Waking up in a king-sized memory foam bed at the bottom of the world's deadliest dungeon was an experience that defied logic.
For a moment, as I stared up at the vaulted, faux-painted ceiling of the Obsidian Manor, I thought I was back on Earth. Then I heard the sound of Gloom, my Gluttonous Void Slime, aggressively slurping a leftover chimera femur on the plush rug next to my bed.
"Squeak! Squeee!" Gloom chirped, its pitch-black gelatinous body vibrating happily as the bone dissolved into nothingness.
"Morning, buddy," I muttered, sitting up and stretching. My body felt incredibly light. The aches, the malnutrition, the phantom pain of my shattered ribs—everything had been erased by yesterday's rapid leveling. I was Level 850 now. I had the stats of a demigod, yet I was still wearing a torn, bloodstained high school uniform.
A soft knock echoed from the heavy oak door of my bedroom.
"Master?" Valeria's voice was as smooth as velvet, but carried the underlying steel of a drawn blade. "I have prepared the morning sustenance you summoned. May I enter?"
"Come in, Valeria."
The tall, silver-haired Valkyrie stepped into the room. She was no longer wearing her blood-spattered combat armor. Instead, she had somehow synthesized a pristine, gothic maid uniform from the manor's closets. She carried a silver tray holding a stack of fluffy pancakes, thick-cut bacon, and a steaming mug of black coffee—all pulled from the Gacha late last night.
"I have secured the perimeter of the Manor, my Lord," she reported, setting the tray on my lap with reverent care. "During the night, approximately four thousand lesser fiends gathered at the edge of the barrier. They are clawing at the wards, desperate to reach you. Shall I go out and harvest them for your glory?"
I took a sip of the coffee. It was perfectly brewed. "No, let them gather. It's more efficient if they come to us."
"Efficient..." Valeria's crimson eyes widened slightly, her face flushing with awe. "Ah. You are allowing the filth to neatly package themselves for your divine culling. Master, your tactical genius is a terrifying thing to behold."
I just nodded, stuffing a piece of bacon into my mouth. I wasn't a tactical genius; I just really didn't want to walk around in the dark if I didn't have to.
Ten minutes later, we stood at the massive double doors of the manor. I stepped out onto the front porch, Valeria standing rigidly at my right, her massive battle-axe resting on her shoulder. Gloom bounced along at my left ankle, bubbling with anticipation.
The moment I crossed the threshold of the manor's protective ward, the dungeon erupted.
It was a sea of writhing, rotting flesh. The Hell-Maw lived up to its name. There were creatures that defied taxonomy—arachnids the size of city buses with human skulls for abdomens, swarms of winged leeches that dripped acidic saliva, and lumbering giants made entirely of fused, agonizingly twisted corpses.
The noise was deafening. A cacophony of shrieks, roars, and clicking mandibles that vibrated right through my bones.
[Warning: Multiple Hostiles Detected][Average Level: 3,000][Threat Level: Calamity]
If the Concord of the Tribes—the so-called elite heroes who threw me down here—were facing this horde, they would have been wiped out in three seconds. S-Rank magic wouldn't dent this tide.
I raised my right hand, pointing my index finger like a gun.
I didn't shout. I didn't chant. I just spoke a single word.
"[Paralyze]."
The violet wave of energy exploded outward, a silent tsunami that washed over the cavern. It moved faster than the eye could track, expanding in a massive three-hundred-meter radius.
The shrieks died instantly.
The charging behemoths locked up mid-stride. The winged leeches dropped from the sky like heavy stones, crashing into the bone-littered floor. The entire horde—over four thousand monsters—froze as if someone had hit the pause button on reality itself.
The silence that followed was so profound it made my ears ring.
"Beautiful," Valeria breathed, her eyes shining with religious fervor. "You command the very concept of stillness, my Lord. They are statues waiting for your chisel."
I walked down the steps of the manor, strolling casually into the frozen sea of nightmares. I stopped in front of a [Grave-Weaver Arachnid, Level 3,500]. Its eight compound eyes were locked onto me, twitching rapidly. It couldn't move its body, but I could see the sheer, unadulterated terror in its gaze. Monsters of this level possessed high intelligence. It knew it was entirely helpless.
"Yesterday, we just melted them," I said, rubbing my chin. "But I realized something last night. The Goddess Vicius called my skills 'trash' because status effects usually have a duration, or they can be resisted. But mine are absolute. They never wear off unless I cancel them or run out of mana."
"A fate worse than death," Valeria noted, her smile turning cruel.
"Exactly. But melting them with [Poison] is too fast," I muttered, opening my interface. "Let's test the [Synthesis] function of the Gacha."
I mentally pressed the button to spin the Gacha.
Clunk.
[N-Rank Item: A Bag of Rock Salt]
I held the small burlap sack of salt in my hand. Then, I activated my system skill. "[Synthesis: Paralyze + Poison + Rock Salt]."
The bag in my hand glowed with a sickening, sickly purple light. The salt crystals turned jagged and dark.
[New Status Item Created: Curse of Desiccation]Description: Inflicts absolute paralysis while violently drawing all moisture and mana from the target's body. The target remains fully conscious as they turn to dust.
"Let's see how this works," I said, tossing a handful of the cursed salt onto the giant spider's face.
The reaction was instantaneous. The spider couldn't scream, but its exoskeleton began to violently crack and buckle. Within seconds, the moisture was violently sucked from its body, creating a localized cloud of dry mist. The massive creature shrank, shriveling into a brittle, gray husk.
I lightly tapped one of its legs with my boot.
The entire Level 3,500 monster shattered into a million pieces of fine, gray dust.
[EXPERIENCE GAINED: 6,500,000][LEVEL UP!]
"Squee!" Gloom cheered, hopping forward to eagerly devour the dust pile.
I turned back to the remaining 3,999 paralyzed monsters. My mana was practically overflowing, regenerating instantly in the dense atmosphere of the Hell-Maw.
"Valeria, Gloom," I commanded. "Salt them."
For the next two hours, my companions walked through the frozen ranks of the apocalypse, casually tossing pinches of cursed salt like farmers feeding chickens. The sound of thousands of high-level monsters crumbling into dust echoed through the cavern.
The experience notifications became a continuous, droning hum in the back of my skull.
[Current Level: 2,150][Current MP: 150,000,000 / 150,000,000]
"Master," Valeria called out, wiping a speck of dust from her pristine apron. "The trash has been taken out. The front yard is clean."
I looked at my MP bar. One hundred and fifty million mana.
"Good work," I said, my heart beginning to race. "Now, it's time to build our empire."
I opened the [Infinite Abyssal Gacha]. The standard banners were there, but at the very top, glowing with an ominous, pulsating obsidian light, was a new option.
[Ultra Rare (UR) / Super Super Super Rare (SSSR) Guaranteed Banner][Cost: 100,000,000 MP]
This was the equivalent of emptying the GDP of a small country into a slot machine. The Goddess Vicius had mocked my Gacha because it cost too much mana to get anything good, and normal humans only had a few hundred MP. She didn't realize that by throwing me into a hyper-dense mana zone and giving me monsters to farm, she had handed me an infinite credit card.
"Let's roll," I whispered.
I slammed my mental hand onto the button.
The cavern darkened. The purple ambient light of the dungeon was sucked toward the holographic slot machine hovering in front of me. The reels spun so fast they blurred into a solid black void. The ground shook, not from a monster, but from the sheer weight of the reality-bending magic taking place.
The reels locked into place with a sound like a tolling church bell.
BONG.
A card materialized. It wasn't metal or paper. It looked like it was made of crystallized starlight and dark matter. It hovered in the air, radiating an aura so oppressive that even Valeria took a defensive half-step back, gripping her axe.
[SSSR-Rank Companion Summoned][Unit: The Witch of Ruin, Architect of the Void][Name: Professor Nyx]
The card shattered like glass.
Reality tore open. A localized black hole formed in the center of the dust-covered courtyard, and from it, a figure calmly stepped out.
She was stunning, but in a deeply unsettling way. She had long, straight black hair with striking streaks of neon purple. She wore a sleek, high-collared laboratory coat that split at the waist, revealing dark tactical gear and thigh-high boots. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses rested on her nose, obscuring eyes that glowed with concentric, spinning rings of arcane formulas.
She held a clipboard and a glowing stylus.
She didn't kneel immediately like Valeria had. Instead, she adjusted her glasses, looked around the desolate cavern, then looked at me, and finally, looked at my Gacha interface floating in the air.
"Fascinating," her voice was crisp, analytical, and completely devoid of fear. "Spatial coordinates indicate a dimension isolated from the primary divine lattice. Ambient mana density is off the charts. And you..." She walked right up to me, leaning in so close I could smell a scent like ozone and crushed lilacs.
"A human possessing an absolute causality-override skill, cross-pollinated with a dimensional summoning matrix," Nyx murmured, her eyes tracing the unseen lines of my status screen. "You are a walking, breathing glitch in the universe. Tell me, Creator, what are your parameters?"
"My name is Kaelen," I said, holding my ground despite the overwhelming pressure she exuded. "And my parameter is revenge. I want to grind the surface world, the Goddess who threw me down here, and the system that supports her into dust."
Nyx's lips curved into a sharp, terrifying smile. "Destruction of a divine hierarchy? Oh, Creator, you do know how to tempt a girl's scientific curiosity."
She tapped her clipboard. "I am Professor Nyx. I specialize in magical engineering, architectural annihilation, and biological optimization. I see you have a Valkyrie for brute force, and a Void Slime for waste disposal. What role do you require of me?"
"I need a base," I said, gesturing to the Obsidian Manor. "This is just a house. I want a fortress. A subterranean empire that can sustain an army. And I need a way to generate infinite mana without having to manually walk outside and paralyze monsters every morning."
Nyx turned to look at the edge of the cavern, where the darkness hid thousands of more monsters slowly creeping toward our position.
"You want a passive mana farm," she stated, her eyes flashing. "Tell me, Creator. Does your [Paralyze] skill have a maximum target limit?"
"No," I answered. "As long as I have the mana, I can lock down anything."
"And your [Sleep] skill?"
"The same. But if I use [Poison] with them, they die too fast, and I have to wait for them to respawn."
Nyx let out a dark, melodic laugh. It was the sound of a genius who had just been handed the keys to the universe.
"Creator, you are using a supercomputer to hammer nails," she chided gently. "You don't need to kill them. Look at this environment. These monsters are saturated with Abyssal mana. If you kill them, you get a quick burst of EXP. But if we keep them alive..."
She raised her glowing stylus and quickly sketched a complex 3D holographic blueprint in the air between us.
"We build a containment grid around the perimeter of your manor," Nyx explained, her voice speeding up with excitement. "We lure the monsters in. You cast [Paralyze] and [Sleep]. We lock them in a state of eternal, unmoving stasis. Then, using my runic engineering, we siphon their passive mana regeneration directly into your Gacha system."
Valeria frowned. "You suggest we let the filth live, Witch? They should be culled for daring to look upon the Master."
"Hush, muscle," Nyx waved her off dismissively. "This is efficiency. If we turn ten thousand Level 3,000 monsters into living batteries, the Creator will have an infinite, automated stream of MP. He will be able to spin his Gacha on an endless loop while he sleeps."
I stared at the blueprint. It was brilliant. It was also profoundly, exceptionally cruel. To lock thousands of living, sentient horrors in a permanent, waking nightmare, draining their life force just to fuel my slot machine addiction.
If the heroes on the surface saw this, they would instantly brand me the Demon Lord.
"Do it," I said without hesitation.
Nyx's smile widened. "At once, Creator. But I will need building materials. Concrete, steel, mana-conductive wiring, and heavy machinery."
I opened my Gacha interface. I still had fifty million MP left from the morning grind.
"I can pull materials," I said. "Just tell me what you need."
"Oh, this is going to be magnificent," Nyx purred, adjusting her glasses. "Step back, Creator. Let us begin the terraforming of Hell."
For the next week, the Hell-Maw ceased to be a dungeon and became a construction site.
I acted as the bait and the warden. I stood at the edge of our newly claimed territory, drawing in the most massive, terrifying beasts the Abyss had to offer. Minotaurs with skin of magma, Hydras that breathed acid, and spectral dragons. As soon as they crossed the threshold, I snapped my fingers.
[Paralyze]. [Sleep].
They crashed to the ground, frozen statues trapped in an endless slumber.
Nyx directed Valeria—who possessed the physical strength of a crane—to drag the massive, sleeping bodies into perfectly aligned rows. Using Gacha-summoned steel cables and runes she painted with her own blood, Nyx wired the monsters together in a massive, grotesque circuit board.
To the world above, the Hell-Maw was a place where people were thrown away to die.
To me, it had just become a server farm.
On the seventh day, Nyx made the final connection. A massive bundle of cables ran from the field of ten thousand sleeping monsters directly into the foundation of the Obsidian Manor.
I stood on the balcony with Nyx, Valeria, and Gloom, looking out over the sea of paralyzed beasts. Their bodies glowed with a faint, rhythmic purple pulse as their mana was violently sucked out of them, channeled into the cables.
A notification pinged in my mind.
[Passive Mana Siphon Established][Mana Regeneration Rate: +50,000,000 MP per hour]
I stared at the numbers. Fifty million mana. Every single hour. Forever.
"It is operational, Creator," Nyx said, standing beside me with her hands in her lab coat pockets. "We have unlimited power. What is your next directive?"
I looked at the Gacha interface. The "Skip" button on my revenge had just been pressed.
"Now," I said, a cold, dark smile spreading across my face beneath the fly mask. "We summon an army. And then, we pay a visit to the surface."