Chapter 2: Deathly Chill

“…Can this be repaired?”

It was his favorite mask, but seeing it shattered to pieces didn’t give him much hope.

Still, filled with regret, Paul gathered the fragments and put them into the bag he was carrying.

He thought about taking out another mask as a substitute but decided against it. It was obvious the same thing would happen because of the debuff.

You’re probably starting to wonder what this debuff, which I’ve been mentioning over and over, is.

This debuff was the first reason people stopped coming here.

A wide-area debuff called the [Deathly Chill] covered the entire island of Flora.

The moment a player left the safe zone of ‘Flora Village’, a notification message saying ‘[Deathly Chill] is seeping into your equipped gear’ would start appearing.

At first, no particular problem arose.

At most, one might feel a little cold.

But the problem was that this debuff didn’t disappear over time; it kept stacking.

A body afflicted by the chill gradually became sluggish, and the durability of equipped gear dropped rapidly.

On top of that, the moment the debuff’s name changed from [Deathly Chill] to [Death’s Aura], it was pretty much the end.
Why?

Because the following system message would appear.

System: [Death’s Aura] is seeping into you.

System: You have died.

…In this way, if the debuffs stacked up, you would die in the blink of an eye.

Moreover, this debuff would not disappear or stop until one left the Flora region. To offset it in the middle, one needed specific items and skills.

And perhaps because of this debuff, the only monsters that appeared here were ‘frozen-to-death undead’.

“Hoo…”

Paul let out another ground-shaking sigh, losing count of how many he’d let out today.

His long, pale platinum-blonde hair shimmered elegantly in the light pouring down from the collapsed ceiling, and his glassy, greyish-white eyes, set in a gentle, puppy-like face, held a gloomy light.

Furthermore, his long, pointed elven ears, a trait not found in humans, drooped downwards, representing his current feelings.

It had been a long time since he had shown his bare face after starting the game, so it felt incredibly awkward.
Paul kept rubbing his face as he surveyed his surroundings again.

The underground labyrinth had few places where light came in directly, aside from the ceiling he had broken through.
There were a few spots where light seeped in faintly, but… the rest was incredibly dark, untouched by light.

Besides, this place was an area that was usually untouched by human hands.

So, it was probably that even lanterns, which would be common in other places, were absent here. With few people coming and going, there would have been no one to make such things.

Usually, in <Arcana Chronicles>, the presence of such items that catered to player convenience meant that someone had already been there and back.

‘…Or maybe not? Maybe even if they installed lanterns, they wouldn’t have lasted long because of the debuff.’

If even equipped gear was being destroyed, there was no way an item installed by a player would be intact.

Thinking that, Paul decided to start walking. He couldn’t just sit here blankly and let time pass. As far as he knew, movement scrolls were useless here.

He had heard that there was no other way but to find the way out on his own.

Still, there were sections where light occasionally seeped in from the ceiling, so he could at least distinguish between rocks and walls for now.

Just in case, Paul took a lamp out of his bag. Inside, instead of oil used for fuel, a sparkling red jewel was set.

When Paul held the lamp and tapped the red jewel set in the middle with his finger, a white flame instantly flared up.

Ding!

System: You have equipped an item compatible with the [Title: Friend of the Spirits].

System: The conditions have been met, and the additional effect of the [Salamander’s Lamp] is activated!

System: Debuffs related to cold are temporarily weakened.

System: [Status Effect: Deathly Chill] is temporarily weakened.

With the effect of the lamp compatible with Paul’s title, a message that the debuff freezing his body had temporarily weakened appeared and disappeared.

Thanks to that, his frozen body felt a little less cold, and his expression naturally relaxed.

‘I should have used it sooner.’

He thought that now, but Paul hadn’t moved around without protection for no reason.

If, by any chance, this lamp were to be destroyed by the debuff, it would be troublesome in many ways.

This lamp was an item he had received as a quest reward a long time ago, and it was practically a very difficult item for Paul to obtain again with his own power.

So, it was also an item he rarely took out unless absolutely necessary.

‘But right now, I need the lamp immediately…’

Paul quickened his hesitant steps to get out of this place as fast as possible.

In <Arcana Chronicles>, people called this place ‘Flora’s Underground Labyrinth’.

Since there was no official name that the system provided when entering a specific area, it was a name arbitrarily given for convenience.

As befitting a place with ‘labyrinth’ in its name, once you entered, it was incredibly difficult to get out.

According to the conjectures of those who had been here before, the total area of this underground labyrinth was larger than expected, and some even said it might not be inferior to the royal castle of ‘Hwion’.

Furthermore, traps and monsters popped up frequently, holding players back, the paths were twisted and convoluted, and unfortunately, the exit, just like the entrance, was not in a single location.

As a result, in the early days, there were quite a few cases of people failing to find the exit and eventually requesting help from customer service.

There were also frequent cases where the GM who came to help got lost alongside the player.

On top of that, in a normal case, the mini-map would usually be activated for places a player had visited once, but here, perhaps due to its ‘labyrinth’ characteristic, the mini-map did not activate even after visiting.

So, if you were unlucky enough to enter again, you had to find your way from the beginning, reluctantly.

At one time, many people put in various efforts to escape this place.

Things like following the common belief that you can find the exit of a maze by keeping one hand on the wall, or creating and distributing maps to people after much effort, or attempting to escape through bizarre methods.

But as mentioned before, the exit here was not fixed, and the entrance was also random.

People posted reviews saying, ‘This is the way to the exit!’ and created maps based on them, but the only way to enter this labyrinth was to fall underground randomly while walking on the snowfield.

In other words, everyone fell into the labyrinth at different locations, and the exits they escaped from were also different, so even with a map, just figuring out one’s current location was a challenge.

If it were an ordinary online game, it would have been different, but this was a world that rivaled reality.

A world that progressed from a first-person perspective, not looking down from a third-person view.

So, even if you knew it in your head and saw it with your eyes, finding your way in a labyrinth where everything looked similar was an incredibly difficult task.

In the end, even with a map, getting lost was the same.

Because of this, it’s said that in the past, there were even some people who quit the game without being able to escape the labyrinth.

But originally, Koreans have a habit of digging into any challenge a game throws at them.

The players, thinking that the game company wouldn’t have created such a piece-of-crap labyrinth for no reason, flocked to this desolate northern region.

To put it simply, after much effort, they discovered that there was a hidden dungeon within this labyrinth.
People rejoiced.

This dungeon, consisting of a total of 7 floors, had a peculiar name right from the start.

<■■■ ■■ ■■■>

That’s right, the name itself was filtered!

There could be nothing more to stimulate people’s curiosity.

People entered the dungeon with excitement.

But the excitement was short-lived.

It took only three days in real-world time to reveal that this dungeon was actually a lackluster den of undead.

People were disappointed.

Although there were occasional golems or ghost-type monsters mixed in, the rest were all undead-type monsters they had already encountered to their heart’s content in the labyrinth.

Moreover, the rewards were ridiculously small compared to the time invested…

It was only natural for people to be disappointed.

It was more efficient to find any other tomb and fight the undead there than to waste time here.

Was that all?

The boss monster in black armor, named [Guardian of ■■■], encountered on the final 7th floor, was ridiculously strong, but after defeating it, the reward was also meager compared to expectations.

There were rumors that it sometimes dropped an item of unknown use, classified as a junk item, but even that had a low probability.

It was truly an anticlimactic result.

As the saying goes, the greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment.

Just as people couldn’t hide their disappointment, someone said.

‘Maybe it’s a region that Noah hasn’t fully developed yet?’