The Shut-in Vampire Does Business in the Labyrinth - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: First Income and Growth

TL: DDTL

I sent all the goblins scattered throughout the labyrinth out through the nearest exits and brought them back to the outpost.

The next morning.

“Stay here. Don’t come out to reality. I’ll go buy food.”

“Grrrk.”

“Krrk.”

I left the starving, collapsed goblins behind and returned to reality.

Now I suddenly had to go buy ten servings of food and haul it all back.

And not just once, but from now on, indefinitely?

I needed to come up with a plan.

Should I start by replacing the fridge?

The one silver lining was that I’d just finished the project I’d been slaving over, so my wallet was comfortably full.

For now, I had to put out the immediate fire, then maybe use the money I earned from farming to stock up on living essentials.

I threw on some clothes and left the house to head to the nearby grocery mart.

My plan was to handle the goblins’ meals with instant food that was quick and easy to prepare.

They offered delivery for purchases over fifty thousand won, so carrying everything wouldn’t be an issue.

I got off the elevator and stepped out through the main entrance.

“Gaaah!”

I stumbled backward and retreated back inside the building, blindsided by something I hadn’t anticipated.

The moment I stepped outside, every bit of exposed skin beyond my clothes started stinging.

It wasn’t quite pain.

It was bearable if I gritted my teeth, but the sensation was so completely alien that I flinched hard.

“What the hell is this?!”

It felt like someone was jabbing me all over with little needles.

The system’s description had been dead-on accurate.

Discomfort.

There was no better word to describe how I felt right now.

I stomped back upstairs, fuming.

I changed into a hoodie, put on a cap, slapped on a mask, and even pulled on cotton gloves despite it not being winter.

Anyone who saw me would think I was a criminal.

I was just an upstanding vampire, nothing more.

At this point, the anxiety was hitting harder than the excitement of awakening at EX-grade.

I wasn’t going to have to live like this forever, right?

Sure, the ability was supposedly top-tier, but if the penalties were this bad, what was I supposed to do?

I might genuinely have to hole up in my room for the rest of my life.

Still, things needed to get done, so I headed straight for the grocery mart.

I’d been worried I might feel some kind of bloodsucking urge when I saw people, but thankfully, nothing like that happened.

People and their blood didn’t look appetizing in the slightest.

I grabbed two carts and dragged them straight to the ramen aisle.

“Are you kidding me? Even the ramen seasoning packets have garlic in them?”

For crying out loud, what was I supposed to eat?

Then I discovered that jjajang ramen didn’t contain garlic.

Standing there in a hoodie covering my entire body with a mask on, sweeping boxes of jjajang ramen into my carts, I was drawing stares.

“…This is a real problem.”

I took off the cap for now.

Since I was inside a building, there was no discomfort from sunlight.

Since I was indoors, I should try not to act too conspicuously.

When I wheeled two carts packed full of ramen to the register, the cashier’s eyes went wide.

“…Are you evacuating somewhere?”

“Oh, haha! No, I’m just stocking up a bit…”

“Anyone would think you were preparing for a war, hoho.”

The lady kept scanning ramen barcodes one after another with the reader.

“Will you be doing delivery?”

“Yes.”

“Just bag everything up and head over that way.”

I’d come in person today because I was short on time, but from now on I’d have to order online.

Since they’d bring it to my door within two or three hours, I attached the delivery labels to everything and headed to my next stop.

My next destination was a bag shop.

Not just any bag shop, but one that sold the bags awakeners wore when entering the labyrinth.

Each one ranged from hundreds of thousands to millions of won.

“Welcome. What are you looking for?”

No matter how flush my bank account was right now, I couldn’t go throwing money around.

“What’s the cheapest one you have?”

At my words, the employee’s expression stiffened slightly with an awkward smile.

“Haha… this one right here is the cheapest. It’s made from leather harvested in the labyrinth, so it’s much sturdier than a regular bag. But since you’re at it, how about going for something a bit nicer, you know, for protection against attacks?”

The employee was trying to subtly upsell me to a pricier bag.

Maybe later, but right now I didn’t need anything better.

“No, I’ll just take this one for now.”

The toughest thing on Labyrinth Layer 1 was goblins. This was more than enough.

“Sure, understood. Then let me wrap one of these up for…”

“No, ten.”

“…Pardon?”

“Ten, actually make it twenty of these.”

A bright smile bloomed across the employee’s previously dim face.

***

“Ahh, sweet relief.”

The moment I stepped inside my apartment, it felt like I could finally breathe.

No matter how much I bundled up, clothes couldn’t block the sunlight completely.

The Sunlight Penalty felt like countless tiny branches whipping my body with every single step.

Why did I have to suffer through this?!

Awakening was supposed to be a blessing, but I’d gotten a curse bundled in with mine.

EX-grade or not, wasn’t a racial debuff penalty going way too far?

The SS-grades ran around smashing through the labyrinth without a single penalty.

Granted, they were all artificially elevated to SS-grade.

They’d consumed over ten thousand ether each, after all….

But I didn’t have time to sit around complaining.

I opened the door to the labyrinth and peered inside.

“Grrrk….”

“Krrk.”

“Kreeek….”

“Hang on, just a bit longer.”

Goblins lay collapsed on the floor clutching their stomachs.

Sigh… the hand I’d been dealt.

Never in my life did I think I’d be boiling ramen for goblins.

I brought the ramen boxes from the entryway into the apartment.

I filled a pot to the brim with water, set it on the stove, and pulled out the paper bowls I’d bought on the way.

Jjajang ramen, the kind where you drain the water and mix.

If it were just for me, I’d toss in some grilled meat and sprinkle on some red pepper flakes, but this was ten servings.

Ten servings for ten goblins collapsed from starvation.

There was no time to worry about taste, so I quickly boiled the ramen and divided it into the paper bowls I’d bought.

Chopsticks were a luxury; I stuck a plastic spork into each one and headed into the labyrinth.

“Come eat, guys.”

“Kyaaah!!”

“Keeek!!!”

“Paahp!”

?

Did one of them just make a sound like “bap”? [TL Note: 밥 (bap) means rice/food in Korean; the goblin’s cry sounds like it.]

The goblins gathered in front of me, looking up.

Seen like this, they were maybe, just maybe, a little cute.

“…Have I finally lost it?”

I handed over a paper bowl of ramen, and instead of picking up the spork, the goblin immediately shoved its face in.

“Hey! That’s still hot!”

“Kyaaaaah!”

Sure enough, it was scalding. The goblin bounced around with black sauce smeared all over its face.

They grabbed the bowls and immediately got it everywhere, knocked them over on the floor, then scooped the noodles back up and ate them anyway.

It was absolute pandemonium.

“…God. How am I supposed to train these things?”

Nine goblins were putting on a masterclass in chaos.

But one, just one.

“Krrk?”

“See, you’re different, Gob!”

“Krrk!!”

Gob was clumsily but successfully eating the ramen with a spork.

But no matter that I’d given him a name, he was still a goblin all the same.

What was different about him?

I opened Gob’s status window.

[Gob LV 2]

-Class: Warrior Goblin

-Strength: 8

-Agility: 8

-Intelligence: 5

“He leveled up?”

“Krrrk!!”

Gob had been the first to become my thrall.

He’d spent the longest time in the labyrinth and fought the most battles.

Because of that, his level had risen, putting all his stats one point above the other goblins.

Could it be that the reason Gob was a bit smarter was because his intelligence went up by one?

“Wait, so getting stronger makes them smarter?”

The Warrior Goblins had an intelligence of 4. Gob, now at level 2, had an intelligence of 5.

Right now, the biggest obstacle for me wasn’t sunlight or garlic, but the goblins’ intelligence.

The intelligence of goblins who dropped their weapons, farmed iron ore instead, and grinned about it.

“So in the end, everything gets solved by getting stronger….”

If the goblins got stronger, their intelligence would rise and they’d get smarter. The increase in Control Power was a bonus.

Beyond sunlight and garlic, yet another reason to keep running the labyrinth had appeared.

“Grrrk!”

“Kyaaah!”

“Paahp! Paaaaahp!”

The goblins were barely managing to pick up fallen noodles off the floor, making a huge fuss over it.

“…Hold on.”

Next time, I should just give them bread or something instead of ramen.

***

After the meal, I immediately equipped the goblins.

I’d naively thought I could just hand them bags and be done with it, but even that turned out to be an ordeal.

Within moments of putting the bags on, the goblins tossed them on the ground. I was mid-sigh when…

“Grrkk! Kyaak!!”

Gob smacked the other goblins upside the head and started communicating something in their own language.

All that krrking meant I couldn’t understand a word, but somehow the explanation seemed to land.

The goblins put the bags on their backs.

“Good job, Gob.”

“Krrrrk!!”

Was this what they meant by peer-level instruction?

The goblins followed my orders without question, but more often than not, they simply couldn’t comprehend the commands themselves.

Yet somehow, when Gob explained it, problem solved.

“Alright guys. Full now, right? You slept before I came back too.”

“Krrrk!”

“Krrk!”

“Kyaak!”

Nine goblins and Gob, all raring to go.

“Now shove any reasonably sized object into your bags, and kill every wild goblin you see.”

The ten Warrior Goblins, armed with weapons and the large bags strapped to their backs for farming, nodded as if they understood.

I smiled and thrust my finger toward the outside with gusto.

“Move out!”

“Kyaaah!”

“Keek!”

“Kiyaaah!”

Go forth, my elite SCVs!

Time to farm!

***

Initial awakening grade: A. Current rank: S.

Gang Dae-ho, a Korean ranker who had painstakingly gathered fifty ether over the past seven years to successfully advance to S-rank, was scratching his head at the system window in front of him.

[Chain Quest: Collect Scrap 1]

– Submit 100 Ruin Scraps.

– Reward: Chain Quest 2 begins.

A quest from the system that he couldn’t just ignore.

On top of that, chain quests like this had a high chance of ending with a jackpot final reward.

Which meant he absolutely had to do it, but.

“Ugh, when am I gonna find the time to collect a hundred scraps?”

A hundred scraps wasn’t hard per se.

Since it was just junk that dropped on the first layer of the labyrinth, the Ruins, he could get them with enough time. The problem was that time itself.

Gang Dae-ho farmed on the third and fourth layers of the labyrinth, and on a good day, his income rivaled that of a decent-sized corporation.

Sure, there were days he came back empty-handed, but even a bad day on the third layer earned him more than an entire day of farming on the first. That was just reality.

Telling someone like him to farm a hundred scraps on Layer 1 was basically telling him to throw money away.

And scraps didn’t even drop that often.

Of course, if he could just buy them, he’d gladly throw money at the problem.

“Nobody’s selling them, are they…?”

Scraps were worthless junk that only took up space, so there weren’t even any listings.

Occasionally some clueless person posted them on the Labyrinth Exchange, so Gang Dae-ho searched through it, but as expected, Ruin Scraps: zero.

Grasping at straws, he put up a post on the Awakener Community.

-Buying 100 Ruin Scraps.

ㄴwho even buys that lol

ㄴmy chain quest starts with this ㅜㅜ

ㄴlmao just go farm them yourself

ㄴit’s such a waste of time tho! I’d have to dig through Layer 1 for days

ㄴjust do a sweep, you’d be done in a week. or post 100k per piece and wait

-Buying 100 Ruin Scraps, 100k won each.

A hundred thousand won per piece. A hundred pieces meant ten million won.

A fortune to most people, but for a ranker like him, it was simply a means of saving time.

People who saw the post and happened to be on Layer 1 would probably farm a scrap or two and bring them in.

The problem was, again, time.

Was he really going to have to keep farming as usual while waiting for scraps that might trickle in who knows when?

He wanted to clear the chain quest as soon as possible, but he couldn’t exactly camp out on Layer 1 where the money was terrible. So Gang Dae-ho resigned himself to waiting, holding back tears.

Ding!

That’s when a message arrived.

ShutInVampLord : hey you buying scraps?

Fists Clenched : Oh! Yes! Are you selling?

ShutInVampLord : yeah I’ve got some.

Fists Clenched : How many are you selling?! I’ll buy everything you have!

ShutInVampLord : you said you’re buying 100 right? I’ve got over 100, you want all of them?

Fists Clenched : …? You have over a hundred Ruin Scraps?

ShutInVampLord : yep!

It should have been a simple purchase, but Gang Dae-ho couldn’t suppress his curiosity.

Fists Clenched : …why on earth did you stockpile that many??

***

Three days had passed since the outpost was established.

“Finally, my first income!”

“Krrkrrk!”

Using the labyrinth trading system that awakeners used, I completed the transaction and ten million won came in as points.

Ten million won from junk items!

Being an awakener was the best!

“Good job, Gob!”

“Krrk!”

Now I just had to convert this into magic stones and sell them to the government, or use it to buy items for myself.

My very first income, earned from stuff farmed in the labyrinth.

I had no idea why someone would buy junk like that, but who cared?

I was just the seller.

Right now, the storage was on the verge of overflowing with all kinds of junk from Layer 1.

Ten goblins were going in and out of the outpost, sweeping up every item in the surrounding area.

None of it was worth much individually, same as the scraps, but when you gathered this much, that was a different story.

I could probably make money just hauling this stuff to a real-world scrapyard.

A method only I could pull off, thanks to my absurdly low farming difficulty compared to everyone else.

Most people ditched junk items inside the labyrinth because of the weight alone.

“Should I buy a few handcarts and bring those in?”

Now I was sure of it.

The labyrinth was real money.

And my ability was the jackpot of all jackpots.

Just as I was getting serious about sweeping up scrap in the labyrinth like a waste collector…

[Your thralls’ average abilities have exceeded the threshold.]

[Control Power increases. 10 > 50]

I could now increase my goblins from ten to fifty.