Chapter 126: The Gold Miners Might Not Strike It Rich, but the Shovel Sellers Always Do
Not only had he been played by a fake death from his so-called master's senior disciple, he had also gotten a thorough mocking from the senior disciple he never called senior disciple. Yusuke's rage meter hit the ceiling on the spot. He was one short decision away from turning around and heading straight back to settle things with Younger Toguro in person.
"Count yourself lucky. The Toguro Brothers didn't intend to kill you. More precisely, they didn't want to just casually finish you off in that particular setting."
Ross continued pouring fuel on the fire from his end of the call.
There was one thing Ross kept to himself, though: if Younger Toguro had "accidentally" killed Yusuke on the spot, what followed would almost certainly have gotten very wild very fast.
Yusuke kept raging on the other end of the line. The fight had been genuinely brutal, and it turned out the other side had just been playing dead, and pretty sloppily at that. On some level, the gap between the two parties had never been clearer.
"But don't think your so-called master's senior disciple has any sentimental feelings for you. In a certain sense he's nothing more than a powered-up version of Hisoka."
"...What do you mean by that?"
Hearing Hisoka's name come up unexpectedly, even Yusuke with rage running this high came back to himself slightly.
"What I mean is, he's the type who deliberately guides people with potential to push themselves harder, and then, once they've reached a level he recognizes, fights them to the death."
What Ross kept to himself this time: unlike Hisoka's purely chaotic-evil alignment, Younger Toguro's behavior probably carried something he'd never admit to, a desire to die and a need to atone. At least, that was assuming his origin story in this timeline hadn't changed.
"To put it plainly, until your strength reaches the level he actually respects, he probably won't come looking for a death match. But..."
"But?"
"He's very likely to use other means. Everything that would force you to push yourself harder, he'll do it."
The call ended. Ross knew Yusuke was almost certainly heading back to the dojo to find Genkai.
Honestly, for Yusuke, a bit of pressure converting into motivation wasn't a bad thing.
In the original story, Yusuke had been essentially dragged into growing stronger by Younger Toguro at a pace that left him almost no real training time. Without Genkai making the decision to stake her life and pass on her entire strength in the form of the Spirit Egg, forcibly expanding his cellular tolerance and raising his spirit power ceiling, Yusuke wouldn't have had the standing to face Younger Toguro at all.
Even in Ross's personal view, the Dark Tournament was the best arc in all of YYH. But it had still inevitably picked up Dragon Ball's habit of reverse-engineering a power spike through the sacrifice-and-fake-death-of-a-teammate trope, forcing Yusuke's strength up hard enough to let him take out a Younger Toguro who was already looking for a way to die.
In the current HxH timeline, things shouldn't fall into that particular trajectory. Yusuke would have considerably more time for deeper and more thorough training.
Ross planned to push hard over the next couple of days and see if he could unlock his second Creator Authority permission, then set up a fast travel node at the Sky Arena so he could stop wasting time on international flights.
One other thought: even though Yusuke had come looking for this on his own, Younger Toguro had chosen to let him walk away. Which meant he had likely learned through some channel that Yusuke was Genkai's disciple, and wanted to give him the circumstances to become strong enough to actually kill him.
Which raised the question: would Younger Toguro come looking for Ross?
Ross didn't know. He prepared for the possibility anyway.
Three days after the call, while still grinding through Tower of Druaga as his main focus, Ross ran Castlevania: Dracula's Curse's Entertainment Mode out of habit to check on the situation, and discovered that True Castlevania had apparently become a tourist destination.
People. A lot of people. Quite a lot of people, scattered across the outer perimeter of Castlevania in every direction.
Some were ordinary people carrying nothing but conventional firearms and bladed weapons, with no Nen ability at all. Others were ability users deploying all kinds of different techniques.
The Grand Cemetery in particular had produced a strangely festive atmosphere: humans locked in constant skirmishes against the endlessly respawning ghouls and skeleton soldiers, generating the general energy of two rival factions grinding each other down.
What made Ross genuinely lose it was what had formed just outside the Grand Cemetery, in the same spot where the Phantom Troupe had set up their temporary camp. A small human settlement had appeared there, organized more or less like a market stall district.
Mostly food and drink vendors, with a scattering of old-fashioned merchants selling shields and pre-gunpowder weapons.
The scene immediately made Ross think of the classic adventurer-merchant-dungeon symbiosis that kept showing up in isekai fantasy settings. It also made him think of the American Gold Rush. Whether the prospectors themselves struck gold was anyone's guess, but the people selling food and drink, pants, shovels, and running hotels, they definitely made money.
Castlevania's current internal state also reminded him of a 2010 Xbox-exclusive Castlevania spin-off: Castlevania: Harmony of Despair.
Harmony of Despair had essentially stripped out the story, compiled maps from across multiple Castlevania titles, and added online multiplayer. Players could pick protagonists from different games in the series and explore cooperatively online.
The number of people here was a bit much even for that comparison, though.
What exactly had the Phantom Troupe posted online?
Actually, information alone wouldn't have drawn this scale of response without real material incentive backing it up.
Ross observed quietly without stepping in as sub-landlord, taking in every detail, and quickly noticed a few things.
First: among the basic ghoul and skeleton units spawning in the Grand Cemetery, there were now distinct variant types. These specials wore ragged clothes and some carried actual weapons. Their attack aggression was noticeably higher than the standard units, their patterns had more structure, and a few of them even showed signs of coordinated attack behavior. Ross's best guess was that these variants were probably the imprisoned souls of mercenaries who had explored Castlevania over the past few days and been claimed by the castle's soul mechanics, their possessions absorbed into the castle's inventory in the process.
Second: when Castlevania's monsters were killed, there was now a probabilistic drop of small coin bags. They were tiny. Maybe two or three Dracula gold coins per bag. But they were real, physical gold coins. That was probably the main reason ordinary people were flooding in at this scale.
Is this because of the small coin bag drops I set up on Genbu earlier?
Ross wasn't certain. But he knew that if he didn't reset True Castlevania soon, Dracula's private coin stash wasn't going to hold up against a locust-scale human invasion of this kind.
The people of the Hunter world's year 2000 were in an entirely different category from the people of Castlevania's corresponding 14th century, in terms of knowledge, information access, and, in a certain sense, determination. As long as the material incentive was sufficient, there would always be people willing to charge into Castlevania even knowing they might lose their lives or have their souls imprisoned.
To the point of spontaneously forming a small human settlement with the exact atmosphere of an isekai dungeon town.
Were people actually using Castlevania as a grind dungeon?
Ross, having fully processed the current situation, stared at his screen and genuinely did not know whether to feel pleased or confused.