I Gain Infinite Gold Just By Waiting-Chapter 249: Episode 50_The Demons’ Banquet (5)

7.

They say if you know yourself and know your enemy, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

In a situation where the enemy didn’t know who he was, but he knew the enemy, what would he have to do to actually lose?

’I have no idea.’

To be honest, Kim Buja was enjoying this.

He knew he could die, surrounded by countless demons before he even had the chance to show off all the tricks up his sleeve, but he was full of confidence that he wouldn’t.

That was how powerful the Gold Maker was.

If Fly was a class built to annihilate enemies head-on, then Kim Buja’s class was built to subdue enemies with powers they didn’t even know existed.

Gold Enhancement, Gold Shop, Soul Harvest.

Taken one by one, they were enough to make you scratch your head and wonder if this was really all a class had to offer, and whether any of it could even be used for hunting.

But once all of them came together and started to create synergy, he was walking a path even Fly had never tread.

CRASH—!

Within the heavenly light, his sword danced, mercilessly cutting down demons that all looked just like him.

Before they could even process what was happening, the demons acted on instinct, rushing the “demon” who was radiating killing intent toward them. But against Kim Buja, who had prepared everything and was now unleashing the power he’d been waiting 24 hours to use, they were nothing more than sacrifices.

That was how the battle went.

Overwhelming, yet not anticlimactic.

During the three-minute banquet that took place once a day, countless demons died. After a week, the demons that had once filled the vast space to the brim had dwindled to a number small enough to count with the naked eye.

Even so, Kim Buja was still alive.

Far from dying, the demons now looked as if they had given up trying to find the one he had transformed into.

It had reached the point where the remaining demons had banded together, trying every trick they could think of to single out the one who was not truly a demon.

"You really think that’s going to work?"

Even that had become content for the stream.

Demons walked right past him as he calmly acted like one of them.

Viewers hurled mockery at the demons who failed to notice anything even as he clicked his tongue at them, but unfortunately, the demons couldn’t hear it.

It couldn’t be helped.

That was the nature of Soul Harvest.

It didn’t just copy the target’s appearance perfectly; it also took on their innate traits.

It didn’t copy their full stats, but it did grant him their demonic aura, blood, appearance, and language, to the point that it was impossible to act unnatural even if he tried.

And so, the Demons’ Banquet steadily approached its end.

After a little over a week, when new demons from outside had joined in and the fresh blood of the banquet had ripened day after day, the announcement finally came.

[24 hours remain until the banquet ends.]

[The Demon King’s resurrection ritual begins.]

[Time remaining: 24 hours]

A massive egg and hundreds of black pillars appeared.

* * *

[Clear Conditions]

☆ Enter Demons’ Banquet

☆ Kill 2,000 demons

☆ Prevent the birth of the Demon King

☆ Kill 10 demon legion commanders

☆ Achieve MVP of Demons’ Banquet

☆ Destroy 200 Sources of Evil

☆ Kill 10,000 monsters

☆ Survive for 20 days

By now, he had already fulfilled many of the clear conditions. The egg and black pillars that had appeared were practically hints for the remaining ones.

"Those are obviously the Sources of Evil."

Would breaking them be how he stopped the Demon King’s birth?

Or was he not supposed to break them?

The hologram gave him the answer.

[Number of Sources of Evil destroyed: 0]

"They tell me to stop the birth, then tell me to break them. What kind of insane clear condition is this?"

In the end, all the clear conditions pointed toward a single answer.

The birth of the Demon King.

From the moment he entered the banquet, achieved MVP, and slaughtered countless monsters, his actions as a player weren’t stopping the Demon King’s birth, but accelerating it.

Even so, he had no choice.

If he didn’t do it, the dungeon wouldn’t clear.

Of course, dungeons weren’t always run with such rigid adherence to clear conditions.

If the number of monsters you needed to kill was lower than the number of monsters remaining in the dungeon, that condition would often be treated as cleared, and the difference would be made up in other ways.

Likewise, in the case of something like the Demon King’s birth, you didn’t have to stay trapped in the dungeon for life just because it was born.

Even if it was born, killing it would be treated as having prevented its birth.

That was why Kim Buja had been able to calmly work through the other clear conditions.

However, if he let it be born, the resulting spike in dungeon difficulty would be impossible to predict.

If he could help it, it was obviously better to prevent it.

"Hmmm."

So his dilemma was how to stop it.

How could he satisfy these tangled, overlapping clear conditions and still clear the dungeon cleanly?

That was the charm of special dungeons, of concept dungeons.

The conditions and penalties all pointed in a specific direction.

These dungeons didn’t throw in random, unrelated elements.

Naturally, the difficulty went up, and in turn, the player’s actions, guided by the clear conditions, became more interesting to watch.

"Let’s just break them first."

Kim Buja knew better than anyone how to stoke that interest in the simplest way.

Impulse.

No hesitation, just forward.

He loosened his tension, sprinted after the demons who were rushing toward the Sources of Evil, and drew his sword.

* * *

RUMBLE—!

The sky darkened.

The clouds trembled and lightning crashed down.

[Time remaining: 4 minutes]

The hologram announcing the end of the banquet floated before Kim Buja, who stood in front of the massive egg.

[Number of Sources of Evil destroyed: 200]

And behind him, countless demons formed a huge ring, encircling him.

The dozen or so legion commanders who had originally been here were gone.

They had already been converted into numbers on the clear-condition list through countless battles. These demons were the ones who had been outside, along with other monsters, who had entered after the Sources of Evil appeared.

Compared to the legion commanders’ armies he had faced when he first arrived, they were pathetically weak.

So they didn’t even dare to charge at Kim Buja, merely circling around him.

An awkward stretch of time passed in the face of a peace that no one had enforced.

The monsters in the back were thinking:

’Once the Demon King is born...’

’We’ll crush that arrogant intruder in one blow.’

Conversely, Kim Buja was thinking:

’Will it be strong?’

And then he checked, just to be sure.

’The cooldown’s up, though.’

There was only one reason he was hesitating.

He had about four minutes left, and Heavenly Song was off cooldown and ready to use.

It was one of two choices.

Use it now to smash the egg.

Or wait until the Demon King was born and then use it immediately to kill the Demon King.

He had no other methods in mind, and he didn’t intend to look for any.

In the end, killing the Demon King was the only way to fulfill the remaining clear conditions and get out of the dungeon.

The reason he was hesitating was that, although the first option was clearly the easier way to find an answer, the risk if it failed was enormous.

What if the egg was being protected by some incredibly powerful force?

What if Heavenly Song and Heavenly Performance both failed to deal any real damage and just fizzled out?

In that moment, he would have thrown away his strongest card against the Demon King and would have to personally deal with the countless trash mobs behind him who were just waiting for the Demon King to be born.

Of course, he could always transform into a demon again and stall for time like he had been doing.

“That’s why I’m even considering it...”

He could afford to, which was why he was torn.

How to put it...

Looking at the massive egg, a strange nostalgia welled up inside him.

“...I just get the urge to break any egg I see.”

Kkyuu!

He would just hit it as hard as he could, and if it didn’t work, so be it.

At some point, the Gold Ring in his hand had turned into a pickaxe. Kim Buja raised it and brought it down, watching the light bloom in the darkness.

8.

[You have cleared the dungeon.]

The shattered shell of the egg lay in pieces. The massive demon that had been inside it was threatening enough to make him feel no regret about taking the risk to break the egg.

If its body alone was big enough to fill that enormous egg, how strong would it have been?

Even if he had somehow managed to fight it and win, he wouldn’t have been able to walk away with the same clean satisfaction he felt now.

“So this dungeon ended up being an egg-breaking dungeon too.”

There were still demons and monsters left, but most of them had already fled when the Demon King died. The ones still here were monsters who had lost the will to fight and were just watching listlessly.

So he ignored them and got to work.

He had spent nearly two weeks in this dungeon.

He had killed countless demons and spent just as much Gold.

Points were different; he earned more than he spent every day through the daily settlement, so it was hard to feel any regret there, but Gold was another story.

It was a currency where consumption outpaced acquisition.

Especially after becoming SVIP, the amount of free Gold he received every day had increased significantly, but the amount he needed to spend had increased even more, which only strengthened his resolve to earn every last coin he could.

So he went around and picked up anything that looked like it might be worth money.

He had to at least make back the Gold he had spent.

Most of what had dropped was junk, but among the items that had fallen from legion-commander-level demons and above, there were quite a few decent ones.

He couldn’t convert them directly into Gold, but it was still better than walking away empty-handed.

—Items dropping from an 8-star Legendary dungeon, damn.

—Those options are insane.

—Even the 8-star Epic items are basically better than most low-tier Uniques.

While Kim Buja treated them like pocket change, the viewers watching the stream were busy marveling at each and every item.

The dungeon they were watching wasn’t a Legendary dungeon scaled to Kim Buja’s level, but the highest-level Legendary dungeon currently in existence.

Naturally, even the junk drops were at a level that 99% of players would never even get to see.

In fact, the legion commanders’ items he had casually scooped up as junk—Epic or even Rare-grade—were so clean and had such good base stats that they drew gasps.

—Did he say he’s putting them up for auction?

—Is Kim Buja going to start running auctions under his own name like Fly?

—He totally could.

—An 8-star Legendary item auction, huh? I’d love to see that.

—Hope he streams it.

—Yeah. It’s a shame Fly always keeps his auctions private, but Buja will probably show us.

The chat flooded with anticipation, but it didn’t last long.

—You going to show us or what?

—Let’s see it now!

The most important part of the video was yet to come.

“Alright, for the grand finale, let’s see what the Demon King dropped.”

Even after the egg had shattered and he had seen the Demon King’s corpse, Buja hadn’t approached it. He had been saving this for last.

He walked toward it carefully.

The Demon King lay there as if asleep, looking like it might suddenly open its eyes and attack, but thankfully, nothing of the sort happened.

Finding what he was looking for wasn’t difficult. The pile of items heaped at the bottom of the egg was practically screaming that it was the reward for clearing the dungeon.

Among the dozens of items, Buja picked up the single brightest ring.

* * *