Level -99 Archmage - Chapter 73

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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 73. Monster of Despair
For an instant, electricity seemed to surge through his entire body.
The target indicated by the message’s contents.
No matter how he thought about it, there was no one else but himself.
All the circumstances pointed to Park Chan-woo, to him alone.
Even examining every detail of the wording, he couldn’t imagine it referring to anyone else.
Beyond that, the message’s content wasn’t the only problem.
……An explosive gain in contribution—something bordering on bug-like exploitation.
Aheta, the Lord of the Moon, might have noticed this fact.
‘Is that why he’s trying to find me?’
Of course.
If he’d noticed, he would absolutely try to track him down and eliminate him.
Even a Lord of the Moon standing shoulder to shoulder with named Creators would fear Bankruptcy above all else.
Every Creator shared the same terror: Bankruptcy.
For a Creator, Bankruptcy meant death.
Bankruptcy wasn’t merely losing the qualification to be a Creator.
You lost every shred of ‘standing’—the grade you’d desperately accumulated to become a Creator in the first place.
Would the demons of the Abyss leave a Lord stripped of standing and power unmolested?
Countless demons would swarm to claim that seat, stripping flesh from bone, gnawing through living tissue piece by piece.
‘To avoid Bankruptcy, you have no choice but to minimize risk factors.’
Creators regarded the Abyss as a kind of ‘game,’ or a ‘gamble.’
But they had stacked the deck overwhelmingly in their own favor.
It began with the Entry Restrictions on the Abyss.
Every created Abyss had an invisible ‘Entry Restriction’ built in.
The Creators set the parameters however they wished, selecting which participants could enter.
Level, stats, Class, attack and defense power—they placed restrictions on absolutely everything.
‘We called it the Invisible Cursed Hand.’
The Invisible Cursed Hand!
No joke—literal truth.
The conditions allowing entry could be verified with your own eyes, but the restrictions blocking entry bore no visible mark.
For example, suppose an Abyss was created with an ‘Entry Requirement’ stating only Level 10 and above could enter.
This ‘Entry Requirement’ naturally displayed to all participants.
But an Abyss of such low difficulty would always have a ‘maximum level’ restriction in place.
Level 30, or below.
They selected only those participants whose level made the Abyss unclimbable or difficult to clear, then cooked them to taste.
‘Absolutely contemptible.’
They called it a ‘gamble,’ but this showed just how much they treated created Abysses like a ‘game.’
Even in defeat, they’d lose only a single game Coin, then play again—such was their design.
Meanwhile, human defeat always led to one thing: death and annihilation.
Unfair.
The playing field hadn’t merely tilted—it was overturned entirely.
The problem was that humans could barely comprehend this ‘unfairness.’
Almost no human could perceive those restrictions.
They’d set the boundaries cunningly and ambiguously, making them difficult to detect.
As a result, halfway through, we thought there was hope in this gamble.
That someday we could win, that we could expose their weaknesses!
False hope.
This Abyss held no hope from the beginning.
Humanity was nothing but a toy they played with and discarded.
If we’d known from the start that humanity was set up to never, ever win, we wouldn’t have fought so desperately to conquer the Abyss.
What a vicious deception this was.
‘The Night Abyss certainly has Entry Restrictions too.’
In other words.
Aheta, Lord of the Moon, was no different from any other Creator.
He’d surely imposed all manner of restrictions on the Night Abyss.
That ‘Uninvited Guest’—it was very likely an entity that transcended such ‘restrictions.’
‘Once someone enters a created Abyss, the Creators cannot access the participants’ information.’
Even as the host who opened the Night Abyss, Aheta couldn’t view the data of those who entered.
‘That’s why he’d resort to this method to find the Uninvited Guest.’
Who could it be?
Then who was the Uninvited Guest?
Was he truly the one Aheta was after?
‘First, there’s the fact that I alone am a Fugitive.’
He turned the matter over in his mind.
Based on everything he’d confirmed so far, every other participant had been a Chaser.
But he was different from the rest. He alone held the designation of Fugitive.
Why?
‘The second Night Abyss wasn’t entered by humans alone as participants. Doppelgangers—they’re participants just like us.’
The picture came into focus.
Humans and Doppelgangers.
Two races had entered this second Night Abyss together.
That he’d been cast as a Fugitive might well have been because he currently bore more resemblance to a Doppelganger than to a human.
This undoubtedly suggested the possibility that Park Chan-woo was an Uninvited human.
Moreover.
‘A user of hidden information.’
It wasn’t inconceivable that someone had noticed the anomaly—that an unknown, undetectable informant was raking in tenfold rewards.
Someone was obtaining a contribution far beyond all reason.
Aheta might well believe the game would only proceed as he’d orchestrated it if he found and eliminated that anomaly before the night ended.
Yet.
‘…For all that, the odds of Aheta having caught on are vanishingly small.’
The probability wasn’t zero, but it approached zero. He was certain of it.
Once the participants had begun to play, there was little the organizer could do.
Information access was impossible, and observing individuals within the Abyss was out of the question entirely.
No matter how rigged the game, the rules didn’t permit seeing your opponent’s hand.
This was one of the few protections afforded to participants in the Abyss—an absolute rule.
Even the Great Nine Lords could not break it.
Naturally, Aheta shouldn’t know who had violated the Entry Restriction.
Though in truth, there were scarcely any methods to circumvent Entry Restriction in the first place.
‘No doubt about it. Someone entered openly, ignoring the restriction entirely.’
In any case, he had looked up at the full moon and entered by legitimate means.
That entry was possible meant he hadn’t completely broken the restriction.
Therefore, Aheta couldn’t know how Park Chan-woo was playing.
The other Creators who’d entered the game faced the same constraint.
The board was set, and the game had begun.
The Creators could only verify the results once they came in.
All they could influence were their own Avatars—those they’d contracted with.
Of course, even that was heavily restricted.
They could do little more than send a few messages offering counsel.
Why else would they have prepared arrangements beforehand in the Water Deity’s dungeon?
If Creators had been free to interfere with their Avatars directly, there would have been no need to arrange things that way.
So then, the Uninvited Guest was not him.
‘If not me, then who?’
He pondered endlessly.
A Mage was one who moved only after accounting for every variable.
Then a memory surfaced.
…There had been similar instances in the past.
More than a few times, organizers had moved personally to hunt for Uninvited Guests who’d entered an Abyss without sanction.
‘Only powerful beings capable of withstanding an Abyss’s rupture can enter other Abysses arbitrarily. Witches, Divine Beasts, the mighty of the Twelve Races….’
A realm humans could never reach.
Monsters of Level 11 and above could circumvent the restrictions of created Abysses to some degree.
Such beings occasionally intruded into another Creator’s Abyss as Uninvited Guests.
Yet it was inconceivable that such a monster would take interest in Earth, where the Abyss had only just opened.
Even if he had conquered the Tower of Pride itself.
There was no reason for such a being to arbitrarily enter a Creator’s Abyss and cause mayhem, only to become the Creator’s enemy.
And yet.
Aheta was searching for someone who had entered his created Abyss without permission.
Someone foolish enough to trespass upon his domain, deserving of his full retribution.
‘Invisible, undetectable in presence. It must be Magic.’
Recalling the message, he deduced the Uninvited Guest’s nature.
Soon, Park Chan-woo was certain: the Uninvited Guest was a user of Magic.
Not merely Magic—but Magic of the highest order.
Only pure Magic can elude the Creator’s gaze.
‘An entity capable of wielding Magic of this caliber….’
He nodded slowly.
The outline was becoming clear.
The identity of the Uninvited Guest, most likely.
‘The Dragon Clan.’
It had to be the Dragon Clan, one of the Twelve Races.
The Magic they wielded was feared even by the lords of the Abyss.
Much less a common dragon.
‘At minimum, a High-rank Dragon or above.’
……Park Chan-woo’s expression hardened.
A monster of despair, capable of annihilating an entire world alone.
Such a creature—a High-rank Dragon or beyond—had entered the Night Abyss.
* * *
Ataraxia, the Black Dragon.
An ancient monster among the Dragon Clan, known as the “High-rank Dragon of Despair,” surveyed his surroundings.
‘The Night Abyss, created by Aheta, the Lord of the Moon. So this is how it looks.’
It was a place he had experienced before, many times over.
In the distant past, the Abyss had even reached the Dragon Clan’s world, and demons who called themselves “Creators” had constructed trial Abysses for the dragons themselves.
Of course, now there was no question of opening an Abyss in the Dragon Clan’s world.
Any ordinary Creator foolish enough to attempt such a thing would become nothing more than food for the dragons.
But Aheta, the Lord of the Moon, was no ordinary Creator.
‘It has been quite some time since I entered the Night Abyss.’
Ataraxia smiled, distant memories of ages past surfacing in his mind.
It had been war.
Dragons and demons.
Both sides had waged slaughter, each yearning for victory.
The moment Sephiro, the Dragon God who had been observing from his throne in the Divine Dragon Hall, rose to his feet, the war ended immediately.
Yet in the stagnant world of the dragons, it remained a rather enjoyable memory.
Particularly because Aheta, the Lord of the Moon, had slaughtered a considerable number of dragons.
In return, Ataraxia himself had killed hundreds of Creators.
‘In this place dwell the holders of the Wish and the Star of Pride.’
Ataraxia’s reason for entering the Night Abyss was simple.
He was tracking the Wish and the Star of Pride at the command of the Black Witch.
After confirming that a human from Earth had conquered the Tower of Pride, his pursuit had led him all the way to the Night Abyss.
But Aheta, the Lord of the Moon, was a Demon King-class being or higher.
Even the dragons did not dare touch him lightly.
Currently, the Twelve Races and the Abyss had established a Non-aggression Pact.
One misstep could ignite war once more.
But Ataraxia paid no heed to such concerns.
He was part of the Radical Faction, those who desired war with the demons anew.
Of course, to wage war required the permission of Sephiro, the Dragon God.
‘But he holds no interest in the affairs of the world anyway.’
Sephiro, the Dragon God, remained uninvolved in all matters of existence.
Even if the Dragon Clan faced extinction, he would scarcely care.
The only reason Sephiro had stepped forth during the ancient war with the demons was because one of the Great Nine Lords had happened to capture his attention.
Ataraxia, the Black Dragon.
The High-rank Dragon of Despair desired nothing less than to wage war against the demons of the Abyss, with the Black Witch at his back.
‘I cannot openly reveal myself as a dragon.’
Whoooosh!
In an instant, Ataraxia’s enormous body transformed to a size matching that of a human.
Then, just as swiftly, he became human.
It was not merely a change of appearance.
《Congratulations!》
《You have been designated as a ‘Chaser.’》
By the Black Witch’s index finger, he had gained the complete qualifications of a true human.
After which, Ataraxia released the Transparent Magic and shrugged his shoulders.
‘Aheta. You will never find me.’
He was certain the Lord of the Moon had sensed his forcible entry into the Night Abyss, but that was all.
They would never find Ataraxia, who had seized the qualifications of a “human” within the Black Witch’s body.
This was why he, a High-rank Dragon, followed the Black Witch.
To stir discord in the guise of other races, drawing the Lords of the Abyss into a grand war.
And then, after victory in that war, to lay all the glory before Sephiro and earn his regard!
This was the greatest glory and honor the Dragon Clan could achieve.
Ataraxia smiled.
“This will be entertaining, at last.”

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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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