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Level Down 1
🕑 Added 2024-02-26 11:15:42 +0000 UTCThe Omnipotent Life of a Man in His Late Twenties That Begins With a Level-Down Trap
Author: Zirco (ジルコ)
Allen, who became an adventurer at the age of 12 and desperately worked hard to support his very young siblings, quit being an adventurer when they became independent and started working as an employee at the Adventurers’ Guild right when they were recruiting.
However, his job was a humble one; managing the Slime Dungeon that adventurers did not care for.
“Damn it, that Guildmaster. Always using us so hard. This is definitely the reason why my predecessor quit!”
After a month of continuing to stomp slimes while feeling depressed, the dungeon suddenly underwent a change and the monsters and traps were completely changed.
Allen investigated alone, but he stepped on a level-down trap in a hidden room he discovered.
Allen's shoulders slumped in disappointment at his own misfortune, but he was blindsided by the unbelievable events that followed.
“Huh, won’t this thing make me incredibly strong?”
New omnipotent days of adventures, encounters, and repayment of favors have begun for Allen, the Guild's chore employee.
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(T/N: release rate will be 5 chapters per week, I should be able to keep that up, but if I can’t, I’ll lower it to, at the slowest, 1 chapter per 2 days.)
Volume 1 - The Guild’s Chore Employee’s Omnipotent Life
Volume 1 Chapter 1 - The Guild’s Chore Employee and The Slime Dungeon
“Haa~”
A man with brown hair so uneven that it’d make you say ‘it’d be too bothersome, so cut it’ was walking as it swayed, letting out a deep sigh as he stepped on a jelly-like monster in front of him; a slime.
Despite the normally disgusting splatter sensation, his almost black brown eyes did not waver, and his expression did not change at all. Well, even if it didn’t change, that face of his is an apathetic one that doesn't seem to have any motivation though.
The man took out a magic stone the size of the tip of his pinky finger from the crushed slime and put it into a well-used bag he wore on his waist.
The magic stone of a slime that even a child can defeat by stepping on it has no value, but he has to take it with him as proof that he did his job properly.
“I wonder, why is this?”
The name of the man who is muttering to himself in a dimly lit cave while stepping on slimes to defeat them is Allen. He is a 29-year-old former adventurer and currently a new employee of the Adventurers' Guild.
The Adventurers' Guild is a union that brings together adventurers who hunt monsters that are harmful to people, perform escort duties, and sometimes run errands, in a sense, they are a sort of jack-of-all-trades shop.
You don't need any special qualifications to become an adventurer, but the majority of jobs involve dangerous work such as fighting monsters. Since people in this profession are often unruly, it may be easier to understand that the Adventurers' Guild is an organization that manages and monitors such adventurers.
One of the jobs of that Adventurers' Guild was to properly manage dungeons.
A dungeon is a mysterious space that creates monsters.
Inside it, even if a monster is defeated, it will spontaneously appear again out of nowhere after a certain amount of time has passed, and not only that, there are also traps set up that will cause you to die even though no one set them.
This alone may seem like there’s not much benefit to it, but the fact that monsters continue to appear also means that materials such as magic stones and the skin and flesh of the monsters can be obtained from their bodies.
Monster skins are used for clothes and shoes, their meat for food, and their magic stones for fuel for magic tools such as illumination, enriching people's lives.
In other words, from another perspective, dungeons can be said to be a treasure trove of resources.
In addition, dungeons sometimes contain treasure chests, mainly in deep floors, and more than one adventurer has become a millionaire from the treasures found there. That was one of the charms that attracted people to dungeons.
Young people become adventurers while dreaming that ‘we’ll be like that one day too’, and most of them end up having their dreams shattered. That was the kind of place a dungeon is.
Allen is currently in one of those dungeons, commonly known as the Slime Dungeon.
Although this Slime Dungeon was a dungeon, it was such a deserted dungeon that there was no one else inside except Allen.
The reason for this is not because there are restrictions on its entry, but simply that it is too unattractive and unpopular.
As the name of the dungeon suggests, this Slime Dungeon only contains slimes.
It is a cavernous, three-floor underground structure that seems to have been created inside a craggy rock, but the slimes that appear are similar in strength, and their weakness is such that even a child can defeat them just by stepping on them.
Defeating monsters gives you experience points, and when you accumulate a certain amount of experience points, you level up.
However, the experience points that an adult could gain by defeating a slime that was weak enough for even a child to defeat were negligible, and the only materials that could be obtained were small magic stones that also had negligible value. In other words, it doesn't make any profit.
A dungeon that everyone recognizes as no longer worth coming to because the floors were so shallow that you couldn't expect to find any treasure chests, that was the Slime Dungeon.
The reason why Allen bothered to come all the way to such a worthless dungeon and defeat slimes was for one of the Guild's jobs; the proper management of dungeons.
A characteristic of dungeons is that if no one enters it and it is left unattended, a phenomenon known as a stampede will occur in which a large number of monsters flood out of the dungeon.
In the first place, dungeons are the property of the nobles who govern the territory, and their management is simply entrusted to the Adventurers' Guild. If that Adventurers' Guild were to neglect its management and a stampede occurred, the heads of the people at the top of the Guild would definitely fly physically.
This Slime Dungeon is no different. Although there may not be any human casualties, there is a possibility that crops and livestock would be damaged.
Normally, instead of having a guild employee go, they would have requested an adventurer to go, but it was so unpopular that no one would accept it.
So, they had no choice but to turn to Allen, a former adventurer.
“Damn it, that Guildmaster. Always using us so hard. This is definitely the reason why my predecessor quit!”
Allen, seeing the face of the Guildmaster, who used to be a renowned adventurer but is now a fat, flabby, thin-headed shadow of his former self overlapping with a slime, stomped on it over and over again in frustration.
He felt refreshed for a moment, but all that was left was his own messed-up shoes and magic stones, and the Guildmaster's face wasn't crushed.
“Haa, so empty.”
It was a month ago that Allen was lucky enough to get a job at the Adventurers' Guild after the previous employee resigned.
And from that day on, the days of crushing slime all by himself began and it started to eat away at Allen's heart. ‘Will I be okay as it is?’ right when Allen was thinking that...
Gogogogogogo!
“Uoh!”
The dungeon suddenly rumbled and Allen let out a voice of surprise as he put his hand on the wall. And almost at the same time, he frowned as hard as he could.
After a while, the shaking subsided and the dungeon returned to calm, but Allen's expression did not improve.
“Seriously? Uwaa, haven’t I got more work now?”
Allen took out the map of this Slime Dungeon from his chest. This map was created by the Guild several years ago, and it depicts the locations of traps and the locations of monsters' initial appearance.
* (T/N: I guess it’s ‘monsters’ spawn point’ or something like that, but I don’t want to use gaming terms for this sentence. Any alternate words?)
Creating things like this to reduce the death rate of adventurers and allow them to conquer dungeons more efficiently is also the job of the Adventurers' Guild though...
“Haa, I guess I’ll investigate again from the entrance.”
Allen roughly scratched his head and began walking toward the entrance.
The rumbling earlier was a sign that the structure of the dungeon had changed. In other words, the locations of traps and monsters' initial appearance drawn on the map that Allen was currently holding have already changed, meaning, it was no longer useful for anything other than checking the terrain, which was the only thing that remained unchanged after this sign.
.
.
.
If the structure of a dungeon changes, mapping becomes a top priority. As long as they had the ability to do it, it made no difference whether they were an adventurer or a guild employee.
In the first place, the structure changes only once every 10 years or so, so there are some lucky adventurers who have never been affected with it at all.
“But who needs a map of a dungeon like this that no one but me will enter?”
Despite complaining, Allen began his investigation from the entrance. His steps were much more cautious than before.
Even if the structure of a dungeon changes, the monsters that appear will basically remain the same, so only slimes will appear. In other words, there is almost no danger from monsters.
The problem was the traps.
Allen knew from experience that if it was the Slime Dungeon with only three floors, there wouldn't be many traps set up.
But a trap is still a trap. If he is caught unexpectedly, he could be seriously injured.
Allen is a veteran who has been an adventurer since he was 12 years old. During his experience, the amount of times he assumed the role of a scout wasn’t small.
As a result, Allen discovered the traps without much difficulty, set them off on purpose, and wrote on the map while checking what kind of trap they were.
When he was in a temporary party, he was dealing with more difficult traps in other dungeons. He won’t struggle with the traps in the Slime Dungeon, which only has three floors.
Allen finished investigating the traps on the first and second floors before noon, ate a simple lunch, and then set out to investigate the third floor.
The investigation of the third floor, the lowest floor, proceeded without problems. To begin with, the Slime Dungeon has three floors, but it's such a small and narrow dungeon that even if you went around all the routes, you could go around it in one day.
There were some traps, but they were all things that were discovered quickly. Wanting to quickly finish his investigation, Allen quickened his pace and entered a small room.
After confirming that there were no traps in that nondescript small room, Allen stomped the slime that was sitting in the center. The next moment, a magic circle shining white appeared at his feet, and a ‘ding’ sound echoed in Allen's head.
“Uoh, seriously? Status.”
A status board spread out in front of Allen that only Allen can see. Allen's status displayed there had changed as he expected.
Even though his prediction was correct, he didn't look happy at all, and on the contrary, Allen was troubled.
“Uwa, as I thought, a level-up trap, huh. Finding one in such a shallow place like this, that’s pretty rare.”
The level displayed on Allen's status board was 168. Up until now, it was 167, so the trap has raised his level by one.
That alone makes it sound like a lucky trap, but although this level-up trap poses no danger to your life, it has a pitfall. Because of that, if you exclude traps that cause death, this could be said to be representative of the traps that were hated by adventurers.
There are reasons such as the fact that the existence of the trap is not visible until it is activated, but the biggest reason why it is hated is that all the stats that increase with the level up are fixed at 1.
Normally, when you level up, your abilities increase by a value between 1 and 10. If all of them become 1, it means that even though your level has increased, there was almost no growth. It’s natural that it’s hated.
By the way, it is said that the values that increase when you level up normally are determined by your actions before leveling up, so if you are a warrior, your attack power and defense power will increase, and if you are a magician, your magic power and intelligence will increase.
The average increase in value is about 4 to 5.
Of course, research had been conducted to see if there were any conditions for increasing the value in order to maximize the benefits of level up, but even Allen, who has been an adventurer for a long time, has never heard of anything that has been found to be more than just a rule of thumb.
“Haha, maybe I’ll just raise mine to the upper limit.”
Allen said this while feeling like giving in to despair a little. This is because Allen's stats were low compared to his level, they were average and noncommittal.
* (T/N: why so contradictory? why?)
Allen, who became an adventurer to feed his much younger brothers and sisters, was unable to form a fixed party, because he could not leave home for long periods of time.
That was why he had been working alone or in temporary parties until he raised his level to this point.
When he was in a temporary party, Allen's role varied from warrior, magician, and scout, depending on the demand.
It was precisely because he was able to do that that he was invited to various parties, but on the other hand, from the perspective of people in his same level, Allen's stats were at best average, and at worst, half-baked and unusable.
And Allen was fully aware of this. In a sense, you could say that it had become a complex.
While half-seriously considering doing so, Allen continued his investigation, easily defeating the dungeon's strongest creature, a huge slime, in the innermost boss room, and completed visiting all the rooms.
No treasure chests appeared, nor new stairs to new deeper floors.
A little disappointed that the change was so unremarkable, Allen went ahead and investigated the boss room.
That said, boss rooms basically contain no traps. There are some bosses who set up traps by themselves, but the huge slime is not the kind of boss who does such things.
It was at that moment, when Allen was examining the wall while thinking about what he would eat when he returned home.
In the corner of the wall near the entrance, there was something so faint that even Allen couldn't notice it unless he looked carefully. The fact that Allen was able to find it was, to put it bluntly, a coincidence. It was at that level.
Allen examined the wall with a nervous look on his face, and carefully pushed on the working wall he found.
Once he did, with a rumbling sound, a hidden passage appeared in front of Allen, inviting him deeper inside.
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