I Gain Infinite Gold Just By Waiting-Chapter 224: Episode 46_The Ice Castle Lord (6)

8.

The Sahara Desert was one of the places already abandoned by humankind even before dungeons appeared on Earth.

It was an environment where humans simply could not live.

On a planet undergoing desertification, it was the most heavily affected region. In a land without water, the daily temperature swung by more than 104 degrees, making it inhospitable to human life. When dungeons appeared there, people wrote them off as impossible to clear.

Of course, humans always find opportunities.

To players, the ever-increasing number of dungeons felt like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Some time had passed, and people had adapted to dungeons to some extent. The atmosphere had shifted to players actively raiding and stripping dungeons for profit. Within a few years, it wasn’t uncommon to see players boarding planes specifically to tackle the Sahara’s dungeons.

In the end, the heat and harsh conditions were just the background outside the dungeon. If you could endure that and get inside, you didn’t have to suffer through the desert’s scorching days and frigid nights. Once you came back out, you could just use your overwhelming physical abilities as a player to travel to a place where you could rest.

Wherever there was money to be made, supply was sure to follow. For a while, Sahara dungeon packages even enjoyed a brief burst of popularity.

Then, after the recent dungeon break, player traffic to the Sahara stopped completely.

Because of the chain reaction of countless dungeons breaking, level-1 monsters were spilling out elsewhere while the Sahara was already spewing level-2 monsters. The number of creatures that emerged far exceeded what a handful of players could handle just by investing time. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

A place where you could earn more points?

That kind of thinking only worked in games.

These were monsters that, quite literally, survived in the desert. Hunting monsters that had adapted to the Sahara’s brutal environment and roamed it like their own backyard? In reality, satellite feeds more often showed monsters that had failed to adapt and died, only to be eaten by other monsters—desert predators that would appear from nowhere to snatch their prey.

No matter how strong a player might be, hunting in a place with scarce water, bone-dry air that sucked the moisture out of you, and no clear place to rest was no different from throwing your life away.

So the place was forgotten.

Dealing with the monsters right in front of them was already a heavy enough burden for players.

Then, just as people were slowly adapting and starting to think about ways to farm points more efficiently, the Ice Castle appeared.

Time had flown by. It was now nearly a year since the dungeon break, and to most people, the Sahara Desert had become a distant, unfamiliar name.

“They’re saying it appeared in the Sahara?”

“Wow, that’s a brutal spot.”

“Still, it’s a god-tier hunting ground. People will figure something out.”

Most people clicked their tongues.

The Arctic, the desert.

Was it a coincidence, or was it intentional that these catastrophes were appearing in the worst possible environments for humans?

Even so, when players started packing their bags, preparing to head to the front lines to get in on the action, people couldn’t help but feel both pity and admiration for them.

One way or another, it was a challenge.

It was another challenge, another event, and the Ice Castle had already proven that the first players to carve out a path would reap the biggest profits.

No, it was precisely because of the Ice Castle that players could be so bold.

This wasn’t the first time.

Ice and sand.

The elements were polar opposites, but the overall pattern felt familiar.

Which was why they let their guard down.

“What kind of status effect would sand have?”

“Petrification?”

“Yeah, petrification seems most likely. Bring petrification resistance!”

They assumed it would be similar, that they could tackle it in a similar way. Even if they couldn’t conquer it, they figured they could at least go and strip it for everything it was worth.

Letting your guard down in a dungeon was the same as signing your own death warrant.

As the players had predicted, the catastrophe that appeared in the Sahara was indeed a dungeon similar to the Ice Castle.

But the similarities were deceptive.

—Breaking News: Advance party of players approaching the source of the catastrophe!

In the middle of the desert was a vortex that looked exactly like a black hole, screaming, “This place is suspicious!” A dark void so deep you couldn’t see the bottom spun endlessly with sand.

It looked like something you definitely didn’t want to fall into.

About ten players cautiously surveyed the area around the sand lake, which was roughly the size of a small pond.

There were no monsters.

“What the hell?”

Nothing lunged at them, either.

The vortex simply kept spinning, as if that was its sole purpose.

The players lingered for a while before finally making a decision. One player stepped forward as their representative.

He extended a foot toward the violently spinning sand.

His foot sank in.

The moment his body touched the rotating sand, it began to move with the current.

“Whoa, hey—!”

In an instant, he was swept far away, then back to where he had started, his body following the rotation as he was gradually sucked deeper.

The remaining players could only watch one change occur during that process.

“Snap out of it!”

His body was slowly turning to stone.

He struggled to get out, but his limbs, steadily being petrified by the sand, couldn’t overcome its pull. Even before he disappeared completely, he became a half-buried sand statue, spinning endlessly with the vortex.

There was no time to rescue him.

The remaining players fell silent.

Not long after, information about the first player who had jumped into the sand vortex was made public.

—He was wearing an item with a level-5 petrification immunity option, and that still happened.

—What the hell is that supposed to mean?

—It’s one of two things.

People mourned him, and using the information he had died to provide, they began to strategize.

—Either you need level-6 status effect immunity, or it’s not petrification.

—It looked exactly like petrification, though.

—Yeah, visually it’s definitely petrification, but it could be some status effect we’ve never seen before. Unless the dead guy comes back and tells us himself, we’ll never know.

There was no easy answer.

In fact, it would have been strange if there had been.

—We should probably wait a bit longer.

—It’s an event, sure, but it’s still a catastrophe. Rushing in seems dangerous.

—This doesn’t feel like the kind of event where you just go in and farm for free.

—It looks more dangerous than the Ice Castle.

Perhaps because their fear had been amplified, no players approached the “Harbinger of Great Catastrophe” in the Sahara Desert for several days. As with the Ice Castle, it was impossible to observe via satellite, so any updates could only come from the players on-site.

After several days, some good news finally appeared.

—Monsters are out!

Normally, this kind of information would never be made public. The advance party had staked everything on this venture, and while they might have looked foolish, they had done their homework. They had risked their lives to obtain this information. Only a total fool would share it freely.

The fact that they were sharing it now meant they were desperate.

—This is insane. Look at all those monsters!

—Damn. Where are they even coming from?

—Just eyeballing it, there have to be at least a few hundred.

—What level are they?

—No idea. At a glance, they look like they’re around 4–5 stars.

Monsters were pouring out.

There were so many that one couldn’t help but grimace. They didn’t just appear; the moment they emerged, they charged at their prey.

The players who had been watching from a distance suddenly found themselves under attack and had to run for their lives. Now, they were calling for help.

They were willing to share this information because they needed more challengers.

When the monsters burst out, something massive rose up from the sand vortex.

People started calling it the Sand Castle.

—A Sand Castle. If we conquer this too, do we get to be a castle lord?

The second special dungeon had been revealed to the world.

* * *

As the Ice Castle Lord, the appearance of a new castle was more than enough to pique his curiosity.

“This is nuts.”

He had expected it.

He had never believed the Ice Castle would be the only one. He had been sure that dungeons posing a threat to humanity would only increase in number and difficulty, not decrease.

It was obvious.

In any game, updates always made things harder and more challenging; they never gradually lowered the difficulty. It was a question of keeping players engaged.

So, it was easy to predict that the Sand Castle would be harder to conquer than the Ice Castle.

“An EXP buff, huh.”

And what they were seeing so far backed that up.

Every few days—on a schedule no one could pin down—a castle made of sand would rise from the vortex. No one had been able to get inside, and although people were trying to figure out how, they hadn’t found a way yet.

A few plausible theories were floating around, but no player had enough guts to actually test them.

You had to bet your life.

Given that, it seemed far better to just hunt the monsters the Sand Castle was spitting out than to force your way inside and die a pointless death.

“Why bother going into the Sand Castle when just killing the monsters gets you an EXP buff and a ton of points?”

From Kim Buja’s perspective, that was exactly how it looked.

There was no need to push it.

People were on edge because of the word “catastrophe,” but based on what had been revealed so far, it was basically just an insanely good EXP event.

If there was one problem—one thing players were complaining about—it was that the Sand Castle, like the Ice Castle, was spawning high-level monsters.

“Still, it’s not content only the absolute top rankers can enjoy.”

They ranged from level 40 to the 80s.

Compared to the Ice Castle, far more players could participate and walk away with EXP buffs.

And yet, or rather precisely because of that, the complaints were exploding.

—How are low-level players supposed to survive?

—The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, even here.

—I want to enjoy the event too!

If it had been like the Ice Castle, where only a tiny handful could even enter, it wouldn’t have been this bad. Everyone would have just assumed that the untouchable top-tier players would hog everything anyway.

But when an event was accessible to most players like this, people lost their minds.

They wanted a piece of it, too.

Users not that far above them in level were heading out to enjoy the event, while they themselves couldn’t go.

The gap between them and their rivals right in front of their eyes widened.

What had happened among the very top players during the Ice Castle event was now simply visible to a much larger group.

Countless players flocked to the Sahara Desert.

So many, in fact, that it made even Kim Buja, who had blocked other players from entering his dungeon, feel a little sheepish.

“I’m jealous,” he said, though he continued to ignore the endless stream of inquiries.

And he did not move.

“There’s no reason to dive into a red ocean.”

Fly and Jeong Cheol had no intention of leaving the Ice Castle, either.

They knew. They were veterans—so seasoned it was second nature.

“Whenever that many people gather in one place, something always goes wrong.”

It wasn’t clairvoyance.

It was just caution.

The kind of leisure that only someone with nothing to lose, someone who didn’t need to rush, could afford.

And that caution soon proved justified.

—Breaking News: Sand vortex growing larger.