Anti-Dungeon Organization

Second floor of the Adventurers' Guild.

After Jack left, Leon watched him disappear from the window, deep in thought.

"What's wrong, Boss?" Tel asked. "What are you thinking about?"

Leon turned back with a smile. "Tel, you've been fooled again."

"Huh?" Tel scratched his head, puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"It's simple. That Mr. Jack is a not-very-skilled con man," Leon said, sounding a little bored.

Black Fist Betang nodded in agreement.

"I could tell that old man was acting weird from the start. He kept shaking and shaking. Anyone would've thought he was having a heart attack," Maru said with a shrug and a bratty grin. "Only a big idiot like Tel would fall for it."

"You!" Tel glared at her, and she giggled as she hid beside Leon.

"All right, Maru, stop teasing Tel." Leon put an end to their squabble, then looked at Tel. "Didn't you notice anything strange?"

"I did get a bit of a feeling, but..." Tel plopped down on the sofa, still fuming. "Jack knew the dungeon too well for it to be fake. He answered all your questions, didn't he? And he even caught the part where you deliberately got something wrong."

Leon chuckled and ran a hand through his radiant, sun-bright blond hair. "Yes, there's no faking how much he knows about the dungeon. But the more convincing he was, the more I suspected one thing."

"What's that?" the others asked, playing along.

"Someone might be guiding Jack from behind the scenes." Leon smiled smugly, and his golden hair seemed to sense his mood, shining even brighter.

"I'm going blind! Where's the hat? Hurry up and put a hat on Boss!" Maru cried, covering her eyes. "Didn't we agree you'd wear a hat indoors?"

"Wearing a hat while meeting guests would make me look undignified," Leon said helplessly.

Black Fist Betang nodded in agreement.

"Anyway, I'm very interested in whoever's behind him. If we can invite them to join the Strategy Group, I'm sure our progress will speed up considerably." Leon's eyes glimmered with ambition. "At the very least, we won't fall behind the Strategy Groups tackling the other mutated dungeons!"

"Maru!"

"I'm here, I'm here." Maru covered her eyes, not daring to look in their direction.

"Go follow Jack. If someone really is guiding him, remember to be polite to them."

"Okay, okay. I really can't stay in this room another second."

Maru turned to leave. With a bit of Night Catman blood in her veins, she couldn't stand the bright light at all.

But then something unexpected happened.

"Ahh—murder—!" A scream came from downstairs in the guild.

Inside a Revival House belonging to the Holy Light Church in Bed City.

Dozens of priests specializing in resurrection were on duty around the clock. When an adventurer's body was transported to the Revival House, they would begin the resurrection immediately.

Someone who had just died could be revived in less than ten minutes. If they had been dead longer, things became more difficult. Once a full day had passed, no resurrection spell would work.

Not every Revival House was run by the Holy Light Church. In fact, churches of every size competed to run them. Outside Bed City, a Revival House might be run by the Forest Church, the Nightglow Church, the Necromancer Church, or another church.

After all, Revival Houses were big business. Adventurers had to pay a fee each time they were revived. It wasn't too much or too little, but just enough that everyone could accept it if they gritted their teeth.

In a study inside the Revival House, a young-looking acolyte asked the old man beside him, "Teacher, can resurrection spells save anyone who's been dead for less than a day? Won't the legendary Death God get angry?"

"Why would he get angry?" the old man asked kindly.

"Because..." The young acolyte hesitated. "Isn't resurrection a desecration of death?"

"Haha, the Death God isn't that petty. Besides, not every death can be undone with a resurrection spell."

The old man affectionately stroked the acolyte's head as he explained:

"Only deaths in dungeons can be undone so easily with a resurrection spell, because dungeons lock a person's soul inside their body. Since the soul hasn't left the body, all you have to do is repair the body and wake the soul, and the person will naturally come back to life."

"But when someone dies in the outside world, except in special circumstances, their soul is immediately pulled into the underworld. At that point, the body is just an empty shell. To bring that shell back to life, you need to perform a complicated and expensive summoning ritual to pull the soul back from the underworld."

"That is what truly desecrates death," the old man said. "Anyone who casts a resurrection spell that way will be marked by the Death God."

The young acolyte asked nervously, "What happens if you're marked?"

The old man said gravely:

"The Death God writes your name in his little notebook."

"?"

The young acolyte blinked in confusion, then pretended to understand. "Oh! So he writes your name in his little notebook. That's terrifying."

The old man's mouth twitched, but he said nothing.

The atmosphere in the study grew quiet, until the young acolyte spoke again:

"So that old gentleman they just brought in can't be saved, right?"

"He can be saved, but he can't."

"?"

The old man sighed and spoke slowly:

"He can't afford the price of being saved."

Jack's body lay all alone in the morgue.

The morgue was the least-used facility in a Revival House, because nearly all the bodies brought there came from dungeons, and most of them could be revived. Cases like Jack's were rare.

"His heart was shredded by a sharp blade. He died on the spot. My condolences," the priest said, eyes lowered in sorrow, to Leon.

"I'm not his family," Leon said, expressionless.

"Oh, then that's fine." The priest's expression changed in an instant. He stretched and asked, "Do you know where his family is? If we can't contact them, we'll have to bury him in a dungeon. This old man was an adventurer, right?"

"Right." Even Maru was stunned by the priest's lightning-fast change of expression.

A dungeon burial was the final resting place for adventurers who had no one. If they had no family to handle their affairs and hadn't bought a grave before they died, their bodies would be sent into a dungeon.

Besides adventuring on the surface, exploring dungeons was an essential part of every adventurer's life. Most people accepted this practice.

"The killer was really cruel," the priest continued. "The Anti-Dungeon Organization has been getting more and more out of hand lately. Now they even dare to kill people in the street. That old man was unlucky, too."

The person who killed Jack had come from the Anti-Dungeon Organization.

It was a mysterious organization that strongly opposed dungeons. Its members claimed that ancient evil gods lurked inside them and believed people had to destroy the dungeons teeming with monsters and destroy everything taken from them.

Everyone treated the organization as a joke, but in the past two years, its actions had grown more and more extreme. First, it organized protests and marches. Now it even dared to kill people in broad daylight.

There were even rumors that the organization had discovered a way to permanently destroy dungeons.

Perhaps Jack had drawn their attention by selling ingredients yesterday, or perhaps it was because he had led people in dungeon raids. Whatever the reason, he had become a victim.

"Boss," Maru suddenly said, "should I stake out this place for a day or two and see if anyone comes to claim his body? If someone does, they might be the person behind him."

Leon fell silent for a moment, then nodded.