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Chapter 467
🕑 Added 2025-05-14 02:00:04 +0000 UTCAnton woke feeling refreshed the next day, and for the first time in a long while, he felt excited. Yes, the sadness was still there, but he felt hope that after some time, he would start looking at the memories of his friends with fondness instead of melancholy.
He dressed himself in a common shirt and pants, looking like an ordinary villager instead of the usual robes that he sported. He wanted to be treated as a beginner warrior-healer. Anton thought of looking up Ruel and his friends, since at least he knew them already and would ask if he could join a dungeon delve. He would have to make sure that they would understand that they would only join them once or twice because he was busy with something else and just wanted to experience dungeon diving.
When he exited his room, Anton didn’t pay for another night. The good thing about Ormunda was that, because of its gigantic size, he could find a place to stay, even for one night, anywhere and at any moment.
Anton went to the tavern where he first met with Ruel’s group, but unfortunately, he didn’t find them there. He spoke with one of the waiters to ask if they knew where he could find Ruel’s group, but the waiter just rolled his eyes at him, saying that with the number of customers they encountered each day, there was no way for them to remember each one of them.
He kept forgetting that Ormunda was one humongous kingdom, and just like any city, the personal touch disappeared, just like modern cities on Earth. That was one of the reasons why the waiter didn’t remember Ruel and his group. Another reason was, Ruel’s party was fairly new, just a few months old and since they were also beginner adventurers, they had not earned enough reputation yet to be remembered.
The only thing he could do was eat breakfast at that tavern first. While eating, he asked the waiter where he could purchase a map of the dungeons and was informed that any merchant store that sells dungeon supplies would sell those, and the waiter, thankfully, pointed him to the nearest supply store, which was just a couple of blocks away.
While walking towards the store where, supposedly, he could buy a map, he wondered what a dungeon looked like. He wasn’t unfamiliar with them since the caverns inside his Diablo II system, wherein he could personally enter, resembled what he thought a dungeon would look like. He also wondered what benefits he could get if he dived into a dungeon. Experience? If it was experience, was it going to be experience for his Diablo II characters or his real body, and would it allow him to level up?
Anton knew that he could get wealth inside the dungeon, but monetary wealth had never been a problem for him, especially when he learned how to create enchanted items. He didn’t know if the dungeons of this world would allow him to increase his power or if the only real way for him to do so was through his Diablo II system.
Anton knew that at the very least, it would give him experience on how to fight monsters. He did not count his fights with the monsters inside his system because the mobs there were the same, so the fight was almost mindless. There was no strategy, just bombarding every enemy with the skills of the current character that he was playing. He knew that he needed to learn how to fight, since if he was going to fight the Undead Coalition someday, that knowledge was essential.
The supply store looked like one of the frontier general stores one could find in an old school frontier town on Earth or any town in a fantasy world, based on what he had read before. The store consisted of blankets, sleeping bags, travel lanterns, tents, bags, and all sorts of stuff that a person would need while traveling the roads or while delving into a dungeon.
Anton went directly to one of the counters and asked if he could purchase a map that would lead him to all the dungeons in the kingdom. The store had them, but they were surprisingly costly. When the store clerk showed one of the maps, he understood immediately why the cost was so high. The map was frighteningly huge, and Anton knew that if he was going to use it, he would tear the map in no time. He purchased it, though, since he truly needed it, but then he realized, looking at the amount of coins he had left, that he was almost broke. He only had around 400 gold coins left.
He did have a lot of enchanted items that he recently made in his inventory, so Anton was not really worried, but before he sold them, he thought to check how much coins he would earn diving a low-level dungeon with a group.
Using the map, Anton started navigating the streets with a goal of reaching the beginner dungeon, which was to the east of the kingdom, but after a tiring two hours of walking and losing his way several times, he gave up and hired a carriage to bring him to the beginner dungeon. At least it only cost him a gold coin.
Looking out the window inside the carriage, he studied the citizens that walking the streets of the Kingdom of Ormunda. There were all sorts of species just like the passengers of the Amelia. There were pretty elves, sturdy-looking dwarves, cute halfings, brutish-looking orcs, beast people of every animal imaginable, and more. Anton could even say that, based on his observation, the humans might not even be the dominant species in the kingdom. At least, he didn’t see any undead, even though he was told by Oscar that there were some in the kingdom that were supposedly living peacefully there.
Anton didn’t know what his reaction would be if he did encounter an obvious undead. He suddenly remembered Zenoxus, Luminetta, and Ecturne. The vampires that he captured and enslaved. They were the first members of his family that were destroyed by the Undead Coalition, and even though at that time, he didn’t show any remorse, the three powerful vampires did become part of their family for a while. He didn’t want to grieve when they were killed, saying to everyone that they deserved to die, since for centuries, they had killed a lot of normal folks, but for a brief moment, he did grieve for them a little. After a couple of hours driving, the carriage driver informed him that they had arrived at the gate that would lead him to the beginner dungeon, and walking there would only take him around thirty minutes more.
Anton asked the carriage driver if he could drive him there, but the driver said that he was not allowed to exit the kingdom. He didn’t know if the carriage driver was telling the truth since Anton saw that there were a lot of carriages exiting the kingdom, but he didn’t argue with the man and just paid him.
At least, he wouldn’t get lost since, according to the carriage driver and the guards, when he asked them that he would arrive at the beginner dungeon by just following the road.
The road was filled with travelers, and he could see groups of them who Anton assumed as adventurers heading to the same place where he was going. After walking for around thirty minutes, he saw several buildings in the distance and he knew that the dungeon’s entrance was there.
