exactly where the vicious bloodspatter would fly.
Then one corpse caught my eye—something slightly unusual.
Among the Horned Fanged Serpents, this one had an extra horn and sharper scales.
‘An evolved form? Super Rare grade?’
Without thinking, as I peeled the meat along the grain, it happened.
[Butchering Skill (Rare) has successfully evolved.]
[It has evolved into Monster Butchering (Super Rare).]
“What the……?”
[Monster Butchering (Super Rare—Lv. 1)]
—Mana efficiency during Monster Butchering: +10%
—Monster meat quality: +10%
—Poison resistance: +1
“……Huh.”
My first Super Rare skill, and it was butchering.
‘It’s good, but……’
Something felt hollow about it.
Then, glancing absently around the chamber.
‘……Oh?’
The corpses scattered everywhere.
Their grain became distinctly visible—without even using the skill’s effect.
Where to cut.
How to carve for the cleanest separation.
I could just see it.
And then, suddenly.
‘This……I could see it on living monsters too, couldn’t I?’
Everything shifted.
In the midst of despair, fortune had tumbled unexpectedly into my hands.
I laughed before I could stop myself.
‘Right. As long as something’s improving, that’s enough.’
In that moment.
Hum.
The Spirit and I seemed to mesh together for an instant.
My soul soared, and the Mana circulation in my body became incomparably smoother than before.
[Valgar Spirit Cultivation Method Stage 1 (Advanced) is evolving.]
[Valgar Spirit Cultivation Method Stage 2 (Master)]
[Mana has increased by 2.]
‘Oh! My Mana too!’
The newly converted Mana flowed through my entire body with far greater efficiency.
‘……What?’
A strange sensation swept through me.
Before my eyes lay a monster’s corpse.
And yet simultaneously.
I saw flames roaring in a hearth.
I felt blood trickling through a channel.
From the ceiling, the entire workshop spread below him.
Beneath his feet, the tremor carried the footsteps of dozens of people.
Four senses.
No.
Five, counting himself.
‘What is this?’
-What do you think?
The Spirit answered.
-It’s us.
‘…….’
His skin prickled with goosebumps.
It was normally possible to borrow the Spirit’s senses.
But this was different.
He wasn’t feeling the Spirit’s senses.
He—the fire Spirit—was seeing flames.
He—the water Spirit—was feeling the currents.
He—the wind Spirit—was looking down over the workshop.
He—the earth Spirit—was sensing the vibration beneath the ground.
And yet, he—Go Cheol-woo—was holding a butchering knife.
‘……it’s all me, isn’t it?’
The moment he accepted that truth.
His consciousness shattered.
‘What?’
It had been an exceedingly faint fragment.
A tiny piece of the energy that composed this world, broken away from the whole.
The fragment that should have dissolved into this world and vanished had, by chance, encountered a passing breeze. No—encountered a will.
A will that refused any constraint, seeking only to move forward freely.
The faint fragment swiftly merged with it.
Of course, even so, the fragment was far too weak to maintain its own existence.
Yet countless coincidences had layered upon each other, allowing it to persist. However.
The free-seeking will, unable to advance further, had hardened its own existence into a rigid stone.
Waiting for someone to liberate it.
And so, at the end of that long waiting.
A mysterious power set it free.
Crack.
-Huh?
Confusion erupted in an instant.
Was he Go Cheol-woo, or was he the fragment?
But a firm rationality soon found its place.
-Jesus. What is happening here.
I was just performing Consciousness Synchronization, for crying out loud.
-Wait.
What’s this?
Why do I see myself in front of me?
And it looks like a giant.
No—not a giant. I’ve shrunk.
Down to the size of my own body’s fist.
It was absurd.
-Is this what they call an out-of-body experience?
After such a ridiculous ordeal, my soul slipped out a bit?
-What the—
Whirr.
‘This is the wind Spirit’s form.’
If I enter my body with this wind form, will I come to my senses?
The moment that thought crossed his mind.
Around his body, he saw things that ‘resembled him.’
Whoosh.
-What is this now! Seriously!?
A fist-sized, two-headed fire sprite with his own face drew close and started a quarrel, and.
-Hmm. This is quite an interesting situation. Disconcerting, but…… well, whatever. Let’s just go with the flow.
Similarly, the two-foot-tall water elemental wearing my face rippled and grinned.
The two-foot clay figure at the feet of my body, staring upward—my face again—watched silently, and my body and I gazed back at it.
In that moment, my body laughed.
“Ah. So this is what it was.”
And it even spoke on its own.
-Damn it.
Whirrr.
My body had been stolen by some unknown ghost.
‘I shouldn’t have trusted that suspicious elf’s words.’
In that moment, feeling I had to do something, I tried to enter through the nostril before my eyes.
But then.
Boom.
-What are you! Get out of the way!
A pathetic ball of flame blocked my path.
In that instant.
Snap.
Something massive like a cord swept past ‘me’—or rather ‘us’—and bound us together.
In that moment, I understood.
-Was I a clone? No, is this a spirit?
-Ah. Damn it. Am I a clone? This feels horrible.
The fireball and I spoke nearly identical words at once.
I was merely fascinated, but the fireball seemed quite displeased.
‘That must be another clone of mine too.’
Did the personality change when it dwelled in a different spirit?
That seemed to be the case.
The water elemental simply flowed around, rippling and laughing.
The clay figure had nodded and accepted it without hesitation.
But we all knew at once.
-This is all me.
I saw my own form in each of those spirits.
It wasn’t just my face appearing.
‘This really is me.’
From the flame, I felt the irritation and anger I had long suppressed.
From the wind, the impulse to remain bound by nothing.
From the water, the resignation to adapt and flow with any circumstance.
And from the earth.
I felt a strong will to endure, persist through it all, and survive.
‘This is all me.’
Moreover, I could feel the sight and will of each of these clones myself.
The mana connecting the four spirits and me resonated.
At the same time, the status window of every spirit appeared.
[Fire Cheol-woo (Lowest-tier Spirit)]
[Water Cheol-woo (Lowest-tier Spirit)]
[Wind Cheol-woo (Lowest-tier Spirit)]
[Earth Cheol-woo (Lowest-tier Spirit)]
The names were a bit odd, but this itself meant I had succeeded in perfect Consciousness Synchronization with the spirits.
And that meant.
-Hoh? You finally did it. You blockhead. Then now…….
To this suffocating, hopeless life.
I could finally bring about change.

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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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