CH 227

“We’ve finally arrived!” Bang Jun-Hyuk cheered as he looked alternately between the empty lot in the distance and the map provided by the Association. “Huh? But why’s the mood so bad?”

Explorers were bustling around in the vacant lot that was as big as a school’s gymnasium hall. But the atmosphere felt unusually tense. They carried blades that glittered under the many lights in the area, and their eyes gleamed just as brightly.

The party squinted as they tried to comprehend the situation, but the open square was so filled with explorers that they simply couldn’t figure out what was happening. Eventually, they joined the group in front of them out of frustration.

“What’s going…” Bang Jun-Hyuk tried to ask an explorer with a spiteful expression, before suddenly freezing on the spot. He was finally able to confirm what was going on with his own eyes.

“Those crazy sons of bitches…” He quickly snapped out of it and drew his weapon, looking panicked.

“I think there was an argument before we arrived. A few of our explorers are down, and the Chinese are in front of us.” Lee Jun-Young ran ahead to confirm the situation, then came back to Kim Jin-Woo and explained the situation. “It seems the Association has ordered the explorers not to respond recklessly, because they want to avoid armed conflict as much as possible. This has led to our side not being able to respond appropriately.”

“Tell them to cut the crap. No matter what they say, if they wanted to intervene, they should have done so long ago. Those are all just excuses now,” Kim Jin-Woo shot back.

He had seen it with his own eyes. He was certain that the South Korean explorers were demoralized. They had their weapons drawn and their eyes were sharp, but none of them seemed ready to actually charge forward and fight.

“It’s always the frightened dog that bares its fangs and barks the loudest,” he remarked.

“That…” Lee Jun-Young squirmed, unable to refute those words. Of course she knew that the usually fierce explorers, who would have charged forward by now, were now simply standing around grinding their teeth. However, the South Korean explorers had an excuse.

First, there were way too many Chinese explorers. Due to the prize the Association had put out for searching other gates, the majority of the explorers had scattered across the Underworld, resulting in just under a hundred explorers assembling at the site of the Chinese gate.

On the other hand, there were over double the number of Chinese explorers; thus, it wasn’t unusual that the South Korean explorers were feeling the pressure.

Second, the South Korean explorers had a fatal weakness. They had almost no Deep Floor dungeon babies to call their own. Unfortunately, China had plenty of Deep Floor dungeon babies, as they had a very large population.

Fighting a battle that was guaranteed to be a loss wasn’t a fight. Instead, the South Korean explorers had to act like wild wolves who knew how to survive, and wait for the next time to get their revenge, as they were inferior in terms of power at the moment.

However, there was no next time in Kim Jin-Woo’s eyes. He muttered, “I don’t like what I’m seeing.” The sight of the man speaking arrogantly in front of him was annoying him.

He didn’t like the sight of the South Korean explorers who dared not charge forward and could only grind their teeth, nor did he like the sight of the arrogant Chinese explorer chattering away noisily on the other side. But if he had to choose which of the two was more annoying to him, it had to be the noisy man.

Kim Jin-Woo wasn’t sure if it was because he felt a sense of belonging that he didn’t even know he had, or if it was because he felt a sense of similarity to the man, but for some reason, the man’s voice sounded as harsh as nails on a chalkboard.

He soon found out the real reason.

[Your opponent’s aura is familiar.]

[The memories of this smell have faded so much that you can barely remember it, but the energy emanating from the being’s body is definitely that of an Underworld Noble. It is too weak to be that of a Count, but it is also too strong to be that of a Baron. Your opponent’s momentum is definitely rooted in the dignity of the Lesser Nobles.]

[Your opponent is definitely an Underworld Viscount.]

The man was an Underworld Noble. A Viscount. The moment Kim Jin-Woo found out, he understood where his anger was coming from. He was annoyed to see an insignificant Viscount speaking nonsense in front of him.

“Master?” Lee Jun-Young was so startled to see Kim Jin-Woo suddenly building up his momentum that she called him ‘Master’ without even realizing it, and quickly covered her mouth in a panic.

“I’ll be back,” Kim Jin-Woo said.

***

Bang Jun-Hyuk and the dungeon baby lying on the ground in front didn’t know each other. Still, he was angry. “Those crazy sons of bitches…”

But he had no way to relieve his anger. The difference in power was just too great for him to act on a whim. It was unfortunate, but they would have to take their revenge next time.

“Ah…” He belatedly remembered the 12th Floor dungeon baby who had accompanied him and had a little anticipation, but that expectation was quickly dismissed.

“Tell them to cut the crap. No matter what they say, if they wanted to intervene, they should have done so long ago. Those are all just excuses now.”

When he heard the other man’s harsh, pointed words, he thought the Deep Floor dungeon baby wouldn’t intervene. The contempt in the man’s tone was crystal clear.

However, that feeling only lasted for a brief moment. As he heard the sound of heavy footsteps, unusually clear in the midst of all the commotion, he turned to look and his eyes widened.

“Move.”

Kim Jin-Woo was right behind him for some reason. Upon hearing his voice, Bang Jun-Hyuk found himself moving aside without even realizing, and the others subconsciously paved a way for him as well.

“Argh!”

When the South Korean dungeon baby got to the very front of the group, a scream erupted from the mouth of the Chinese dungeon baby, who had been bragging about his strength.

“It’s nice that you’re boasting about your modest power.” Belatedly seeing the man enduring the pain as he prepared to fight, the South Korean Deep Floor dungeon baby wrinkled his nose and spoke. “But you should know your place.”

Screams began to erupt among the Chinese explorers.

***

Kim Jin-Woo intended to put the man in his place and leave. After all, his objective was to see the gate with his own eyes and check on the status of the Lesser Floors, and in fact, it could be said that he had accomplished his goals to a certain extent.

But he soon had to perform a course correction.

[Your opponent's aura is familiar. You can feel the energy of the lowest rank Noble in the opponent's body.]

[Your opponent's aura is familiar. You can feel the energy of the lowest rank Noble in the opponent's body.]

[Your opponent's aura is familiar. You can feel the energy of the lowest rank Noble in the opponent's body.]

[Your opponent's aura is familiar. You can feel the energy of the lowest rank Noble in the opponent's body.]

Shockingly, many of the Chinese explorers held the rank of Underworld Noble. Even their meager strength somehow had the energy of the Underworld nobility mixed into it, so Kim Jin-Woo found himself busily engaged in combat with the entirety of the Chinese explorers.

“Kiyooooo!”

Some explorers charged at him wildly, but none could endure the Highlord’s blow and found themselves immediately knocked out on the ground.

“Wooo-uhh.”

And what a one-sided beatdown it was. By the time there were twenty Chinese explorers lying on the ground, there were none left who dared to approach him.

Just as the Korean explorers had felt inferior in front of the Chinese explorers, the Chinese explorers quickly gave up resisting in front of the Highlord. A whopping two hundred dungeon babies fell to their knees.

Kim Jin-Woo’s expression didn’t change at all. Rather than being content with this victory that was so small that it didn’t even register in his ‘Undefeated’ streak, it was more important to find out what exactly had happened to the Chinese explorers for there to be these many Underworld Nobles among them.

But there was a problem. He was a South Korean, and they were Chinese. Naturally, there was no way the two parties could communicate.

“Can any of you speak Mandarin?” Kim Jin-Woo asked. The South Korean explorers looked at the nameless explorer who was lying in a pool of blood on the ground.

“Fuck,” he cursed. No wonder he couldn’t see any of the Association executives. That person had been the first to die.

***

{Urgh, thank you for your hard work.}

After taking care of the wounded, Kim Jin-Woo left the gate area and called Park Sung-Jin to explain the situation. “You requested two things from me, didn’t you? One was to check the existence of other gates, and the other was…”

{To crush any Chinese provocation we might not know of.}

Of course, he had been a bit excessive in his handling of the matter, but Kim Jin-Woo had his own reasons for doing so.

{Oh, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that it’ll give me a bit of a headache trying to follow up from this situation, but actually, it’s not too different from how I was originally hoping it would turn out.}

Park Sung-Jin clarified that armed conflict was unavoidable, and that since it had come to this, it would be better for them to be the ones doing the crushing than to be crushed.

“Isn’t it a bit problematic for us to actually block one of the Chinese gates from our side?” Kim Jin-Woo asked.

{Well, the justification is that China is just so big that there are way too many gates. Even by official count, they have more than forty gates. Some of them are intra-floor gates, and this one seems to be one of those.}

He further stated that at this point, the South Korean government secretly hoped that the Association would block China’s ambition to occupy one more gate in South Korea.

From his point of view, he didn’t care what kinds of diplomatic issues between the two countries on the surface might arise, but he wanted to prevent the Association that he had painstakingly taken over from being dissolved by the government.

{We’re making the necessary preparations on our end, so please don’t worry too much.}

Kim Jin-Woo wrapped up the troublesome topic by telling Park Sung-Jin to send over a Chinese interpreter.

“Maaaaaaasteeeeerrrr!”

As soon as Kim Jin-Woo hung up the call, something soft rushed into his arms. He simply said, “Angela.”

Angela, the gorgeous vampire with honey-colored hair, rubbed her cheeks against his chest without holding back. “You have no idea how much I’ve missed you!”

“If it’s blood you wanted, I should have sent you enough,” Kim Jin-Woo said.

On several occasions, he’d had no time to care about the matters on the surface and had sent Angela his blood in transfusion packs. Thanks to that, despite not having seen her master in a while, she looked as healthy as ever.

“That’s barely enough to sustain my Source of Life. And besides, what I wanted to see was Master, not Master’s blood.” Angela puffed up her cheeks and pouted with a sad expression. But seeing her licking her tongue with a glimmer in her eyes, Kim Jin-Woo couldn’t trust her completely.

“Urgh.” Eventually, he stretched out one of his wrists and was able to end their greeting.

After licking away every single trace of blood on her tongue, Angela belatedly asked why she had been called. “I wish you would have called me because you missed me, but I know that’s never going to happen. Why did you call me?”

“There was something I wanted to ask you. At the same time, I wanted to know how my parents are doing,” Kim Jin-Woo said. He was too busy tending to matters in the Underworld, but there was no way he wouldn’t wonder how his adoptive parents were doing.

“Father is completely healthy now, and Mother is doing well too,” Angela replied.

“What? ‘Father’, ‘Mother’?”

Kim Jin-Woo frowned upon hearing Angela calling them such intimate terms when his smartphone suddenly rang.[1]

“Mother…” he began.

{You cold-hearted boy, do you not plan on coming back home anymore?}

Given the situation, Kim Jin-Woo found himself without an excuse, and he could only apologize.

{Whatever, that aside, listen to me. My dearest daughter-in-law is heading over to see you now, so stay at home and wait for her, alright?}

“Your what?!” Kim Jin-Woo responded in a panic. Angela, who was right in front of him, started pointing at herself.

1. This was noted in an earlier chapter, but in Korean culture, there are different ways of referring to someone’s parents. The way Angela is referring to them is how a daughter-in-law would call her parents-in-law, which is why Kim Jin-Woo is taken aback. ☜

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